By Bryan Bender The Boston Globe
Saturday, November 27, 2004
WASHINGTON
Nearly a third of the one million U.S. military personnel called to duty in
Afghanistan and Iraq have served two or more extended tours in combat zones,
according to figures compiled by the Defense Department.
The data demonstrate the extent to which the missions have placed enormous
strains on soldiers and their families and how the frequent deployments are
threatening the Pentagon's ability to retain veteran soldiers in the future,
according to military officials and specialists.
"Our research indicates that deployment is a big influence on people's
commitments to military service," said Harold Weiss, a psychology professor and
co-director of the Military Family Research Institute, a government-financed
center at Purdue University that is conducting a study on how military
deployments affect families.
"Both spouses and members are part of the decision-making process when a family
decides to stay in the military," he said. "It's a family decision because the
military is not a job; it is a life. Multiple deployments will make it harder to
stay in the military."
The Pentagon's longtime goal has been to deploy individual soldiers overseas
only once in a four- or five-year period so that the troops and their families
can fully prepare and adjust for extended duty away from their home base.
But the war in Afghanistan and the larger war in Iraq have stretched the
military so much that the Pentagon cannot predict when it will again be able to
stagger deployments over several years. Ground forces have been particularly
affected.
There are ominous signs that the strain is hurting the military's ability to
fill the ranks. The U.S. Army National Guard, which has tens of thousands of
soldiers deployed overseas, saw its recruiting numbers slide by 30 percent in
October, part of a trend that began last year, the first year of the Iraq war.
Many Afghanistan and Iraq veterans say the frequent periods away from home raise
new concerns about how their families will be able to cope while they are away
and how they will be compensated afterward.
Some worry they may be forced to leave military service if they are not
confident that the Pentagon is doing everything possible to look after them and
their families.
"When we joined, we understood we were not taking a job at a department store,"
said Lieutenant Colonel Samuel Poulton, an army reservist from Chelmsford,
Massachusetts. Poulton served in Iraq and Kuwait last year at the same time that
his 27-year-old son, an army staff sergeant, was deployed to the U.S. Navy's
detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
"We went into this with our eyes open, but the concern is how will we and our
families be treated?" said Poulton, 56, a sociology teacher at Waltham High
School in Massachusetts. "Will we have health care, educational opportunities?
Will our families be taken care of if something bad happens?"
The breakdown indicates that as of Sept. 30, there were 955,609 members of the
armed forces, including active-duty and reserve personnel, who had been deployed
for operations in Afghanistan or the Gulf region since the Sept. 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks. Of those, 303,987 had been sent overseas more than once.
The U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps have carried much of the load abroad. Of
about 500,000 members in the active army, 279,393, or more than half, have been
sent overseas in the past three years. And of those, 34.6 percent have served
multiple tours, some for a year or more and others several months at a time.
For the corps, the percentage of the total force dispatched to Afghanistan or
the Gulf is greater: 98,979 of about 120,000 marines. Of those, 27.6 percent
have done multiple tours, according to the Pentagon's count. The corps will be
adding about 3,000 marines to reduce the burden.
For part-time soldiers who leave jobs as well as families behind, the percentage
serving multiple tours is even higher. Of the 90,649 Army National Guard
soldiers deployed, 35.9 percent have been called up more than once.
For the U.S. Army Reserve, 34.6 percent of the 64,978 that have served since the
Sept. 11 attacks have returned home, only to be redeployed within months.