Posted on 03/17/2004 4:17:06 AM PST by T-Bird45
Janine Suppes put it plainly.
"My own husband will not be re-enlisting," she said.
Glen Suppes, a Hotchkiss high school teacher, father of three and a Colorado National Guardsman, has been gone for 14 months, in Iraq for 10, with two more months to go.
When he comes home, he will join a growing number of military reservists and National Guard soldiers who will leave the service when their enlistments are up.
"Mass exodus. That's the term that keeps going around," said Janine Suppes.
So far, at least, an exodus is not reflected in the numbers. Nationally, officials say that recruiting and retention of troops exceed the Pentagon's quotas. In Colorado, however, National Guard and Army Reserve enlistments and re-enlistments are lagging.
The concern, however, is with the future. Many citizen-soldiers deployed to Iraq are just now returning and thousands more are headed there to replace full-time troops who are coming home after a year of duty. Whether Guard and Reserve troops who have been or will be away for a year or more stick with the military is the issue.
Officials are worried. In January, the commander of the Army Reserve, Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly, warned of a "recruiting-retention crisis" in the Guard and Reserve.
Helmly is not alone.
"I really worry that there is a looming problem," said Michael O'Hanlon, a foreign policy analyst for the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.
"Some people are fed up already. But I think it's actually going to be cumulative as deployments increase. The real issue is going to be what happens when people have to go back for a second time. We're not anywhere near the end of this Iraq deployment yet."
Many of the departing reservists and Guard members are simply tired of being called away from families and civilian jobs for prolonged or repeated military duty - not the short-term assignments they were accustomed to before 9/11.
In the view of some, the Pentagon has broken faith, pulling them out of civilian careers and businesses and turning their part-time military obligation into full-time duty. More and more, they say, the Pentagon is using them not as emergency or temporary forces, but as permanent substitutes - in Iraq and elsewhere - to avoid expanding the active-duty ranks.
More than 40 percent of the 105,000 troops now headed to Iraq for a year to replace regular troops are National Guard and Reserve forces.
William Foster's 40-member Marine intelligence unit from Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora was sent to Kuwait for six months last January, returned home in June and was reactivated last month. Half are back in the Middle East and the other half are expecting new deployment orders.
And when their duty is over? "I don't know anyone in my unit that's going to re-enlist, as far as my close friends go," Foster said.
Glen Suppes left Hotchkiss last January with C Company, 109th Medical Battalion of the Colorado National Guard. They waited at Fort McCoy, Wis., until April before going to Iraq, and are not expected home until late April.
"My husband was in the regular Army for three years and in the Guard for 11," said Janine Suppes. "He said if he wanted to be gone for this many months, for this kind of duty, he would have stayed in the Army."
Such assignments are a misuse of the Guard and Reserve, said Steve Robinson, director of a veterans group, the National Gulf War Resource Committee.
"The whole idea is they are not active-duty soldiers. They're citizen-soldiers and this is not their full-time job," said Robinson.
Still, the Army is beating both its active-duty and Reserve recruiting and retention goals nationally. The Pentagon needed 26,900 enlistments in regular Army and 5,475 in the Reserve through the quarter that ended in January. It got 27,119 in the regulars and 5,664 in the Reserve.
"The overall picture is OK," said Army spokesman Sgt. Maj. James Vales.
In Colorado, though, there is some slippage.
The Colorado Army National Guard was supposed to have 3,150 troops at the end of September, but had 3,062. The Army was supposed to recruit 49 new soldiers for the Reserve and 206 for the regular Army in Colorado for the four-month period through the end of January. It recruited 39 for the Reserve and 176 for the Army.
"We are really down on our USAR (Army Reserve). Usually we fill those faster and are over our percentage," said LaWanda York of the U.S. Army Recruiting Battalion in Denver.
More will be leaving as soon as they can, some Guard and Reserve members predict.
"You're not seeing a drop (in membership) now because there's a stop-loss and nobody can get out," said Jonathan Davis, a Marine reservist in Foster's intelligence unit facing his second callup since January 2003.
