Amazing isn't it Bush joined the Guard so as not to go to Vietnam but he sure as hell can call them up. (Cheap shot and very poor, but the righties here would have said a lot worse had Clinton or Gore done this)
It just proves things are not as rosy as the administration wants people to believe. Because they wouldn't do this before the election UNLESS,
1) they knew they were going to win and had no fear of any repercussion....
or
2) things are so bad we need everyone we can get over there and the administration is trying to save their ass before it truly erupts over there... (which reminds me when this started the press were everywhere over there, now all I see are little snippets and we truly hear very little)
Regardless of why, these boys need our prayers and our support. Hopefully they will be home when they are scheduled to be and not like active duties who are told one thing then end up being told that they can't leave yet.
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Weekend Warriors Go Full Time
National Guard Deployment Is the Biggest Since World War II
By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 2, 2004; Page A01
FORT POLK, La. -- Deep in "The Box," big blue buses morph into rolling, apocalyptic explosive devices. Danger crouches in the high brush and glares down from the pines. Smoke and flame interrupt breakfast, obliterate lunch, upend dinner. Sleep is for the weak or the foolish.
A tireless teenager's constitution is all that keeps Bret Roberts, a 19-year-old National Guardsman from Depoe Bay, Ore., alert. Under the weary gaze of his squad leader, Roberts peers down a lonely Louisiana road as he leans hard into a belt-fed M249 machine gun capable of delivering 750 rounds per minute. "Looking for the big blue bus of love," he says with the devil-may-care aplomb of a grizzled veteran.
Spc. William Wiese, left, and Pvt. Bret Roberts look for makeshift bombs along the roadside while training at Fort Polk, La. (Rebekah-mae N. Bruns -- U.s. Army)
The bus Roberts is looking for is a prop, just as the explosions and the menace in the woods are artful fictions, all part of an elaborate training exercise concocted to prepare thousands of National Guard troops engaged in the biggest deployment of citizen soldiers in more than half a century. Sometime this spring, not long after Roberts and his pals leave the 200,000-acre training pod known as "The Box," National Guard and reserve troops will come to represent nearly 40 percent of the 105,000 U.S. military men and women in Iraq.
Not since World War II have so many National Guard units been pressed into service abroad. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, more than 143,000 National Guard members have been mobilized worldwide, with the biggest single concentration expected this spring when more than 35,000 Army National Guard troops -- topping the wartime peak of 30,000 -- are slated to arrive in Iraq as thousands of their colleagues rotate home.
Yesterday, the Pentagon announced that units from New York, Louisiana, Idaho and Tennessee would be deployed to Iraq by late this year or early next.
The massive call-up is beginning to make governors, who rely on the National Guard to respond to disasters, exceedingly nervous. In Arkansas, for instance, more than half of the state's 8,200 National Guard troops have been mobilized. The state has had to call out the National Guard over the past six years for two giant tornadoes and a devastating ice storm, and Arkansas officials wonder whether they would be too shorthanded to respond quickly to another crisis. One-fourth of Maryland's National Guard has been mobilized, as has 30 percent of Virginia's.
N. Wayne Ruthven, director of the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management, estimates the outflow of National Guard troops from his state could cause 40 percent delays in disaster response time and "a 40 percent time delay may mean the difference between life and death."
The huge deployment is also redefining the nature of National Guard service, transforming weekend warriors into something very close to full-time soldiers, who regularly leave behind jobs, businesses, families -- entire lives -- for extended periods. Roberts and his unit, the Oregon Guard's 2nd Battalion, 162nd Infantry, nicknamed "The Volunteers," are nearing the end of six months of training away from home to be followed by a one-year assignment in Iraq. Some of Roberts's colleagues are already old hands at this; they are not that far removed from lengthy stints in the Sinai and in Kuwait in the past few years.
No one knows what all this packing and repacking will mean for the future of the National Guard. The guard is currently meeting its retention and recruiting goals, but there is no way to know whether those now enlisted will opt to return to duty.
The fears are palpable. Mark Sanford, the Republican governor of South Carolina and an Air Force reservist, predicted at last week's National Governors Association meeting in Washington that a flood of the butchers, insurance agents, small-business people and others who make up the Guard will be reluctant to reenlist because of the increasing demands on their time.
"It's going to be a testing time for the Guard," said Eric Parnell, who at 43 is the oldest soldier shipping out for Iraq with the Oregon Guard unit. "It's transformed from a weekend with the boys to an integral part of the Army."
Gone are the days when the Guard's abilities were routinely disparaged. During Desert Storm in the early 1990s, the Guard was humiliated when three of its brigades intended to supplement active-duty divisions were not sent into battle because top military brass deemed them unfit for combat. This time around, with the Guard receiving spanking new equipment and months of enhanced training, there has been little criticism of its readiness.
