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."
Point is that if your neighbour committed a murder it is no good reason to accuse you of domestic violence.
But your sophism is a cute one. It might trick people even with IQ around 115.
X is a bad guy who deserves punishment. X is not guilty of a crime Y which deserves similar punishment. It is fair to punish X for Y. If it is fair to punish bad X for crime Y when it is not committed by X then it is reasonable to punish every person which is bad for any crime no matter who committed it.
But will it be an efficient way to wage a war? Imagine if after Pearl Harbour Americans attacked some nasty dictator in Latin America and started war against Stalin? You are not saying that Stalin was a good guy?!
Hate to reply and run, but I've got to go shovel snow.........(Eat your heart out)
Uhmm, when I joined the Guard, there was a draft and no war. "They" said that a military obligation could be fulfilled by spending 8 years in the Guard instead of 2 years in the regular Army.
"They" also said that, if activated to regular deployment, the entire division would be called, not individuals or select companies.
All these promises turned out to be lies.
The Guard was sold as a home guard that would get paid only about one-fourth as much as a regular, but it would be possible to have a civilian life as well.
It was NOT sold as becoming a reserve bin of soldiers that would be the first to man the depleted ranks of the regular military at the first hint of foreign conflict.
After the abuses of the government in these last few years, we'll probably find there is going to be no one willing to be a part of the home guard at all. It's difficult enough living for 8 years as never a soldier, never a civilian as it is. And, oh, by the way, National Guard alumni get no GI bill and no veteran benefits.
It is if I'm beating my wife.
You act as if there's no connection between Iraq and terrorism. You and I both know that's not correct.
I nominate this post for the SPOTD award!
Huge standing army is a threat to freedom and prosperity. It was necessary to face the global Communist enemy. After collapse of Soviet block (caused in part by excessive costs of arms race) the downsizing is the only sensible thing. America should keep a few key bases abroad and have a moderate size agile military able to respond quickly and efficiently againt precisely selected targets.
Blind indiscriminate lashing out is a sure way to squander ones strenght and to lose.
I cannot - you need a high level clearence to know the real reasons :). I guess you do not know them either.
I didn't realize I called it the "War Caused by 9-11." Perhaps you could point out where I did.
So, you think Saddam didn't support terrorists, huh? Like Abu Abbas who recently died in Iraq? Or how about the northern terrorists who we've linked to al Qaeda?
And just because we haven't found WMD's yet . . . I suppose it didn't bother you beforehand that Saddam wouldn't explain when and where he got rid of all the WMD's he "supposedly" had during the Clinton Administration, WMD's the UN Inspectors even said he had? Thinking of Saddam with biological and chemical weapons doesn't bother you? How about with nuclear weapons? Does that bother you? It's patently unfair to grade our before-the-war efforts by what we "supposedly" know today. EVERYONE agreed Saddam had WMD's . . . it was up to him to prove he didn't. And we gave him twelve years to do so.
Lastly, don't try to paint me with your race-baiting brush to justify your position. I purposefully didn't use race because it gives those spoiling for a fight . . . like you . . . such an easy target. Are you denying that those who willingly commit suicide in the name of Allah, while murdering as many innocents as they can, are not "religious zealots?" It doesn't matter to me if they're Muslims or Baptists . . . if they're committing suicide and murdering innocents in Whatever name it is they call their God, they're religious zealots. Your race-baiting says much about you.
Evidently, you're against the War on Terror or the War in Iraq . . . which to me is part and parcel the same, but evidently it's not to you. So, instead of taking pot-shots, why don't you tell me what you would do instead. Would you have us hide under our beds like the Spanish? Would you have us waste another twelve years playing kissy-face at the UN? Would you have us withdraw ALL our troops from the "100 countries" and have them build fences around our borders so we could hunker down like the Alamo defenders?
Just what is it you would do? Naysayers are a dime a dozen. It takes nothing to take potshots. But do you have a better alternative? That is the question. I await your reply.
Your nephew is doing great work -- he deserves a huge thanks.
And I gotta say that stories like this really piss me off too. I don't know why so many people (even some Freepers) feel so comfortable with putting down the valor and sacrifices of soldiers in the Guard and Reserve. It makes no sense. Guard and Reserve service has its own unique difficulties, and it's kept this country strong since the 1600's. You'd think the Guard and Reserve would have earned a little more respect after 400 years of successfully defending liberty.
1000 bases in 140 countries? What are you counting? What is the source for that bit or data?
Saddam was bankrolling many terrorist groups. He is gone. There is now a chance of a democratic Iraq prospering in the middle east, which can affect the whole region.
Why do you think the house of saud does not want to see the new Iraq succeed, because they know they are next.
But you go ahead with your Buchannite/DU shortsighted rants.
If I may say so, what many here don't seem to understand is that this "issue" is a total, 100% illusion created by the press to get their readers riled up and sell a few newspapers.
In fact, retention rates in the first Gulf war went up for units mobilized for war. It's too soon to get real good data about retention rates in this war, but lack of data never stops the press from whipping up a non-story into something that naive readers will believe.
After the real numbers come in, the press will just shrug and go on to invent some other imaginary story to write about, without putting out any corrections or apologies.
Meanwhile, unsophisticated readers get the impression that the Guard and Reserve is filled with whiners, which also isn't true, and these soldiers deserve a better "thanks" for their service than this kind of abuse.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.