Nashville's Patriotism
This story reflects very well on Nashville and the patriotism of her people.

Northern California ranked second to Nashville in the Marine Corps' national recruiting last year, according to Maj. Mark Johnson, commanding officer of Marine Recruiting Station San Francisco, which covers the area from Monterey to Eureka and as far east as Solano County. He said some of the hardest work for the military was in San Francisco high schools, which have a policy that bans on-campus recruitment by military services.

Nonetheless, said Capt. Tuan Pham, a Marine recruiting officer, the service has had good results in San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, Santa Rosa, Alameda and Contra Costa County. Overall, he said, the Marines signed up 1,122 young men and women last year in the San Francisco district. Army Lt. Col. Paul Woods, who runs the Northern California recruiting headquarters in Sacramento, said the region has "a positive environment" for recruiting. "We are doing well overall since Sept. 11," he said. Woods said that unlike the Marine Corps, the Army does not rank its recruiting districts' numbers. He said he has signed up about 300 new recruits a month for the active Army and the reserves.

The results were a bit of a surprise to some military officers, who share the national perception that Northern California in general and the Bay Area in particular have strong anti-military prejudices. Woods said he had been told that Northern California did not look favorably on the military when he was transferred to the area after five years in Europe. Recruiters have more success in rural areas and smaller cities than they do in large cities, Woods said. This is true over the rest of the country, and Northern California is no exception.

The story notes that the San Francisco school districts' ban on military recruiters violates federal law, but the school districts don't appear in a hurry to comply. What do you expect from San Francisco? The region's built-in anti-American bias screams from the headline of the story, in which the San Francisco Chronicle calls people who join the miltary "suckers." Feel free to flame the writer.