by Bradley Parsons
Staff Writer
Two images of the Iraqi people stood out when Staff Sgt. Chris Beard recalled his nine-month tour of duty in Baghdad. Some brought food and ran errands for the U.S. soldiers confined to their quarters. Others rigged rotting dog corpses with bombs.
Beard said Iraqi insurgents would hide a bomb under anything a U.S. soldier might pass. A plant, a radio, a car, Beard said his men learned to respect everyday objects as potential threats. It’s the bomb blasts and gunfire that are now treated as commonplace.
Asked how he functions amid the violence, Beard pointed out to Hemming Plaza and said, “going through that stuff for me is like taking a walk across downtown.”
Beard is one of about 3,500 soldiers from Florida’s National Guard that served in Iraq last year. National Guard Maj. Gen. Ronald O. Harrison said the shift to full-time duty that usually accompanies a call up and the transition to a foreign land can take a heavy toll on reservists and Guard members.
“It’s the minute-man thing,” said Harrison. “At a moments’ notice they’re expected to drop everything from their civilian lives and fight to protect their country.”
Left behind are families and careers. Harrison said the Guard members have to balance the obvious physical challenges with mental stress. By day they might be expected to fight, build a school or train Iraqi security. At night they worry about their jobs. Some wonder if their job will be waiting when they return. Many of them take a pay cut when they replace their civilian pay with checks signed by the government.
Harrison said he’d witnessed Florida employers providing strong support for their National Guard members and reservists.
“Everybody knows how important the family is to the soldiers, but in the National Guard, the employers are really the unsung heroes,” he said.
“They might lose someone for a year and hold their job open. I’ve seen a lot of employers step up and even continue pay, which is incredibly difficult to do for a lot of them.”
More employers across the country are holding jobs and stretching payrolls than at any time since the Korean War. Not since that conflict and World War II has the military leaned so heavily on its reserves, said Harrison. Of the 160,000 soldiers sent to Iraq and Afghanistan, about 37,000 have come from National Guard or reserve units.
Harrison joined Mayor Peyton in City Hall Wednesday to highlight the success stories coming out of Iraq. Harrison works with the Iraq-America Freedom Alliance to publicize stories that he said had been largely ignored by the media.
In addition to fighting and providing security, the reserve troops have helped renovate 3,300 Iraqi schools, distribute nine million new textbooks with pro-Saddam propaganda taken out and train more than 200,000 Iraqi security officers.
The work load provides a sense of purpose, but Harrison said morale among the reservists can drag when deployments are extended.
“The best thing we can do for them is to tell them when they’re coming home and then stick to that date,” he said. “When they get extended, that’s when you start having morale problems, and rightly so. That’s just human nature.”