Index of Articles
Note: Topics below are now bookmarked! Click on the underlined topic below to link to the pages on that topic.
Pre-Boot Camp Cuts Washouts
Blanco Gets Briefing from National Guard Leaders
Army Guard Division Commander Looks to Past, Future
The National Guard Changes its Stripes
National Guard Brigade Prepares for Deployment to Iraq
Army Fears Reservists are Stretched Thin
Reserve Components Among Units Extended in Iraq
North Dakota National Guard: Doctors Heading to Iraq
151st Signal Battalion Gets Home Just in Time
N.D. National Guard Unit Returns Home
Guard Unit Gets Joyous Welcome
Twelve Members of the 1457th Return, Others Expected Next Month
Town of Patriots Dusts off Flags for Guard Unit’s Return
Legion Post Honors Guard Unit Back From Active Duty
Bill Would Waive Pension Penalty for Guard, Reserve
Thrift Savings Plan: Good Way to Increase Wealth, Executive Director Says
Washington Guard Unit Takes Over Iraq Supply Hub
Two National Guard Soldiers Injured in Iraq Attacks
133rd Embraces Hero as One of its Own
Guard Gives Sisters More Time to Decide on Returning to Iraq
HOMEFRONT: DEALING WITH DEPLOYMENT
Davenport Resumes Rallies for Troops
National Guard Opens Center to Aid Families
Wives Establish Group Concerned Over Iraq Deployment Extensions
With Breadwinners Overseas, Guard Families Face Struggle
A Push to Get Troops Home
Boots on the Ground, and Anxiety at Home
HOMEFRONT: DEALING WITH AFTERMATH
Re-entering Life After Being Deployed
Guardsman Who Refused Anthrax Vaccine Discharged from Army
Kentucky Guardsman Killed in Iraq
Guardsman with Fort Lewis Task Force Killed
Vermont Soldier Dies in Iraq Ambush
Freedom Calls Foundation Helps Soldiers in Iraq Contact Home
Military Phone Card Donation Program Goes Public
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Washington Times
April 22, 2004
Pre-Boot Camp Cuts Washouts
Targets National Guard Recruits
By Jan Dennis, Associated Press
Marseilles, Ill. — The drill sergeant’s stomach-twisting growl echoed through concrete barracks lined with baby-faced recruits on a weekend pass from high school.
“I want you to move like someone’s shooting at you – because someday they might,” Sgt. James Locke barked, sending dozens of first-day soldiers scrambling past long, neat rows of cots and footlockers.
The one-weekend-a-month, pre-boot camp was launched this spring by the Illinois Army National Guard , which is banking that an early taste of the military will help new recruits survive basic training and trim a washout rate that reached about 30 percent last year.
“It’s designed to remove that fear of the unknown. When they get to basic training, they’ll understand what their role is and not only pass, but become honor graduates,” said Maj. Steven Rouse, an Army National Guard recruiter.
Nearly 300 newly enlisted privates – many of them high school juniors and seniors committing to a six-year enlistment in exchange for a paid college education – got their first marching, weapons and physical training April 3-4 at the Army National Guard complex in Marseilles.
“I was extremely nervous. I have to go to the bathroom right now, but I’m afraid to ask,” Andrew Bittenbender, a 17-year-old junior, said during a hurried lunch on the camp’s first day.
Keith Arvik, 17-year-old junior, said he liked his first day as a private, but wondered how many push-ups he’d have to do if he messed up. Others offered advice for avoiding the drill sergeants’ wrath – just look straight ahead and shut up.
Not everyone appreciated the orientation.
“I just think the drill sergeants should cool it down. We’re not in boot camp yet,” said Cindy Aguiler, 17.
In fact, during the two-day camp, the instructors were offering a slightly less-intense version of the discipline recruits will face for nine weeks when they’re at an out-of-state Army base for basic training this summer.
Maj. Rouse said the experience is aimed at teaching recruits that drill sergeants are trying to build discipline and teamwork, not dish out abuse.
“The biggest thing this will overcome is the mental aspect of it because that far outweighs the physical,” said Maj. Rouse, a 19-year military veteran.
Of 1,580 guardsmen recruited in Illinois last year, 465 dropped out. The program should help scale back those losses, said Lt. Col. Chris Lawson, commander of recruiting for the Illinois Army National Guard.
The Army National Guard began urging states to implement the program last summer after similar boot camps improved retention rates in Delaware, New Jersey and Nevada, Lawson said. Illinois was among the first states to sign on, but every state now offers some variation of the program, he said.
Nationwide, the Army National Guard hopes the camps will ultimately help slice a 2002 washout rate of 27 percent to just 12 percent, which would add more than 4,000 new soldiers a year to the nation’s defense effort.
In Illinois, which averages about 2,000 new recruits annually, recruiting is up by about 100 soldiers so far this year, surprising because of the broad media coverage of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, Maj. Rouse said.
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The Associated Press
April 23, 2004
Blanco Gets Briefing From National Guard Leaders
Dateline: Baton Rouge, La.
The planned deployment of 3,000 Louisiana National Guard soldiers overseas will leave the state with just two-thirds of its guardsmen at home, but it won’t harm the state’s ability to protect itself, according to the commander of the National Guard.
Maj. Gen. Bennett Landreneau said Thursday he was “confident and secure” Louisiana’s homeland security efforts would continue even as a brigade with about 4,000 soldiers – 3,000 from Louisiana – has been activated for overseas services.
Gov. Kathleen Blanco said while it shows how well-prepared Louisiana soldiers are, there were times she felt like Louisiana was playing a disproportionate role in the country’s overseas operations, including the war in Iraq.
“After this deployment, I think our soldiers should have a time of reprieve,” Blanco said after a private meeting with the leaders of the 256th Infantry Brigade.
Landreneau said when the 256th leaves, about 4,000 of the 11,000 men and women in the Louisiana National Guard would be deployed at the same time.
“It certainly does sober us up,” Blanco said of the large number of Louisiana troops that will be overseas.
The 256th is set to train first at Ford Hood, Texas, for deployment in support of the Iraq war. It was unclear when the soldiers would be moved overseas or when they would return.
Blanco and Landreneau asked employers to sign a ceremonial statement of support for the troops who are leaving their jobs behind because of the deployment.
“It’s pulling a lot of people out of our work force,” the governor said.
Landreneau said employers so far have been extremely supportive. Federal law requires that employers must allow the men and women to return to their jobs when they come back from their deployment, but Landreneau said the statement would “let that individual know they’re going to be welcome when they come back home.”
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Army Guard Division Commander Looks to Past, Future
By Master Sgt. Bob Haskell, USA
Special to American Forces Press Service
Fort A.P. Hill, Va., April 23, 2004 – Maj. Gen. Daniel Long Jr. sounds like a man with two sets of eyes when he talks about the Virginia Army National Guard outfit he has commanded since August 2002.
His eyes to the front are focused on training the 11,500 citizen-soldiers in the 29th Infantry Division for the kind of warfare the Army is waging in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The eyes in the back of his head are looking back 60 years when that Guard division began fighting its way onto Omaha Beach at Normandy, France, on June 6, 1944, to begin the liberation of Europe from Nazi occupation.
Being trained and equipped to fight the right kind of war against the enemy at hand is the common denominator. It is why Long is devoting a considerable amount of his time and energy to, as he describes it, getting back to the basics or “resetting the division.”
“In light of what’s happening in Iraq and Afghanistan and around the world right now, I felt I needed to change the focus so this light infantry division is prepared to do a lot of things without knowing specifically what’s going to be asked of it,” Long recently explained here, where many of his soldiers were qualifying with their weapons.
“I think knowing the division’s history helps us to understand why it’s so important to train well,” he added.
That is why Long is leading 100 soldiers, including 60 or so junior enlisted people, to Normandy this June to be a part of the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings.
The division’s band will be there. So will an honor guard. So will a lot of young soldiers, who will walk the beach and climb the cliffs and talk to the aging veterans who survived that dreadful time.
“I want those soldiers to talk to the veterans and bring the stories back to the rest of the division,” Long said. “I think it’s important to know the sacrifice and the commitment those men made back then. I think it’s important to see that they’re just like you and me.
“The veterans are very proud of this division,” he added. “They were great patriots then, and we have great patriots now.”
That’s why Long insists it is time to get back to the basics so his soldiers are prepared. That means they will fight and defeat terrorists who wear no regulation uniforms and who kill with rocket-propelled grenades and improvised explosive devices equally as well as their forebears helped fight and defeat the more easily defined German army in 1944 and 1945.
It’s a tall order, because his division is spread over Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts, Connecticut and North Carolina. Furthermore, 7,000 of the 29th’s soldiers have been guarding gates and patrolling airports in this country and guarding detainees at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, since the global war against terrorism began.
“Those things are important, but they really degrade your perishable infantry skills,” he observed. Long is a lean, soft-spoken man, who balances his obligations as a one-man construction firm in Fredericksburg, Va., with the full-time demands Army Guard division commander.
He has proven himself as a soldier and commander by going through the Army’s Ranger and air assault schools, by earning the Expert Infantryman Badge, and while serving as deputy commander of the Multinational Division North stabilization force in Bosnia in 2001-02.
Therefore, Long has a good idea of what today’s light infantry soldiers should be prepared to do. He is determined to reset the division at the grassroots level.
He envisions “multifunctional squads or teams” with leaders who can command and control them “for a pretty good period of time.”
Each squad, he said, should include a designated marksman and spotter, who can hit targets 500 meters away and report on what the enemy is doing. Each squad should include an engineer, who can breach obstacles with high explosives, and a couple of medics, who can keep wounded soldiers alive while waiting to be transported to a hospital.
He wants his soldiers to know how to patrol and convoy through cities, how to deal with civilians and imbedded members of the news media, how to fly in helicopters and how to fight at night.
“This division is supposed to own the night. The war doesn’t knock off at 5 o’clock in the afternoon,” Long said. “So we have to train during the night. This division counts an awful lot on moving around the battlefield using aviation assets,” he added. “The soldiers have to know how to carry their weapons and rucksacks on helicopters, how to dismount and what it’s like to fly in turbulent conditions. And the soldiers have to know how to work their way up a street and how to pull someone out of a building.”
Nearly 600 of his soldiers, in the 3rd Battalion, 116th Infantry, are now training to do those things at Fort Bragg, N.C., before they deploy to Afghanistan this summer.
Long wants all of his soldiers to be trained in those skills in case they too are sent into harm’s way. He wants his soldiers to have the chance, like him, to go through Ranger and air assault schools and to earn the Expert Infantryman Badge so they will become better combat leaders and more motivated trainers.
“War is bad business,” Long said. “You may only need your weapon for a few seconds, but isn’t it great to know you can do it right?
“If we’re going to send our sons and daughters and our grandchildren to do this, I want to make sure we’ve done everything we can for them to be successful,” he added. “Failure can be very expensive.”
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National Journal
April 24, 2004
The National Guard Changes its Stripes
By George Cahlink
In March, on a dusty plateau at the Army’s National Training Center in California’s Mojave Desert, the strain of relying on an all-volunteer military to fight the nation’s wars was evident on Staff Sgt. Trevor Johnson’s face. In a few weeks, Johnson and the rest of the Washington state National Guard’s 81st Armored Brigade would be in Iraq. But before Johnson shipped out, the 43-year-old guardsman, who normally works as a civilian federal supply clerk at Camp Murray, Wash., was grimacing as he was schooled on the finer points of establishing a perimeter defense.
Johnson leads about 20 soldiers, whose normal job while wearing the uniform is as behind-the-lines logisticians. The Army, however, needs more supply convoys and security personnel in Iraq, so they are being retrained for those roles. On this day, they are working on a drill that has them providing perimeter security for a radio-relay tower.
Johnson tells his troops to spread out in a 180-degree semicircle to secure the site; a small hill will protect the other half. Suddenly, a more senior soldier is in Johnson’s face with a string of questions: What if the enemy comes over the hill? What about guarding the road that leads to the site? Johnson says nothing. Finally, the instructor tells him what he wants Johnson to know: Forces must guard the road and form a 360-degree perimeter around the tower. Johnson nods at the instructions and redeploys his troops. “This is a lot different than the training we’ve done before. It’s new, and we’ve just got to go with it,” Johnson says.
Indeed, Johnson is not alone; the entire National Guard is changing. “Today’s Guard is not the Guard of the past,” says Army Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, chief of the Pentagon’s National Guard Bureau, which manages both the Army National Guard and Air National Guard . “The Guard’s mission has shifted from a strategic reserve built on a Cold War deterrence construct to an operational reserve that must be capable of joint and expeditionary missions.”
Once derided as “weekend warriors” who lacked modern equipment and skills, and long known as the nation’s last line of defense, the Army Guard and Air Guard are now on the front lines of military operations. Nearly 40 percent of the 135,000 troops on the ground in Iraq today are in the National Guard . (In fact, about one-fifth of troops whose duty in Iraq was recently extended are guardsmen.) Moreover, 80 percent of all Army Guard and Air Guard personnel will be called up least once in the next three years, for missions ranging from flying air patrols over major U.S. cities to patrolling on foot the streets of Falluja, Iraq, and Kandahar, Afghanistan. As a result, the National Guard is undergoing an unprecedented overhaul in how it’s organized, equipped, and trained.
At a February meeting of the National Governors Association, Blum, a Special Operations officer who was the commanding general of forces in Bosnia for six months in 2001 and 2002, called for a major restructuring of the National Guard . Otherwise, he said, the Guard may not be able to meet both its state and federal missions. Unlike each of the military services’ federal reserve components — Army Reserve, Naval Reserve, etc. — the National Guard is a state force under the command of each state’s governor and trains normally only one weekend a month, unless the president activates the force for a federal mission. About 25 percent of the National Guard today is on active duty.
One major problem, Blum points out, is that active-duty call-ups are not split evenly among states. He called it “unacceptable” that some states have as many as 75 percent of their guardsmen on active duty, while other states have only a handful. Sen. Christopher (Kit) Bond, R-Mo., co-chairman of the Senate National Guard Caucus, agrees that the increased reliance on the Guard has revealed “shortfalls” in how it is structured. Blum says at least 50 percent of a state’s forces should be available to a governor at all times for state emergencies.
Governors back that idea. Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne, a Republican who chairs the National Governors Association, calls Blum’s proposal “workable” and says Blum deserves credit for being one of the first Guard leaders to address the governors directly. “I appreciate his sensitivity that you do not need to take all assets from a state,” Kempthorne added.
Washington Gov. Gary Locke, a Democrat, says having 50 percent of forces available all the time would allow him to meet the state’s emergency needs. He says the current deployment of the state’s largest Guard unit, the more than 3,500 members of the 81st Armored Brigade, has caused some delays in responding to state emergencies because of equipment shortages and too few forces. Also, Locke says, the state spent an additional $200,000 training new forest firefighters because guardsmen normally did that job.
Blum says the plan will benefit not just state executives but soldiers and airmen as well by offering a more predictable deployment schedule. Army guardsmen would be deployed for no more than 18 months once every six years, Air Guard personnel no more than three months once every 15 months. Army Guard soldiers would follow a six-year schedule during which they would spend 18 to 24 months in intensive training for a deployment, 12 to 18 months deployed, and 36 to 48 months available for state emergencies or homeland-security missions.
Col. Jim Barrineau, chief of the force management division at the Guard Bureau , is planning the structural changes. Currently, Guard units have an uneven mix of capabilities, with some units being called up far more frequently than others. As a result, states with units in high demand routinely have fewer forces to call on for local emergencies, while other states’ units can go decades without ever being called up for federal duty. Barrineau says reconfiguring the National Guard will ensure that all units more fairly shoulder the burden of active-duty deployments.
Since the September 11 attacks, for example, military police units have been in high demand for both homeland-security missions and patrols in Afghanistan and Iraq. Field artillery units, however, have rarely been called up. Some artillery units have already been retrained as military police units and deployed. Barrineau says the Army National Guard’s new force structure will add about 10,000 military police, increasing the total from 20,000 to 30,000 while cutting the number of field artillery battalions in the Guard by about 25 percent. Other military jobs that will see increases include intelligence analyst and combat engineer. Air defense and combat support jobs, such as cooks and administrative personnel, meanwhile, will be scaled back.
The National Guard currently has 36 combat brigades. But only 15 of them are “enhanced” brigades, the Guard’s largest and most modern fighting units, which can be ready for war within 30 days and can integrate quickly with active-duty forces. Other Guard brigades have some of the military’s oldest equipment and require significant training before they can be deployed.
