Posted on 08/15/2004 6:51:14 PM PDT by wagglebee
FORT HOOD, Texas - (KRT) - Spc. Brian Harris made a cold calculation about his future in fatigues.
Then he signed the papers, raised his right hand and repeated the re-enlistment oath given by his platoon leader. He shook hands with the men from the 588th Engineer Battalion, posed for a picture and went back to work.
An Iraq war veteran, Harris weighed the probability of another long deployment before his initial enlistment would expire. He decided the best option was to re-up with a guarantee that he could move to Fort Lewis, Wash., near his hometown.
"I figured I would deploy again in the next year, so if I'm going to deploy, I wanted to deploy from home, and my wife can be close to home, too," Harris said.
The Army is defying the conventional wisdom that the Iraq war will empty its ranks, and it appears to be on track to meet its retention goals for early, midcareer and career-enlisted soldiers.
As of late July, the Army had re-enlisted 45,256 soldiers of the 56,100 it needs to meet its target this fiscal year, which ends in September. Short of an awful last two months, Army officials say they'll make their goal.
In a year of long deployments to Iraq, the scandal at Abu Ghraib prison and a decidedly bloody spring in which 278 service members died, retaining so many battle-tested corporals and sergeants is no small feat.
"In a way we're plagued by anecdotes where one soldier in a thousand is interviewed and complains that he can't wait to get out of the Army, so that means everybody must want out of the Army," said Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon. "That becomes the truth, but it isn't. We don't have any problem with retention."
The reasons, Army career counselors say, are many: an unsettling civilian economy, large bonuses, improved pay and combat itself.
As one soldier put it, a firefighter who never got to fight fires would be unlikely to keep riding the truck.
"I joined the Army to run around in the woods, blow things up and bite the heads off snakes," said Master Sgt. Jerry Johnson, who leads retention efforts in the 82nd Airborne Division.
"When I'm guarding something on post, when I'm doing book work or practicing map-reading, that's not exciting," he said. "That's not what I joined for. When I'm in a combat situation, I'm doing what I signed up to do."
The picture is not uniformly rosy. Plenty of soldiers are jumping out of uniform when given the opportunity.
The Army is straining to find fresh troops to rotate into Iraq and Afghanistan, and many experts believe that the Bush administration is close to breaking the Army and its reserves.
Close to half of the 135,000 troops in Iraq are reservists or members of the National Guard, and that proportion will increase in 2005.
The Army has tapped 5,600 former soldiers for recall into the active duty, and the service has had enough of a recruiting problem this year that it is sending many of its recruits into basic training before they want to go.
Thousands more soldiers are covered by a stop-loss order preventing them from leaving or retiring, a move that critics call a backdoor draft.
Lastly, there is some evidence that soldiers are retiring as soon as they hit the 20-year mark and become eligible for full retirement benefits.
Still, this year's re-enlistments are evidence that the exodus isn't overwhelming among the enlisted or the young officers.
Hilferty said the Army is losing 5.5 percent of its lieutenants and captains a year, significantly fewer than four years ago.
"We did think the Bosnia and Kosovo rotations in the late '90s would cause retention to go down," Hilferty said. "It didn't. The units who rotated through there had higher retention rates than those that didn't."
But Sgt. Maj. Mike Massey, the 4th Infantry Division's chief career counselor, said the Army's regular and long rotations around the globe may hurt it in the long run.
"A deployment helps retention," Massey said. "Back-to-backs won't."
Rested from his 12-month deployment to Iraq, Staff Sgt. Marcus Rose, 28, an 11-year Army veteran and the son of a career soldier, re-enlisted this month at Fort Hood for the "fourth or fifth" time.
"I've been around this my whole life," Rose said. "I'm used to the environment."
The 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment left Fort Polk, La., in March and April 2003, setting up a base of operations around Baghdad after the invasion. Month after month, the 4,300 soldiers stayed.
When their 12-month tour came up, they stayed longer still at the order of top commanders who needed the extra firepower for the violent coordinated uprisings of the spring.
