Archive for April, 2004
Forget Your Family – Iraq Tours Extended
That’s right. The enemy who has taken over your homeland could care less about how long you spend on the battlefield. In fact, they would rather you spend a long time and tie up all the loose ends with their enemies before they complete the destruction of your homeland. The only way to change this is to clearly identify who this enemy is and face them head on. How much more time are you willing to spend watching your friends die in some foreign country for lies based on wars? How much longer must sons, daughters, husbands and wives wait for the return of their loved ones? How many of them will only receive a folded flag in place of those they have lost? The decision is all up to you. Stop fighting for the enemy, and start fighting against them where they are doing the most damage….at home.
Source:The New York Times
Date: 16APR04
The triumphant display of fighter jets over the nearby town of Leesville has been postponed. So, too, has the celebratory parade down Third Street and the floats featuring decorated veterans and musicians playing big band music. At the Landmark Hotel, just up the road from the entrance to this expansive Army base, the military wives who had traveled cross-country for promised reunions with their husbands are packing their bags and heading home.
For Eboni Abrams, the ”welcome home” signs and the march of red, white and blue ribbons up and down Colony Boulevard feel like cruel taunts, now that her husband, Specialist Roy L. Abrams, is spending an extra three months in Iraq along with 2,800 other troops who were supposed to return to Fort Polk in the coming weeks.
”I feel bad, real bad, like I have a hole in my heart,” said Ms. Abrams, 25, who was planning a surprise vacation to Disney World for her husband this weekend.
Across the country, thousands of military families who expected joyous reunions in the coming weeks are now trying to grapple with dashed hopes and renewed fears that their loved ones will have to face several more months of perilous duty in Iraq.
In Utah, family members whose relatives are in the 1457th engineer battalion of the Utah National Guard had expected them home within days. They were told at a tense meeting in Spanish Fork on Thursday that after 14 months in Iraq the battalion’s tour would be prolonged.
In announcing the extended tours of duty, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the 20,000 troops who are to remain in Iraq for up to three months were needed to quell the latest surge in violence and to protect supply convoys that have come under increasing attack in the past two weeks. Gen. John P. Abiziad, the top American officer in the Middle East, said earlier this week that he needed an additional two brigades of troops to keep the number of American troops in Iraq at about 130,000.
The extension effectively cancels the Pentagon’s plans for reducing troop levels to about 115,000, or lower, this spring, and breaks a department commitment last fall to limit troops’ time to 12 months.
”We regret having to extend those individuals,” Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters at the Pentagon. ”But the country is at war and we need to do what is necessary to succeed.”
The Pentagon’s order affects a wide range of troops, including infantry, helicopter crews, military police and logistics specialists, in both Iraq and Kuwait. The extensions affect about 11,000 soldiers from the First Armored Division, based in Germany, 3,200 troops from the Second Armored Cavalry Regiment and an unspecified number of soldiers from other posts.
Lt. Gen. Richard A. Cody, the Army’s deputy chief of staff for operations, told reporters that about 6,000 Reserve and National Guard soldiers from 20 states will have their tours extended, raising concerns among some military personnel experts.
Maj. Ron Elliott, a spokesman at Fort Polk, said the extension had come in the middle of the Second Armored Cavalry regiment’s ”flowing” back home, with about 700 servicemen having arrived at Fort Polk and 2,800 still in the Iraq or Kuwait, all of whom were expected to be back by May 11.
”In part, it’s because of their expertise and their combat experience” that they were chosen to stay, he said. Some had already reached Kuwait for the journey home and were turned around before they could board planes.
In Leesville, the homecoming party, billed as the Louisiana Homefront Celebration, was scheduled for June 19 and had been in the works since the fall. Mayors from across central Louisiana and the area’s Congressional delegation had been involved in planning for the series of events, which were expected to draw tens of thousands of people to downtown Leesville, a town of 7,000 people whose livelihoods are integrally linked to Fort Polk.
Paula Schlag, a community relations officer at the base, said the event was to be inspired by the joyous victory day celebrations that followed the end of World War II but with a modern twist. Fighter jets would screech across the sky, marching bands would parade through town and at least one unnamed Nascar celebrity was expected to join the festivities.
”Imagine a joint color guard and marching units from all the services, with vehicles from a horse to modern transport to show the transformation of the Army,” she said. Like many others here, she did her best to find a silver lining in the disheartening news. ”We’re going to use the extra time to enhance an already phenomenal event,” Ms. Schlag said.
Jessica Halverson, whose husband, a second lieutenant, has been in Iraq for more than a year, said it was important not to complain. ”I was disappointed, of course, but you give yourself a few hours to feel sorry for yourself, but then you put on your good face for everybody else and just keep on,” Ms. Halverson said. ”You’ve got to have a lot of strength to be a military wife, and how you react affects the other wives.”
Forced to cancel a planned family holiday at the beach, Ms. Halverson said she took her 3-year-old daughter, Emma Kate, to the zoo and the movies to distract her from the disappointment. ”It’s kind of like a blanket of sadness for the first couple days,” she said.
Others were not so ready to hide their emotions. Angela Macarini, whose husband, Henry, is in Kuwait with an Air Force Special Operations unit out of Hurlburt Field, near Pensacola, said she and her husband were both losing faith in the war effort. ”Sometimes I think we did the right thing and sometimes I think we didn’t,” said Ms. Macarini, a waitress who was shopping at the Winn-Dixie in Navarre, Fla., on Thursday afternoon. ”It’s getting more and more scary. I feel like the Iraqi people are not prepared for democracy and it’s not the Americans’ place to go fix the situation for them.”…
