Citizen-soldiers fed up Many in Reserve, Guard plan to quit because of Iraq duty
By Dick Foster, Rocky Mountain News March 17, 2004
Janine Suppes put it plainly.
"My own husband will not be re-enlisting," she said.
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Glen Suppes, a Hotchkiss high school teacher, father of three and a Colorado National Guardsman, has been gone for 14 months, in Iraq for 10, with two more months to go.
When he comes home, he will join a growing number of military reservists and National Guard soldiers who will leave the service when their enlistments are up.
"Mass exodus. That's the term that keeps going around," said Janine Suppes.
So far, at least, an exodus is not reflected in the numbers. Nationally, officials say that recruiting and retention of troops exceed the Pentagon's quotas. In Colorado, however, National Guard and Army Reserve enlistments and re-enlistments are lagging.
The concern, however, is with the future. Many citizen-soldiers deployed to Iraq are just now returning and thousands more are headed there to replace full-time troops who are coming home after a year of duty. Whether Guard and Reserve troops who have been or will be away for a year or more stick with the military is the issue.
Officials are worried. In January, the commander of the Army Reserve, Lt. Gen. James R. Helmly, warned of a "recruiting-retention crisis" in the Guard and Reserve.
Helmly is not alone.
"I really worry that there is a looming problem," said Michael O'Hanlon, a foreign policy analyst for the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.
"Some people are fed up already. But I think it's actually going to be cumulative as deployments increase. The real issue is going to be what happens when people have to go back for a second time. We're not anywhere near the end of this Iraq deployment yet."
Many of the departing reservists and Guard members are simply tired of being called away from families and civilian jobs for prolonged or repeated military duty - not the short-term assignments they were accustomed to before 9/11.
In the view of some, the Pentagon has broken faith, pulling them out of civilian careers and businesses and turning their part-time military obligation into full-time duty. More and more, they say, the Pentagon is using them not as emergency or temporary forces, but as permanent substitutes - in Iraq and elsewhere - to avoid expanding the active- duty ranks.
More than 40 percent of the 105,000 troops now headed to Iraq for a year to replace regular troops are National Guard and Reserve forces.
William Foster's 40-member Marine intelligence unit from Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora was sent to Kuwait for six months last January, returned home in June and was reactivated last month. Half are back in the Middle East and the other half are expecting new deployment orders.
And when their duty is over? "I don't know anyone in my unit that's going to re-enlist, as far as my close friends go," Foster said.