After three years in the Air Force, Tamara Watkins enlisted in California's Air National Guard so she could get a nursing degree while continuing to serve her country. After all, the Guard's slogan was: "One weekend a month, two weeks a year."
"But it didn't work out that way," the petite 28-year-old staff sergeant admits.
Terrorists attacked in New York and Washington, D.C. Watkins was activated during her first weeks of school and deployed to Afghanistan, where she helped evacuate wounded soldiers and prisoners from dangerous areas. She loved it. But she's debating whether to re-enlist when the time comes in 2006.
"I'm waiting to see how I feel after I have children," she said. "I don't want to be that woman who leaves a 3-month-old behind."
After two deployments, her husband has already given up the Guard.
The Guard is changing. In the past, its responsibility was filling in on the domestic front when active duty military personnel were deployed to conflicts and war zones. Unless they were federalized to handle national issues, these Guard members were the heroes who held down important private-sector jobs while also calming riots, rescuing flood victims and putting out wildfires in their state. If they were deployed, it wasn't for more than 12 months.
Now their deployments can last up to two years. They, along with reserves from the five branches of the military, make up more than 25 percent of the American force in Iraq. The reserves and Guard account for about 20 percent of the U.S. military deaths in that conflict.
The impact of this new role for the Guard and reserves reverberates throughout society. Passionate patriots who never before considered leaving the Guard or reserves before retirement are questioning their commitment. Recruitment and retention are down. As deployments occur and extend, families are sent scrambling to find day care and make their house payments on new, lower government salaries. Employers must stretch their existing staff to cover for the weekend warriors now gone for a year or more. State and Guard leaders must "think outside the box" to make sure there are enough Guard members and Guard helicopters to continue in their traditional role of helping in time of emergency -- such as fighting wildfires.
Weak spots
U.S. administration officials, who had been whittling down the active military since the end of the Cold War, must face the global implications of using their citizen soldiers as boots on the ground.
"They are going to have a severe manpower issue," predicted Michael Keane, a lecturer at the University of Southern California who spent three weeks this winter embedded with the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq. He is writing a book on military strategic terminology that will be used by the U.S. Naval War College.
"I think we should all be worried," he said. "It's a serious issue when we no longer have a reserve because the troops are essentially deployed."
When Keane spins the globe, he sees all the weak spots in the U.S.-dominated balance of power. Already, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is pulling troops out of South Korea to bolster ranks in Iraq. There's been talk of reducing strength in other places where American forces have traditionally kept a strong presence.
"People will start to press you on strategic press points," Keane said. "People like China, who has interest in Taiwan, and has tested us on our commitment on Taiwan in the past, will be tempted to be more aggressive there. If we withdraw troops from the Korean Peninsula, the North Koreans will be tempted to be more aggressive.
"If we have a military crisis somewhere else, we don't have the troops to deal with it."
Rumsfeld, though, has disputed the theory that the United States will have trouble handling the world's hot spots.
"There is no question whatsoever that the United States of America is capable of executing its defense strategy, which includes, as we use the phrase, a situation, a conflict where we win decisively and then a second one where we swiftly defeat an enemy that intends to do something, and that is not an issue," Rumsfeld said, according to a June 2 Pentagon news conference transcript.
The United States has 1.4 million active military personnel, according to Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Dan Stoneking. There are 1.2 million in the Guard and reserves. Of those Guard and reserves, 161,000 are deployed in the global war on terror -- 55,000 of them in Southwest Asian areas including Iraq and Afghanistan.
There are 138,000 U.S. military troops in Iraq, about 27 percent of which are reserves or Guard, Stoneking said. As of June 18, 147 members of Guard and reserve units had died in Operation Iraqi Freedom. An additional 14 died in Afghanistan's Operation Enduring Freedom.
Recruitment numbers down
The deaths and deployments are cutting down on the number of people willing to sign up for the Guard and reserves. Gen. Peter Pace, the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a Senate panel June 2 that recruitment numbers are down in both the Guard and reserves, according to an ABC News transcript. Pace especially bemoaned the 23 percent drop in recruitment by the Air National Guard.
"I'm not satisfied with what the numbers portend," Pace said.
