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Ben Halloran is a skinny 17-year-old from Ottawa who really wants to go to war.

He has a brush cut under his ball cap. He can do 100 push-ups in a row and he's not bad at paintball. He thinks being screamed at by a drill sergeant at boot camp will be “fun.”

On weekends, when he re-enacts the Battle of the Plains of Abraham as a corporal in the 78 Fraser Highlanders, armed with broad sword and powder musket, he can play dead and actually sneak a nap on the ground, while the fake fighting carries on around him – a handy skill, he points out, for a real soldier who has to catch sleep where he can.

If the Canadian military would let him, it is clear he would be boarding a plane for Afghanistan tomorrow.

“It's the best time of my life to do it,” he says. “They can break my body now, and I'll have 30 years to recover.”

Early on Thursday at the capital's downtown recruiting centre, he finished the two-hour, multiple-choice exam for his application. He wants to join Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry. Even if he gets accepted after the medical test and final interview, he may not be fully trained before 2009, when Canada's Afghanistan mission is set to end.

“If I am lucky, I'll just make it,” he says. And maybe, he adds wishfully, the mission will get extended.

Across this country, as Canada's soldiers fight and die in a brutal war with no clear ending, increasing numbers of men and women apply to join their ranks. In the past year, the number seeking to enlist in the Canadian Forces has increased by 40 per cent.

Some come to the military as a second career – at the Ottawa recruiting centre, the oldest applicant was a 54-year-old woman. But most of them are like Ben Halloran, barely out of high school: In the past year, Canadians 18 to 24 years old accounted for 60 per cent of new recruits, up from about 40 per cent the year before. Mr. Halloran applied as soon as he graduated from high school and his parents were willing to sign their permission form – 17 is the starting age for the regular force.

The Forces want to sign up 13,200 new soldiers, sailors and fliers by the end of next spring. Since April, they have put uniforms on roughly 3,400.

It seems strange, one recruiter concedes, that war draws people to a soldier's life, rather than driving them away.

But the military is a profession that sells itself best when it seems the most active and dangerous.

“People see Canadians putting their lives on the line and they want to do something,” says Sergeant Stéphane Marleau at the Ottawa recruiting centre.

In the past year, the military has released a flashy advertising campaign, on the advice of focus groups that said they wanted recruiting material to be more grim and realistic.

The results are a more modern website and those energizing commercials that play on television and in the movie theatres, showing scenes of war and rescue, with the slogan: Fight Fear. Fight Distress. Fight Chaos.

“It gets your heart thumping,” says Robert Huebert, associate director of the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary.

And that reaches the very people the military wants most – the young men and women who are risk-takers, who want to know they won't be pushing inventory forms at a desk or aimlessly driving a truck from point A to point B.

The number of people showing up at recruitment centres always rises when the military plays prominently in the news: It happened after the ice storm in 1998, and in the weeks after 9/11, and now even as six new coffins return home from Afghanistan.

War is the military's best advertisement. Military personnel enlist for all sorts of reasons – because the pay is good, to avoid a desk job, because it runs in the family. In recruiting surveys, prospective soldiers give two explanations more often than any other: They come for the challenge of the job. And to serve their country.

Says Dr. Huebert: “We're at war. But we're on the side of the angels.

“We are stopping the Taliban from its murderous intent against its own population, so that's human security. And we are in this war to ensure that al-Qaeda is not given a breathing space, so it's Canadian national security.

“What can be more stirring to a Canadian youth than to know you are participating in that?”

Almost everyone who sits at Sgt. Marleau's desk eventually asks the same question: “Will I be sent to Afghanistan?”

He gives the same answer each time: “When you join, you are agreeing to put yourself in harm's way.”

This morning, the recruiting office is short-staffed as candidates wander in and out.

A young man in a suit, with a civil-service job, has come in to inquire about an intelligence posting. A British soldier with a Canadian girlfriend wants to see if he can switch armies.

A twentysomething with a day's growth on his beard is waiting to have blood taken for his medical.

In a back room, Ben Halloran and seven other men and women, all under 30, are checking boxes on a list of math and writing questions. They all pass.

There are more than 100 different jobs in the Canadian Forces, and just as many routes to getting there. Recruiters see university graduates interested in the officer program, teenagers interested in a subsidized education and people who left high school without graduating, enticed by the fact that within four years as corporal they could be earning roughly $50,000 plus leave and benefits.

Captain Holly-Anne Brown, public-affairs officer for the recruiting branch, remembers an orthopedic surgeon who applied on the condition that he would be sent promptly to Afghanistan to treat the soldiers there.

Occasionally, Sgt. Marleau says, they see the Rambo types. “After 9/11, people came in and said, ‘Give me a weapon, I want to go over.' But we're not looking for war lovers who want to kill people.”

Often, in this land of office workers, the motivation is more pragmatic.

Byron Cotnam, 28, returned to Canada recently after teaching English and math overseas; with his engineering background, he could land a high-tech job. But he says that “it was depressing to think of coming back to work in a cubicle.” Now, he wants to be an electrical engineer or a fighter pilot. He has just written his exam.

“My parents pushed me. When I told them I was thinking about it, they thought it was a great idea.”

For one thing, Mr. Cotnam is unlikely to end up in combat any time soon. Like many new recruits, by the time his application is processed and his training is completed, 2009 will have come and gone.

