Weekend Edition Sunday (1:00 PM ET) - NPR December 21, 2003
Reservists questioning whether they'll re-enlist for another tour of duty
ANCHORS: LIANE HANSEN
REPORTERS: CHRIS ARNOLD
LIANE HANSEN, host:
Persistent insurgent attacks in Iraq have fueled a huge demand for US military police to patrol city streets. Civil affairs units are needed for reconstruction as are transportation units to carry supplies. Most of these support troops are reservists who have regular jobs back home as police officers, civil engineers and truck drivers. Some 62,000 Army National Guard and Reserve troops are stationed in the Central Command theater, which includes Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan. Most never expected to be deployed for so long and that's leading some to leave the force. NPR's Chris Arnold reports.
CHRIS ARNOLD reporting:
The US military may be experts at launching a heavily armored assault, like it did in Iraq, but security experts say the Army was caught off guard by the very different demands of the long-term occupation there, which has forced it to lean very heavily on the National Guard and Army Reserve. Some of those reservists just got home two weeks ago.
Unidentified Man: Dismissed!
Group of Soldiers: (In unison) ...(Unintelligible).
(Soundbite of applause)
ARNOLD: In a high school gym in Brockton, Massachusetts, members of the Army Reserves' 325th Transportation Company were reunited with their families. The troops were driving fuel trucks to Baghdad International Airport, at times taking sniper fire and getting pelted with rocks. They've been away for 11 months. Now some, for the first time, hold sons and daughters born after they left. Sitting on the bleachers with a group of soldiers' wives, Margaret Anderson and Patti Hall(ph) say the past year has not been fun.
Mrs. MARGARET ANDERSON: One word? Hell.
Ms. PATTI HALL: Yeah.
Mrs. ANDERSON: I mean, seriously, yeah, it has been an emotional roller coaster, up and down. You're sick with worry. You're stressed all the time. You can't focus.
Ms. HALL: You live day to day...
Mrs. ANDERSON: But you live day to day...
Ms. HALL: ...but you're proud as all hell.
Mrs. ANDERSON: ...and then it's--and proud as all hell. There you go.
Ms. HALL: Yeah, proud as all hell.
Mrs. ANDERSON: That's it. Absolutely.
Ms. HALL: Yeah.
ARNOLD: Reservists called up now are told to expect 15 months of active duty, some of the longest reserve deployments since the Korean War. Many here say that's just too long to be pulled away.
Sergeant JOHN FLEMMY (325th Transportation Company): This job says a lot--jobs, family. I was glad to do my part, but it just seemed like a long time. That's all, you know.
ARNOLD: Sergeant John Flemmy, from Braintree, Massachusetts, is a bus driver for physically handicapped kids. Still dressed in his desert fatigues, he's standing close by his wife, Eleanor(ph), with their sons one-year-old Nicholas and two-year-old John Jr. When he could call from Iraq, Flemmy would talk to his older son on the phone.
ELEANOR: A couple of times I had to keep the phone from him, though, because he was having nightmares after he talked to him and he wouldn't sleep, wouldn't eat. And then as the months went on, he was OK with it.
ARNOLD: But as the months went on, Sergeant Flemmy says the long deployment changed the way he felt about being in the Army Reserve and about re-enlisting.
Sgt. FLEMMY: Yeah, it did. It's going to affect my--I already know I won't be re-enlisting. I have another year left, and I'll finish up my year. You know, I've been in it 13 years now. I think that's going to be enough.
ELEANOR: I mean, he missed the first year of his second son's life, you know.
Sgt. FLEMMY: Yeah. I want to see my children grow up.
ARNOLD: The Army recently reported that re-enlistments for reservists in the past year fell about 7 percent below expected levels. The biggest drop-off was seen in career reservists such as Sergeant Flemmy. Those soldiers, of course, have the most experience and training. Some security experts think that could lead to a talent drain from the force as soldiers decide this just isn't what they signed up for.
And that's the heart of the problem, says John Pike, who heads up GlobalSecurity.org, a defense policy research group. He says historically, up until a few years ago, the plan was that National Guard troops would not be sent abroad for anything short of World War III and the Army Reserves were only used for short deployments.