California has 15,800 Army National Guard members and 4,600 Air National Guard members. While some states have had to contend with deployment of up to 60 percent of their Guard units, only a little more than 10 percent of California's are currently deployed. Many more have been alerted about possible deployment in the next few months. Some expect to leave in August.
The state numbers are unlikely to be bolstered by waves of new recruits. Army National Guard recruitment numbers are down in California, according to 1st Lt. Jonathan Shiroma, a spokesman for the California Army National Guard. Numbers are also down in Ventura County, said Col. Steven Friedricks, who leads the 146th Airlift Wing at the Channel Islands Air National Guard base.
"There's been a spike in retirements," he said. "People who would've stayed 30, 40 years are retiring at 22 and 23 years."
As far as recruitment, he noted: "We are holding our own, ... but it's a harder sell."
Tech Sgt. C. Kukui Akim, a recruiter at the base, said it's about 75 percent more difficult to recruit people today than it was before September 2001. There's been a 10 to 20 percent drop in his recruitments.
"The reason why is that the National Guard role is starting to change," he said. "There's nothing wrong with that. But ... everyone we have in Air National Guard will be tasked in a position that is possibly deployable."
He counts on the enticement of up to $52,000 for education, his unit's ability to often allow for shorter 30- to 120-day "rolling deployments," and Americans' desire to prove their mettle to bring people in, he said.
Akim himself has four degrees and is working on his fifth. He added the decline in new enlistments is partially offset by an increase in the number of people leaving active duty and signing up with the Guard.
Sgt. 1st Class Jose Mendez, who works for the Command Retention Office of the Army Reserves 63rd Regional Readiness Command, said he hasn't seen a lot of people wanting out, although he is counseling two people who are finishing their contracts now. Mendez said their biggest concerns about re-enlisting are related to family. Mendez is based at Los Alamitos but works in Port Hueneme and Santa Barbara.
"I talk to them about staying in because we need them," Mendez said. "We need them because they are veterans, and they become the leaders to our younger troops who haven't had the experience."
Political clout
The fact that they are more mature and experienced, though, can work against the military in the long run.
Reservists typically have more political clout than the average Army enlisted soldier. They tend to be older and established in professions and are more likely to have families, said Scott Sigmund Gartner, an associate professor of political science at University of California, Davis.
Deployments of reservists helped sway public opinion against the Korean War, which became widely unpopular within four months of its inception compared with the Vietnam War, which took 40 months, he said.
"The reservists are pharmacists, teachers and pilots, and they vote and their friends vote and they are community leaders and have a lot more political influence than the 18- and 19-year-olds," Gartner said.
Another reason that reservists and Guard members haven't been used in active combat in the past is that most members of units tend to live in the same areas, Gartner said. If several members of a unit are injured and killed, the political impact in that area is likely to sway opinion away from the war.
Michael Bernstein, a history professor at the University of San Diego, said administration officials didn't extend reserve duty in the Vietnam War because "they understood the support for the war was paper-thin."
"During the Korean conflict and World War II, the reserves' deployment was stretched, but they were used to replace the active duty going out of country," Bernstein said. "Now we have situation of the reservists are being sent overseas themselves."
Bernstein suspects officials are in a predicament where they need troops in Iraq and Afghanistan but are quickly running out of active-duty military. They already have instituted policies such as "stop-loss," which requires military men and women to stay with their units even after their service is scheduled to end.
"The administration is walking a tightrope," Bernstein said. "They want this war to go to a successful conclusion and they need more troops, but there is a limit to how much they can push it to the point they invoke anti-war sentiments."
And there's a limit to how long those who once thought of themselves as part-time soldiers can put their real lives on hold.
Robert Watkins, the husband of Staff Sgt. Tamara Watkins, left the Air National Guard in December after serving two post-9/11 deployments. His wife has had more deployments as a Guard member than she did during her four years of active duty in the Air Force.
Robert Watkins said simply: "It's different now. You have to always be prepared to leave."
The 30-year-old Newbury Park resident believed his career as a supervisor at Southwest Airlines would stall if he continued to go on deployments.
"I miss the camaraderie," Watkins said. "But not the uncertainty."
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