9-2-04

Unguarded At Home
As National Guardsmen Are Deployed Overseas, Homes and Local Families Are Left Vulnerable
By Arthur R. Vinsel, Community News Reporter

‘Adventure is Closer Than You Think’
—Poster on Armory Wall

     California National Guard troops of San Pedro’s Charley Company, Third Battalion, 160th Infantry Division, are lucky, in a way. True, they’re gearing up for a year in the Middle East, a year away from family, friends, and careers that will have to be put on hold. But they’re not headed to Iraq; they’re headed to Sharm-el-Sheik, a windy town on the Red Sea that’s 16 hours away by jetliner, where they’ll be helping to enforce the 1980 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.
     “If you have to go over there, the Sinai is the place to go,” says Sgt. John Schlag, 38, a platoon leader in Charley Company. He’ll be vacating his post as local National Guard noncommissioned officer family support specialist.
     Service in Iraq has grown increasingly controversial. On Tuesday, August 24, Former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura—a former Navy Seal—criticized the overseas use of the Guard.
     “Now that I’m a civilian, I’m here to speak out,” Ventura said, alluding to his role as head of the state guard while governor. “The current use of the National Guard is wrong.” Ventura spoke at the launch of a new group called Operation Truth, set up “to give voice to troops who served in Iraq.”
     Ventura said that Guard members were doing jobs they weren’t trained for in Iraq, “which is dangerous.”
     In contrast, local guardsmen are doubly fortunate. In addition to avoiding Iraq, they’ll receive substantial training as well. Still, lives will be disrupted, and homeland guard duties will be further neglected.
     The all-male mechanized infantry unit, about 450 men strong—some local but most from the L.A./Orange County metropolitan region—will mobilize November 1, to ship out for the Middle East in January. They will first train at Camp Roberts, a sun-baked Central California military reservation of golden rolling hills and chaparral, an unholy stand-in for the Holy Land, bisected by the sandy Salinas River. The terrain is little changed from the 1700s when Mission San Miguel was established nearby.
     “We’ll be doing some time up there in October,” says Sgt. John Schlag. “Then we report to our staging area at Fort Lewis, WA, for more training. We leave in January for the Multinational Force and Observers team (MFO 48) in the Sinai Peninsula.”
     A lean, crewcut career soldier brought back into National Guard ranks with Operation Noble Eagle after the 9/11 terrorist assault on America following a nine-year civilian career, Sgt. Schlag chose to stay in this time.
     “I was in Desert Storm in 1991 with the regular Army. I was on active duty for10 years, then became a windshield replacement technician for a company in San Diego. I missed the service life,” says the Overland Park, KS native. He says he just traded his little red mobile service truck for the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, workhorse of mechanized infantry.
     Schlag is training his NCO family support replacement, Sgt. Donald MacDonald, 36, a Garden Grove resident originally from Erie, PA, in the duties peculiar to preparing National Guard’s citizen-soldiers and their dependents for full-time duty in a climate always hot and sometimes unfriendly.
     For the most part, their job is preparing families who remain at home for the separation and strains active duty places on them.
     “Right now, my role has been notifying the soldiers and their families. The biggest thing is getting the ladies together,” quips Schlag, two days before a monthly Family Readiness event Sunday, Aug. 22, at the Joint Reserve Training Center in Los Alamitos. “I’ve already fielded several calls from women.”
     Greatest concerns among guard families—none wanted to be interviewed for this article—are health benefits and making ends meet while the breadwinner is enforcing the 1980 peace treaty brokered by then-President Jimmy Carter between Israel and Egypt.
     Besides a basic National Guard pay rate, the soldiers will receive $250 a month hazardous duty pay and another $225 a month family separation pay, neither bonus taxable. Their base pay is taxed.
     Sinai assignments are safe enough his unit will not receive the extra $300 a month in hostile fire and imminent danger pay given guards and reservists sent to Iraq.
     “It does what it does,” says Sgt. Schlag, noting his unit represents many military job classifications, but in civilian life some of the 450 members are not affluent. For some, the extra pay is attractive, particularly for collegians who must put their educations on hold.
     “A certain percentage of our ranks are at the lower end of the economic sale,” he continues. “It really does help some of our soldiers who struggle.”
     “We strongly encourage them to take care of their families while they are gone,” adds Schlag, noting the monthly family orientation meetings are geared to educate those who stay behind on finances and health benefits due them as well as coping with other hardships.
     Cases such as one in San Bernardino, where a National Guardsman who’d been making $125,000 a year as an architect was sent to Iraq on $24,000 military pay, are extreme. His family contacted CNG civilian support workers after their savings were exhausted; their home was about to be foreclosed and they were relying on charity food pantries.
     Career military families can access base clinics, but when National Guard call-ups occur, costing civilian jobs, those families are enrolled in Tri-Care, a federal managed health care program. They may still use military medical facilities.
     Like most in his unit, Schlag will miss the comforts and pleasures of home.
     He and his wife live on-base at San Pedro’s historic Fort MacArthur, which he says—with the exception perhaps of million-dollar South Bay hilltop estates—is probably the most beautiful residential area in the region.
     “And we like to have breakfast every Sunday at the Lighthouse Deli, just up the hill on Pacific,” he adds.
     In his statement last week, Ventura also said the Guard was designed to protect the homeland, not fight overseas. While local guardsmen are stationed in the Sinai, local ports remain woefully under-protected.
     As Major General Peter Gravett (Ret.) told Random Lengths last June, at the Port of New Jersey and New York, “The Port Authority alone has 1,600 officers while the Port of Long Beach and L.A. only has… a few hundred.”

Due to ship out in January 2005, Sgt. John Schlag, above left, and Sgt. Don MacDonald prepare for their year-long deployment. Photo: Neena Lee Fitzgerald.