Five Years Young: Vanity Fair's Iraq Archive

The signs never got better, exactly:

"There's white, there's black, and there's gray," a recently retired army recruiting-station commander told me. "Any recruiter who's successful lives in the gray and goes into the black pretty often.… There's no way to recruit within the rules and be successful."

That's from 2005's "The Recruiters' War." There's a lot more.