The redesigned Guard will have two fewer brigades overall, and the rest will be far smaller and have lighter equipment but will be more readily deployable for war. The brigade design will match those in the active Army, which is creating new units that are lighter, more agile, and more modular.
Barrineau says the changes would cost billions of dollars for both new training and equipment — specifically, more Humvees for the additional military police and more trucks as some heavy combat vehicles are phased out. The Guard expects to begin receiving money for the restructuring in the 2005 Defense supplemental spending package that the Bush administration has promised after Election Day. The plan will aim to have all 34 brigades redesigned by 2011.
Ultimately, the size of the Army Guard would shrink by about 46,000 troops to a total strength of 342,000 by the end of this decade. Barrineau says a handful of yet-to-be-determined states will see “major” changes in their force makeup, but most would see their personnel trimmed back by only about 2 percent. Certain capabilities would be available for every state, among them military police and combat engineers, plus transport, helicopter, medical, and chemical-warfare units that can respond to weapons of mass destruction. The Air Guard is expected to make some changes to its force structure as well, although those changes will likely be far less significant than the Army Guard’s, because the Air Guard is already closely aligned with active Air Force units.
Bond says the National Guard Caucus backs the restructuring.
Back at the National Training Center, Guard troops from the 81st Brigade were continuing to learn new jobs as their mid-March deployment dates neared. A captain who commanded an armor company was learning how to negotiate with Iraqi villagers to support humanitarian operations. An Army logistician upgraded the scope on his rifle, after learning he’d be providing convoy security. Tank and Bradley Fighting Vehicle drivers and gunners were taught how to drive smaller Humvees and learned the hand signals used by infantry soldiers.
Blum says the changes under way with the 81st Brigade are a harbinger of the changes coming to the rest of his force and a sign of the crucial role the National Guard now plays in military operations. “I don’t apologize at all for the rate we are using the National Guard today. We’re quite proud of the fact that the old question — ‘Is the Guard relevant?’ — is long gone. For the last two and half years, even our worst critics realize the worst thing they can say about us is that we are essential.”
The Guard Now, and Next
* 25 percent of the 460,000 soldiers and airmen in the Army National Guard and Air National Guard are now on active duty.
* 37 percent of the troops now on the ground in Iraq (not counting those troops whose tours were recently extended) are in the Army Guard .
* Eighty percent of all Army Guard and Air Guard personnel will be called up at least once in the next three years for active duty.
Under the New Plan:
* Army Guard soldiers would be deployed no more than once during a six-year term, and Air Guard airmen would be deployed for no more than 90 days every 15 months.
* A given National Guard unit would be available for state missions 50 percent of the time, training for deployment 25 percent of the time, and on deployment 25 percent of the time.
* Over six years, Army guardsmen would be activated full-time once, for 12 to 18 months. The rest of the time, they would be under the command of their state governors.
SOURCE: The National Guard Bureau
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The Associated Press
April 20, 2004
National Guard Brigade Prepares for Deployment to Iraq
Dateline: Lafyette, La.
The 256th Infantry Enhanced Separate Brigade of the Louisiana National Guard should be ready for deployment to Iraq within three to four months, according to one of the men coordinating the unit’s activation as a federal fighting force.
The brigade is being assembled at Fort Hood, Texas.
“If there is one thing the families of the 256th need to know, it is that we are going to prepare them as best we can for where they are going to go,” said Lt. Col. Don Collett, one of the men planning the brigade’s training at Fort Hood. “Your soldiers will be taken care of and looked after.”
The National Guard unit will be formally placed under U.S. Army command upon arrival at Fort Hood, he said. Family members will be able to keep in touch with their loved ones via mail and, most of the time, e-mail during the training, he said.
The 256th will be billeted at Fort Hood, but final housing plans have not yet been worked out, Collett said. The 256th’s first days will be devoted to a Soldier Readiness Check, during which military and legal paperwork is double-checked and medical and training records are validated. Once the paperwork is done, soldiers will begin weapons qualification and receive any individual training that is needed.
The 256th will then begin collective training, working from the platoon to the brigade level. Colett said that the 256th will be augmented by individuals and units from other states with any special support skills that may be needed.
“It’s a national effort to get this brigade out,” Collett said. “They will get the manpower and the modern equipment they need to support their mission. They are going with the most modern equipment we can give them. They will be prepared.”
Once the full-unit training at Fort Hood is done, the 256th will be sent to a Combat Training Center – either the National Training Center in the Mojave Desert at Fort Irwin, Calif., or the Joint Readiness Center at Fort Polk where it will be evaluated for mission readiness.
“This will be the final check to be certain that the brigade is ready to do what it will be asked to do,” Collett said. “Once that is verified, the brigade will begin preparations for overseas deployment.”
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Dallas Morning News
April 21, 2004
Army Fears Reservists are Stretched Thin
Major restructuring planned as concerns about turnover rise
By Richard Whittle, The Dallas Morning News
Washington – In a video message mailed recently to 300,000 Army Reserve soldiers and their families, Lt. Gen. Ron Helmly explained the problem his arm of the service faces “straight up,” as he puts it.
“I believe the news has accurately reported that planning for postwar operations in Iraq did not recognize the full potential for the violence, instability and insecurity that has occurred. So now we’re engaged in something that we didn’t expect,” the Army Reserve chief acknowledged.
Combined with the war on terrorism, the unexpected turmoil in Iraq has boosted the Army’s demand for Reserve and National Guard troops to unprecedented levels – leaving their leaders worried that many reservists may quit to avoid repeated and often dangerous deployments.
Guard and Reserve troops, for example, account for about a fourth of the 20,000 soldiers who last week received word that their year-long deployments to Iraq are being extended three months because of an upswing in violence that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld acknowledged he didn’t anticipate.
In response to the demand for their troops, Gen. Helmly and his National Guard counterpart, Lt. Gen. Roger Schultz, have embarked on the most sweeping reorganizations of the Army’s two-pronged “reserve component” since the Vietnam War.
“To relieve the pressure on our soldiers, I’m restructuring our force to take the type units that are no longer needed and reorganize them into units that are needed and required for the global war on terrorism,” Gen. Helmly explained in his message to families.
“Having more of the right kinds of units means we don’t have to keep going back to the same soldiers, their units and their families over and over.”
Gen. Schultz is aiming to restructure the Army Guard in similar fashion, but with the additional aim of making sure at least 50 percent of each state’s Guard troops remain available to cope with natural disasters and other, more traditional duties at home.
No mass exodus, yet
Recruitment and retention statistics don’t forecast any exodus so far, Army Guard and Army Reserve leaders report, though an informal survey of reservists in Iraq recently found about a quarter thinking of getting out.
Gen. Schultz said first-time Guard enlistments were “outstanding” in 2003. But the Guard missed its goal for recruiting regular Army veterans last year.
Surveys of members serving in Iraq and Afghanistan “would indicate turnover’s going to be a little higher, retention’s going to be a little lower” when they get home, Gen. Schultz said.
“Retention is still high,” he said. And surprisingly, turnover in the Guard is lowest among those who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan – about 12.4 percent, compared to 16.7 percent overall.
Staff Sgt. Juan Reyna, 37, a 20-year National Guard veteran from Pharr, illustrates one reason why. Shortly before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, his South Texas Guard unit deployed to Bosnia.
“Ever since then, it’s been one mission right after the other,” Staff Sgt. Reyna said.
After Bosnia, he lost his civilian job in motorcycle sales. Then the Guard called him up again and sent him to Guantánamo, Cuba. Since early last year, he’s participated in Operation Armored Falcon, defending Air Force installations in the United States.
Married and the father of two, Staff Sgt. Reyna acknowledges that he’s “missed a lot of football games and cheerleader tryouts.” But his family “bears with me,” he said. And despite the strain, he won’t be leaving the Guard.
“For me, it was a bit of a blessing,” he explained, “because now I have a steady job.”
But no one knows how many reservists might decide differently as thousands rotate home.
“We’ve got soldiers that are now returning from 12 months of tough, tough duty,” Gen. Schultz noted. “I don’t see a crisis, but turnover is going to be up.”
Even after that rotation ends, Guard and Reserve members will account for about 40 percent of roughly 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq. And while no one knows how long U.S. troops will be needed in Iraq, Army leaders are planning to keep 100,000 or more there through at least 2006 – about a fifth of the regular force.
The regular Army’s congressionally mandated size is 482,000. To cope with the Iraq occupation, Mr. Rumsfeld has used emergency powers to add 30,000 troops to the force.
The Army National Guard is about 350,000 strong, the Army Reserve about 205,000. As of April 14, more than 150,000 Army Guard and Army Reserve members were mobilized, setting aside jobs and families to go on active – and for many, hazardous – duty.
Changing roles
The reshaping of the Army Reserve and Army National Guard mirrors a plan by Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker to reorganize the regular Army. He is dividing its 10 divisions, which generally have three brigades of about 5,000 soldiers each, into 48 smaller brigades that can replace each other “plug and play” style.
The goal of the Army Reserve reorganization is to make the force complement rather than supplement the Army. Gen. Helmly aims to do that by “inactivating” some units, reclassifying some soldiers, retraining others and creating more flexibility in assignments.
The overall plan is to create 10 “packages” of brigades that can be deployed for six months at a time each, creating a rotation that will give most, if not all Reserve members, four to five years between possible deployments.
“It is an immense change,” Gen. Helmly said in an interview. And one being done as his outfit is busier than ever before. “We’re rebuilding the whole damn engine while the car is running down the highway at about 75 miles an hour,” he quipped.
The Army National Guard , which exists partly to provide governors with emergency forces, has equally ambitious plans. Details must be worked out, but the Guard is to disperse battalions, brigades and smaller units of its eight divisions to separate states.
One goal is to ensure that governors have enough troops to handle state emergencies.
The Army Guard also is converting one transportation company and seven field artillery battalions from six states – including Texas – into military police units to meet a demand for 18 MP companies at U.S. bases.
Military police, lodged entirely in the Guard and Reserve, have been especially in demand for guard duty in the United States and occupation duty in Iraq.
Like the Army Reserve plan, the Army Guard reorganization aims for a rotation schedule that limits mobilizations of individuals or units to once every six years.
Some members of Congress say reorganizing isn’t enough. Expanding the regular Army is the only way to take the pressure off the Guard and Reserve, said Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Calif.
The House Armed Services Committee member has introduced legislation to permanently boost the regular Army by 40,000. Sens. Jack Reed, D-R.I., and Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., have offered a similar bill.
The statistics on retention are misleading, they contend, because “stop-loss orders” have prevented many from getting out even if their contracts have expired.
“We have a stop loss on at least 200,000 active duty and Guard and Reserves that have been activated, so it’s hard to say what anybody’s retention numbers are,” Ms. Tauscher said.
Those stop-order losses typically expire 60-90 days after a reservist finishes a deployment, Gen. Helmly said, and are being used partly to create a cooling-off period and prevent rash departures.
Major complaints
Gen. Helmly said surveys he has ordered suggest that many of those deployed to Iraq were less unhappy about the fact they got sent than about how it was done and what they were told.
Some only got a few days’ notice, making it hard to arrange details of family and job. Many had their deployment unexpectedly extended to a year from six months when peace failed to break out. Some say their units were given inadequate equipment.
Sgt. Sean Reeder, 37, an oilfield technician from Victoria, said his Texas Army National Guard artillery unit, which spent 11 months in Iraq attached to the Army’s 4th Infantry Division, faced the same dangers as soldiers with active-duty units, but had to make do with hand-me-down gear.
They were issued “old, Vietnam-era” flak jackets that lacked new ceramic plates that stop bullets and shrapnel better, he said. They got the new plates about a month before they came home.
Many Guard soldiers had difficulties working out problems with pay and benefits, Sgt. Reeder said, and got inadequate help from the regular Army.
“Every time we’d go to check on our pay or check on our promotions, we’d always hear, ‘Well, we can’t do anything for you because you’re National Guard,’ ” he said.
The deployment was rough on families, he said, estimating that one in four soldiers experienced marital or other family problems while in Iraq.
One way to make deployments easier for employers and families, he said, would be to “have a defined date and time that you’re going to go and return, and try to stick by it as closely as possible.”
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Army News Service
April 22, 2004
Reserve Components Among Units Extended in Iraq
By Master Sgt. Bob Haskell
Arlington, Va. (April 22, 2004) – More than 4,100 Army National Guard Soldiers belonging to units from 14 states will remain on duty in Iraq and Kuwait for an additional three months or so to support the global war against terrorism.
The Pentagon announced April 15 that the members of the 21 units would remain in those countries longer than their anticipated one-year tours of duty to help meet the force requirements for Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that 20,000 Soldiers would serve over there for about 90 additional days.
Army Guard and Army Reserve Soldiers make up about a quarter of that force, officials said.
“The period will be for up to an additional 90 daysin Iraq and up to 120 days total deployment,” Rumsfeldexplained. “Needless to say, we regret having to extendthose individuals. But the country is at war and weneed to do what is necessary to succeed.”
The purpose of the delayed redeployments is to provide the combatant commander with the forces required to defeat those elements threatening the security of Iraq, officials explained.
The affected Army Guard personnel are in support units – primarily military police, transportation and engineer companies and battalions. Four units are from Illinois. Nearly 900 belong to three Missouri units. Three more units come from Tennessee, and two are from South Dakota.
The others come from Alabama, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Nebraska, New Mexico, Ohio, Utah, the state of Washington, and Wisconsin.
Pentagon officials said military members will receive $1,000 for each month or part of a month they serve in Iraq beyond the date their units were due to return to their home stations.
Gen. John Abizaid, commander of the United States Central Command, asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the additional force capability, Pentagon officials explained. Rumsfeld approved the delay in redeployments to support that combatant commander. The 20,000 retained Soldiers will give Abizaid a total force of 135,000 troops in Iraq, officials explained.
“The Army – active, Guard and reserve – issupporting the combatant commander as a single unifiedteam,” said Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum, chief of the NationalGuard Bureau .
“Our units have fought together, endured together andwill remain together. The cohesion baptized by fireand hardened in the crucible of combat is an invaluablecombat multiplier,” Blum added.
“The plan is capability based. When a unit’s capabilitiesare not required, the combatant commander will releasethose units,” National Guard officialssaid. “The Iraqi military, civil defense forces andIraqi police are taking more responsibility for theirsecurity situation with each passing day.”
Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged the contributions and sacrifices that the National Guard and reserve Soldiers are making.
“Certainly to those families of those Soldiers, wethank them for their continued sacrifice and to theemployers of the Guard and the reservefor their continued contribution to this war on terrorism,” Pacesaid. “It’s not an easy sacrifice, but as [SecretaryRumsfeld] mentioned, it’s a very worthy cause.”
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The Associated Press
April 23, 2004
North Dakota National Guard: Doctors Heading to Iraq
By Blake Nicholson, Associated Press
Bismarck – Eight North Dakota National Guard doctors who normally help other soldiers get ready for deployment are now getting themselves ready to go to Iraq.
One of the physicians was mobilized March 5 and already is overseas, Guard spokesman Rob Keller said Thursday.
The other seven will be deployed at various intervals within the next 10 months. All will serve four months of active duty, including three months in Iraq supporting medical units from other states. The rest of the time is for processing at Fort Bliss, Texas.
The doctors are members of the state Guard’s Medical Detachment, a group of 45 doctors, nurses and other medical professionals. Keller said their primary duty is to help North Dakota soldiers get medically ready for deployment, handling such things as physical exams and smallpox vaccinations.
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The State (Columbia, SC)
April 19, 2004 Monday
151st Signal Battalion Gets Home Just in Time
Families Relieved Loved Ones Made it Home Despite Pentagon Plan to Extend Deployments
By Paul Wachter; Staff Writer
For 24 hours, the 400 soldiers of the 151st Signal Battalion were worried their return to South Carolina from the Persian Gulf would be delayed.
“After the Pentagon announced last week that deployments were going to be extended, we thought we might have to stay a few more months,” said Lt. Col. Heather Meeds, commander of the Greenville-based S.C. National Guard unit. “Thankfully, we were able to go home.”
Hundreds of family members greeted the 151st Signal Battalion on Sunday at Fort Jackson’s Weston Lake recreation center.
“I’m just so glad they were able to come home,” said Anna Hightower, of Greenville, who was waiting for her husband, Sgt. 1st Class Chad Hightower, with the couples’ three toddlers. “When I heard about troop delays, it seemed as if we might be starting all over again.”