Mr. JOHN PIKE (GlobalSecurity.org): Basically, we have an Army that was designed to fight the Red Army in Europe in the Cold War. We have an Army that is designed to defeat Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War. We do not have an Army that was designed to fight a war on terrorism in Afghanistan. We do not have an Army that was designed to occupy Iraq.
ARNOLD: Pike says Army officials are looking at reconfiguring the types of troops they have in the full-time activity duty force vs. the reserves.
Mr. PIKE: Right now if you take a look at an Army division, they have a lot of soldiers who are trained to do air defense, to shoot down enemy aircraft. Well, it's been half a century since an enemy airplane has actually attacked American troops.
ARNOLD: But Pike thinks retraining enough full-time troops to be MPs and to drive trucks could take more than a year, which will mean more long deployments for reservists. Having just returned from Iraq, members of the 325th Transportation Company don't even want to think about that.
Mrs. ANDERSON: And then she's going to be running around...
(Soundbite of baby whining)
Mrs. ANDERSON: What? Here we go.
ARNOLD: At their home in Randolph, Massachusetts, Margaret Anderson is changing her infant William's diaper while her husband, Sergeant Bruce Anderson, plays with their two-year-old daughter, Teresa. Margaret's the one who described the past year as hell. Above the changing table, there's a picture of Bruce in a tent in Iraq.
Sergeant BRUCE ANDERSON (325th Transportation Company): That's how they were relating to me...
Mrs. ANDERSON: That's who daddy was...
Sgt. ANDERSON: ...was.
Mrs. ANDERSON: ...a picture. Yeah, he was the picture. He was a piece of paper.
ARNOLD: Bruce Anderson, who's a cement truck driver, says when he finally got home he was nervous coming up the front steps. He had never met his five-month-old son before. He remembers holding him in the living room and looking into his face for the first time.
Sgt. ANDERSON: I was holding him. I didn't let him down pretty much the whole night, and it was a great feeling to have him in my arms and he started smiling at me after a while. And the same thing happened with my daughter. We had a fire in the fireplace going and we all sat right down here in the living room and basically stared at each other, non-stop, you know, saying, 'Ooh, I can't believe it's you.'
ARNOLD: A few days later, Bruce heard Margaret start yelling after she turned on the television.
Mrs. ANDERSON: I turned it on--all we heard was, 'Oh, my God! Oh, my G--Bruce!' And he came running down.
Sgt. ANDERSON: I go, 'What's wrong? What's wrong?' And she told me Saddam was captured.
Mrs. ANDERSON: They got him!
Sgt. ANDERSON: And we both just cheered and--I don't know, hard to...
Mrs. ANDERSON: Awe.
Sgt. ANDERSON: Yeah.
Mrs. ANDERSON: Excitement. Couldn't believe it. It was--you know, and I turned to him and I said, 'You know, you were part of this whole thing.'
Sgt. ANDERSON: Knowing he got captured made the whole war effort definitely worth it.
ARNOLD: But Sergeant Anderson says his wife was actually more excited than he was. First, it kind of made him wish he'd been with his troops when it happened, but also, having been in convoys that got ambushed and shot up in Iraq, he has a sense that catching Hussein was a very important step, but it's still very dangerous over there.
Sgt. ANDERSON: Because even though Saddam is gone, there's other people and powers that are still around in the country that are just--we're coming up right behind them, you know. They hate Americans, and I think too many American lives have been lost over this. So hopefully, it won't be too much longer, but it's going to be a while before things settle down over there, I believe.
ARNOLD: Everyone in the 325th Transportation Company made it home. The worst injury was sustained by a female soldier, who lost her vision in one eye after being struck with a stone thrown by an Iraqi teen-ager.
The Army's official goal is that reserve units coming off a deployment won't be reactivated for five years, but some units have already been called up twice inside of one year. The troops and families here are hoping they can stay back home together for more time than that. Chris Arnold, NPR News, Boston.
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HANSEN: It's 18 minutes past the hour.
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