JACKSON - A McComb-based Mississippi National Guardsman told reporter Matt Williamson what was on the mind of a lot of 3,500 others with him in the statewide Mississippi 155th Brigade Combat Team about to be deployed to Iraq:
"These guys who have been in 20, 25 years, all they've ever done is one weekend a month, two weeks a year, and now it's for real time," said Spec. Jonathan Kilcallen of the 155th Infantry battalion.
He added: "Real Army works a lot different than a peacetime National Guard unit."
A colleague of his chimed in to observe: "It's not a Guard anymore." Comparing themselves to highly trained regular Army troops, he said: "It's hard making National Guardsmen into that type of fighting machine."
Williamson, an experienced reporter for the McComb Enterprise-Journal, spent several days at Camp Shelby living with the Mississippi National Guardsmen, and wrote an excellent three-part series replete with heartfelt feelings of the soldiers as their deployment is three weeks away.
Now these Mississippi Guardsmen find themselves uprooted from their civilian lives about to be tossed into an increasingly unpopular foreign conflict their national leaders launched in a hostile desert land many miles away.
What's striking is that the Guardsmen, who reported to Hattiesburg's Camp Shelby when they were activated in August, have gotten little news about how things are going for the American military on the ground in Iraq the past four months.
One soldier asks: "You heard anything about Fallujah? I hear it's not been good."
Maybe it was just as well that he didn't know that more than 52 Marines and soldiers have died and 300 wounded there since the U.S. all-out offensive to retake the old minaret-studded city from insurgents began Nov. 8.
While yellow "support our troops" ribbons are brandished on automobiles by many citizens who do not question whether American troops should be fighting in Iraq or wonder how long they will be there, these questions are seriously on the minds of wives left at home by the departing Guardsmen.
Sgt. Jackie Huff of Summit said his wife is more than unhappy over his being activated, especially on the last day of his Guard enlistment commitment. "She hates it," he told Williamson. "She despises it."
There's "plenty of gray hair" among the soon-to-be-deployed Mississippi Guardsmen he saw at Camp Shelby, Williamson told me.
I'm reminded that when I went to war 62 years ago, virtually all of us were in our early 20s. If we saw anyone with gray hair, certainly in the Navy where I served, it was a four-stripe captain, an admiral, or a salty old pre-war chief petty officer.
The other night on Aaron Brown's News Nite (his show is the only one I watch on CNN), I spotted one name in a list of recent war dead, a 39-year-old staff sergeant from the Kansas National Guard, killed in Iraq. My goodness, I thought, 39! He may have been a grandfather.
This just illustrates how upside down was the Pentagon's pre-invasion planning, or lack of it, as to the number of regular troops that would be needed for the invasion, then the massive occupation and insurgency that inevitably would be faced afterwards.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, against the advice of senior commanders who said 200,000 troops would be needed, sent 40,000 to 50,000 fewer than that. Rummy insisted his "lean and mean" military would defeat Saddam Hussein's crumbling army and pacify the country in a matter of days. Most troops, he said, could soon be withdrawn.
Now 20 months later, we know the Rummy dream has turned into a nightmare. Now "gray heads" from National Guard units from states such as Mississippi, even retirees who already have served their time, are being thrown into a deadly insurgency jihad aimed at killing Americans.
When I went off to war in WWII, there was a clear and present danger to our national security on two sides of the world from precision war machines of the Axis powers, Germany and Japan, that had already cost the lives of many Americans and our allies.
Iraq posed no such threat to us before George Bush preemptively invaded Iraq on the presumption that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and was linked to master terrorist Osama bin Laden. Both have proved false.
What role the Mississippi Guardsmen will have when they reach Iraq is unclear, but unquestionably they will be going into dangerous territory where the life of any foreigner is in jeopardy.
When these weekend warriors got into the National Guard, they doubtless thought their primary mission was to serve the home front, to fight fires, stop looting and save lives when a tornado or hurricane hit.
Now they are being thrust onto the world stage into what could be judged by history as this nation's worst foreign policy blunder. Our prayers go with them.