The soldiers of the 151st provided the telephone, Internet and videoconferencing network that the U.S. military uses in Iraq and Kuwait.
The unit was mobilized in February 2003, reached Kuwait two months later and moved into Iraq in June.
“There were a lot of challenges to our mission at first,” Meeds said. “For one, we were asked to use a lot of commercial equipment that we’d never used before.”
Existing Iraqi infrastructure wasn’t of much use, said Maj. Ronnie Finley.
“They had built some tunnels for fiber-optic cables, but never started installing them,” he said. “We basically started from scratch.”
During their service in the gulf, 151st troops processed more than 9 million phone calls with a call completion rate of 94 percent.
Though not traditionally a “front-line” unit, the 151st came under frequent mortar attack while operating around Baghdad and in southern Iraq.
“It was dangerous,” said Spc. James Cunningham, of Laurens. “Just about every day we’d be attacked by mortars.”
Though none of the battalion’s troops was killed in action, Master Sgt. Thomas Thigpen, 52, died of heart attack or stroke in Kuwait on March 16, 2004.
“As a commander you want to return with all your troops, and Thigpen’s death was a big blow,” said Meeds.
The soldiers said they were optimistic about Iraq’s future.
“At first the Iraqis were more aggressive, but now, except for a small percentage, most of them want us there and asked us to stay,” Cunningham said.
“In our time there, we saw a lot of schools built, new money introduced, and a lot more electricity and construction,” Meeds said. “Despite what you hear on the news, most Iraqis are happy we’re there.”
Currently, there are about 500 S.C. National Guard troops in Iraq, half as many as in February.
After Sunday’s relaxation, the 151st reconvenes today at Columbia’s McCrady National Guard Training Center for demobilization procedures.
“There’ll be a lot of daddy time, and then we’re going to drop the kids with my sister and take a vacation,” said Anna Hightower.
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The Associated Press
April 21, 2004
N.D. National Guard Unit Returns Home
By James MacPherson
Bismark, N.D . (AP) – Gabriella Sullivan’s daddy came home from war over the weekend, a weary soldier in desert camouflage eager to put down his gun, pick up diapers and stare into the face of his 1-year-old daughter. Spc. Kelly Sullivan was one of about 170 members of the National Guard’s 957th Multi-Role Bridge Company to return after about a year in Iraq. Their unit was easily outnumbered by the 3,000 supporters offering hugs, cheers and tearful thanks.
The joyful scene at the local armory Sunday was one that has been replayed across the country in recent weeks as soldiers return to their old lives – even as those lives have changed as much as they have.
Sullivan said the first thing he intended to do was “reconnect with my daughter,” a little girl he could only dote on for two days since her birth. She now has seven teeth and has learned to say “Daddy” to his pictures and videos.
Though Sullivan helped build bridges to move troops and equipment in a still-dangerous nation, he said his wife pulled the most difficult duty during his deployment.
“She had way more to deal with than I did over there,” he said.
Cleone and Duane Hatzenbuehler decorated the armory’s halls Sunday with posters drawn by schoolchildren in their hometown of Hebron. The Hatzenbuehlers’ son, Wade, and his wife, Kelly, were deployed together with the 957th.
“We tortured ourselves every night watching the evening news, yet we wanted to know what was going on,” Cleone said. “It’s an awesome day. It’s got to be one of the best days of our lives.”
Sgt. Dan Olson, a firefighter from Bismarck, was met by his wife, Tonya, and the couple’s daughters, 7-year-old Emilee and 4-year-old Amy. Emilee had marked off a space on the cast on her broken arm for her dad to sign.
“It was unbelievable to be away so long,” he said.
The 957th’s soldiers, whose average age is 22, left Bismarck on Feb. 12, 2003, and arrived in the Middle East last April. “Many of these soldiers left as kids, but they didn’t come back as kids,” Col. Bill Seekins said. “They’re full-blown soldiers now.”
Three of its members were killed in Iraq: Staff Sgt. Kenneth Hendrickson, 41, of Bismarck, and Sgt. Keith Smette, 25, of Makoti, were killed by a roadside bomb on Jan. 24. Spc. Jon Fettig, 30, of Dickinson, was killed in a rocket attack in July.
Fettig’s wife, Cody, was waiting for her brother, Donny Ladwig, to return on Sunday. “I’m ecstatic for every other family, and through this all they’ve become my family.”
Jon Fettig’s sister, Tenille, is Cody Fettig’s best friend and Ladwig’s fiancee. “Time hasn’t moved fast enough,” she said while waiting for Ladwig to arrive.
Besides the thousands of well-wishers who packed the Raymond J. Bohn Armory, Seekins said thousands more lined the streets for the four-mile drive from the airport.
That caught the attention of Harlan Lyson, a World War II veteran and a member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars honor guard. He was happy that people turned out to welcome the soldiers home.
“When I got discharged, I had to hitchhike home,” he said.
Spc. Ashley Jahner was met by her parents, Leroy and Joyce Jahner, of Linton. Their daughter said the first thing she wanted to do was go shopping. She said she then plans to re-enlist and be a helicopter pilot.
“She’s a tough cookie,” said her mother.
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Boston Globe
April 22, 2004
Guard Unit Gets Joyous Welcome
Mission Finally Ends After 14 Months in Iraq
By Joanna Weiss, Globe Staff
Ayer — They figured they might be gone for six months, when they went to Iraq at the start of the war. But sometime late last summer, after months of searing heat and sandstorms and primitive living conditions, the Army National Guard unit from Ayer got the news that would leave its base shaken and sullen for a week: They would have to spend a full year on the ground and return sometime in 2004.
The homecoming came yesterday — 14 months after the dreary February morning when the 110th Maintenance Company left its base in Massachusetts for Iraq. When they filed off five charter buses into the bright midafternoon sun and greeted their families, a few of the 200 returning soldiers said they were sure that, duty complete, their military days were done.
“Worst year of my life,” said Walter Loud, who celebrated his 50th birthday in Iraq. He had served in the Navy for 16 years and the Guard for 13, but had never had an overseas deployment.
“I’m a family man,” he said, as he hoisted his 3-year-old grandson into the air. “I don’t like being away.”
Not every soldier regretted the Iraq experience; many talked about the appreciation they received from most Iraqis they met, the feeling that they’d helped their country, and the way their relatives at home had grown stronger and more self-sufficient.
“I felt as though I was doing my job, and I know in the big scheme of things, it’s all going to work out for us,” said Charles Williams, 39, of Stoughton. “I know I’m not the same guy as a year ago.”
He and others expressed relief that the bulk of their unit, which maintained vehicles and repaired electronics and weapons, was stationed at an air base five hours from Baghdad, away from the fiercest fighting.
But all of them appeared thrilled to be home as they walked through the parking lot, wearing the sand-colored fatigues that they had worn in Iraq.
They blinked hard, in part because the sun was so bright, and in part, some said, from disbelief at being in a familiar place again.
It was the same old armory, but with the trappings of a carnival: bunches of yellow balloons and a moon bounce, dozens of children carrying small American flags.
Signs were posted on trees and street signs, or tied to the chain-link fence in front of the amory: “Welcome Home Dad, I’m Proud of You,” “We Love You Nate,” “We’re Proud of the 110th!”
There were dozens of strollers and carriages, holding the soldiers’ nephews and nieces, granddaughters and grandsons, sons and daughters — including Jacquelyn Gradito, 9 months old, who was born when her father was in Iraq. Peter Gradito, 37, a Fitchburg firefighter, got a chance to see her shortly after her birth, when he returned home for a two-week leave.
But his wife, Jill, 37, and his 3-year-old daughter, Gianna, were left aching for more visits.
“It’s been 408 days,” Jill Gradito said. “Not that I’m counting. I’m just ready to start as a family again.” The tears, it turned out, didn’t overwhelm her when her husband stepped off the bus, snuck up behind her, and said “hello.” She figured more would come later, once she got home, before she served the chicken piccata dinner she had ordered for his relatives and friends.
Other families had planned similar celebrations, barbecues, and rituals, old and new. Mallory Whitney, 16, of Orange, looked forward to showing her father, Frank, her new driving skills.
“When he left, I didn’t even have my permit,” she said. “Now I’ve got my license. I’m going to drive him home.”
She and her 13-year-old brother, Bryan, had made it through the long year on short phone calls from Iraq and gifts.
Bryan wore a dog-tag necklace that said, “My Dad is serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom;” Mallory had a necklace with her name in Arabic. Though some of the soldiers had taken advantage of two weeks of leave, their father stayed in Iraq.
“He figured it would be too hard to come home, be here for two weeks, and say goodbye all over again,” said his friend Rhonda Kimball.
Now, many families said, their lives could return to normal. For some that will mean tuning into war news again. Many relatives said they had shut out coverage of the war because it was too upsetting.
For others, it will mean an end to subterfuge: Erika Reinikainen, 27, of Gardner, did not tell her father about a trip to Baghdad to see some of Saddam Hussein’s palaces — until after it was over. Bruce Reinikainen, 53, had not been thrilled about that. He wasn’t happy about the war.
But since he got the news that his daughter was coming home, something about the world had lightened again.
“When we heard,” he said, “I was dancing all the way.”
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The Associated Press
April 23, 2004
Twelve Members of the 1457th Return, Others Expected Next Month
Dateline: Salt Lake City
Twelve members of the Utah National Guard’s 1457th Combat Engineer Battalion have returned from Iraq and the rest are scheduled to follow them soon.
Amid the rejoicing by the Guard families, the relatives of Army Reservists from the Salt Lake City-based 419th Transportation Company, who have been ordered to remain in the region indefinitely, fear their loved ones are being forgotten.
“The Reservists seem to be invisible,” said Kristen Merrill of Layton. Her husband is among the 175 soldiers in the company. “My husband says they’re all worried that everyone has forgotten about them.”
Merrill said she understands that the soldiers will be driving convoys from Kuwait to somewhere north of Baghdad.
On Sunday, families members are to meet at the Reserve center in Salt Lake City for information on the unit’s mission.
The meeting is closed to the public.
Like the 419th, the Guard’s 1457th had been slated to return and then was told its service in the Middle East was being extended.
But Pentagon officials confirmed Thursday that the battalion would be coming come next month after all. They said the change in orders occurred after officials reviewed what types of units would still be needed in Iraq.
The 12 members who returned Thursday all were near the maximum two years of active duty.
“It’s kind of exciting,” said Staff Sgt. Kira Weimer of Salt Lake City said on arrival at the airport. “It hasn’t quite hit me all yet, but it probably will when I get home.”
Staff Sgt. Charles Barkey of Spanish Fork had no one to greet him because he had not told his wife he was returning.
“I’m surprising her. As soon as we get out of here, I’m surprising her at work,” he said.
Weimer said she had mixed feelings, knowing her 24 months of active duty would be over but friends would be left in the Mideast.
“It was kind of wrenching when I had to leave pretty much my family there,” she said. “I feel better knowing that they might be coming home.”
In the beginning, the work was scary, she said. A security perimeter was set up, and if the soldiers left the perimeter, they were “locked and loaded and ready to shoot if anything happened.”
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Los Angeles Times
April 24, 2004
Town of Patriots Dusts off Flags for Guard Unit’s Return
The 1058th of Hingham, Mass., Comes Home With All its Troops — Just As it Did in the Gulf War .
By Elizabeth Mehren, Times Staff Writer
Hingham, Mass. — In Iraq, they drove more than a million miles, escorting convoys and steering trucks through the desert. But on Friday, it was one final mile through this quaint New England town that brought tears to the 1058th National Guard unit — and cheers to several thousand family and friends who lined their route home.
“This is just amazing,” said Billy Chiu, 29, descending from a Pumpkin Lines transit bus after a year in Iraq, as a bagpipe played “Give My Regards to Broadway.”
For much of the day, a chilly spring rain fell on Main Street — where 140 signs, each bearing the name of one member of the Hingham-based transportation unit, were tacked to telephone poles. “Great job!” they read.
Five buses filled with returning troops rolled down the historic boulevard of the town, founded in 1633, that had proudly sent Benjamin Lincoln, forebear of the president, off to fight in the Revolutionary War.
The 1058th arrived in Ft. Drumm, N.Y., this week. But it was the ride down what Eleanor Roosevelt called the most beautiful Main Street in America that showed them they were home at last.
Giant oaks and maples sported yellow ribbons. Children climbed on car roofs, waving flags and banners. A delegation from the South Shore Baptist Church stood on the corner of Main and Free streets, waiting to clap for Bobby Stockbridge — a member of the congregation who also belonged to the 1058th. “Thank God for Bob and the 1058th,” read a sign outside the church.
On another corner, 10-year-old Olivia Vita carried a hand-colored sign that said: “Thank You, 1058th.” She explained, “My whole class came to wave them goodbye when they left. I just had to be here when they came back.”
The 20,000 residents of Hingham — which hugs the seacoast midway between Boston and Plymouth — need little excuse to wave their American flags. Flags come out throughout the year: on Memorial Day, Veteran’s Day, Labor Day, Patriot’s Day and, of course, on Flag Day. The major social event here is the flag-filled Fourth of July parade, led each year by the town’s oldest living veteran.
It was during last summer’s parade that Marion White decided to mobilize the town when the 1058th came home. With their children overseas, White and other parents marched in the parade in their place, carrying a banner identifying themselves as the families of the 1058th.
“That was when I knew this town believed in its soldiers,” said White, a seventh-grade teacher from Raynham, about 25 miles from Hingham. “They cheered and they cheered, and I realized Hingham was 100% behind these soldiers.”
White’s daughter Kathleen, 29, left her job at a nuclear power plant to serve as a trucker in Iraq. She ended up as a gunner, operating a .50-caliber weapon.
“They were a transportation unit. Supposedly, it was a safe job,” said her brother, Christian White, 31. He whipped out his cellphone to show a picture of Kathleen on duty in Iraq — standing atop a truck, her giant gun beside her.
“The hardest part of her being over there for 14 months was listening to the reports every day of another death,” he said. “Every unit that was hit, you thought it might be her. Your stomach dropped. Your heart raced. And it just got worse by the day. It never got better.
“Every person here has a soldier that was directly involved in a convoy unit,” Christian White said. “These families know that we are still at war.”
Scanning the crowd for his stepfather, Hanniff Brown, 16-year-old Ewan Scott of the Dorchester section of Boston said he tried to keep his little brother, Dominique, from watching television while their dad was in Iraq.
“Every morning you wake up, this one died, that one died — and you know it could have been him,” the teenager said.
Whether through luck, providence or a combination of the two, the 1058th returned intact. The day they came back to the Hingham Armory, newspapers and television stations across America were displaying previously suppressed pictures of soldiers’ flag-draped coffins arriving in the U.S. They arrived home as Pentagon officials were announcing the highest death toll for any month since the U.S.-led invasion began — at least 100 American soldiers dead so far in April.
As he embraced his wife, Spec. Jude Forsythe, 40, had an explanation for how the unit had avoided fatalities in Iraq.
“Togetherness,” he said. “Working together as a team. We never went anywhere alone.”
Reluctantly, Felicity Forsythe pulled away from her husband. “Hold your daughter; she needs you,” she said as her husband embraced a weeping Alexis Forsythe, 11.
“We knew he was coming home today,” Felicity Forsythe said. “But none of this was real until just now…. He is safe, and we’re going to take good care of him now.”
Forsythe had this to say about planting his feet back on the Massachusetts soil: “Sweet.”
On the steps of the armory, a group of veterans applauded the versatility of the returning soldiers.
“They went to do one job, transportation, and ended up as an armored escort,” said Bob Beal, who served in the Pacific in World War II with the Marine Corps and also fought in the Korean War.
“There’s only one thing to account for getting them all back here safely,” Beal said: “God.”
Lt. Col. Chris Henes, head of the Massachusetts National Guard in Milford, said he was too superstitious to talk about why the 1058th had fared so well.
“I don’t want to say it’s unusual, and I don’t want to jinx us, but going back to Desert Storm [the Persian Gulf War], we have been lucky,” he said.
Henes said the future plans of the unit were uncertain. He also said the 1058th was fortunate to be home, while so many other units in Iraq have seen their tours extended.
While waiting to greet her son Paul, 36, Janice Ferrone of Woburn, Mass., said she was glad the Pentagon had released the pictures of coffins returning to the U.S. mortuary at Delaware’s Dover Air Force Base.
