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When Sub-Lieutenant Alain Blondin joined the navy in 1982 and found he was the eldest of his platoon, he felt over the hill at the ripe old age of 21.

Two decades later in 2002, when he re-enlisted after 17 years as an industrial mechanic in the private sector, he was shipped off to basic training with a woman four years his senior.

"Twenty-five years ago, someone my age would have really been a fish out of water [in a platoon]," says SLt. Blondin, 46, who is stationed in Halifax. "Nowadays, it's normal - or at least it's accepted."

Swept up by the promise of an exhilarating career, signing bonuses for their professional skills and a sense of patriotism, greater numbers of mature adults are joining the Canadian Forces, where the proportion of new full-time recruits over the age of 25 has quadrupled since 1982.

Of the 6,536 new full-time enlistees over the past year, 39 per cent were older than 25, compared with 10 per cent 25 years ago, the military says.

The increase comes at a time when casualties continue to mount among Canadians serving in Afghanistan, where four soldiers have been killed by roadside bombs in the past two weeks alone.

"My wife's been supportive, although of course she's not crazy about her husband going to a potentially dangerous part of the world," says Captain William Swales, 43, who enlisted last year despite having three young children and a fourth on the way.

Capt. Swales, a flight surgeon based in Trenton, Ont., and possibly bound for Afghanistan next year, said having his children understand that his skills could help limit the carnage overseas was a factor in his decision.

"We would watch these repatriation ceremonies on television, and I would say, 'Would you want Dad to help them if he could?' " Capt. Swales says. "I told them I'm not going to hurt anybody. They're pretty understanding about that."

Convincing his colleagues at Peterborough Regional Health Centre was another matter, Capt. Swales recalls. Even with an advertised signing bonus of up to $225,000 for physicians, he took a 25-per-cent pay cut to join the military. He plans to serve until retirement.

Recruiters attribute the rise in older recruits in part to the more specialized disciplines - such as lawyers, doctors and computer technicians - required by the Forces and whose training takes time. Few of these older recruits will find themselves in combat units on the front line.

The increase is also likely a function of the greater number of Canadians deferring career plans to continue their education beyond high school.

SLt. Blondin felt compelled to re-enlist when he visited a recruiting centre in Ottawa with his then 17-year-old son and learned his prior service qualified him to earn close to $40,000 a year as a naval officer. Five months later, he closed his industrial mechanics business and was in boot camp.

"When the lady started interviewing my son, I was standing over him looking at the pay scale and said, just as a joke, 'How much would you give me?' " recalls SLt. Blondin, who has a son in the army and another in the navy. "She took me quite seriously. I told her I was too old. She said, 'No, you're not.' "

Another factor, observers say, was the extension of the compulsory retirement age in 2004 to 60 from 55.

The move had the ancillary effect of boosting the maximum age for new recruits across all occupations by five years, effectively permitting a 57-year-old who could pass the physical fitness requirement to enlist for a three-year engagement.

But the overwhelming majority of older enlistees, recruiters say, join because of dissatisfaction with their civilian jobs.

"There are a lot of people coming through our doors with high levels of education who find they've been missing something on the civilian side," says Sub-Lieutenant Steve Churm, a recruitment officer in Hamilton. "On the professional side, we're seeing a lot of people with law degrees."

Where the average age of a new recruit hovered at about 21 prior to 1990, it has steadily crept upward. By 1995, it had risen to 22, topped 25 in 2000, and was a shade less than 28 in 2005, according to the Forces.

Perhaps not coincidentally, 2005 marked a turning point in the military as the proportion of new recruits older than 25 hit 60 per cent.

The Forces mandated that more than half of new recruits be placed in combat units, and launched its most aggressive recruiting campaign in recent memory, marked by slick television ads, a spectacle at the Canadian Football League's Grey Cup game and a revamped website that invites users to "Join Us" with the click of a mouse.

"In the last two years, our strategic intake plan has been heavily dominated by the combat arms," says Captain Holly-Ann Brown, a spokeswoman for Canadian Forces Recruiting. "Are there people over 25 applying for combat arms? Sure. But, typically, the person coming to the military looking for a career in combat tends to be out of high school."

As a result, the average age fell to about 24 last year - still closer to 30 than the minimum entry age of 17 for full-time service.

Older service men and women can be costly in terms of benefits, and there is also the dicey issue of whether they can hold their own with the young and spry. Yet military data indicate that nearly one-quarter of the 2,596 troops currently serving in Afghanistan are older than 40. More than a third are younger than 29.

Professor David Bercuson, a military historian at the University of Calgary and director of programs at the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute, said the shift toward a more mature recruit is changing the dynamic within the military hierarchy.

Where rank, and rank alone, once dominated the command structure, Prof. Bercuson says, age and wisdom are now playing larger roles in the decision-making process.

"People want to know why they're being asked to do something, and officers have to realize that more and more they're dealing with mature, intelligent beings who, in some cases, have more experience and education than they do," Prof. Bercuson says.

"The day when you ordered people around because you were a certain class is gone in the Canadian military."

SLt. Blondin agrees maturity carries weight in the military. That knowledge, he says, offers comfort considering he is being shipped to Afghanistan next year, and that his 21-year-old seaman son, Ryan, may be headed to the Persian Gulf.

"You can act as a voice of reason sometimes," SLt. Blondin says. "A lot of these young officers are very gung-ho."