21 July 2004

A Shrinking Base; Support for War Wanes Among Military Families
Facing Redeployment
   By Hanna Rosin

HINESVILLE, Ga.-- Yes, sir, this is Bush country: Real pit
barbecues, yellow ribbons on church doors, wild boar in the woods.
Fort Stewart 10 minutes away. And one teenage party loyalist
greeting guests for his mother's Party for the President, on
National Party for the President Day, a boy with impeccable
manners who, when peppered with questions by the adults in the
living room, blurts out things such as "Condi Rice speaks, like,
three languages!"

So why does hostess Michele Bourque sound as defensive as if she
were living in Berkeley?

"There's just so much negativity around," she says, explaining her
decision to host this party. "There's not a lot of positive
affirmation about why George W. Bush should be president. We just
want to let people know, he's not as bad as people think."

Bourque is not a balloons and party hats type. Her family just
moved to this ranch house outside Savannah and the decorations are
spare -- some birthday cards on the mantelpiece next to a portrait
of the president and the first lady, plus trays of cold cuts and
fruit to feed a couple of dozen people. Alas, only two have turned
out this evening, an Army couple from the base.

But between them and the kids, they are plenty enthusiastic.
Christopher, the young host, recently wrote Bush a letter to
"cheer him up, and let him know how grateful I am for what he did
in Iraq." His father, Staff Sgt. Kenneth Bourque, is about to be
deployed there. Christopher's twin brother, Andrew, wrote one,
too, telling Bush to "relax, have fun whenever he can, because
right now he's in for a fight." A form letter response from the
president also sits on the mantelpiece.

"Kerry, Kerry, Kerry," says one of the guests, Stacie Young.
"These young guys in the squad say, 'I'm voting for Kerry,' " she
says, meaning the guys who serve with her husband. "And I say,
'Why would you do that? Vote for your kids! Vote for your
security!' "

To her husband, John, a sergeant who fought with the 11th
Engineers, the view of Iraq in the media is unrecognizable. In the
stories he tells at the party, Iraq is a place where soldiers
throw candies to children and drink sweet tea. It's where he saw a
sergeant get shot in the neck to save his platoon, where for the
first time he felt a sense of purpose. Where "we felt like
celebrities, we would march around and the people would chant,
'Saddam bad, Bush good.' " Many Unhappy Returns

Sometime around Election Day -- rumors on the base say between
November and January -- troops from Fort Stewart will be deployed
to Iraq. Most here belong to the 3rd Infantry Division, the one
known during the war as the tip of the spear. They are the troops
who fought in Najaf, led the march into Baghdad, seized Saddam
International Airport and Hussein's palaces, who led the fighting
the day the iconic was pulled down. So for most, this will be
their second tour. But the mood going in this time is very
different.

Most have been home long enough to settle into a domestic routine,
but not long enough to obscure the memory of watching someone in
their unit get shot. Plus, this time the mission is murkier, the
enemy more elusive and the return date open-ended.

"The first time I was kind of scared, but it wasn't as bad as I
expected. We did our jobs without too much of a struggle," says
Spec. Ben Schlabach, who's in a maintenance company. "Now it's a
totally different ballgame over there. You don't know who's on
your side. You have to be alert, keep your eyes open. You don't
know when you'll come home. You just don't know what to expect."

The second time, it's hard to maintain the conviction that the
citizenry of Iraq is entirely grateful to be liberated. Spouses
have been trained to be on alert for signs of post-traumatic
stress disorder, and all have heard the story of the soldier who
came home and, when his wife asked him to change the baby's
diaper, flung his wife across the room. Any sense of adventure is
dampened by the existence of a new Heroes Walk on base, 45
saplings planted in honor of the men of Fort Stewart who died in
Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Talk to a soldier eating his burger in the base food court and
he'll tell you he's ready to complete the mission and support his
commander in chief. "I got a job and I'll go out and do it," says
Staff Sgt. Jeff Laplante. Others talk about unfinished business or
even revenge, if someone they know was killed. They are
professionals, they chose this path and they are deeply patriotic.

But some soldiers say the picture is murkier, particularly if
their families are around. In the weeks leading up to deployment,
soldiers are psyching themselves up by listing all that they fight
for: family, buddies, their home town, democracy and God. Last
time around the sentiment extended naturally to the president. Now
that connection for some soldiers is what pollsters call soft.

Paul Rieckhoff fought with the division and has since left the
Army. This week, he is launching Operation Truth, a nonpartisan
group dedicated to telling the public about the war in Iraq from
the perspective of those who fought there.

"People can deal with it if it's honest and up-front," he says
about the deployments. "But they've broken their word so many
times it gets frustrating. Everyone says they love George W. Bush,
but when you get over there and see your buddies blown up and then
think: 'What the hell are we doing over there?' You start to
think: 'Who do I hold responsible?'