“This is a war, and [death] happens,” she said. “It should be acknowledged. It shouldn’t be covered up.”
Acknowledging the soldiers in the 1058th was what Marion White had in mind when she began working with Hingham officials to plan a festive welcome.
“This is small-town America, and we wanted to make sure they got the hero’s welcome they deserved,” she said. “Between the signs and the flowers and … all these people turning out to cheer for them, I’d say they got it.”
White looked for a moment at her daughter, who had dropped more than 60 pounds while in Iraq. “Mom, all we had to eat were little cups of chicken noodle soup,” Kathleen White said.
As the crowd headed home, Marion White said she would be back in Hingham this summer to march in the Fourth of July parade.
“But this time,” she said, “I’m going to march with my soldier.”
Winston-Salem Journal (Winston Salem, NC)
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April 25, 2004
Legion Post Honors Guard Unit Back From Active Duty
They served in U.S.; Army Reserve Unit Still Serving in Iraq and Kuwait
By Mary Giunca and Jim Sparks Journal Reporters
When chief warrant officer Wayne Church’s National Guard unit was called to active duty almost a year ago, Church wasn’t certain how much excitement he would see. After all, he is 53 years old and the unit was being deployed in the United States.
The quiet family man found himself jumping out of airplanes as part of his training with the 18th Airborne Corps. Church and three other members of the unit earned their wings while at Fort Bragg.
“I wasn’t sure if I’d get a chance to do it,” Church said. “They don’t have an old-man standard. They have a 17- to 19-year-old standard.”
Church and 43 other members of the 105th Engineer Group of the N.C. Army National Guard received a hero’s welcome yesterday at American Legion Post 55 on Miller Street.
The welcome was a formal one – the soldiers have been home anywhere from a few days to few weeks.
The group, which has its headquarters in Winston-Salem, was on active duty for 11 months. Members of the group were split up and sent to three different locations. One group went to Fort Bragg, another group went to Fort Belvoir in Virginia and the third group provided protection for a national security agency near Fort Meade, in Maryland.
Bryan E. Beatty, the secretary of the N.C. Department of Crime Control and Public Safety, thanked the soldiers for doing their duty.
“We want you to know we feel safer, we sleep better at night because of heroes like you,” he said.
Though yesterday was a time of celebration for the 105th, the mood was quite different for families of local soldiers serving overseas in the 846th Transportation Company of the U.S. Army Reserve.
The 846th, a trucking unit based in Salisbury that has been operating in Iraq and Kuwait for a year, was supposed to return to Fort Bragg on Easter Sunday.
However, the unit’s 106 soldiers were told that they were being held back just hours before they were to board planes from Kuwait for home.
Christine Van Lew of Kernersville, whose boyfriend, Travis Schenck, of Midway is in the 846th, said that it hit her hard when she heard last week that the 105th, a unit deployed in the United States, was being released while her soldier’s unit was still overseas. Schenck worked in maintenance for the town of Kernersville before his deployment.
“It really ticked me off,” Van Lew said.
The 846th is made up of soldiers from counties throughout the Central Piedmont, including Forsyth, Davidson, Guilford, Randolph and Yadkin.
Yesterday, Army officials held a closed meeting at the Salisbury Civic Center to answer questions from families of soldiers in the 846th.
The meeting lasted an hour longer than expected.
As they left, several in attendance said that the atmosphere in the meeting room was heated as the soldiers’ relatives vented their anger.
They said that the frustration grew as Army officials dodged questions about the extended deployment, including exactly how long their loved ones would be expected to stay in a war zone that had grown more dangerous over the past several months.
Family members and soldiers of the 846th were told at first that the unit would remain overseas for an additional two months.
Army officials said yesterday that the unit’s deployment has been extended four months, until August, but that it could possibly be moved back even more.
Van Lew said that having the unit held at the last minute was bad enough without the uncertainty surrounding how much longer it will have to stay.
“If they need them there longer, that’s fine, just be up front about it,” Van Lew said. “Give us a deadline and stick to it. Don’t jerk it out from under us.”
During their deployment, most of the soldiers in the 105th were able to come back and visit their families regularly, but several of them spoke of missing their usual routines.
Church felt his age every morning when the airborne training call came at 4 a.m., he said. He had to run a 71/2-minute mile for four miles.
Members of his unit called him “Grandpa” and “Geritol,” he said.
Church said that, in time, his example inspired younger members of the unit.
“A lot of them told me, ‘Every time I wanted to fall (drop) out, I’d see you and I couldn’t fall out,'” he said.
Spc. Lisa Burkholder Dumas, who was in the 105th, was transferred to the 211th National Guard unit and sent to Iraq.
Dumas is with the military police and said she wasn’t allowed to say where she was in Iraq. She worked with security patrols there.
“Of course, you’re always scared of what’s to come,” she said, “but it wasn’t something I didn’t want to do.”
Dumas spent part of her tour of duty in Kuwait.
“It was awful in Kuwait,” she said, “with the sandstorms, the heat, the humidity. It’s like beach sand. The storms last for days at a time.”
Dumas said she missed vegetables most of all.
“I think I ate salad for two weeks straight when I got home,” she said.
Dumas had been married for just six months when she was sent to Iraq in March. Even though she is happy to be home, a part of her waits for another call, she said.
Sharon Alexander, who serves as family-readiness coordinator for the unit, said that although Guard members and their families were celebrating, they are conscious that the war is not over.
“That threat hangs over their head,” she said. “That’s always been hanging out there. We don’t know what the future may hold.”
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Akron Beacon Journal (Ohio)
April 22, 2004
Bill Would Waive Pension Penalty for Guard, Reserve
House Plan for Troops to Use Retirement Funds Called ‘Pathetic’ Effort
Dateline: Washington
The House voted unanimously Wednesday to let financially pinched National Guard and Reserve troops tap into retirement savings without penalty, although some Democrats called the effort to support the troops ”pathetic” and ”rather pitiful.”
The House voted 415-0 to waive the 10 percent penalty imposed on early withdrawals from retirement accounts and pensions for National Guard and Reserve troops deployed six months or longer since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Those taking advantage of the waiver could still owe income taxes on withdrawn savings.
Rep. Clay Shaw, R-Fla., said the bill aims to help the one-third of reserve troops who took a pay cut when activated to duty.
”The house payments go on. The grocery bills continue to pile up,” he said.
Democrats voted unanimously for the bill, but many said the country should make a much bigger effort to support troops fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
”That is a really pathetic gesture,” said John Tanner, D-Tenn. ”Active duty guard and reservists and their families are the only people in this country who have been asked to sacrifice anything, anything whatsoever.”
Employers are not required to pay workers activated to duty, nor do they have to continue providing health insurance and other benefits. Employers are required to give the same or equal job to the soldier when active duty ends.
The bill waiving penalties on early retirement withdrawals would apply to National Guard and Reserve troops activated between Sept. 11, 2001, and Sept. 12, 2005. Those military personnel would be given two years after they return to civilian life to replenish the accounts.
Democrats asked Republicans to push additional legislation supporting National Guard and Reserve troops, including better child tax credits and access to health insurance, along with tax credits for employers who make up the difference between civilian and military pay.
”It is no profile in courage for us to say you are now able to borrow money from your pension fund and can have it penalty free,” said Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y.
A few questioned whether families that borrow from their retirement funds would have the means to refill the funds.
”They have to invade their retirement plans and their savings to subsidize this war effort because their families are under some serious economic stress,” said Rep. George Miller, D-Calif. ”They’re getting penalized by destroying their long-term retirement to subsidize this war.”
The Senate has not yet considered the bill.
American Forces Press Service
Thrift Savings Plan: Good Way to Increase Wealth, Executive Director Says
By Rudi Williams
Washington, April 23, 2004 – Defense Department officials want thousands more service members to invest in their future through the Thrift Savings Plan, or TSP.
And now is a good time for service members to start paying themselves. The Current TSP open season started April 15 and runs until June 30. This is the time Service members can start or change their contributions to their TSP account.
Service members can contribute up to 9 percent of their basic pay each month, and up to 100 percent of incentive pay and special pay, including bonus and combat pay. But their total contributions from taxable pay may not exceed the Internal Revenue Service limit of $13,000 for 2004.
“You’re never too young or too old to start a savings account in TSP,” said Gary A. Amelio, executive director of the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board and chief executive and managing fiduciary of TSP for federal employees. “The tax deferral benefits are excellent and compounded earnings are simply a phenomenal way to increase your wealth.”
TSP assets total more than $110 billion. The plan maintains retirement savings accounts for more than 3 million participants. This includes federal civilian employees in all branches of government, U.S. Postal Service employees and members of the seven uniformed services.
Created by the Federal Employees’ Retirement System Act of 1986, TSP is a tax-deferred savings option and lowers the taxable income for participants in the 2004 tax year. The savings plan is similar to 401k plans offered by many private employers. It’s separate from and in addition to the military retirement system, which is based on years of service and rank.
Administered by the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board, TSP was available only to civilian employees until October 2001, when the program was extended to active and reserve component service members, including the Coast Guard. The program also was extended to members of the Public Health Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Members of the National Guard and Reserve who are also federal civilians are allowed to have both a military and civilian TSP. “If you’re part of both work forces, you can have two different accounts,” Amelio noted. “And you can combine the accounts after you separate from either service.”
But Amelio said if TSP participants with military and civilian accounts exceed the
IRS limit of $13,000 before the end of the calendar year, the plan will return the excess contributions. “It’s called an excess deferral,” Amelio noted.
The government gives matching funds to Federal Employees’ Retirement System TSP participants. Uniformed services and Civil Service Retirement System participants normally don’t receive matching funds, but the service secretaries can authorize matching funds for service members in critical military occupational specialties.
“FERS employees have a less lucrative defined benefit plan than does CSRS and
them uniformed services,” Amelio explained. “So the TSP is intended to make up the difference for FERS participants.”
He also pointed out that CSRS and military participants are limited to contributing up to 9 percent of their base pay, while FERS members are allowed to contribute up to 14 percent of their base pay.
When service members leave active duty, they have several options. They can leave their money in TSP, allowing it to continue to grow, take a partial or full withdrawal, roll the money into another plan or an Individual Retirement Account, or purchase an annuity. They also could choose to make periodic distributions to themselves, Amelia said.
More than 220,000 uniformed service members signed up for TSP in 2002, the first year they were eligible. By December 2003, more than 390,000 people were investing in TSP.
“Participation numbers have been rising steadily since the plan was made available,” Amelio noted. “Today, we have about 410,000 members of the armed services participating. We’ve been putting a special focus with DoD on getting more and more armed service members to participate. So we’re very pleased that the numbers continue to go up, and DoD is helping us get the word out to the members.”
Amelio attributes the increase in participation to knowledge, familiarity and comfort.
“As members of the armed services become more familiar with TSP, the more they like it,” he said. “They find that it’s a wonderful saving program, easy to participate in, and doesn’t cost them anything. The more they talk to their colleagues in the armed forces about it, they become more comfortable about the plan, and they like it more and more. That’s why the participation is going up.”
TSP has investment funds, which vary in risk and investment mixture: government securities investment (G fund); fixed-income investment (F fund); common stock index investment (C fund); small capitalization stock index investment (S fund); and international stock index investment (I fund).
TSP enrollment can be done online through the MyPay Web site, or by completing a TSP enrollment form (TSP-U-1) and turning it in at the local pay or personnel office. Enrollment forms are available online at the TSP Web site.
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The News Tribune (Tacoma, Washington)
April 22, 2004
Washington Guard Unit Takes Over Iraq Supply Hub
By Adam Lynn, The News Tribune
Members of a Washington National Guard brigade are in charge of security at one of the most important bases in Iraq.
The 82nd Airborne Division transferred responsibility for defending Logistical Support Area Anaconda to the 81st Brigade Combat Team on Sunday, the brigade reported. The base, about 50 miles north of Baghdad in Balad, is the main supply hub for U.S. forces in Iraq.
Soldiers of the 81st will staff checkpoints and security towers and run patrols around the base. They also will help train members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, Capt. Anne Marie Peacock, the brigade’s deputy public affairs officer, reported via e-mail.
The 81st has about 4,000 soldiers in Iraq, the largest deployment by the Washington National Guard since World War II. The vast majority of brigade soldiers are from Washington state. Formerly known as the 81st Armor Brigade, the unit is based at Camp Murray, south of Tacoma.
Col. James Chambers, commander of the Army’s 13th Corps Support Command, said protecting Anaconda is vital to Operation Iraqi Freedom, according to Peacock’s e-mail. The 13th Support Command is responsible for supplying U.S. military units throughout the country.
Anaconda is in the “Sunni triangle,” an area of central Iraq where anti-American sentiment runs deep. The base has been attacked a number of times.
Brig. Gen. Oscar Hilman, the 81st’s commanding officer, said the brigade would try to integrate members of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps into all operations, according to Peacock. The U.S. government hopes to turn over authority to Iraqi citizens July 1.
Elements of the 81st took over security at two other bases this past weekend, Peacock said.
The 1st Battalion, 303rd Armor Regiment assumed control at Camp Victory South near Baghdad on Saturday. The 1st Battalion, 161st Infantry Regiment took over the defense of Forward Operation Base Gunner, between Baghdad and Balad.
The 81st is serving a one-year deployment.
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The Associated Press
April 23, 2004
Two National Guard Soldiers Injured in Iraq Attacks
Dateline: Raleigh, N.C.
Two National Guard soldiers from North Carolina were injured in attacks by Iraqi insurgents – one burned and the other hit by small arms fire.
Lt. Matthew Delk, 33, of Roanoke Rapids was burned Tuesday during an ambush in Mosul. Delk, who has been the Halifax County manager since November 2001, is a member of South Carolina’s 268th Engineer Firefighters Detachment.
Pfc. McKenzie Callihan, 22, a member of the N.C. National Guard’s 30th Heavy Separate Brigade, was wounded by small arms fire at a traffic checkpoint in northeastern Iraq.
Delk sent an e-mail message Wednesday to his staff in Halifax County from Camp Diamondback in Mosul.
“Yesterday, I was commander of a small convoy going to do a fire assessment recon of Tall Afar airfield,” Delk wrote. “We had 4 humvees and 13 people. Today, one of us is dead, one is critical, and 6 or 7 more of us are wounded.
“My vehicle bore the brunt of the IED,” he wrote. “They opened up on us with AKs, and a firefight ensued. We know that we got at least four of them, they had others that were able to drag away the bodies during the fight.”
His vehicle was destroyed and out of four vehicles, only one could drive away, Delk wrote. Eventually, the attackers were driven away and the area secured.
Delk said he had burns and blisters over his hands and face, and bruises everywhere. He expected to spend several weeks in Germany recuperating.
In Bladen County, Terry Callihan said he was told that his son, McKenzie Callihan, a Bladenboro High School graduate, was “in a firefight, and he took three rounds in the legs and maybe the hip, and that they airlifted him out,” Callihan said.
The wounded soldier was in stable condition, said Capt. Robert Carver, the N.C. National Guard’s spokesman. The wounded man was initially taken to a Baghdad hospital, and was being transferred to the Army’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany.
Initial reports indicated that the wounded soldier was working at a traffic checkpoint near the town of Tuz about 10 p.m. when a car tried to avoid the checkpoint, Carver said. Several anti-coalition fighters were killed in the incident. There were no reports of other U.S. injuries.
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Portland Press Herald (Maine)
April 24, 2004
133rd Embraces Hero as One of its Own
Troops From Maine Are On Hand as the South Carolina Soldier Gets a Purple Heart for Risking His Life in an Ambush.
By Bill Nemitz staff writer
Dateline: Mosul, Iraq
He walked slowly into the small room just off the entrance to the small hospital at Camp Diamondback, his face and left hand covered with burns, his lower right arm buried beneath a mound of gauze.
“Hey, sir, how you doin’?” Lt. Matthew Delk said in his deep southern accent as Maj. Dwaine Drummond, executive officer of the Maine Army National Guard’s 133rd Engineer Battalion, stepped forward to greet him.
“I’m fine,” Drummond said softly, taking Delk’s left hand. “How are you?”
“I’m doin’ great,” Delk said. “I’m doin’ great.”
He isn’t, of course. It will be months before Delk fully recovers from the injuries he suffered Tuesday when the Humvee in which he and two Maine soldiers were riding was blown 75 feet sideways by a roadside bomb in western Mosul.
But this is the military, where some days it’s good enough just to be alive. And where acts of heroism under enemy fire do not go unnoticed.
