The last time I was at a National Guard armory, I didn’t see many teenagers. The demographics of the Guard has changed substantially since Kent State. Remember, most of them have had at least one deployment to Iraq and/or Afghanistan.
True. I was in a Howitzer Battery in 1984. All of our unit was prior service vets with at least 3 years active behind us. Most were four year and over prior service. The youngest guy I worked with in Ammo was in his late 20's like me.
I want to know what the ROE are and how the Guard is viewing their mission? Is this a test run??? I hate, absolutely hate the thought of our military being used as riot police. But check this out...
http://www.dvidshub.net/video/348951/khaan-quest-2014-field-training-exercise#.U_H8xWNYBaA
International riot training.
“The last time I was at a National Guard armory, I didn’t see many teenagers. The demographics of the Guard has changed substantially since Kent State. Remember, most of them have had at least one deployment to Iraq and/or Afghanistan.”
The ones posted in Longmont last year after the major floods here were all children; even the sargents were only very early 20’s. They struck me as fairly naive, uneducated, uncertain, untrained, and slightly fearful as well.
The other thing I realized is that they were NOT local, but were from cities far away. I realized that this was on purpose so that they would be less reluctant to shoot or mistreat the locals, since they would view the locals as villagers who were not the same kind of people at all as their own villagers.
Quite frankly, they scared the beejezus out of me every time I had to go through one of their checkpoints.