Guardsmen face 2nd call to Iraq
John Hanson, a city building inspector in Northern California, already served one tour in Iraq with his National Guard unit. If called, he said he is prepared to go back: "But I'm not going to lie and say I'm happy about it."
Francis Shaw, a Long Beach medical technician, worries about the toll another deployment would take on his family, his civilian job and his 55-year-old body.
So far, more than 7,000 members of the California National Guard have been deployed for 12- to 18-month tours in Iraq, the first use of the state militia in overseas combat since the Korean War.
Until last week, under National Guard policy, most of these soldiers were exempt from another activation for at least two years.
But faced with the "surge" of forces proposed Wednesday by President Bush as a way out of the Iraq conflict, senior military officials have announced a change in the rules that would let them recall some of these state units to serve an unprecedented second tour.
The National Guard headquarters in Washington has announced that one large state unit already in Iraq, the 1st Brigade Combat Team from Minnesota with 4,000 troops, has been asked to stay an additional four months as part of the proposed increase in forces.
Pentagon officials say that California units, such as the 1st Battalion, 185th Armored Regiment in San Bernardino, which served in Iraq in 2004-05, may be asked to go again under the president's proposal.
Interviewed last week, veterans of the 1-185th were generally resigned to a possible second tour, although they said it would put strains on their families and civilian careers.
For many of these soldiers, the Pentagon proposal represents a dramatic departure from what recruiters told them when they enlisted about the amount of possible active duty they would face.
"If I were 20 years younger and had a better background in the infantry, I wouldn't mind going. But as old as I am and with my family situation, it's going to be difficult," said Shaw, who works at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Long Beach. Shaw said that when he was in Iraq, the staff at the hospital was trained to cover for him.
Many National Guard soldiers are older than their regular military counterparts. In addition to his tour in Iraq as a team leader outside Baghdad and on the Kuwait border, Shaw also served two tours in the Vietnam War with the Navy. The Huntington Beach resident has three older children from an earlier marriage and a 3-year-old son with his wife, Cindy, a former Navy nurse.