Friday morning, as a light drizzle turned Mosul’s dust into a sticky quagmire, a small contingent piled into a pair of Humvees and made the five-minute trip down the hill from Camp Marez to the hospital at Camp Diamondback.
Their official mission: To formally present Delk, a member of South Carolina’s 268th Engineer Firefighters Detachment assigned to the 133rd, with a Purple Heart for the wounds he sustained during Tuesday’s ambush by anti-American insurgents.
Their unofficial mission: To thank him for risking his life to save a mortally wounded Spc. Christopher Gelineau of Portland and for saving Spc. Craig Ardry of Pittsfield, who is now recovering from his own burns and other injuries at a military hospital in Germany. And to embrace Delk as one of their own.
While Drummond read the citation in a loud voice, Lt. Col. John Jansen, commander of the 133rd, pinned the medal on Delk’s blue hospital pajamas, speaking the whole time in hushed words meant only for the young lieutenant from Roanoke Rapids, N.C.
When Jansen finished, Delk nodded his thanks and, with tears in his eyes, placed his left hand on Jansen’s shoulder. Stepping back, he then lifted his bandaged right hand to his forehead in painful salute.
Then he spoke.
“Everybody there did tremendous things,” said Delk, who commanded the convoy of 12 soldiers – six from Maine, three from New York and three from South Carolina. “And I’m really sad and sorry that we lost a wonderful soldier. My prayers are with his family and with him.”
Jansen quietly assured Delk that he did everything he could, that Gelineau’s wounds were too severe for anyone to save him.
Delk, flanked by his two somber comrades from the 268th – Sgt. Dave Sandy and Sgt. Charles Boone – looked down and nodded. And for a few moments, he was back there.
“I don’t know how I got out onto the street,” he said, staring at the floor. “I still don’t know.”
But he does know that he somehow got Gelineau and Ardry away from the burning Humvee. And that when he picked up his M-16 with burned hands to return the insurgents’ small arms fire, the hand guard of his weapon had been blown off by the explosion. He fired it anyway.
“It’s a pleasure to have you as part of our family,” Jansen said, now in a voice loud enough for all to hear. “And it’s a personal privilege to know you.”
Finally, one by one, Delk’s visitors stepped forward and embraced him: Jansen, Drummond, Chaplain David Sivret, Spc. Ryan Estes, Spc. Ryan Chapman and 1st Lt. Christopher Elgee, who took Delk’s calls for help over the 133rd’s radio.
“I’m sorry I called you all those names, man,” Delk told Elgee.
“Don’t worry about it,” Elgee replied with a smile.
Last in line stood Sgt. Carrie Fletcher. She approached Delk, held out her hand and said, “I’m Sgt. Fletcher and I spoke with Spc. Ardry’s wife . . . and she asked me to thank you for her.”
And with that, Fletcher gently hugged the young man with the Purple Heart on his pajamas.
Mission accomplished.
Promise fulfilled.
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New York Times
April 24, 2004
Guard Gives Sisters More Time to Decide on Returning to Iraq
By Jo Napolitano
Chicago, April 23 — Rachel and Charity Witmer, members of the Wisconsin National Guard serving in Iraq, have been granted another 15 days of leave to decide whether to seek reassignment after their sister, Michelle, was killed in Baghdad.
“Everyone has an opinion on how they think my daughters should be responding,” said Lori Witmer from her home in New Berlin, Wis. “We aren’t making any comments right now just to protect my daughters.”
Rachel, 24, and Charity, Michelle’s 20-year-old twin, did not want to speak publicly about their decision. But military officials said the two remaining sisters felt a strong allegiance to their two families: the one in Wisconsin and their unit outside Baghdad.
“They have such a sense of duty and they want to not only honor their sister’s memory and her dedication to serve in the mission, but they also feel that they have built a family with their fellow soldiers and the units that they serve,” said Lt. Col. Mark Bruns, commander of the 641st Battalion, to which the three women were assigned.
At the same time, after watching their mother, father and two brothers suffer Michelle’s loss, Colonel Bruns said, they fear jeopardizing their own lives and the possibility of their parents losing another child.
“They don’t want to be responsible for anything that could happen in the future by putting themselves in harms way again,” he said.
Specialist Michelle M. Witmer, who was serving with the 32nd Military Police Company, was killed on April 9 when her Humvee was attacked in Baghdad. Her sisters returned to Wisconsin on April 12 and her body came back on April 15.
After their sister’s death, Rachel and Charity spoke about the agony of deciding whether to return to their comrades in a statement on April 13. “We are conflicted, because we have two families and we can’t be with both at the same time,” they said.
The women’s parents said that their family had made a tremendous sacrifice and that their daughters should be brought home immediately.
Lt. Col. Tim Donovan said he could understand their desire to be with their unit. “Serving in a military unit creates very strong bonds between the soldiers who live and work together and those bonds are further strengthened when that service is in a hostile environment with danger all around,” he said. “They depend on each other not just for friendship and camaraderie, but for their security.”
Specialist Rachel Witmer serves in the 32nd Military Police Company, and Sgt. Charity Witmer is a medic in the 118th Medical Battalion.
Mary Kay Kulla, whose husband, Scott, is serving in the same unit that Michelle served in, said she hoped the sisters decided to stay home.
“I speak from the perspective of a family member and wife never having been a soldier, so my perspective is yes, please stay home,” Ms. Kulla said. “Things are just escalating overseas, and it’s scarier and scarier by the day. Everything is becoming more and more uncertain. I don’t think anyone could fault them for making a decision to stay, if that’s what they chose.”
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The Associated Press
April 19, 2004
Davenport Resumes Rallies for Troops
Dateline : Davenport, Iowa
Residents have returned to a city intersection for weekly rallies to show their support for U.S. troops in Iraq.
Last Friday, about a dozen people showed up during rush-hour traffic, turning the intersection north of downtown into a noisy display of patriotism. About 70 flags decorated the corners.
“I think we should have a challenge to every city in America to do this,” said Joan Stupka of Davenport, who said it was her first time at the intersection. “I support our troops and I support our president.”
Motorists honked their horns or waved.
“I’m taking pictures to e-mail to my son. It means a lot to him,” said Annette Wood of Davenport, whose son serves with the 106th Aviation unit of the Iowa National Guard. Families with loved ones in the unit learned Thursday that the unit’s stay had been extended for another 90 to 120 days.
“I’m not apprehensive. I’m anxious for us to win. I’m anxious for our troops to come home,” she said.
The Friday rallies began after the war started, then faded. They have now resumed with this month’s fierce fighting and heavy casualties.
A weekend of new fighting pushed the death toll for U.S. troops in April to 99, already the record for a single-month in Iraq and approaching the number killed during the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein last year.
On Friday, an American soldier was taken hostage.
“That might be why we’re hearing all of this (horn-honking),” said AnnaBelle Meredith of Coal Valley, Ill. “How dare they take one of ours.”
Four soldiers with ties to Davenport have been killed in Iraq.
– Cpl. Michael R. Speer, 24, a Kansas native who joined the Marine Corps in Davenport, killed April 9 in hostile fire in Al Anbar Province, west of Baghdad.
– Army Sgt. Paul Fisher, 39, of Cedar Rapids, died Nov. 6, 2003, at a hospital in Hamburg, Germany, following a Nov. 2 missile attack on a Chinook helicopter near Fallujah; assigned to Detachment 1, Company F, 106th Aviation Battalion, Army National Guard, based in Davenport.
– Army Chief Warrant Officer Bruce A. Smith, 41, West Liberty, killed in the Nov. 2, 2003, attack on a Chinook helicopter near Fallujah; assigned to Detachment 1, Company F, 106th Aviation Battalion.
– Marine Sgt. Bradley S. Korthaus, 29, Davenport, drowned March 24, 2003, while trying to cross the Saddam Canal in southeastern Iraq; assigned to the 6th Engineer Support Battalion.
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New Jersey Star Ledger
April 20, 2004
National Guard Opens Center to Aid Families
Somerset Facility Will Seek to Relieve Burdens on Kin
By Rick Hepp Star-Ledger Staff
When her mother is deployed to Iraq later this year with the National Guard’s 42nd Infantry Division, Laura Fitzgerald knows the duties of caring for her extended family will fall to her.
“Often people don’t realize the hardship on the families left behind. There are lots of things that come into play,” said Fitzgerald, 31, of North Brunswick. “My mother is the rock of our family. Now, I have the job of stepping in and being that rock.”
Her mother, Eveleen Fitzgerald, 54, of North Brunswick is an administrative specialist in the National Guard who works as a Highland Park police officer in her civilian life. She and roughly 2,500 other troops from units based in Somerset, Lawrenceville and Teaneck will report next month to Fort Dix for readiness training before being shipped to Iraq as early as this fall.
An additional 900 National Guard soldiers are to report in May for duty guarding terrorism detainees at the U.S. military prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. All told, nearly 70 percent of the New Jersey Army National Guard is expected to be deployed within the next year for missions around the globe.
To ease the transition for the families of the soldiers, the National Guard opened a family assistance center Sunday at the National Guard Armory in the Somerset section of Franklin Township where family members can get advice on issues ranging from dealing with the separation to home finances. It will be open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekdays and a family support hotline, (888) 859-0325, has been established for off-hour emergencies.
“These soldiers are going to need to be focused on their jobs, and that’s what this program is all about,” Brig. Gen. Maria Falca- Dodson, the deputy adjutant general of the New Jersey National Guard, told the troops and their families Sunday during the ribbon- cutting ceremony.
The center will offer counseling sessions, discounted professional services for home and automotive repair, and household and school- related items for the families. There is also a recreation room so children can play together while adults attend various meetings.
Col. Bill Rochelle, commander of the 42nd Infantry Division Support Command, said, “As a soldier, the No. 1 thought in their mind is taking care of their families while they’re away. This family assistance center is one of the answers to that.”
“This gives you a place to go when you have a problem. It gives you a place to go when you need to talk to someone. It gives you a shoulder to cry on. It gives you a friend. And it gives the soldiers a piece of mind,” Rochelle said.
Laura Fitzgerald said the center will help take some of the burden off her while filling in temporarily for her mother.
“I’m her only daughter and although I’m the youngest I’ve been chosen as the one to take over all the responsibilities. I need some place that I can say, ‘Listen, this is what I need,'” she said. “It’s a big burden, so this is going to be extremely helpful.”
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The Associated Press
April 20, 2004
Wives Establish Group Concerned Over Iraq Deployment Extensions
Dateline : Salt Lake City
Three wives of Utah National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers whose deployment in Middle East has been extended have established what they hope will become a national organization to voice their concerns.
“The idea was to create a unified voice and develop a platform addressing the concerns,” said Linda Dexter, a Saratoga Springs resident and wife of Staff Sgt. Kevin Dexter.
Members of the Utah National Guard’s 1457th Combat Engineers and the Army Reserve’s 419th Transportation Company have been away from their families nearly 15 months, and their deployments were extended last week.
When the 1457th left Utah, the general belief was they would be gone six months, maximum, Dexter said. “And that seemed an impossible length of time at that point,” she said.
After they left for Iraq, officials said troops could serve up to a year in the war theater. Time at training camps didn’t count toward the year.
They served nearly all of that period. Then came the extensions.
Guard families are proud and have a great sense of patriotism, said Dexter, whose family had to move to another home last year when their rent was raised.
“But we are also absolutely weary and so are our soldiers,” she said.
She is one of two vice presidents of the new organization, Rights for American Citizen Soldiers, which was formed after families met with military officials last week.
They want to be supportive of the National Guard and not protesters in an anti-war sense, Dexter said.
Natalie Whatcott of Lehi is president of RACS.
“We’re disheartened and we’re disappointed and we’d like some answers,” said Whatcott, wife of the 419th Transportation Company’s Sgt. 1st Class Steve Whatcott.
Linda Dexter and her husband have four children, “and certainly it’s affected them,” she said.
The last time they saw their dad was for a two-week leave in November.
Their 8-year-old son spends a lot of time “kind of brooding,” Linda Dexter said. “One poignant question he asked me was, ‘I wonder each day, has someone killed my daddy or has my daddy had to kill someone?’ That is a tremendous burden.”
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Portland (ME) Press Herald
April 20, 2004
Guard Families Demanding Answers to Constant Duty
By John Richardson, Portland Press Herald Writer
Nancy Durst says she wants an explanation, and she may go to the Pentagon to get it.
Durst’s husband, Scott, is a reservist in the 94th Military Police Company and one of about 5,000 part-time soldiers told this month to cancel plans for their long-awaited homecoming because they’re staying in the Middle East for another three or four months. Scott Durst left his family and full-time job as a Maine Drug Enforcement agent in December 2002, about 17 months after returning from Bosnia.
“He’s been deployed two-and-a-half of the five years we’ve been married,” Durst said. “They signed up to serve their country. But the reason they are not active duty is that they have other civilian jobs to go to . . . They have done their time.”
Why, Durst asks, are members of the Reserve and National Guard spending more time in war zones than some active duty units?
That question is being asked by a growing number of families and political leaders around the country. Maine’s two U.S. senators, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, are even trying to set up a meeting with Department of Defense officials and the families of the 94th, Durst says.
“We want answers,” she said.
The explanation may not be the one Durst and other relatives hope for.
The elevated role of part-time soldiers, made more obvious by the nature of the conflict in Iraq, is the product of 34 years of U.S. military reform triggered by the Vietnam War. Now, the Iraq war may well lead to another long-term shift in the structure of the military and the role of citizen-soldiers.
Already, the Iraq experience is changing the perception of the Guard and Reserve, and causing concern about their ability to retain members who feel they, their families and employers have been pushed to the limit.
“When they have to choose between their part-time job – which is me – and their full-time job, they’re going to choose their full-time job,” said Brig. Gen. John W. “Bill” Libby, head of the Maine Army National Guard .
Libby spent part of last week at Fort Dix in New Jersey, welcoming home the 150 members of the 1136th Transportation Company in Bangor. Despite Libby’s gratitude and the Guard’s support for the soldiers and their families, he expects some members to leave the Guard after a long, frustrating deployment in Iraq. “I think that unit’s going to be a challenge for us,” he said.
There are 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, and it is estimated that 40 percent of them will soon be members of Guard and Reserve units. Part-time soldiers, people who have jobs such as teaching and truck driving, are not only serving next to career soldiers. They are dying with them.
Sgt. Jeremiah Holmes of North Berwick was killed March 29 in Iraq when an explosive device knocked his truck off a bridge while his unit was delivering supplies to Marines west of Baghdad.
Holmes, a former active duty soldier who had a wife and 11-month-old son, was a member of the Army National Guard 744th Transportation Company with headquarters in Hillsboro, N.H. His unit was deployed for training in late December, and sent to Iraq in February for 18 months.
The fact that Guard and Reserve units are in harm’s way should not come as a surprise to the soldiers or their families, military officials say.
“Nowadays, when people sign up, they’re briefed that there is always the potential for activation,” said Maj. Peter Rogers, spokesman for the Maine National Guard.
Knowing it might happen and believing it will, however, are two different things.
“They shouldn’t be surprised, but we still have people that think oh, gosh, I never thought I’d be activated,” Rogers said.
More likely, they are surprised at how often they’re being activated and how long they’re being deployed. “Some of the families and soldiers have been called up three times in the past six to 10 years,” Rogers said.
Guard officials in Maine agree with frustrated relatives that the frequency and duration of deployments show an overreliance on the Guard and Reserve. “It’s clear that we’ve got an inappropriate mix,” Libby said.
Guard and Reserve troops were deployed in large numbers during World War II and Korea. The United States avoided large-scale activations during the Vietnam War, however, relying instead on drafting soldiers who had less training and motivation. It was during Vietnam that enlisting in the Guard became known as a way to avoid getting sent to war.
Vietnam, and the experience with the draft, would change the structure of the military. Along with wanting a better fighting force, military officials believed that using part-time units would have generated more support for troops.
In 1970, the Defense Department adopted the so-called Total Force concept, calling for active, Guard and Reserve units to all be part of a coordinated fighting force. The policy continues, in part as a way to adapt to changing threats and to reduce the costs of a modern military. Over time, active duty units were trained for combat while Guard and Reserve units were trained for traditional support missions, such as engineering, transportation and policing.
By the 1990s, experiences in the Gulf War and in Bosnia sent a clear message to reservists and guardsmen that their roles had changed. There was more to the job than training for one weekend a month and two weeks in the summer.
