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"Ain't Gonna Study War No More"

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Monday, December 20, 2004

The New Military Life: Heading Back to the War

MANHATTAN, Kan., Dec. 15 - Earlier this year, as Sgt. Alexander Garcia's plane took off for home after his tense year of duty in Iraq, he remembered watching the receding desert sand and thinking, I will never see this place again.

Never lasted about 10 months for Sergeant Garcia, a cavalry scout with the First Armored Division who finished his first stint in Iraq in March and is now preparing to return.

He and the rest of his combat brigade at Fort Riley, the Army base a few miles from this town, have been working for weeks, late into the frigid prairie nights, cleaning and packing gear and vehicles for the trip back to Baghdad after the New Year.

"I figured that the Army was big enough that one unit would not have to go back again before this thing was over," said Sergeant Garcia, 20. "It's my job and it's my country, and I don't have any regrets. But I kind of feel like I did my part. Just as I was readjusting to life back home, just as I was starting to feel normal again, this kind of throws me back into the waves."

No one is feeling normal anymore at Fort Riley and other bases across the country, where military life is undergoing a radical change. They are stoic here, and many point out, as Sergeant Garcia does, that they signed up for this.

Still, in decades past, troops had gotten used to a predictable rhythm to their deployments. Even during Desert Storm and Vietnam, most soldiers could expect to take just one trip into harm's way.

But with the military stretched thin in Iraq and in Afghanistan, some soldiers and marines are being sent to war zones repeatedly, for longer stretches in some cases, and with far less time at home between deployments than they say they have ever experienced before.

Here in Kansas, the base and the small towns nearby have begun to resemble an enormous machine in an endless cycle: bringing soldiers home with late-night celebrations in gymnasiums and screaming roadside banners, and then sending them off again, with fresh uniforms, new DVD players and snapshots, and formal farewells.

The motion is constant, whirring along, even as the world beyond Fort Riley's churning slows down for the holidays. Next month, a brigade of 3,500 Fort Riley soldiers will begin returning to Iraq for a second time; a few days ago, 3,500 others, many of whom arrived home to their quiet Midwestern post this fall, learned they would be headed back to Iraq as early as the middle of next year.

This frenzied pace is swiftly becoming the norm. Nearly a third of the 950,000 people from all branches of the armed forces who have been sent to Iraq or Afghanistan since those conflicts began have already been sent a second time. Part-time soldiers - Army national guardsmen and reservists - who often have handled support roles, not frontline combat roles, are slightly more likely to have served more than one deployment to the conflict zones than regular Army members.

And, of the nearly 1,300 troops who have died in Iraq since the war began, more than 100 of them were on second tours.

The change is leaving its emotional mark on thousands of military families. Some family members say the repeated separations have been like some awful waking dream, holding their breath for their soldiers to make it home safely, only to watch them leave once more. Some families who have lost loved ones on repeat tours of duty said they felt a particular ache - a sense that the second trip pushed fate too hard.

Among some of the soldiers themselves, the thought of returning to Iraq carries one puzzling quality: Unlike so many parts of life, in which the second try at anything feels easier than the first, these soldiers say that heading to Iraq is actually more overwhelming the second time around.

"The first time, I didn't know anything," Sergeant Garcia said. "But this time I know what I'm getting into, so it's harder. You know what you're going to do. You know how bad you're going to be feeling."

During peacetime, marines have usually been deployed for six months, then stationed at home for 18 months, said Capt. Dan McSweeney, a Marine Corps spokesman. For now, Captain McSweeney said, the pace for some is closer to seven months away and seven months home. About half of the 32,000 marines now stationed in Iraq are serving second tours, he said.

The Army's goal is that fulltime soldiers can expect deployments one year of every three, and reservists expect to go away far less, one year of every six, said Lt. Col. Christopher Rodney, an Army spokesman. At the moment, though, Colonel Rodney said, some soldiers are leaving for a year and coming home for a year, though some tours have stretched longer, some stays at home shorter.

Army officials said they were seeking ways to make repeated deployments easier on soldiers and their families, as the Army is shifted to create more brigades and to spread the burdens. Colonel Rodney said that the military was also trying to give troops as much advance warning about deployments as possible. The Army's chaplains, too, said they were offering more extensive relationship counseling for military families as one way to ease the strains.

