Text 5404, 191 rader
Skriven 2004-11-26 14:13:26 av Alan Hess
Ärende: Guard improperly trained?
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If this is true, it's inexcusable.  Our troops, be they National Guard or
regular army, deserve proper training for the missions they're expected to
undertake.
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http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/printedition/bal-te.guard26nov26,1,4137123.st
ory?coll=bal-pe-asection


National Guard troops claim they're ill-trained for Iraq
Some say their treatment reflects active-duty bias; Commanders dispute
allegations


By Scott Gold
Los Angeles Times

November 26, 2004

DONA ANA ARMY CAMP, N.M. - Members of a National Guard battalion preparing for
deployment to Iraq said this week that they were under strict lockdown and
being treated like prisoners rather than soldiers by Army commanders at the
remote desert camp where they are training.

More troubling, say a number of the Guard troops, is that the training they
have received is so poor and equipment shortages so prevalent that they fear
their casualty rate will be needlessly high when they arrive in Iraq early next
year. "We are going to pay for this in blood," one soldier said.

They said they believe their treatment and training reflect an institutional
bias against National Guard troops by commanders in the active-duty Army, an
allegation that Army commanders denied.

The 680 members of the 1st Battalion of the 184th Infantry Regiment were
activated in August and are preparing for deployment at Dona Ana, a former
World War II prisoner-of-war camp 25 miles from its large parent base, Fort
Bliss, Texas.

Members of the battalion, headquartered in Modesto, Calif., said in two dozen
interviews that they were allowed no visitors or travel passes, have scant
contact with their families and that morale is terrible.

"I feel like an inmate with a weapon," said Cpl. Jajuane Smith, 31, a six-year
Guard veteran from Fresno, Calif., who works for an armored transport company
when not on active duty.

Several soldiers have fled Dona Ana by vaulting over rolls of barbed wire that
surround the small camp, the guardsmen interviewed said. Others, they said, are
contemplating going AWOL, at least temporarily, to reunite with their families
for Thanksgiving.

Army commanders said the concerns were an inevitable result of the decision to
shore up the strained military by turning "citizen soldiers" into fully
integrated, front-line combat troops. About 40 percent of the soldiers in Iraq
are reservists or National Guard troops.

Lt. Col. Michael Hubbard of Fort Bliss said the military must confine the
soldiers largely to Dona Ana to ensure that their training is complete before
they are sent to Iraq.

"A lot of these individuals are used to doing this two days a month and then
going home," Hubbard said. "Now the job is 24/7. And they experience culture
shock."

But many of the soldiers interviewed said the problems they cite go much deeper
than culture shock.

Tensions exacerbated

Military analysts agree that tensions between active-duty Army soldiers and
National Guard troops have been exacerbated as the war in Iraq has required
dangerous and long-term deployments from both.

The concerns of the guardsmen at Dona Ana represent the latest allegations that
a two-tier system has shortchanged reservist and National Guard units compared
with their active-duty counterparts.

In September, a National Guard battalion undergoing accelerated training at
Fort Dix, N.J., was confined to barracks for two weeks after 13 soldiers
reportedly went AWOL to see family before shipping out for Iraq. Last month, in
a highly publicized incident, more than two dozen Army reservists in Iraq
refused to drive a fuel convoy to a town north of Baghdad because the trucks
they had been given were not armored for combat duty.

At Dona Ana, soldiers have questioned their commanders about conditions at the
camp, occasionally breaking the protocol of formation drills to do so. They
said they have been told repeatedly that they cannot be trusted because they
were not active-duty soldiers - though many of them are former active-duty
soldiers.

"I'm a cop. I've got a career, a house, a family, a college degree," said one
sergeant, who lives in Southern California and spoke, like most of the
soldiers, on condition of anonymity.

"I came back to the National Guard specifically to go to Baghdad, because I
believed in it, believed in the mission," the sergeant said. "But I have
regretted every day of it. This is demoralizing, demeaning, degrading. And
we're supposed to be ambassadors to another country? We're supposed to go to
war like this?"

Pentagon and Army commanders rejected the allegation that National Guard or
Reserve troops are prepared for war differently than their active-duty
counterparts.

"There is no difference," said Lt. Col. Chris Rodney, an Army spokesman in
Washington. "We are, more than ever, one Army. Some have to come from a little
farther back - they have a little less training. But the goal is to get
everybody the same."

The guardsmen at Dona Ana were scheduled to train for six months before
beginning a yearlong deployment. But they recently learned that the Army plans
to send them overseas a month early - in January, most likely - as it speeds up
troop movement to compensate for a shortage of full-time, active-duty troops.

'We are preparing you'



Hubbard, the officer at Fort Bliss, also said conditions at Dona Ana are
designed to mirror the harsh and often thankless assignments the soldiers will
take on in Iraq. That was an initiative launched by Brig. Gen. Joseph Chavez,
commander of the 29th Separate Infantry Brigade, which includes the 184th
Infantry Regiment. The program has resulted in everything from an alcohol ban
to armed guards at the entrance to Dona Ana, he said.

"We are preparing you and training you for what you're going to encounter over
there," Hubbard said. "And they just have to go get used to it."

But military analysts questioned whether the soldiers' concerns could be
attributed entirely to an attempt to mirror conditions in Iraq. For example,
the military's ammunition shortage has meant that the soldiers have often
conducted operations firing blanks.

"The Bush administration had over a year of planning before going to war in
Iraq," said Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor who
has acted as a defense lawyer in military courts. "An ammunition shortage is
not an exercise in tough love."

Turley said that in every military since Alexander the Great's, there have been
"gripes from grunts" but that "the complaints raised by these National
Guardsmen raise some significant and troubling concerns."

The guardsmen in New Mexico said they want more sophisticated training and
better equipment. They said they have been told, for example, that the vehicles
they will drive in Iraq will not be armored, a common complaint among their
counterparts already serving overseas.

They also said the bulk of their training has been basic, such as first aid and
rifle work, and not "theater-specific" to Iraq. They are supposed to be able to
use night-vision goggles, for instance, because many patrols in Iraq take place
under cover of darkness. But one group of 200 soldiers trained for just an hour
with 30 pairs of goggles, which they had to pass around quickly, soldiers said.

The soldiers said they have received little or no training for operations that
they expect to undertake in Iraq, including convoy protection and guarding
against insurgents' roadside bombs. One said he has put together a diary of
what he called "wasted days" of training. It lists 95 days, he said, during
which the soldiers learned nothing that would prepare them for Iraq.

The fact that the National Guardsmen have undergone largely basic training
suggests that Army commanders do not trust their skills as soldiers, said David
Segal, director of the Center for Research on Military Organization at the
University of Maryland. That tension underscores a divide that has long existed
between "citizen soldiers" and their active-duty counterparts, he said.

'A bad situation worse'



"These soldiers should be getting theater-specific training," Segal said. "This
should not be an area where they are getting on-the-job training. The military
is just making a bad situation worse."

The soldiers said they were risking courts-martial or other punishment by
speaking publicly about their situation. But Staff Sgt. Lorenzo Dominguez, 45,
one of the soldiers who allowed his identity to be revealed, said he fears that
if nothing changes, men in his platoon will be killed in Iraq.

"Some of us are going to die there, and some of us are going to die
unnecessarily because of the lack of training," said Dominguez, a senior squad
leader who has been in the National Guard for 20 years. "So I don't care. Let
them court-martial me. I want the American public to know what is going on. My
men are guilty of one thing: volunteering to serve their country. And we are at
the end of our rope."

The Los Angeles Times is a Tribune Publishing newspaper.

Copyright + 2004, The Baltimore Sun

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