Those recent conflicts, however, did not prepare military families for the war in Iraq, or the war on terror.
Aside from the larger scale of this war, the stabilization of Iraq demanded the specialties that now exist almost entirely in the Guard and Reserve. The nature of the job in Iraq often means that a specialized Guard unit, such as the 94th Military Police, is extended for more than a year while an active duty combat unit is sent home.
Many part-time soldiers and military families fully understand that the world and the military have changed, says Sam Jackson of Farmington. His son, Cpl. Samuel “Craig” Jackson, was deployed in January and is in Iraq with the 152nd Field Artillery Battalion from Waterville.
“This has become the new look of the Guard. This is the answer to not having a solid draft. You’ve got to have something to back up the Army,” he said.
Jackson says he understands that some other families are frustrated and losing patience. But he says the military needs to be able to react to threats in Iraq or anywhere.
“There’s no way of foreseeing that this could have happened the way it did,” he said. “I understand them wanting their soldiers back, but when you pull 20,000 troops out of there with what’s going on, you’re putting a lot of other people at risk.”
Nancy Durst says her husband was proud to go to Iraq, even after having just served in Bosnia. But after two extensions, the second one only 10 hours before flying home, he and others are demoralized and planning to get out. “He’s done,” she said.
The fact that the 94th provides a specialized and much-needed role in Iraq doesn’t appease Durst. “These MPs are being penalized for being MPs, when the military has known . . . we are short of MPs,” she said.
Durst says she knows that a trip to the Pentagon to question defense officials won’t reverse three decades of military policy, or bring her husband back before the summer. But she and other relatives want the military to consider the 94th’s service during the past five years before it gets extended again.
Frustration among families is a growing concern for the Guard. Patience of employers is another.
While employers are required to protect the jobs of activated troops, they may be less supportive after repeated and prolonged deployments. Many members also are self-employed, and may decide they can’t leave their businesses any more.
“We couldn’t function without the families and without the employers,” Rogers said.
Military officials and politicians at the national level are now re-examining the role of the citizen soldiers, and reconsidering decades of reform that left active forces without the support specialists needed in the war on terror. It’s become a hot political issue, with Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry criticizing the Bush administration for relying too heavily on the Guard and Reserve.
In the short term, Congress and military officials also are discussing ways to improve benefits and incentives, such as medical and dental insurance, for part-time soldiers who they hope will re-enlist.
Many part-time troops also said they would not re-enlist after the first Gulf War in 1991, then changed their minds and stayed. Given the short duration of that war, however, that doesn’t provide a lot of reassurance to the head of Maine’s Army National Guard .
“We’re going to have some problems with retention in all of our units that we didn’t experience after Desert Storm, because this operation isn’t over,” Libby said. “The deployments continue, and there’s no end in sight.”
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New York Times
April 25, 2004
With Breadwinners Overseas, Guard Families Face Struggle
By Andrew Jacobs
Nashville, April 22 — It took Jay Johnson seven years to build up his mobile catering business and a year to nearly lose it all. When he enlisted in the Tennessee National Guard , Mr. Johnson thought he might be away from home for six months, a year at most. But as he and other members of the 269th Military Police Company enter their 18th month of deployment, his well-laid plans for keeping the business afloat in absentia, and ensuring his family’s financial security, have begun to falter.
Mr. Johnson’s business, Johnson & Son Catering, is down to one lunch truck, from three before he left for Iraq, leaving his wife, Candace, and two young children to scrape by with half as much money. Although she has eliminated contributions to the family’s college and retirement accounts, and cut all but the most essential spending, Ms. Johnson is still struggling to make ends meet.
“If he doesn’t come back soon, we’re going to lose it all, and he’s going to have to start all over again,” said Ms. Johnson, who works full time as an insurance adjustor. “He’s proud to serve his country, but the Army doesn’t seem to care about him or us.”
As the war in Iraq continues, and the Pentagon prolongs the mobilization of tens of thousands of troops, the toll on both the soldiers, and the families they have left behind, is mounting. But while the war has been hard on all military personnel and their loved ones, the financial and emotional impact has been particularly acute for the members of the Guard and the Reserve who have been forced to give up civilian jobs, in a few cases, for 20 months. Among members of the 269th Military Police Company, about 170 men and women from across central Tennessee, the financial hardships are rising as deployments stretch far beyond the traditional six-month mobilization.
“It’s been hell,” said Brandie Broersma, whose husband, Specialist Will Broersma, is serving in Iraq. Mr. Broersma declared bankruptcy and gave up the couple’s mobile home after their income plummeted. “I don’t think National Guard families were prepared for such long deployments,” Ms. Broersma said.
Congress, recognizing the predicament of many members of the Guard and the Reserves, approved a bill this week that would allow them to tap into private retirement accounts without penalty, although some lawmakers, particularly Democrats, say that provision is not enough.
For those serving in what is the largest and longest mobilization of civilian soldiers since World War II, multiple extensions of their tours of duty have been a drain on troop morale and an added stress on the families at home. “How can we as soldiers fight effectively knowing how our loved ones, our lives and our futures are suffering needlessly back home?” Specialist Richard Hodgkinson, a member of the 269th, asked in an e-mail message. “We were told we would return home within 5 to 9 months and now we are being told it will be 22 months. How much is enough?”
Two weeks after announcing 90-day extensions for 20,000 troops, about a quarter of them in the Guard or Reserves, the Pentagon said last week that those returns might be further delayed, adding to the distress of some military families. Although most say they support the president’s decision to go to war and are proud of their relatives’ service, many question why part-time soldiers who traditionally handled domestic unrest and hurricane cleanups are spending so much time in a perilous war zone.
Bob Wennerstrand, whose son, Specialist Derek Wennerstrand, has been deployed with the New Hampshire Army Reserve since December 2002, says he and other families still support the war. But in many cases, he said, Guard and Reserve members have been in Iraq longer than some full- time members of the military. “The guys truly feel like they’ve been forgotten, and they feel like they’re being treated like second-class citizens,” he said. “This has been stressful on everyone.”
The Pentagon’s decision this month to reverse some homecomings, sometimes days before scheduled returns, has also fueled widespread disillusionment among units. “We’re all still reeling,” said Specialist Josh Blanchett, a member of the Illinois National Guard , who said his platoon had been deployed for 447 days and had already sent home most of their belongings. When extensions were announced at midnight on Easter Sunday, he said his unit was already disheartened by a previous 24-day extension that had just expired. In a telephone interview from Iraq, he said his fellow troops were convinced the extensions would just keep coming.
“The uncertainty is just killing us,” he said. “It’s like checking on a turkey in the oven 24 hours a day. Don’t get me wrong, we’re all doing our job for the country. We’re just tired as hell.”
John Goheen, a spokesman for the National Guard Association, an advocacy group, said many soldiers would be willing to serve for long stints, but they wanted a clear sense of when their time was up. “The big thing is predictability,” he said. “Soldiers want to know when they’re going and when they’re coming back so they can plan their lives.”
Some of the mounting disquiet among family members stems from their belief that the Pentagon is placing National Guard and Army Reserve soldiers in jobs that would be better served by full-time soldiers. There is also lingering resentment from the early days of the conflict, when some Guard units complained about an inadequate supply of body armor or drinking water. Many, like Josey Blanchett, the wife of Specialist Blanchett, believe their loved ones are not properly trained to handle the challenges of life in a combat zone. “These are not career soldiers; they’re supposed to be weekend warriors,” she said. “In many cases, they signed up to get college loans.”
Mr. Goheen said that although the Pentagon needed to make some changes to the way civilian soldiers were used in wartime, he believed that enlistees were well aware that their potential duties extend beyond occasional civil defense tasks like filling sandbags during floods. He said he was bothered by some of the criticism that the Guard has been misused in Iraq.
“The nation is paying for their school, giving them a paycheck while they’re in school, so they will be there when the nation needs them,” he said. “That’s like saying: `I come to work because they pay me. I don’t expect to ever have to do anything.’ ”
But the lack of predictability, coupled with the recent surge of violence in Iraq, has made this conflict even more fraught for families.
Week after week, pictures of servicemen and women pinned to the flag of honor at Woodlawn Elementary in Clarkesville, Tenn., disappear in batches of four or five, marking a homecoming and a child’s release from longing and anxiety. More than 100 children there have had a relative in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Manny Souza, 8, is still waiting to pull down the photograph of his father, Specialist Sean Souza, a member of the 269th. Last Wednesday, when his mother, Sherri, told him his father would not be coming home next week for trout season, Manny cried until he was red in the face.
“It’s hard because they let you take a day off from school when your daddy comes back and all the other kids brag about it,” he said. “I just want mine back, too.”
Ms. Souza tries to stay positive in front of her two boys but admits the extensions have been rough on her, too. She says she takes anti-anxiety medication but still barely sleeps these days and smokes through a pack and a half a day.
“Sean’s depressed and I’m depressed,” she said.
The most difficult moments come when her husband fails to send an e-mail message or to call at the appointed time. “On those days, I just stay in bed, call in sick and put the phone under my pillow,” said Ms. Souza, 39, who works as a phlebotomist for the Red Cross. “I can’t breathe until I hear from him.”
Ms. Souza tries to channel her nervous energy into home improvements, Cub Scout activities and chores her husband once performed. She prods friends to write letters to the Pentagon and the president appealing for the 269th’s speedy return. This week, four black footlockers arrived packed with her husband’s possessions, including souvenirs he bought in Baghdad, a set of desert fatigues and the good luck talismans he holds in times of trouble.
“We’ve never been apart for more than two weeks,” she said, flipping through photographs of her husband posed atop a Humvee or clutching his assault rifle. “I just want to grow old with Sean.”
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Chicago Tribune
April 25, 2004
A Push to Get Troops Home
Families Press U.S. Over Longer Duties
By Bill Glauber, Tribune staff reporter
Freeport, Ill. — A determined band of Illinois families is appealing to the Pentagon to bring home the 333rd MP National Guard Company, a unit that was headed to the U.S. before being ordered back to Iraq.
The unit’s citizen-soldiers–activated in February 2003 and dispatched to Iraq last May–had already sent home much of their gear before arriving in Kuwait on Easter.
They had expected to head home from Kuwait within days.
Instead, the unit’s troops were among 20,000 soldiers whose deployments were extended 90 days by the Pentagon as violence surged in Iraq.
A captain in the unit said the soldiers themselves are “rightfully upset” but prepared to fulfill their mission.
On the homefront, though, families have mounted a letter-writing and petition campaign to get the unit’s remaining troops–about 150–airlifted to the U.S. immediately.
“I want them home,” said Sue Warneke, who heads the unit’s Family Readiness Group. “They have done their tour of duty.”
The bid to bring home the 333rd MP Company, based in Freeport, is an extraordinary tale of citizens respectfully standing up to the government. It’s also a sign of the mounting strain endured by troops in the field and by families at home as the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq enters a dangerous phase near the June 30 deadline to hand over sovereignty to the Iraqi people.
Deployments for three other Illinois National Guard units also were extended–the 933rd MP Company based in Chicago, the 1244th Transportation Company based in North Riverside, and Company F, 106th Aviation, based in Peoria.
The Family Readiness Group of the 333rd MP unit has taken its grievances to the top, sending a letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld requesting that the troops return home as soon as possible.
They’ve also gathered more than 1,000 signatures on a petition.
“Their tour in Iraq has already been extended once, and the strain of another tour of duty in Iraq is becoming a health concern for these soldiers,” the petition said.
The office of U.S. Rep. Donald Manzullo (R-Ill.) delivered the letter to Rumsfeld and will forward the petitions, a spokesman said, adding that the congressman urged the defense secretary to send home the unit “sooner rather than later.”
“If you get enough support and enough pushing, you might get something accomplished,” said Warneke, mother of 23-year-old Army Spec. Jeremy Warneke. “I know they have a job to do, but they have already done their job.”
Members of the 333rd MP Company, who have left jobs and families for an extended tour overseas, were in Kuwait last week preparing to head back to Iraq, back to war.
The unit initially arrived in Kuwait last April and moved into Iraq on May 9. They had anticipated that they fulfilled their duty of serving a year in Iraq. Family members said they were due home the last week of April.
Connie Wescott, 52, has two children serving with the unit, Army Spec. Kirk Bausman and Army Spec. Erin Bausman. Wescott, vice president of the Family Readiness Group, was among those who signed the letter to Rumsfeld, though she did not sign the petition. While she wants her children to return home quickly, she recognizes they have a job to fulfill.
“I’m as scared as hell as the next person,” said Wescott, a nurse whose uniform is adorned with American flag pins. “I know these kids are in the National Guard, and whoever expected this when they signed up. They are military. We have a lot of soldiers over there and everyone wants them home.”
Others want their loved ones out, immediately.
Ramona Richter hasn’t seen her live-in boyfriend, Sgt. Enzo DeCristafaro, since a Christmas leave.
“It’s hard to support something that has taken someone you love away from you for so long,” said Richter, 24, a special-education teacher who lives in DeKalb.
Father-son journey delayed
Matt Holst, 23, keeps postponing the motorcycle trip he plans to take with his father, Sgt. 1st Class Patrick Holst, 49, a trucker.
Gathering petition signatures and trying to rally support to bring the troops home gives him a purpose in life as he waits for his dad.
“My dad has already sent half his stuff home, three footlockers full of clothes,” said Holst, a student at Northern Illinois University.
Susan Bo-nesz, 32, a mortgage underwriter, canceled a July vacation to Las Vegas she had planned to take with her husband, Capt. Ronald Bonesz, who leads the unit. She said she forfeited $1,488.37.
But she said she would gladly give that up and more to see her husband reunited with their 2 1/2-year-old daughter.
“They need a break, all of the Guard, all of the soldiers,” she said. “There are American soldiers all over the world who would love to serve their country like these soldiers. These soldiers are tired and exhausted.”
So are the family members.
Katie Reifsteck of Lanark, Ill., is a former member of the National Guard unit married to Staff Sgt. Dan Reifsteck, who is overseas.
She has experienced an eventful year that included the birth of a daughter by emergency Caesarean section, a car accident that injured her back, and a storm that caved in the roof of her home.
An area veterans group paid for half the $3,000 bill to rebuild the roof, she said. Family members have helped her care for her children, Natalie, 7 months, and Stephen, 2.
She said that when the news hit of the extended deployment, her son “tore a picture of my husband up and said, `No more.'”
Reifsteck said she was left “with a lump in my throat and a lump in my heart.”
The troops, themselves, are coping with the extended deployment.
“Most of the soldiers are rightfully upset,” said Capt. Bonesz, 32, in an e-mail correspondence with the Tribune.
“After being told that soldiers would be in Iraq for only one year, any extension is a hard pill to swallow, but we will all get through this and we will complete our mission,” he wrote.
The unit–which was based south of Baghdad–trained its replacements and left them armored vehicles, radios and weapons systems, items that the Army worked to replace to make the troops “combat ready.”
Troops also left behind toiletries, water coolers, fans and DVD players for their replacements, according to family members, and have spent “in excess of $200” each to replace the items, Bonesz said.
` They are also human’
Bonesz said “it is easy to say that this is OK or the soldier will get over [the disappointment of the extended deployment], but until someone has had to go through it, it is not the same. The soldiers here are strong, but they are also human and have emotions.”
He concluded his note by stating the soldiers are the best he has worked with. “Deep down [they] know they have a job to do,” and whether they know it or not, they “are making history.”
“This company will get through this deployment and get home to their loved ones,” said Bonesz, an engineer.
Army Spec. Amy Popurella, said in an e-mail that there was “anger and sadness” in the unit, adding that when she left Iraq in the “rear-view mirror,” she had a feeling the experience “wasn’t over yet.”
“I know people may think we sound like whiners but we are real soldiers that have done our time and are ready to go home,” she wrote. “The government asked for 365 [days], we gave them 365, now please just let us go home and get some rest. All of us know we will be back here one day to do it again. But right now to win this war they need fresh troops in, not tired ones.”
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The New York Times
April 25, 2004
Boots on the Ground, and Anxiety at Home
By Jill P. Capuzzo
Dateline: Toms River
The photograph being passed around the room Monday night showed a smiling young man in tan Army fatigues in front of a shimmering pool and vast Arabic-style mansion. Janet Interdonato explained that her son, Kevin, was standing before the palace of one of Saddam Hussein’s slain sons.
The group murmured its approval. Later, there was applause for the two families that sold the most yellow ribbons, and for the visiting soldier who was granted a leave so he could meet his 5-week-old son, and for the young mother who was here with her mother and baby for the first time.