Iraq will be Parnell's last go-round, he says while picking through a mess-tent breakfast of gristly ham slices. He has had enough after four years of active duty and 17 years in the Guard. He wants to get back to cutting meat at Albertsons. He wants his life back. Many will take the same path, but an upsurge in patriotism could counterbalance the departures, he said.
Parnell is one of the steady hands navigating the crazy quilt of manufactured obstacles and complications invented by the Army's training gurus at Fort Polk. The people who run the Joint Readiness Training Center here have built a network of simulated Iraqi villages and populated them with more than 200 actors, who assume the role of Iraqi citizens -- some friendly to the United States, some not so friendly. The scenarios are seemingly endless, each one mapped out on a chart that slightly resembles a Hollywood movie treatment. This makes sense because the Army sent some of its trainers to California studios to study war-movie special effects -- it is a case of art imitating life, then life imitating art. The script calls for bursts of looting, roadside bombings, the quandary of discovering sensitive religious artifacts and the death of a prominent Shiite cleric.
A group of soldiers based at Fort Polk -- known as "the most hated unit in the Army" -- plays the starring role of Iraqi insurgents with ruthless efficiency, popping out of the giant fort's byzantine nooks to simulate the slaughter of unsuspecting National Guard troops. It looks a bit like the world's greatest game of laser tag, with each soldier carrying a laser-fitted weapon and wearing a sensor-studded vest that registers hits. Teams of observers monitor the proceedings, grimly jotting notes that will be used during critiques at the end of the eight-day course.
Roberts's squad spent hours of boredom manning a damp mortar pit ringed with sandbags and marked by a sign that read "Don't Feed the Animals." Under a camouflage tarp, which kept their 81-inch weapon relatively dry, they nibbled through gloppy Meals Ready to Eat and waited for the inevitable.
One afternoon, a breathless battalion officer ran up with word of a hazardous-material spill. Roberts piled into the back of an open Humvee with his squad leader, a rawboned sergeant from Toledo, Ore., named Aaron Strom. Strom, 23, had big plans for 2004. He was going to go back to school and learn enough about motors to open his own repair shop, instead of working for someone else.
He even changed Guard units, hoping to avoid an overseas deployment, figuring he'd done his part by going to the Sinai for Uncle Sam. But it didn't work out that way. Strom, who joined the Guard when he was 17, got the deployment call and he had a big problem to face. His former girlfriend wasn't emotionally prepared to care for their 2-year-old daughter, who was beset by nightmares, and he was worried that his current girlfriend wouldn't be happy about him running off just months into their new relationship.
He had to make a move.
Within days, he had proposed to and married his girlfriend, Jessica, and arranged for his daughter, Mikayla, to stay with his mother while his ex-girlfriend sorted out her life.
"I did a whole 180 with my life real quick," Strom said of the deployment order. "That was the last thing I needed."
Next to Strom, William Wiese, a soft-spoken specialist, crouched with an automatic weapon against his shoulder, peering through the drizzle. Wiese is as close to a pacifist as it gets in the little six-man squad. In spare moments, he read a book called "The Buddhist Tradition" and argued with Roberts -- who loves to blow things up and has been dubbed "a stone-cold killer" by his mentors -- about the ethics of hunting for sport.
The deployment was a conflicting event for Wiese, who was recently laid off from his job at a lumber mill. The call-up meant a steady paycheck to support his wife, Arya, and their children, Aaron, 21/2, and Samuel, 1.
But it also meant a painful separation. "Emotionally, I'm not sure it was such a good thing," he said in a barely audible voice.
After a bumpy, half-hour ride, their Humvee pulled up near a pile of debris marking the mock chemical spill and the squad scrambled out to secure the area. An officer from another Humvee told them to check for explosive devices and Roberts bounded off enthusiastically into the woods, blithely running past a real-world sign marking an old target range that read: "Danger Unexploded Ammunition."
The official observer watching them was apoplectic. Strom, composed beyond his years, calmly corralled his youthful charge and lectured him at the side of the road.
"Sometimes he tries my patience," said Brant Gilmore, 27, the squad's driver. "But then, I have to think to myself, 'He's only 19 years old.' "
Properly scolded, but unbowed, Roberts lay next to the road, aiming his big machine gun and sucking the mound of Copenhagen he had stuffed along his gumline.
He is mindful of the real-life dangers that await -- 76 of the 547 soldiers killed in Iraq have been members of the Army National Guard or the reserves -- but says he is prepared for anything. One of the casualties -- a National Guard specialist named Chris Taylor, 25 -- was laid to rest, just to the east of them in Kentwood, La., on one of the days that Roberts and his squad were training at Fort Polk.
Roberts's boss -- a lovably crusty 43-year-old captain named Daniel Morris -- knows the risks, too. Morris is a trumpet player, and he has already packed two horns for Iraq. One is for happy tunes; the other, he'll set aside in case he needs it for a funeral.
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LINK:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...¬Found=true