"My overall encapsulation is that the public will be
overwhelmingly surprised at how many people coming back from Iraq
will not vote for George W. Bush."

Yes, war is a fearsome enterprise, and yes, this is a new and
dangerous world, but "how the deployment was handled made it
worse," says Loren Thompson, a defense expert at the Lexington
Institute, an Arlington think tank. Return dates are announced and
canceled at the last minute. Missions are open-ended. For soldiers
used to planned rotations, this kind of uncertainty crushes
morale. Add to that the overall chaos in Iraq and "there's a lot
of resentment," says Thompson. "If you're in the Army, you feel
the institution is unraveling all around you."

"For the first time I hear officers openly debating against Bush,"
says Donald Vandergriff, an Army major and a professor at
Georgetown University. "They don't want to vote for Bush and they
don't want to vote for Kerry. What choices do they have? Zero,
basically."

The Defense Department does not allow soldiers to be polled on
their political opinions, and the culture still distrusts anyone
who expresses those opinions too overtly. But it's clear that the
military, famously conservative, hasn't pulled away from Bush. A
recent poll of families with current and retired military members
showed them supporting Bush 52 percent to 44 percent.

But at Fort Stewart, some of the support seems less of the
enthusiastic than of the devil-we-know variety.

Aaron Symonette is in a transportation unit about to return to
Iraq, and his wife, Judy, says this time she's "twice as scared,
twice as nervous. To be honest with you, I feel it's unnecessary,
that we should have pulled out once we captured Saddam."

Aaron Symonette doesn't think about those larger questions except
"whenever somebody gets captured or killed. That's when we think,
man, why are we really here?" To the families at Fort Stewart, the
concept of exit strategy is not abstract. The families were
expecting soldiers home on July 2, 2003, so Judy lost weight, got
her hair done, hung white banners and balloons, ironed the kids'
clothes, bought a bottle of her husband's favorite champagne. And
then the night before, she was told, no, he wasn't coming home
yet, and he didn't until October.

Still, "although I'm irritated, I still would prefer Bush over
Kerry," she says. "Bush has already started this thing and he
knows what's going on. The rapport is already established. A new
person would just have to be briefed all over again and that makes
me nervous." Ballot Battles

Most experts assume officers will continue to vote Republican. But
as for the other components that make up the military vote --
enlisted personnel, veterans, dependents -- their votes are "in
play," says Christopher Parker, a former Army captain and a
political scientist at the University of California, Santa
Barbara.

In an election in which national security is a prime issue, the
morale of the troops takes on outsize significance. And it takes
only small shifts to make a difference. If Eglin Air Force Base
were in Alabama instead of Florida, says Thompson, Al Gore would
be in the White House. A 5 percent shift in the veterans' vote
would have given New Hampshire and Arkansas to Gore.

The people most likely to shift their support from Bush to Kerry
are in the reserves and National Guard, says David Segal, a
professor at the University of Maryland. "In the past the antiwar
movement was rooted in college campuses," he says. "Now the major
movement against the war is in reserve families."

Reservists, used to serving a weekend a month, are being called up
for a year at a time, over and over. They leave homes to serve in
jobs for which they feel unprepared, attached to commanders and
units they don't know. "We are the stepchildren, here to be
abused," says Michael Ray Gibbins, eating his lunch at Fort
Stewart with two buddies from the Texas National Guard at the end
of a day that started at 3 a.m.

Gibbins lacks the sense of, well, reserve that keeps some career
soldiers quiet about the election or the war.

"They ought to shoot the person who made us go over there," he
says.

Gibbins has been grafted to a unit here for a year, and for now
he's mostly guarding the base. He's a mechanic but like many
reservists is being retrained as a military police officer. "If
they sent us over there now, we'd die," he says.

Gibbins was on the crew that helped clean up after the crash of
the Columbia space shuttle. He wears a shirt with this quote from
Bush: "The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to
Earth. Yet we can pray they are safely home."

"This does not -- I repeat -- does not show my support for Bush,"
he says. "I'm supporting the crew."

Even outside the reserves, it's not hard to find people who are
newly disillusioned. They are parents who lost children, soldiers
who went over and found it hard to maintain the sense that Iraqis
were evil, or that their commanders had everything under control.
They've become antiwar, and some are anti-Bush, but they don't
sound like the usual suspects.

Jean Prewitt's son was with the 3rd Infantry Division and was
killed three weeks into war. But she swears that has nothing to do
with her opposition to the war. She's just been reading the
papers, she says, and can't fight the sense that "we find out more
and more each day how we were lied to. We went there for no good
reason. It's just so big and tragic and horrible."

