Scope of deployments changes Guard

By Manuel Roig-Franzia
Washington Post

FORT POLK, La. — Deep in "The Box," blue buses morph into rolling, apocalyptic explosive devices. Danger crouches in the high brush and glares down from the pines. Smoke and flame interrupt breakfast, obliterate lunch, upend dinner. Sleep is for the weak or the foolish.

Soldiers of Company A, 1st Battalion, 116th Infantry Regiment of the Virginia National Guard attended a ceremony in their honor at The National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Va. The storied regiment is among the many National Guard units being called up to support operations in Iraq. Associated Press

The bus Roberts is looking for is a prop, just as the explosions and the menace in the woods are artful fictions, all part of an elaborate training exercise concocted to prepare thousands of National Guard troops engaged in the biggest deployment of citizen soldiers in half a century. Sometime this spring, not long after Roberts and his pals leave the 200,000-acre training pod known as "The Box," National Guard and Reserve troops will come to represent nearly 40 percent of the 105,000 U.S. military men and women in Iraq.

Not since World War II have so many National Guard units been pressed into service abroad. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, more than 143,000 National Guard members have been mobilized worldwide, with the biggest single concentration expected this spring when more than 35,000 are slated to arrive in Iraq.

Last week, the Pentagon announced that units from New York, Louisiana, Idaho and Tennessee would be deployed to Iraq by late this year or early next.

The massive call-up is beginning to make governors, who rely on the National Guard to respond to disasters, exceedingly nervous. In Arkansas, for instance, more than half of the state's 8,200 National Guard troops have been mobilized. The state has had to call out the National Guard over the past six years for two giant tornadoes and a devastating ice storm, and Arkansas officials wonder whether they would be too short-handed to respond quickly to another crisis.

N. Wayne Ruthven, director of the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management, estimates the outflow of National Guard troops from his state could cause 40 percent delays in disaster response time and that "may mean the difference between life and death."

The huge deployment is also redefining the nature of National Guard service, transforming weekend warriors into something very close to full-time soldiers, who regularly leave behind jobs, families — entire lives — for extended periods. Roberts and his unit, the Oregon Guard's 2nd Battalion, 162nd Infantry, are nearing the end of six months of training away from home to be followed by a year in Iraq. Some of Roberts' colleagues are old hands at this having recently served in the Sinai Desert and Kuwait.

No one knows what all this will mean for the future of the National Guard. The Guard is meeting its retention and recruiting goals, but there is no way to know whether those now enlisted will opt to return.

Mark Sanford, the Republican governor of South Carolina and an Air Force reservist, predicted at the recent National Governors Association meeting in Washington that a flood of the butchers, insurance agents, small-business people and others who make up the Guard will be reluctant to re-enlist because of the increasing demands.

"It's going to be a testing time for the Guard," said Eric Parnell, 43. "It's transformed from a weekend with the boys to an integral part of the Army."

During Desert Storm in the early 1990s, the Guard was humiliated when three of its brigades were not sent into battle because top military brass deemed them unfit for combat. This time around, with the Guard receiving spanking new equipment and months of training, there has been little such criticism.

Iraq will be Parnell's last go-round, he says. He has had enough after four years of active duty and 17 years in the Guard. He wants his life back. Many will take the same path, but an upsurge in patriotism could counterbalance the departures, he said.

Parnell is one of the steady hands navigating the crazy quilt of obstacles invented by the Army's training gurus at Fort Polk. The Joint Readiness Training Center has built a network of simulated Iraqi villages and populated them with more than 200 actors, who assume the role of Iraqi citizens. The scenarios are seemingly endless, slightly resembling a Hollywood movie treatment — the Army sent some of its trainers to California studios to study war-movie special effects. The script calls for bursts of looting, roadside bombings, the discovery of sensitive religious artifacts and the death of a prominent Shiite cleric.

A group of soldiers based at Fort Polk plays the starring role of Iraqi insurgents with ruthless efficiency, popping out to simulate the slaughter of unsuspecting troops. It looks a bit like the world's greatest game of laser tag, with each soldier carrying a laser-fitted weapon and wearing a sensor vest that registers hits.

Roberts' squad spent hours of boredom manning a damp mortar pit ringed with sandbags and waited for the inevitable.

One afternoon, a breathless battalion officer ran up with word of a hazardous-material spill. Roberts piled into the back of an open Humvee with his squad leader, a raw-boned sergeant from Toledo, Ore., named Aaron Strom. Strom, 23, had planned on going back to school to learn enough about motors to open his own repair shop.

He even changed Guard units, hoping to avoid an overseas deployment, figuring he had done his part by going to the Sinai Desert. But Strom, who joined the Guard when he was 17, got the call, and he had a big problem to face: his former girlfriend wasn't prepared to care for their 2-year-old daughter, and he was worried his current girlfriend wouldn't be happy about him running off just months into their new relationship.

He had to make a move.

Within days, he had proposed to and married his girlfriend and arranged for his daughter to stay with his mother while his ex-girlfriend sorted out her life.

After a half-hour, their Humvee pulled up at the site of the mock chemical spill and the squad scrambled out to secure the area. An officer from another Humvee told them to check for explosives, and Roberts bounded off, blithely running past a real-world sign marking an old target range that read: "Danger Unexploded Ammunition."

The official observer was apoplectic. Strom, composed beyond his years, calmly corralled his youthful charge and lectured him.

"Sometimes he tries my patience," said driver Brant Gilmore, 27. "But then, I have to think to myself, 'He's only 19 years old.' "

Properly scolded, but unbowed, Roberts lay next to the road aiming his big machine gun. Roberts said he is mindful of the real-life dangers that await, but is prepared.