"Kidnapped" By The White House

He will wake up on April 2 in Iraq, along with 2,600 other members of the Minnesota National Guard, men and women whose loved ones wait at home, calendars circled with their expected spring return now symbols of a cruel joke. The spring reintegration into regular life will have to wait until late this summer – if then, because the Iraq deployment of this state's National Guard has become something of a voyage of the damned, as if they are the troops who went to Iraq and couldn't find a way back. While America is flush with photos and stories of its troops deploying to Iraq again under the so-called "troop surge" plan announced by U.S. President George W. Bush last month, much less attention has been paid to those who can't come home. As part of the Bush plan, these Guard soldiers, many of them farmers, small business owners, white-collar and blue-collar workers, were extended for at least another 125 days, leaving more birthdays and anniversaries missed, vacations deferred and heaping more burdens on the loved ones left behind where anger and frustration now rule. When this unit of citizen soldiers finally returns home, they will have served about two years, the longest uninterrupted stint in this hot, deadly, stressful, often demoralizing war of any soldiers in the U.S. "They've been kidnapped, kidnapped by their own government," says Linda Anderson, who has led much of the anger in this state as she waits for her husband, First Sgt. Randy Hatch, to return. Many are calling this the most pronounced example of what is known in this country as a "backdoor draft," in which Washington keeps its volunteer soldiers in Iraq after their service should have ended. There are worries in this state about the physical grind of a two-year deployment on its citizens but there are bigger concerns about the psychological toll, the mass reintegration of such a number of soldiers into everyday life, the youngsters who don't know their fathers, the returning men and women who have drifted from spouses, the returning soldiers who zoom down interstates at 150 km/h as if dodging explosive devices, the small businesses and farms that did not survive. "Is this a raw deal? Of course!" wrote Maj.-Gen. Larry W. Shellito, the Adjutant-General of the Guard, using unusually blunt language by military standards in informing the families of the decision. "We have every right to be angry, but the reality is that the long-awaited homecoming will be pushed back." In Washington, Republicans try to blunt debate on the troop surge. In the frigid Minnesota winter, there is talk of little else, a sense of outrage mixed with disgust at Republicans who filibuster and play backroom political games while exhausted single mothers juggle parental duties and work responsibilities, with husband and father absent. http://www.thestar.com/News/article/180331 [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on February 12, 2007]

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