The odds are higher for Mr. Halloran – unlike many applicants competing for a few coveted posts as firefighters or intelligence officers, he wants one of the “hot” jobs in the forces. A 17-year-old keen to be an infantryman might see his first day of boot camp within a month of his final paperwork.

In the stories told about the 66 Canadian soldiers who have now died in Afghanistan, there are those who seemed destined to wear a uniform and others who shocked their families by choosing to do so – some who chose to put their lives at risk even when loved ones begged them not to go.

Darryl Caswell's family, for instance, was not surprised when he announced his plans to enlist. He had talked about serving in uniform since he was 7, when the ceiling of his bedroom was cluttered with model airplanes hanging from fishing wire. He was an adventurer at heart who jumped from airplanes for fun and scuba dived and rarely, his stepmother Christine remembers, drove the speed limit.

As he neared military age, they watched proudly as he found a new purpose in life.

He started going to church every Sunday, often sitting by himself in his grey suit in the balcony of Trinity United in Bowmanville, Ont. Afterward, he was tutored for his written admission test by a former math teacher who was a member of the congregation.

“That just showed us how much he wanted it,” says Ms. Caswell, who had pushed him to finish high school. “He was starting to find himself.”

After Trooper Caswell was stationed at Petawawa, he would come home on weekends, announcing at the door, “I'm home, soldiers.” When the family ate out on special occasions, he would proudly wear his dress uniform. He would fold the towels in the bathroom, military-style.

Being a soldier “was always there, inside him,” says Ms. Caswell, weeping on the phone.

He found his calling. That's what she tells herself, trying to accept that Trooper Caswell was killed by an improvised bomb three weeks ago.

Even a military father may have mixed feelings about his son enlisting. Daniel Woodfield, a former naval officer, was unloading tractors at his auction company when his son Braun, 21, wandered in two hours late for work and announced he had joined the infantry.

“He wasn't working for me any more,” recalls Mr. Woodfield, more than two years after Private Woodfield died in an accident in Afghanistan. “We had a few choice words, but afterward I more or less had a big, heavy heart, and said, ‘My boy's grown up. He's moving on.'”

And that ambition can be impossible to stop. Shirley Boneca still doesn't understand why her son, Corporal Anthony Boneca, felt compelled to join the reserves. His father, Antonia, served with the Portuguese army, but never wanted that life for his son.

When he enlisted, in Grade 11, they thought that it would be good for him to have some focus. “We didn't think he would ever stay,” Ms. Boneca says. When he volunteered the first time to go to Kabul, she tried three times to talk him out of it. “The more I talked, the more indignant he became,” she recalls.

“This is what I have to do,” he told her.

He came back safely the first time, never having fired a gun. The second time, when he volunteered for Kandahar, they knew it was far more dangerous but said nothing.

“It was much harder. We couldn't say, ‘We don't want you to go.' We had to send him off with our hopes and prayers.”

Cpl. Boneca, 21, was killed a year ago on Monday, in a gunfight with the Taliban three weeks before his tour of duty ended. While his parents may wonder about why their son chose this path, they are fiercely proud: “I could never do that,” his mom says.

Part of the story may lie in the letters and boxes of mementos from his fellow soldiers. But the Bonecas cannot bear to open them yet.

“He wanted to serve his country,” his mom says. That must be answer enough.

When first asked why he wants to be a soldier, Ben Halloran says brightly, without hesitation, “I really like guns,” which is probably a little too much honesty for the army. The appeal, he clarifies, is not that “they can maim a whole bunch of people.” He likes how all the tiny parts work in synchronicity. His parents wouldn't let him have one, but after years in cadets, he knows how to take a rifle apart and put it back together.

He can't imagine using a gun to shoot another person. But that's what boot camp is for, he supposes – getting you used to the idea that you might have to kill or be killed.

But the motivation to risk your life runs deeper than playing war, even when you're only 17. While listening to CBC Radio, Mr. Halloran got the news that six more soldiers had died in Afghanistan. “We have to stay,” he says, “otherwise that means nothing.”

When asked about news footage that he has seen from Afghanistan, he doesn't describe gunfights and tanks. He recalls images of Canadian soldiers helping neglected children in an orphanage.

“I never wanted to sit behind a desk, not even at school,” he says. “This will be a challenge. It's going to push me to the limits, and I'm going to see if I can handle it.”

His parents have had three years to get used to the idea of their son enlisting: He has been talking about it since he was 14 years old, and itching to sign up, his mother Nancy says, since he turned 17 this past winter. His parents refused to give their permission until he graduated.

When Ben joined the cadets, Ms. Halloran says, “we thought he would grow out of it, but the desire got stronger every year.” It was a challenge for a mother who had never let her son own a gun when he was little and a father who had hoped he might one day take over his business.

They tried to suggest a trade. They pointed out any news about the hazards in Afghanistan. But he would come home after a weekend of sleeping in the cold on cadet training with “a fire in his eyes.” They knew they couldn't change his mind.

Now, Ms. Halloran comforts herself knowing that he will be properly trained and that it will be many months before he goes anywhere.

“I'm proud of him, of the fact that he wants to defend his country. When I read the paper, of course, my gut clenches. But there's nothing I can do to stop him,” she says.

“He has a lot of courage. I just put him in God's hands.”

Erin Anderssen is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail. With files from Caroline Alphonso, David Andreatta, Joe Friesen and Rod Mickleburgh.