"What's gonna happen in 2005 and 2006 when these people's enlistment contracts are up, you're gonna see a drop in reservists."
Davis, a sales manager with a six-figure salary in civilian life, has been a Marine reservist for seven years, but plans to leave when his enlistment is up next year.
The Pentagon's "stop-loss" orders prevent troops in key occupations from leaving, even when their enlistments are up.
Michael Adams, a physician's assistant from Norwood and a captain in Suppes' Colorado National Guard medical company, was held on active duty and sent to Iraq for a year, even though his enlistment ended last April.
"Because of the stop-loss order, he couldn't get out," said his wife Sharon, a registered nurse at the Uncompahgre Medical Center in Norwood, where her husband works in civilian life.
Adams' absence left the clinic without its primary care provider, other than a doctor who visits two days a week. When Adams returns in April, his wife said, "he will more than likely get out" of the Guard.
They're not being unpatriotic by leaving, reservists and Guard members insist. Some endured the rigors of Marine boot camp to serve. Many, like Adams, express firm support for the U.S. action in Iraq.
They also are the first to admit that, yes, they did sign enlistment contracts stating they could be called up in times of national emergency.
Patrick Berner, a member of Davis' and Foster's Marine Reserve unit, lost the one-man marketing business he had founded and built when he had to deploy to Kuwait for six months January 2003.
"It's too costly," said Berner, whose enlistment ends next March. "It cost me everything my wife and I have worked for for the last 10 years."
Now, as he tries to rebuild his financial life and support his pregnant wife and 21-month-old son, the Marines have again activated his unit and he faces a second Middle East deployment.
Suppes has willingly left home many summers with the Guard to assist on wildfires in Mesa Verde and around western Colorado. He joined hundreds of Guard members who served for months on airport security duty after 9/11, his wife said.
Those more traditional callups were for shorter periods and in specialized roles, allowing Guard members to maintain their civilian lives, careers and businesses.
"There's an old saying about having the goose that lays the golden egg," said Davis. "If you keep squeezing it's neck, it's not gonna lay the golden egg for you anymore."
Pearl Harbor was not done by Adolf Hitler, who was a Nazi. What's your point?
The Clinton Legacy is garbage as far as I'm concerned. I must (gag, puke, choke) defend the @ss on this one though. GHB and Cheney of all people, started the major downsizing of the military. The democraps were more than happy to oblige, but the military itself and the President went along with it, said we needed to downsize and they did a great job. In fact, Rumsfeld is still trying to downsize our active military. I think we need to voice our opinions about this.
I can't speak for everyone else, but I have no doubt the press is magnifying this to no end. I view any negative comments as being directed at those whiners highlighted by the press, not at the reserves and Guard as a whole.
You need to become better acquainted with our reasons for going into Iraq.
On a more serious note, any article quoting a Brookings expert is immediately suspect.
God bless you and yours. Your service is greatly appreciated!
The Army needs another 3 active-duty divisions with support. Marines should add some people as well.
Not to me. The BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) commission did meet in 1991 for the first time (and with good reason, IMHO), but its work was accelerated during the reign of the Impeached Rapist. Not to mention the sleazeball couldn't even keep his trousers up while deploying troops (probably to deflect attention from his numerous domestic problems).
" In many cases (in the medical field for instance) reservists may have better skills than their active duty counterparts (reserve doctors may see seriously ill or injured people every day, while an active duty doc, will perhaps see a healthier segment of the population). "
My experience in the Medical Corps was the opposite. The Army provides complete medical care for its gazillions of personnel (it's the largest medical services operation in the USA). The civilian medicial community spends 75% of its efforts on geriatric events. Yes, soldiers are young and healthy, that's why a much higher percentage of the care in the Medical Corps has to do with injury and trauma, rather than Alzheimers and cancer.
The problem is that the US has about 1000 military bases in over 140 countries, amost none of them having anything to do with defending America. That's the problem, bud.
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