The Full-Time Part-Time Soldier

By Mark Thompson/Washington

California middle school vice principal Stanley Echols missed the birth of his daughter last year when the Pentagon called up his National Guard unit and he spent 10 months protecting a Washington State military base. This year he will miss her first steps because his military-police unit has just been called up again. "I honestly didn't think it would happen this quickly," he said last week from the Sacramento armory where he commands the 270th Military Police Company. After only six months off, Echols' state unit returned to Pentagon command on Saturday. Within a month, a Pentagon official says, the 270th will probably be in Iraq, protecting U.S. troops and guarding Iraqi POWs.

Captain Echols and his 180 men and women are a new kind of American fighting force: the almost full-time part-time soldier. The Pentagon called up 12,039 more National Guard and reserve members last week, bringing the total on active duty to 188,592. It's the largest reserve call-up since 1991's Gulf War. These weekend warriors had planned on giving up a weekend a month and two weeks a year for war games in exchange for pay and help getting a college education. But for many the part-time commitment has become a full-time job. A decade ago, the Pentagon required 2 million days of work from its reserves. Last year the total climbed to 15 million.

Active-duty soldiers are doing their job when they deploy, but reservists--truck drivers from California and Maryland, cops and sheriffs from Utah and Maine, helicopter pilots from Georgia, engineers from Alabama--are leaving theirs behind. Ironically, that social disruption is exactly what the Pentagon intended when it redefined the mission of the reserves after Vietnam. Bitter at having been isolated from the rest of American society, it shifted to the reserves many traditional military tasks, like police and logistics. The idea was that any major war would require calling up those part-time soldiers and force sacrifices across the nation, which would help ensure public support for foreign engagements.

Since the cold war's end, reserve forces have been called up for duty in the Gulf War, the southern and northern no-fly zones over Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and now, again, Iraq. "We can't have a situation where we call you, as a Guardsman or reservist, every year for three or four years," says Thomas Hall, the Pentagon's top reserve official. "You won't want to stay in the Guard and reserve, and employers might worry about employing you."

With this in mind, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, himself a former Navy reservist, is thinking of swapping some active and reserve missions--putting more tank units in the reserves because they're less likely to be needed on short notice, and transferring more MPs, who must be deployed quickly, into the active force. "It doesn't make sense to have the people who are required very early in a conflict in the reserves," Rumsfeld told the Reserve Officers Association recently.

The strain is showing. Military police whose voluntary enlistments are up have had their terms extended--involuntarily--for a year. Many earn less money while in uniform. (Echols' public-school employer makes up the shortfall, but he estimates that only half his troops are as lucky as he is.) And spouses can be left to tackle alone an overwhelming home life. Echols' wife Denise, who is studying to be a nurse, will have to take care of three kids--ages 8, 4 and 9 months--after he ships out. That's why, when her husband comes home, she plans to ask him to get out of the Guard for good. --By Mark Thompson/Washington