Several hundred Hawai'i Army and Air National Guard members will be sent to Arizona this summer and next as part of a national campaign to beef up the border with Mexico, Maj. Gen. Robert Lee, head of the National Guard in Hawai'i, said yesterday.

The two-week assignments in remote desert areas will be part of the annual training sessions required of all National Guard personnel in Hawai'i, Lee said.

The troops will be placed in areas far from Arizona cities. Their job will be to notify border security personnel of illegal immigrants making their way from Mexico into the United States, and provide humanitarian assistance until the immigrants can be taken into custody and sent back to Mexico, Lee said.

"We'll be in some rough areas, places where very desperate people trying to get across often get stuck in a no man's land without any water or other help," he said.

The duty conditions will be similar to what many of the same National Guard members experienced during a year's deployment in Iraq last year.

"The heat and dust will remind a lot of them of Iraq, but at least nobody will be shooting at them," Lee said.

The Hawai'i guardsmen will be part of a force of 6,000 soldiers helping with border duties over the next two years at the direction of President Bush. Guard units are being used until the border patrol can be built up enough to handle the job on its own.

The training missions will begin on a small scale within a matter of weeks, with about 50 volunteers with special skills such as communications and medicine joining the effort. By next summer, however, the two-week training rotations will involve hundreds of Hawai'i-based troops from both the Army and Air National Guard here, Lee said.

Hawai'i officials specifically requested that they be assigned to help in Arizona, in part because that's where troops are needed the most and in part because the National Guard in both states have a long history of cooperation, including one Tucson-based battalion that is actually part of Hawai'i's 29th Brigade.

"It was our choice to go to Arizona," Lee said. "We have to do our annual training anyway, and we felt we may as well do it along the Arizona border as in Pohakuloa," on the Big Island, Lee said. "We'll be getting all our needed training under unique conditions and doing humanitarian work at the same time."

Last year, about 2,200 Hawai'i-based Guard and Army reservists were deployed to the war in Iraq for up to 12 months. While the Arizona duty may look and feel like the same desert war zone, it will be much different.

"This isn't a deployment. It will only be for two weeks. And there won't be any bullets," Lee said.

Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, the head of the U.S. Army National Guard, yesterday said about 3,600 soldiers are already in the Southwest border states of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. That number will increase to as much as 6,000 by the first of August, he said.

Lee said one of the hardest parts of the assignment will be the logistics of rotating soldiers in remote areas for the relatively short two-week periods. Officials here are working to coordinate details of the plan with Arizona officials before the rotations increase next summer, Lee said.

Reach Mike Leidemann at mleidemann@honoluluadvertiser.com.