Subject: Change the rules for the National Guard.?
From: Stephen Harding
Date: 2/20/04 7:32 AM Pacific Standard Time
Message-id:

Kevin Brooks wrote:

"Stephen Harding" wrote in message

I don't think people are exactly flocking to the Guard any more,
given the rather lengthy, and sometimes consecutive, or round-robin
deployments.

Not certain people in the Guard really expected to be used so hard.

Since when? Guard deployments have been on the upswing since ODS, with
their
assumption of first the SFOR mission and more recently KFOR. The old days
of
units never expecting to be mobilized have been long gone, even before the
events following 9-11. The tempo since 9-11 has probably been greater than
many thought before, but the Guard and Reserves as a whole were much more
cognizant of the possibility of being mobilized now than they were twenty
years ago, when the most they could usually expect was maybe a three-week
AT
to facilitate their participation in OCONUS training operations instead of
the normal two weeks.

This may be so, but I certainly don't recall some of these repeat
deployments that some individuals, and Guard units are doing. At
least around here (W. Mass.). It may be a seeming bias produced
by news coverage, where individual, and especially families of
individuals are complaining of the length of the duty call, and
sometimes repeat calls. Even Ft. Campbell in Kentucky had families
of (unit??) members publicly complaining about this, and I don't
believe these were reserve or Guard.

When you are in the Guard, I think you are still entitled to put
family and job related concerns at a higher level. That's the
way it's always been and GWI or not, seems that was the prevalent
thinking, at least around here (we have a combat engineer unit
locally for Army, and a Warthog unit for the air).

When you're regular, you know you are GI, and family and you take
second row seats when Uncle has need of you.


SMH



The guard is where you go when you don't want to go to war but want everyone to
think that you do. End of story.


Arthur Kramer
344th BG 494th BS
England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany
Visit my WW II B-26 website at:
http://www.coastcomp.com/artkramer