Her sister sent her a clipping about a group called Military
Families Speak Out, and she joined. "A lot of them are radical,
peace not war, that kind of thing, and I'm not one of those."
She's a former postal worker and a lifelong conservative. But the
war has changed her. "It just frustrates me, how they won't admit
they made a mistake."

Sgt. Frank Carey went over with the 3rd Infantry Division. At
first, he was "excited. It was like 'Red Badge of Courage.' " That
feeling lasted through the initial invasion. "There was just
elation, that we'd been bombed and we were still in one piece.
That it had gone pretty smoothly."

But then came the occupation. "I didn't know what the plan was and
I was hoping someone two grades above us knew and wasn't telling
me for some reason. Then it dawned on me: I don't think there is
one. It was a very uneasy realization."

Carey talked to Iraqis and found it hard to maintain the sense
that this was part of the axis of evil. "The Iraqis were just like
us, dads who don't want their daughter to marry some jerk.

"As time went on I felt like I'd been caught in some big machine
and that machine had a goal and no matter what happened, it would
achieve that goal."

Who will he vote for?

"That's a good question," he says. Last time he went out of his
way to vote for Bush, getting special permission to leave a
training mission and go to the polls. "This time I'm on the fence.
But more on the fence between someone like Nader and Kerry." The
Ones Back Home

It's summer, and deployment still feels far enough away. Some
soldiers buy Harleys or motorbikes. A surprising number are in a
rush to get married. On the drive to the Burger King or the base
gym, Heroes Walk can look like a landscaping project. But there
are signs of what's to come. The PX has just launched its Back to
School sale, a reminder of the next important cycle parents will
miss. Mothers are starting to notice how clingy their kids have
become -- she's such a daddy's girl now, they'll say, I don't know
what she'll do when he's gone.

Carrie Moss is an Army wife who's both calm and wants to know
everything. "Whatever he'll tell me, I'll take." She knows every
detail of how the men in her husband Brennan's battalion got
killed or injured, and even some things he doesn't know she knows.
Like when she overheard him tell his father on the phone, "Three
times, I just knew I was gonna die."

She also knows her husband is one of the "crazy ones," that his
view of combat is "when you play football, you don't train just to
sit on the bench." And she knows there are some even crazier, like
the guy in his battalion who was in a vehicle that exploded. He
lost most of his hearing and some of his sight, but downplays his
injuries so he can fight with the Special Forces.

She takes comfort in a couple of things: "He's not stupid," and he
operates cannons, which means he shoots from a few miles away. And
some part of her hopes he'll accept the Army's offer to become a
recruiter, although she knows he wouldn't like it. "Either way,
I'm not worried," she says.

Unlike her friend Julie Samples. Asked how she feels about the
impending deployment, Samples says, without hesitation:

"I'm scared. I'm scared."

For Samples, calm is hard to maintain. She looks at al Qaeda Web
sites. She's drawn to articles about the beheadings. "It's so
scary over there now. All the suicide bombings and kidnappings. I
don't want to use the word, but it's just barbaric."

Last year her 25-year-old daughter Ebony was found dead from an
accidental overdose. Now she feels close to families who
experience loss but finds no comfort with them.

"Who's that, sweetie?" she asks her daughter Treanna, 3, who has
picked up one of the many glamour shots that decorate the living
room. "That's my Ebony!" the child answers, referring to a sister
she barely knew. This morning the family is busy getting ready for
day care, for camp, for their father Corey, a staff sergeant, to
go back to training. "The maid is off today," jokes Julie to Corey
Jr., 7, as his father hustles Treanna out the door.

Only when her husband and youngest daughter are gone does she
confess:

"If he were to die . . . ," she says, unable to speak for a
moment. "I don't ever want to go there.

"God is good. He doesn't give you more than you can bear."

For her, waiting is all about praying. She founded a wives group
at her church called Prayerfully Waiting. This is their special
spouse's prayer: "Lord, give me the greatness of heart to see the
difference between duty and his love for me. Give me a task to do
each day to fill the time when he is away. While he is in a
foreign land, keep him safe in Your loving hand. And when duty is
in the field, please protect him and be his shield."

She does not see the need for this war but doesn't blame the
president. The thought that a commander in chief may have done
this for the wrong reason is just too scary. She "believes in
Bush," she says, the way she believes in prayer. It's something
she clings to.

While she's talking she notices Corey Jr. behind her. He just won
a prize for a Cub Scout essay about how he wanted to be a soldier,
she says brightly.

"No I don't," he answers.

"How come?"

"Bang. Bang," he says, pointing his finger at his chest and
turning his head to the wall in mock death.
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