Washington ? The Iraq war is drying up at least part of a pool of recruits the Army has relied upon for decades: black Americans.

The Army has long enjoyed a special relationship with black Americans, who have filled its ranks at rates far beyond their share of the population since the draft was abolished in 1973.

But in a trend compounding the Army’s recruiting woes, those days may be over.

“A lot of black kids, they don’t want to be in it,” said DeTorrian Rhone, 18, who recently graduated high school. He talked to Army recruiters but decided to go to Texas Southern University instead.

“Most of the kids say they don’t want to fight for a country that’s pickin’ on other countries,” he said. “I don’t want to fight because this (Iraq) war was stupid, it wasted money. Army people are getting killed for nothing, and we should have stayed in our own business.”

Rhone represents a trend that began before the war in Iraq but has worsened since: a steep drop in the percentage of black Army recruits.

“We saw the most precipitous drop immediately after Sept. 11,” Maj. Gen. Michael Rochelle, commander of Army recruiting, said at the Pentagon this year.

In fiscal 2001, which ended 19 days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, nearly 23 percent of all new Army recruits were black – as in each of the previous five years. So far in fiscal 2005, which ends Sept. 30, only about 14 percent are.

That’s a decline of nearly 40 percent in the proportion of black recruits – when the Army never needed them more.

Ever since the Army became an all-volunteer force in the 1970s, it has relied on blacks for roughly a quarter of its soldiers, though they constituted less than 15 percent of the population. And for historical and economic reasons, they have answered the call.

One reason: the Army was one of the first U.S. institutions to integrate – a step taken in 1947 by order of President Harry Truman. And while racial tensions within the service took years to overcome, after the Vietnam War the Army became known for offering equal opportunity.