"I think it's an honor and a privilege to serve," said Col. James "Jim" Ard, 56, of Honokowai.

A family practitioner for Kaiser Permanente in Lahaina, Ard is a member of the 1984th Army Hospital unit of the Army Reserves headquartered at Fort Shafter on O'ahu. The original mission of the unit's 300-plus nurses, doctors and medics was to back up staff at Tripler Medical Center on O'ahu and to answer any calls for help in the Pacific region.

Ard is the only Maui doctor and one of three Kaiser physicians in the state assigned to the 1984th unit.

Since 2004, Ard has been answering deployment calls to German hospitals, when doctors there have been assigned to war-torn Iraq.

Once an active Army officer, Ard had two separate assignments to work directly in Iraq, but both times those missions were scrubbed at the last minute, and he was redirected to Germany.

"I feel fortunate," Ard said last week prior to leaving the island on Friday. "I'll go wherever I need to go."

As a physician, Ard's last three deployments have run for 90-day stretches. And while he has yet to serve in Iraq, his work in German hospitals has indirectly supported the war because he has either relieved or replaced the physicians who get called to serve in the Middle East.

This fourth deployment is to take him to a U.S. hospital in Baumholder, Germany, where he'll have Army soldiers and their families as patients for about 90 days. His deployment tour actually lasts about four months because of training, travel times and debriefings.

Ard explains that physician Reservists, who had not been called to duty since the Vietnam War, have had their deployments limited to 90 days for a number of reasons, including the loss of salary at home, particularly for doctors in private practice, who suffer financially when they are serving in the Army for extended periods of time.

Kaiser Permanente supports Ard's service in the Reserves. The Lahaina medical clinic has been hiring a physician to temporarily take Ard's place when he's called for duty.

As an Army Reserve physician, Ard said, he believes his skills as a doctor have expanded, in part because of the variety of military assignments he's received.

For example, one of his deployments involved working as the chief of an emergency room.

"It wasn't an eight-hour job, and it wasn't just seeing patients. I did my shift, plus I did administrative work," he said.

During a deployment in 2005 to Fort Drum in New York, Ard was a physician working in a military clinic that cared for soldiers, many of them returning from deployments in Iraq.

"You're seeing a different kind of patient. They're young, and the soldiers are actually less needy. They only see doctors because they have to."

As a doctor specializing in family medicine, Ard said, most of his patients have had illnesses, not injuries, but some of them are also soldiers' wives who are pregnant.

Ard said the hardest part of his deployments has been leaving his wife, Jeanet Dizon Ard, and their 7-year-old daughter, Stacey Ard, who attends Kamehameha III Elementary School in Lahaina.

Ard also has a 21-year-old daughter, Hayley Ard, a philosophy student at Oxford University. "I have always had the support of my family," he said.

Before leaving Maui, he expressed gratitude to Kaiser Permanente for working around the Army schedule. He said he's also thankful to his patients, who he says make sacrifices to be without their regular doctor.

"I think they should all get credit for what they do and for the support they give," Ard said.

He said he doesn't know how many more deployments, if any, he'll receive after his current stint. However, he expects to retire from military service in about two years, when he will have served approximately 35 years.