"This is a completely new and completely different kind of animal," said Sgt. First Class Tom Ogden, a member of an Army aviation unit from Fort Carson, Colo., who has spent nearly 20 years in the military.

"I've never seen anything like it," he said. "And what everybody is starting to know now is that this is going to be what's going on for the foreseeable future."

Sergeant Ogden, 37, returned home to his wife, Rene, and their 7-year-old twins in April. His unit is to leave again, he said, in March. "For me, this one will be harder," he said. "The last time, we thought there was an off-chance we would see some stuff. But things have escalated, and now we know we will."

At Fort Riley, soldiers and their families said they had wrestled with the new, faster pace. Some spouses said they worried about managing so much of life alone - children, bills, cars and home repairs.

"I think this is the new norm," said Sandra Horton, whose husband, Staff Sgt. T. J. Horton, is to leave Fort Riley for Iraq, once again, in January.

The Hortons have been through the stresses and loneliness of deployments many times in Sergeant Horton's 17 years in the service, and they said they would manage just fine this time, too. Again and again, they both said that this was simply his job, even if it meant that Ta'Von, 6, grew many more inches before his father saw him again.

Still, in a quiet moment, Ms. Horton acknowledged: "It feels never-ending now. We feel like he's always gone. But what can we do?"

For Specialist James Webb, a younger soldier here at Fort Riley, the family stresses seem overwhelming. "I feel like I'm in a no-win situation," he said.

Specialist Webb, 28, lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment off the base. He talks on the telephone for hours to his wife, who lives in Georgia. He said he was lonely, struggling with depression and being treated for post-traumatic stress from the roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades he saw as a gunner on the top of a Humvee.

He returned this fall, but has not been able to reunite permanently with his wife and three stepdaughters because he cannot find them on-base housing. His wife moved home, to Georgia, during his deployment, and now there is talk of another deployment as quickly as next year.

"There's been some distance," he said somberly of his wife, whom he married in October 2002, not long before his first deployment. "She's really not liking the military lifestyle at all. She tells me things would be better if I just moved back to Georgia."

Still, Specialist Webb said he hoped to remain a soldier for his career, though he said he worried about losing his family."At the same time, this is my job," he said. "I signed on the dotted line. And this is a small thing I can do for my country, to protect my wife and stepdaughters."

No one can be certain how the pace of deployment may affect the military in the years ahead: Will soldiers finish their enlistments and leave? Will fewer recruits agree to sign up? Two studies based on data before the 2001 terrorist attacks suggested that service members who had one or two deployments were more likely to re-enlist than those who had had no deployments, but the pace and danger levels of deployments have shifted since then.

Cpl. Kenneth Epperson, a Fort Riley soldier, said that he and his wife, Amanda, were fine with the pace of deployment. His daughter, Nikki, was born while he was in Iraq, and he has spent many weeks since he returned in April away from his family again, getting special training in California and Georgia.

"I joined the Army to be a soldier," said Corporal Epperson, who is 21 and headed back to Iraq in a few weeks. "I expected this."

Others were surprised.

At Camp LeJeune, in North Carolina, Lance Cpl. Peter Kirby said he probably would not re-enlist in the Marines when his contract ends in 16 months. He had thought about the military as a career, Corporal Kirby said, but was now leaning toward being a police officer or a park service worker.

"This isn't the life I'd like to lead," he said, adding that he was getting married in a few weeks. "If I'm going to start a family, I don't want to be absent in my kids' lives."

In Tucson, Elena Zurheide is preparing Christmas for her 7-and-a-half-month-old son, Robert III. "I hate Christmas," Ms. Zurheide said. "I hate holidays. I hate everything right now."

Her husband, Robert Jr., was a lance corporal in the Marines. He was killed in Falluja this spring, a few weeks before their son was born. He was on his second tour to Iraq.

"I never wanted him to go a second time," she said. "I just started having the feeling that we were pushing our luck too far, and he thought so, too."

She said she wrote to Corporal Zurheide's commander before he left, asking that her huband be permitted to stay behind - or that he at least be allowed to wait for the birth of their son. She said she never heard back.

"I should have broken his arm to keep him here," she said. "I knew it was too much to go again."

Her son, Ms. Zurheide said, looks just like his father.

MONICA DAVEY
Published: December 20, 2004



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