While this was only the third meeting of the Toms River ” Family Readiness Group,” created in February as 124 members of the 112th Field Artillery division of the National Guard were shipping out to Iraq, this hodge-podge of parents, wives, girlfriends and siblings had already started to coalesce around a common goal – providing support and hope to anxious family members left behind.
Two days earlier, the anxiety of hundreds of other National Guard families was lifted when they laid eyes on the soldiers of the 253rd Transportation Company, the first National Guard unit in New Jersey to return after serving a yearlong tour of duty in Iraq. But in the meantime, several hundred members of the Guard from throughout the state have been put on alert that they are next on the list to be called up, joining the state’s 1,600 Guard members currently mobilized.
In the coming months, New Jersey’s National Guard members will be called up in numbers not seen since World War II, with an estimated 70 percent of the state’s 7,000 members expected to see active duty by the end of 2004, according to Col. Charles Harvey, head of the state’s Joint Forces Headquarters and the 57th Troop Command. Most of those soldiers will be sent to Iraq or to related operations elsewhere in the Mideast or in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the colonel said.
Around the country, about 100,000 National Guard members (of a total 460,000 members) and 75,000 reservists have been called to active duty since the war began. In the first year, Guard members and reservists accounted for about 25 percent of the 135,000 troops serving in Iraq. Now heading into the next phase of the operation in Iraq, the National Guard is expected to make up closer to 40 percent of the ground forces.
“Nationally, this is the largest and most complex mobilization since the Korean War,” said John Goheen, a spokesman for the National Guard Association, a Washington-based lobbying group. “You have your peacekeeping troops, your homeland security troops, and the troops in Iraq and elsewhere in the region.”
Sometimes referred to as “weekend warriors” or “citizen soldiers” for their normally limited duty providing local security or emergency cleanup, this mobilization of the National Guard has caught some Guard members and their families by surprise. And with the mounting number of deaths — more than 100 so far this month alone — and taking of hostages during this time of intense fighting, the relatives of many National Guardsmen are asking what their spouses, sons or daughters are doing at war, and, more importantly, when they will be home?
“In my opinion, we had to know for sure why we were going over there,” said Maria Cecelia, whose son, Sgt. Juan Perez, just returned from Iraq. “You don’t just go there because somebody told you something.”
An embittered Ms. Cecelia, who lives in Woodbine, called the war a “waste of time,” adding that the Iraqis “want to live the life they live, and everybody has to respect that.”
Her daughter-in-law, Michelle Perez, also believes her husband was called to duty for “not the right reason.”
And though Ms. Perez, a secretary from Mays Landing, fully supports the service her husband has provided, she said she had put her life on hold since her husband was deployed last April and was even reluctant to go out in case her husband should call. Then when he did call, she said, she could hear gunfire in the background and the phone would go dead. It could be several hours before she would hear from him again and know everything was all right. While 70 members of the National Guard have died so far in Iraq, none have been from New Jersey.
Like many of the family members waiting for the Guard unit, which is based in Cape May Courthouse, to return last weekend, Ms. Perez was cautiously optimistic that the tour of duty would not be extended.
Indeed, the 253rd Transportation Company, of which Sergeant Perez is a member, was rumored to be heading home last December. Then family members got word that the military’s “365-days-boots-on-the-ground” order was going to be strictly enforced, and that the unit would not be back until this April. Their return to the United States appeared more likely when the unit was flown to Kuwait two weeks ago. But with last week’s announcement that tours were being extended for 20,000 soldiers — including 6,000 National Guard and Reserve members — to counter insurgencies, most family members refused to get their hopes up until they saw the soldiers marching along the tarmac at Fort Dix last Saturday.
“I’ll believe it when I can actually touch him and know it’s real,” said Ms. Perez, 35, who married Sergeant Perez two days before his unit left for basic training.
Like many who join the National Guard, Ms. Cecelia said both her sons signed up for the educational benefits – tuition-free access to any of the state colleges or universities. And while they accept the possibility of being called to active duty, either by the state or the country, for years Guard members’ service has been largely limited to one weekend of drills a month and two weeks during the summer, required to maintain their federal Guard status.
When she signed up in 2001, Specialist Nicola Harvey said she was primarily interested in the free tuition that came with joining the National Guard. During her second semester at Atlantic Cape Community College, the 28-year-old Atlantic City resident found herself being called to active duty.
“I was thinking of the weekend warrior kind of thing,” said Specialist Harvey, a driver with the 253rd Company. “Not going to war. That’s not what the recruiter said.”
In fact, she got a lot more war than she was bargaining for. While transporting equipment along a road north of Baghdad last August her convoy was cut off by a vehicle that exploded in front of her truck, filling her eyes with shards of glass and bits of shrapnel and leaving her temporarily blinded. She is still suffering from damage to both eyes.
Specialist Harvey received a Purple Heart for her injuries, which she gladly displayed during the welcome home celebration at Fort Dix last weekend. And while she said she was proud she survived a year in Iraq, she was uncertain if she would renew her commitment.
In addition to their military obligations, most Guard members have full-time jobs or attend school, so the uncertainty of the scope of the operation in Iraq and the broader “war on terrorism” has created an added level of distress.
“It’s not a World War II situation, where you have the whole nation committed to a war and a place,” said Mr. Goheen of the National Guard Association. “This is an open-ended mission. So they want to know, ‘How long am I going to be there?’ Unlike active duty, most Guardsmen have to juggle families, school, jobs. They need to tell their employers when they’ll be back.”
Also different from the enlisted army, where families live together on military bases with a support system in place, the families of National Guard members have few networking opportunities. In response, family assistance centers have begun springing up at National Guard armories over the last year. In the last two months alone, five new centers have opened in New Jersey, adding to the three that opened soon after the war began. In her 23 years with the military, Jane Hackbarth, a retired master sergeant, said she has not witnessed such a gearing up of support systems for the Guard.
“Our families are geographically separated and they don’t know each other,” Ms. Hackbarth said. “They only become a support group because of the reality of this deployment.”
Ms. Hackbarth, who runs the family assistance center in Lawrenceville, said, “Once the soldier leaves, we become the one-stop shop, helping family members understand the language of the military, coping with pay problems, and getting to meet each other and bond as military folks.”
Like the family readiness group in Toms River, most of the support meetings try to maintain a positive attitude. Back for a two-week leave to meet his newborn son, Specialist Ronald Wentworth drew some laughs when he shared news from the front with the group – “no, the mechanics still don’t have any tools;” “yes, the bugs are driving us crazy;” and “no, no one has had time to play with the balls and mitts the group sent over.”
The upbeat tenor is not only meant to provide support for the family members, but also ease the concerns of the soldiers.
“It keeps our minds clear knowing that you guys are good and safe and supporting each other at home,” Specialist Wentworth told the group on Monday.
But that does not mean emotions are not running high.
After passing around the photograph of her son, Kevin, who just turned 25, tears began to well up in Ms. Interdonato’s eyes as she talked about the day she had to say goodbye to him in February.
“I never thought 24 years ago, when I held this baby in my arms, I’d ever have to send him off to war,” she said. “It was the hardest day of my life, and I hope I never have to do it again.”
Capt. Kevin Williams, a chaplain and the coordinator of the assistance center in Toms River, put it this way: “People have been in the Guard for 20 to 25 years and never gone anywhere. We’re citizen soldiers and expected to stay that way. Suddenly, we’re shoulder to shoulder with active duty. This is clearly a shock for everybody.”
Many of those left behind latch onto superstitions, develop coping skills or find other distractions to help pass the time.
Ms. Perez said she decided not to cut her hair until her husband came home. Faith Parker said she started a diary, which she writes in every day, then mails the entries to her boyfriend, Specialist Billy Davies, every three days “so he doesn’t miss out on anything.”
Jamie Burrows has been busy buying a house in Dorchester and selecting bridesmaids and dresses for the wedding she is planning for August now that her husband, Specialist James Burrows, is back from Iraq. They, too, were married in a rushed ceremony just days before her husband’s unit was mobilized.
“We don’t really remember it,” Ms. Burrows, 21, said of the small wedding held at Fort Dix. “They gave us a wedding planner, but it was all so rushed. There was a couple right before us, and another right after us.”
Of the August wedding, she admitted that her husband was “not quite as excited about it as I am, but he promised me so we’re doing it.”
One subject many spouses and mates were reluctant to talk about was the psychological effect the year apart might have on the relationship.
Ms. Parker said she thought her relationship with Mr. Davies would get stronger. Ms. Perez is planning a honeymoon so they can “get to know each other all over again.” Ms. Burrows said she didn’t expect much of a transition.
“We weren’t married for very long, so there were not assigned duties yet,” said Ms. Burrows. “It will be like starting over.”
Despite these optimistic views, military family counselors say the issue is very real.
“The big question is: what happens when they come back?” said Ms. Hackbarth, noting that the adjustment can be particularly difficult for National Guard families who are not so indoctrinated into the military way of life to start. “No one who goes there comes back the same person. They will be forever changed.”
And while being in a war zone can have long-range effects on the soldiers, those left behind may have changed also, according to Sgt. Maj. John Hughes, the family assistance coordinator for the 253rd, the Cape May Courthouse company that just returned from Iraq.
“The spouses have taken on the breadwinner role, writing checks, making big decisions,” Major Hughes said. “Now the soldier comes back and the spouse might not be so ready to relinquish that role.”
After completing their first contractual tour of six years, Guard members can renew their contracts for one to six years. A minimum of 20 years of service in good standing is required to be eligible for the military’s pension plan. The question now facing many National Guard soldiers as they return from active duty is whether they wish to remain in the Guard.
Guard members can be called for active duty for up to two years, so some families are concerned that their soldiers might get called back for another rotation in the war-torn country. For soldiers providing services most in demand, like the military police, civil affairs and transportation, Mr. Goheen said that is a real possibility.
“There’s no predictability,” said Ray Martyniuk, a spokesman for the New Jersey Department of Veteran and Military Affairs. “The National Guard exists for the sole purpose to be ready for emergencies. If there are three emergencies in a row, they will get called three times.”
And while many families may have discussed retiring from the military during this long year apart, Mr. Goheen noted that once the soldiers are back home their outlook might change.
“Soldiers on their way home told their wives: ‘I’m done. I’m not going to do this anymore,”‘ said Mr. Goheen. “But after they’ve been here for a few months, their attitude changes. They say, ‘Let’s go back and get this thing done.”‘
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Norfolk Virginian-Pilot
April 21, 2004
Re-entering Life After Being Deployed
By Matthew Dolan
Chesapeake — What happens afterward? After the ecstatic moment when the bus wheezes to a halt and spits out a war-weary soldier into the arms of loved ones.
After the first night spent in a hotel room with a wife who’s been on her own for the better part of two years. After the homecoming roses have wilted, the congratulations cheers have quieted and the neighbors have stopped asking, So what was it really like?
Staff Sgt. Burton Harrison knows the answer now. And it’s hardly the one he predicted four months ago.
He returned on the eve before New Year’s Eve. As a National Guardsman whose ranks have carried the heavy burden of multiple deployments, he was gone for 10 months after Sept. 11, 2001, to protect military bases near Washington, D.C., and another 10 months at war to guard an Iraqi prison.
Since then, Harrison, 36 , has tried to reclaim the life he left behind, piece by piece. But he said the peace and quiet at home still unnerves him.
Today, the rest of his 229th Military Police Virginia National Guard unit arrives back at the armory in Virginia Beach. When they do, they’ll begin the same readjustment that Harrison has reveled in – and suffered from – since his own homecoming .
“It’s been harder than I ever thought,” he said.
To find Burton Harrison when he’s not working, a good guess is in his chair.
The puffy brown recliner takes center stage in the living room of his two-story, semi-detached house in Great Bridge. Here, he can lounge in a blue Old Navy T-shirt, jeans and bare feet. He’s grown a goatee now – definitely not Army regulation – to please his wife.
The TV flickers a few feet away, and his mug of black coffee sits nearby on the floor. This, he says, is paradise.
“I feel like I was in a time warp,” Harrison said in an interview Saturday. “I’ve come back and everything changed without me.”
His eldest, Christina, went from pre-adolescent to full-blown teenager. His youngest, Dylan, transformed from a timid toddler to a babbling 5-year-old who loves to dress up in his own soldier uniform.
Harrison no longer fears what might happen when he sleeps or whether he’d have to use the 9-mm gun that he used to keep under his pillow. He no longer lives in a world where he couldn’t trust prisoners who would sweetly call him “Mr. Harrison” one day and pelt him with stones the next.
He is no longer oppressively hot all the time, or worried about eating food that could cause diarrhea, or aggravated by the three hours it would take to make a five-minute phone call home.
He is, however, still afraid of spiders. “The guys gave him a hard time about that over there,” his wife, Tina, said, laughing.
On his homecoming day, there were grand plans. Tina, 33 , and their four kids wanted to throw a big party.
Harrison said no. He wanted instead a slower re-entry into civilian life. He even took a couple of days before he visited his mother. The couple talked too about taking a far-away vacation, but reconsidered once they took a second look at their shaky finances.
He wears his service on his sleeve. His truck has a military police window sticker. And the public’s reaction, he said, has ranged from the man who called him a callous killer to the elderly anonymous woman who gave him a hug.
Hardest of all, Harrison said, his employer seemed to abandon him.
During his first deployment, they hailed him as a hero. Tina said she received the same treatment at a company Christmas party last year.
But when he returned and, as required by law, tried to resume work as an elevator mechanic, his boss told him that he couldn’t come back right away. When he finally returned, the company tried to lay him off, he said. An advocacy group for the National Guard and his union brokered the problem.
“They were not yet up on the law,” he said. “But it still hurt real bad. I feel like I left one war only to come back to another one.”
Only today do the Harrisons feel like they’re on solid footing. They no longer worry about the income that dropped with Harrison’s military activation and forced Tina to get a job driving a school bus.
The kids’ grades appear to be back on track, they said.
Less and less frequently, Tina Harrison finds herself reminding her husband that he should talk to his family with a tone more gentle than the one he would use with his soldiers.
“We never thought it would take this long,” she said of the readjustment.
Harrison enjoys telling war stories. Many are filled with harrowing images of mortar fire, roadside bombs and occasional bloodshed in the prison just outside Baghdad. But he also recalls quaint moments of practical jokes, silly nicknames and innocent Iraqi children who wanted nothing more than a hug.
Reminders of the war in his home are everywhere.
Yellow ribbons have been tied around the four pine trees in the front yard.
Pictures on a living room table show Harrison in uniform on Sept. 11, a nervous Tina at his side. A slender green book on a living room shelf holds a war journal Harrison kept with details of everything from the morbid to the mundane.
Sounds of ordinary life also bring back memories. At a recent trip to McDonald’s, he heard the sharp whizzing sound of a soft drink machine. In a flash, he was back in Iraq, listening to bullets getting closer and closer to his camp.
Harrison credits the open lines of communication with his wife as a balm to ease the stress. From the war, he tried to call her every three days.
“We’re married, but we’re also best friends,” Tina Harrison said.
He also credits the Army for keeping in touch. About once a month, he now receives a call from an Army counselor, asking about his job, his family life and his health.
Some in his unit aren’t doing as well. A couple of soldiers, he said, cracked under the pressure. A few saw their marriage break apart.
Harrison said five National Guardsmen who were deployed have already left the unit after their return. He expects more to take a pass on re-enlistment.
“Some were really young, kids who only joined up for the college money,” he said. “But some had a lot more experience.”
For Harrison, the deployment was more of an awakening. He said he wants to be more decisive, more bold, after coming so close to death. On his to-do list: buy instead of renting a house, look into a new career, and rededicate himself to military service, no matter the toll it requires.
“I’m not a hero. I consider myself an American patriot,” he said. “If called tomorrow, I’d go again.”
Tina nodded in agreement, but her speech seemed to be paralyzed at the thought. Then she spoke.
“It’s in his blood,” she said.
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Health & Medicine Week
April 19, 2004
Guardsman Who Refused Anthrax Vaccine Discharged from Army
An Ohio National Guardsman has been discharged from the Army for refusing another order to be vaccinated against anthrax, this time while in Kuwait.
Specialist Kurt Hickman, 20, of Granville, arrived in Kuwait on February 11. He was ordered to take the vaccine 2 days later.
