Army of One?

So here we are, hanging out at our mobilization station for pre-deployment training. Things are actually pretty ok so far. I am sure that most people would think things are pretty jacked up at times, but for the most part, judging from experience, the process here is pretty much what I expected, but it can be frustrating.

The basic concept here to get us all trained up to be high speed, hooah, hooah, active duty soldiers so we can go overseas, complete our mission and come home. In reality, we are National Guard soldiers who are probably more capable than a lot of Active Duty soldiers when it comes to performing our tasks and completing our missions.

Don’t get me wrong here, I respect Active Duty soldiers very much, they have made careers out of defending our Nation and I have not. I don’t plan to either, but that doesn’t mean that the National Guard is not up to the AD standard.

You see the difference is pretty easy to figure out when you stop and think about things. AD soldiers are soldiers 24/7/365. No questions asked. It’s what they do. They are soldiers in and out and they train for their mission as part of their job, their career. One would expect AD soldiers to be able to do their missions blindfolded if necessary. I mean really, it’s what they do all the time. The thing with National Guard soldiers is that we are soldiers for one weekend a month and two weeks a year. We have less training time in a year than AD does in a quarter. One might think they can draw the simple conclusion that less training time equals less capability to perform our mission to standard. But that just is not the case. It’s simply not true. You see, National Guard soldiers are more than soldiers. We are plumbers, electricians, police officers, physical trainers, bankers, nurses, and college students. We bring to the table not just our military specialties, but our civilian ones as well. That is an advantage that AD soldiers do not have over Guard soldiers.

We have one weekend a month to accomplish some of the same tasks as AD soldiers may have the entire month to complete and we get them done in that weekend. The National Guard moves at a much higher pace than the AD component and that difference is what makes this deployment process frustrating.

We have been at our mob station for a while now and really have accomplished no great training that we will need for our deployment. We have spent days doing nothing and countless hours waiting because no one seems to know what is going on. It is frustrating. The basic process has been something along these lines… stand in line, sit in briefings, listen to some people talk to you, stand in line some more, sit in more briefings, sign here, initial here, sign here again, stand in line, review some paperwork, sign here initial here, get some shots, sit around for a while, fill out the same paperwork you did yesterday because they lost it, show up at the Central Issue Facility to get deployment equipment and have them not even know who you are even though you are scheduled, and wait in line some more. Parts of it are completely ridiculous.

This whole process is completely retarded. I mean please. Have you not been mobilizing units since September 11, 2001? Seriously, can there be no smoother process for this? I am amazed that we win wars the way that our Army functions on a day to day basis. I mean really, if things worked liked they really were supposed to work…we would’ve been out of Iraq before we even got there. (Yes, I am being somewhat sarcastic…)

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not being antiwar or antimilitary or anything. I'll defend the military any day of the week. And I am not saying I don’t want to be here or that I don’t want to go, because I do. I am just trying to vent some frustrations about this process. Just because you want something in the end doesn’t mean you have to enjoy the process you go through to get there.

So the DoD policy says one year Boots-on-Ground, but really, this is more like two years. If we were AD, our mobilization station would be our duty station. We would live in our homes during the pre-deployment process. We would deploy to perform our assigned mission. (i.e. Infantry would be Infantry, Scouts would be Scouts, Military Police would be Military Police and so on and so forth). We would then deploy to our destination and our one-year clock would start. We would serve one year BOG and return to our duty station to demobilize and go back to our homes and our families. But we aren’t AD, we are NG.

Our lives stop and readjust starting the day we get our alert notification. Mine was June 2005. Since that time, my husband and I had many decisions to make in reaction to the alert notification. I dropped out of law school. Our plans to purchase a home where I would’ve gone to school changed to having to buy one where my husband works. Since I dropped out of school, we had to adjust to one income for since we had no student loans to supplement for my not working during school. We cancelled all plans that we had in the next few months because we didn’t even have a possible mobilization date. My unit scheduled some drills, some Soldier Readiness Processing, and other necessary training to fill some time. I went to a school in Las Vegas for a week and for the rest of the time, I pretty much waited to be deployed. And here I am now, mobilized, Title 10 Active Duty status, waiting for my year to start. I would imagine that we will probably be here for three or more months, training, before we ever get overseas to start the clock. You see, we would need the three or more months training because we don’t get mobilized to perform our assigned mission anymore. Oh no, the NG has a pretty good trend now of being mobilized for completely different missions than they are qualified for resulting in numerous months spent at a mobilization station re-training to be qualified for their “new” mission. Plus, in the end we’ll have another month of demob when we return in 2007.

Let’s do the math now…six months from alert to mob, four months mob time, one year in country, one month demob = 22-23 months of my life affected by this mobilization.

I’m not trying to complain about this, I really am not. I am just trying to make sense of all of this and it’s not easy all the time. Especially now when we are all thrown into a chaotic process, with seemingly no real organization, no answers for our questions, constant change, and soldiers who are now trying to adjust to always being around other soldiers, whether you like them or not.

There is no alone time here unless you are creative and can make it for yourself somehow. There are people who annoy the crap out of you that you cannot get away from. There are people that you enjoy being around that you can never seem to get tasked together for something. People are crabby because they don’t know what is going on and what will come next and they are stressed out having been moved from their homes and their lives into this unknown world. It is stressful for all of us. The scary part of it all is that I am sure that in due time, this will be normal for us and we will feel the same stress and frustration upon returning home to our families. That’s the scariest reality of it all.

But for now, I will continue to adjust fire and train as required to perform our mission successfully. When I get just a little down or a little frustrated, I remind myself of something that my sister told me to remember during the tough times, “There’s no place I’d rather be than right here right now, ” and I think that’s true. And I drive on.