Thursday, July 15, 2004
2/3 of guardsmen NOT RETURNING...so who will be place them? *cough* Draft *cough*
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Almost two-thirds of Indiana National Guardsmen in a battalion that spent a year in Iraq chose not to re-enlist when their service time expired.
Over the past 21 months, the service contracts of 102 soldiers in the 1st Battalion of the 152nd Regiment expired. Of those, 32, or less than one-third, chose to re-enlist.
The unit typically keeps 85 percent of its members, a sergeant in charge of retaining members said.
Before the war, the unit had 650 members. Now the regiment headquartered about 40 miles northeast of Evansville has about 530 soldiers left, The Herald reported in a story today.
In early 2003, 610 of the members were deployed to Iraq.
"That one big word, 'deployment,' has done more damage than anything," said Sgt. 1st Class Gary Love, who is in charge of convincing soldiers to stay.
"What killed us was the stop-loss," Love said. "There wasn't a whole lot we could do."
The Defense Department has been taking numerous steps to keep enlistment up during the Iraq conflict, included issuing a "stop-loss" order that prevents soldiers from leaving the military when their obligations end and multiple deployments of guard and reserve units.
Typically, retention is tracked in one-year cycles, broken down by quarters.
But the stop-loss order, which lasted 18 months, meant some battalions, instead of spreading manpower losses over a manageable period, have dropped members all at once.
Eighty percent of the unit's soldiers affected by the order -- 59 of 74 Guard members -- did not re-enlist, Love said. The goal was to keep at least half of those troops, he said.
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