It was July when the soldiers came home, 15 months after they left. Sixteen of them had been killed in action, 200 wounded.
The reaction?
"We go to war, soldiers deploy and re-enlistments go through the roof," said Staff Sgt. Mark Duffy, the senior career counselor in the regiment.
The regiment was given its objective months ago: re-sign 682 soldiers. It has delivered 966 so far.
It's been considerably tougher at the 4th Infantry Division, which returned from a yearlong deployment to Iraq in March.
The division, which has enlisted 88 percent of its target of 2,812 soldiers, is on pace to get 100 percent, but it hasn't been easy, Massey said.
"We are having to work harder than ever before," Massey said. "We're in a serious selling mode. That selling mode is the only thing that is taking us this far."
The 82nd Airborne, a division based at Fort Bragg, N.C., that has ranked among the most deployed since 2001, has met 92 percent of its objective.
For soldiers with 10 years of service or more, the division has met 105 percent of its goal; for soldiers on their first enlistment, 89 percent.
The Army gave a boost to retention efforts this year by releasing more than $100 million in bonuses.
Junior soldiers are pocketing lump sums of $5,000 to $10,000 and don't pay a dime in taxes if they re-enlist in a combat zone such as Iraq or Afghanistan.
Few soldiers with more than 10 years of service are eligible for them because the Army figures that if they've been in that long, they're likely to stay until the 20-year mark anyway.
What attracted many of the 2nd Armored troops, Duffy said, was the bonus and a guarantee that the soldiers could stay at Fort Polk for several more years, an offer made only at certain installations.
Allowing soldiers to stay at their bases eliminated many concerns, Duffy said, because families don't like moving as frequently as the Army usually requires.
Johnson, from the 82nd Airborne, said the bonuses are also adding to the length of re-enlistments.
"The soldiers would have enlisted anyway, but they'd probably only take a two-year commitment," he said. "The bonuses help them make a four-year commitment."
Sometimes, though, money isn't a factor. Spc. Bryan Murphy, 23, a Maryland native, re-enlisted - this time for four years instead of three - because he hadn't met his goal of making sergeant.
"I'm doing this for my son and to prove to myself that I could do something with my life," Murphy said.
Massey, from the 4th Infantry Division, said people would be surprised how far a simple bit of praise and appreciation of sacrifices goes with soldiers.
"They get that warm and fuzzy," he said. "They think, `Hey, they appreciate me. They value me.' If no one in their platoon or company ever tells them they're a good soldier and a valuable part of the Army, then they'll leave because they figure no one cares if they do."
A series of pay raises over the last four years has also contributed to re-enlistments, soldiers say. Since 2000, pay has increased about 25 percent, and housing allowances have gone up as well.
For example, a sergeant stationed at Fort Hood with a wife and two children earns $2,130 a month in base pay, plus $784 a month for housing: $34,968 annually. While deployed in Iraq, that sergeant would earn an extra $475 a month and pay no taxes.
The bonuses and pay raises, as well as an economy that is still recovering from recession, have all made the Army more appealing, soldiers said.
"I gotta tell you, I love all the negative press on the economy," Johnson said.
Maj. Ronald Elliott, a spokesman for the 2nd Armored, said his son reconsidered leaving the Army after returning from Iraq, where he served with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment.
"You're going to see those soldiers who will get out anyway, regardless of the deployment pace," Elliott said. "But the greater percentage see the cause as greater than their individual concerns."
The leftists at Knight Ridder just can't bring themselves to admit that some people love this country and are willing to risk their lives defending it.
Short of another war on the scale of WWII, all a draft can ever do is create anti-war riots. Which is almost certainly why the 'Rats keep suggesting it.
bttt
They're still underpaid, IMO.
Little Tommy D is 'deeply saddened".
Only the democrats talk about the draft. Social security and Medicare to scare the old folks. Racism to scare the minorities. And now... the draft... to scare the vh1 generation.
Do you think if Clinton hadn't reduced the army by 175,000 this would be a question? There were those of us who said in the 1990's that the military cuts were too deep.
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