When he refused, he was escorted back to Camp Atterbury in Edinburgh, Indiana, on February 25. He stayed there until he was discharged on March 28, 2004, Guard spokesman James Sims said.
Troops going to high-risk areas for more than 15 days have been required to be vaccinated since 1999 to protect them against biological weapons.
Hickman’s attorney, Kenneth Levine, said Hickman always wanted to serve his country, but didn’t want to expose himself to what he considers to be a dangerous vaccine.
Hickman’s discharge notes that he received four medals during his service.
Sims said the Army gave Hickman an honorable discharge and demoted him from specialist to private. He likely will receive a similar discharge from the National Guard, Sims said.
Hickman, a sophomore journalism major at Ohio University, will have to repay the money the Guard paid for his tuition along with any bonuses he received for meritorious work.
Sims said privacy policies prohibit the disclosure of how much Hickman earned and how much he will have to repay.
Hickman joined the Guard in 2001. He was first charged in November with disobeying an order for not being vaccinated with his unit, the 196th Mobile Public Affairs Detachment.
He was court-martialed in December. A military judge recommended a sentence of 40 days in jail and a bad-conduct discharge.
Hickman’s Ohio penalty was put on hold after U.S. District Judge Emmit Sullivan ruled that the military could not force troops to take shots against their will without an order of the president. The ban was lifted after the FDA said the vaccine was safe and effective for use against inhaled anthrax.
At Camp Atterbury, Hickman, then under the jurisdiction of the regular Army, again refused to take the vaccine and was charged with disobeying an order.
That charge was dropped when Lt. Gen. Joseph Inge decided to allow Hickman to be deployed.
In 1999, five Ohio Air National Guard members based in Cincinnati were discharged for refusing the vaccinations.
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The Associated Press
April 20, 2004
Kentucky Guardsman Killed in Iraq
By Bruce Schreiner, Associated Press Writer
Dateline : Louisville, Ky.
A Kentucky Army National Guard officer killed in Iraq during an ambush on his military convoy was remembered Monday as a leader who set an example for fellow soldiers.
First Lt. Robert Henderson II was killed Saturday near Diwaniyah in southern Iraq, the state Department of Military Affairs said.
The convoy was supporting the Army’s 1st Armored Division when it was attacked by insurgents about 70 miles south of Baghdad, said Lt. Col. Phil Miller, a National Guard public affairs officer in Frankfort.
“It’s our understanding the convoy came under small-arms attack by enemy forces,” Miller said.
Henderson, 33, of Alvaton, is survived by his wife, Lisa, who is pregnant with their first child, according to family friends. His mother, Lillian, said her son had been in the Guard since he was 17.
“He loved it,” she said in a statement from the Department of Military Affairs. “He always wanted to do what was right. He was the best.”
Henderson was a platoon leader in the Owensboro-based Detachment 1, 2123rd Transportation Company. The unit hauls tanks and other heavy armored vehicles, artillery equipment and engineering equipment.
Warren County Judge-Executive Mike Buchanon, a friend of the family, said high-ranking Guard officials told him that Henderson displayed “strong leadership” during the attack. The convoy was ambushed as it slowed down to go around an overturned trailer, Buchanon said.
“He was shot twice and continued to lead his platoon through the ambush to safety,” Buchanon said.
He said Henderson was taken to a field hospital, where he died.
Henderson was the second Kentucky Guard casualty in the Iraq conflict.
Sgt. Darrin Potter, a member of the 223rd Military Company in Louisville, died in September when his military vehicle overturned and was submerged in a canal in Baghdad.
A comrade remembered Henderson as “a good man and a good soldier.”
“He definitely set the example when it comes to what the soldiers should be aspiring to be,” said Kentucky National Guard 1st Sgt. Michael Oliver, who formerly served in the same unit with Henderson.
Oliver said Henderson was a hands-on officer.
“He loved driving the trucks,” Oliver said. “Normally, as an officer you sit back, supervise and direct. Lieutenant Henderson loved … to get right in there and ask that driver to scoot over and let him have the opportunity to actually drive the vehicle.”
Oliver, of Bowling Green, was transferred to the 2113th Transportation Company, based in Paducah, after his promotion to first sergeant. That happened 10 days before his former comrades were activated.
“Right now there’s a tremendous sense of guilt that I carry with me because I’m not there with them,” Oliver said, his voiced choked with emotion. “They are a great bunch of soldiers.”
The 2123rd deployed to southwest Asia in January.
In Frankfort, Gov. Ernie Fletcher said Henderson “paid the ultimate sacrifice while serving his country.”
“Our commonwealth has truly lost one of its finest,” he said.
Kentucky Adjutant General Donald C. Storm said he was “deeply saddened” by Henderson’s death, but said “our resolve is not shaken.”
“He was a true patriot who answered the call of his nation,” Storm said. “Our hearts, thoughts, prayers and support go out to his family.”
Henderson graduated from Warren Central High School in 1989 and attended Western Kentucky University from 1990 to 1994, Miller said.
Henderson worked as a sales manager at the Lowes home improvement store in Bowling Green for several years. Robert Castle, operations manager at the store, said Henderson was well liked.
“He was the type of person when he was faced with a challenge, his eyes would light up and he’d get this look on his face and you just knew it was going be taken care of,” Castle said.
Buchanon watched Henderson grow up. Henderson’s mother is a bookkeeper at a floral and greenhouse business run by Buchanon’s wife.
“He was dedicated to the National Guard and to the military service,” Buchanon said.
Henderson’s comrades held a memorial service on Sunday at the unit’s base camp in Kuwait.
Kentucky currently has 365 Guardsmen deployed in Iraq, Storm said. He said they have been “in the eye of the storm.”
“They’re not on the peripheral here,” he said. “These soldiers are part of the front lines. And as you know … the front line in this war is 360 degrees.”
Funeral arrangements for Henderson are pending.
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The News Tribune (Tacoma, Washington)
April 21, 2004
Guardsman with Fort Lewis Task Force Killed
By Michael Gilbert, The News Tribune
A Maine National Guardsman attached to the Fort Lewis-based Task Force Olympia was killed Tuesday and four other soldiers were wounded when their convoy was struck by a roadside bomb in northern Iraq.
The attack occurred Tuesday morning west of Mosul, according to a U.S. military press release and news service reports.
The soldier who was killed and three of the injured are from the 133rd Engineer Battalion of the Maine National Guard, according to the Portland Press Herald, which has a columnist and photographer embedded with the battalion.
The paper reported that one soldier was seriously injured while the other two suffered minor injuries. A fifth soldier who is not part of the 133rd also suffered minor injuries.
The 8,800-soldier Task Force Olympia includes the Stryker brigade and other units from Fort Lewis, as well as active-duty, Reserve and National Guard troops from other posts and states.
A spokesman with the Maine National Guard said families of the killed and wounded soldiers had been notified. He said the soldiers fought back and “neutralized” the insurgents who attacked them.
A Task Force Olympia press release said two of the soldiers were taken to the 67th Combat Support Hospital at Mosul Airfield, where one died of his injuries.
The other three soldiers were treated and returned to duty, according to the press release.
The task force press release contained few additional details, such as the location of the attack, the number of vehicles in the convoy, the type of vehicle the slain soldier was riding in or a description of the soldiers’ injuries.
Otherwise, U.S. military officials Tuesday characterized the Task Force Olympia zone as “quiet.”
Iraqi police arrested four people who attacked their headquarters with small-arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades, and U.S. troops captured five people suspected of attacking coalition forces in Mosul on Monday night, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the deputy director of coalition operations, told reporters in Baghdad.
A coalition soldier was wounded near Tall Afar, about 35 miles west of Mosul, when his patrol was attacked with a hand grenade. The patrol captured two of the attackers, Kimmitt said, according to a transcript of his Tuesday morning briefing.
Kimmitt also said authorities in Mosul are concerned about rhetoric from the mosques and in the local media following the killing of Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi, assassinated by an Israeli missile strike Saturday in Gaza City.
On Monday, Stryker brigade soldiers detained eight people wanted for “anti-coalition activities” and recovered weapons and ammunition, according to another Task Force Olympia press release.
Soldiers from the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment raided what U.S. officials called four terrorist safe houses and captured eight men suspected of planning and carrying out attacks on coalition forces, according to the press release.
Soldiers from the 5th Battalion, 20th Infantry regiment recovered a small number of fuses and rockets north of Qayyarah and troops from the 416th Civil Affairs Battalion found four 120 mm artillery rounds near at Iraqi Civil Defense Corps checkpoint 13 miles west of Mosul, the task force reported.
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The Associated Press
April 22, 2004
Vermont Soldier Dies in Iraq Ambush
Dateline : Montpelier, Vt.
Christopher D. Gelineau, a Vermont high school graduate who was in Iraq with the Maine National Guard, died Tuesday after enemy fighters ambushed his convoy.
Gelineau, 23, is the seventh soldier with Vermont roots to be killed in combat since the war began over a year ago.
A 1999 graduate of Mount Abraham Union High School in Bristol, Gelineau was a specialist with the 133rd Engineer Battalion. Before being deployed to Iraq in March he lived in Portland, Maine, where he attended the University of Southern Maine.
“He was a very nice boy. He was patient and quiet,” said aunt Pam Gelineau of Eden Wednesday night. “I don’t know what else to say.”
Gelineau’s mother and stepfather, Victoria and Jesse Chicoine, live in Starksboro, and his father, John, lives in Eden.
The families left early Wednesday for Maine to be with Gelineau’s wife of one year, Lavinia, Pam Gelineau said.
Those who knew Gelineau described him as a quiet, friendly, reliable young man who loved working with computers.
Gelineau was one of about 500 members of the 133rd Engineer Battalion sent for a one-year tour of duty in Iraq, based in the northern city of Mosul.
Several members of the 133rd, including Gelineau, were driving in a convoy Tuesday in Mosul, serving as a protective escort to military firefighters from South Carolina, Maine National Guard officials said.
Gelineau was in the lead Humvee when a roadside bomb exploded and heavily damaged the vehicle. Enemy fighters then began shooting at the soldiers.
Gelineau and three others were injured in the explosion and battle. Gelineau and the others were taken to a nearby military hospital, officials said. They said they were unsure whether Gelineau died of his wounds en route or at the aid station.
Gelineau is the first member of the Maine National Guard to be killed in Iraq.
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ARNEWS
Freedom Calls Foundation Helps Soldiers in Iraq Contact Home
By Stephen Larson
April 20, 2004
Washington (Army News Service, April 20, 2004) — Many of the Soldiers in Iraq are young parents and won’t see their spouses or children for a year or more. But Soldiers will soon be able to more easily send e-mail to or call their loved ones at home due to the donation of millions of dollars of telecommunications equipment and services to the Army.
Freedom Calls Foundation has collected $10 million worth of donations for equipment and services to provide free Internet, voice over Internet Protocol telephone and video teleconference services for up to 10,000 troops. The Army officially accepted the donation April 6.
Ed Bukstel, operations director of Freedom Calls, said country music star Rodney Atkins has pledged to help launch the Freedom Calls network with a live concert that will be video teleconferenced to Iraq from a military base.
“I can’t imagine how happy the families of these Soldierswill be when this program is fully operational,” Atkinssaid. “I think it’s a wonderful use of this excitingcommunication technology.”
Started with an e-mail
The initiative started in August, when Bukstel, the executive vice president of SkyFrames Inc., a satellite telecommunications company, of Costa Mesa, Calif., received an e-mail “out of the blue,” from a sergeant in Iraq.
“She (the sergeant) wrote to me that communicationsavailable for Soldiers in her unit to contact homewere very poor and that it would be helpful to troopmorale if they could get Internet access and e-mailso they could stay in touch with loved ones,” saidBukstel. “She asked if I had any ideas that might help.”
SkyFrames issued a press release to ask for donations to help out this unit in Iraq. John Harlow, a Wall Street lawyer, read the release, contacted Bukstel, and together they established the Freedom Calls Foundation, a non-profit entity incorporated in the state of New York and registered with the Charities Bureau of the state of New York Department of Law.
Among the larger donors, Bukstel said, Hewlett-Packard donated 1,000 laptop computers, 100 printers and scanners; Logitech donated 500 web cameras and microphones; Loral Space & Communications donated Very-Small Aperture Terminal satellite dishes, hub connections and a full-year subscription of free bandwidth; Motorola donated a wireless broadband platform that will allow troops in a 15-mile radius to tie into the network; and FedEx donated about $300,000 of cargo space to get the gear to Iraq. Bukstel said that an American engineer is working with an Iraqi telecom company to provide installation and maintenance services.
The waiting is the hardest part
Among those helping Freedom Calls navigate through Army channels for approval of the donations have been Lt. Col. Michael Kwak, the Army’s Product Manager, Defense Wide Transmission Systems and then his successor, Lt. Col. Earl Noble, and Janice Starek, a project leader for PM DWTS.
Some of the issues to be ironed out, Starek said, have been who will be responsible for the donated equipment when it’s in Iraq, and what will happen to it after the troops come home.
Starek said the equipment will be signed for by local Morale, Welfare and Recreation personnel in Iraq and that at the completion of the mission, PM DWTS will be responsible for determining disposition.
“The equipment will either be transferred to otherMWR activities, placed on long-term storage or disposedof, if the equipment is obsolete at that point,” saidStarek.
But in the end, the waiting was worth it. Just ask a Soldier.
“Calling home is the biggest morale booster thereis,” said Spc. Johanna Adams, a personnel specialistwith the 4th Infantry Division, Fort Hood, Texas.
PM DWTS got a taste of how sweet it can be to help Soldiers in Iraq stay in touch with loved ones on June 6 parents deployed to Iraq got to watch their children graduate from Vicenza High School, a Department of Defense school in Vicenza, Italy. After the ceremony, students and parents spoke to each other through the VTC link. Through the VTC link there were personal face-to-face congratulations and tearful reunions.
A commander in Iraq wrote that the VTC “had to be the biggest morale booster I’ve witnessed in 25 years of military service. The VTC brought a once-in-a-lifetime event to the battlefield of Iraq. The joy I witnessed on both ends of the video monitor will be in war stories for many generations to come.”
Bukstel said that he plans to go to Iraq after the first installation is operational.
“It’s going to bring tears to my eyes when this happens,” hesaid. “One guy told me when he was in Vietnam he didn’ttalk to his family for over a year. Well that was yearsago – now we have technology, so that doesn’t haveto happen.”
(Editor’s note: Stephen Larsen is the public affairs officer for Program Executive Officer, Enterprise Information Systems at Fort Monmouth, N.J.)
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United States Department of Defense
News Release
April 23, 2004
Military Phone Card Donation Program Goes Public
The Department of Defense announced today that any American can now help troops in contingency operations call home. The Defense Department has authorized the Armed Services Exchanges to sell prepaid calling cards to any individual or organization that wishes to purchase cards for troops who are deployed. The “Help Our Troops Call Home” program is designed to help servicemembers call home from Operations Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom.
For those wishing to donate a prepaid calling card to a military member may log on to any of the three Armed Services Exchange web sites: the Army and Air Force Exchange Service https://www.aafes.com/, the Navy Exchange Service Command https://www.navy-nex.com/, and the Marine Corps Exchange https://www.usmc-mccs.org/. Click the “Help Our Troops Call Home” link. From there, a prepaid calling card may be purchased for an individual at his or her deployed address or to “any service member” deployed or hospitalized. The Armed Services Exchanges will distribute cards donated to “any service member” through the American Red Cross, Air Force Aid Society and the Fisher House Foundation.
The Armed Services Exchanges operate telephone call centers in Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan, and other countries and aboard ships — anywhere servicemembers are deployed in support of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom. All of these locations stay busy around the clock to keep up communication between deployed troops and their loved ones. The cards available through the “Help Our Troops Call Home” program offer the best value for calls made from the call centers, never expire, and there are no added charges or connection fees.
Individuals and organizations also can show their support to deployed troops and their families with gift certificates. The “Gift of Groceries” program allows anyone to purchase commissary gift certificates at http://www.commissaries.com or by calling toll free 1 (877) 770-GIFT. The Armed Services Exchanges offer the “Gift From the Homefront” gift certificate for merchandise at these exchange web sites: http://www.aafes.com and http://www.navy-nex.com or by calling toll free 1 (877) 770-GIFT. Gift certificates may be purchased to be mailed to servicemembers and family members or will be distributed to “any servicemember.” Only authorized commissary and exchange patrons may redeem the gift certificates at military commissaries and exchanges, including those stores supporting deployed personnel around the globe.
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