COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Service: General
Fighting mad
Michelle Tan, Army Times
January 23, 2006
Eighty Individual Ready Reserve soldiers who didn’t report for duty will be discharged from the Army, but that angers IRR soldiers who are overseas.“They’re firing people for quitting,” said Sgt. Chris Bray, who’s in Kuwait for a year with 2nd Battalion, 128th Infantry Regiment, of the Wisconsin National Guard. “I think they should be compelled to report. Otherwise, it makes fools out of us who did.”
IRR soldiers have previously served in the Army but are still subject to a call-up because they have not completed their eight-year service obligation. Unlike soldiers in the National Guard and Army Reserve, IRR soldiers do not train regularly and rarely mobilize for active duty.
The Army began calling up IRR soldiers in the summer of 2004, reflecting the strain of providing enough manpower to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As of Dec. 11, the Army had called up 7,380 IRR soldiers.
Of those, 4,417 were supposed to report for duty by Dec. 11, but 383 had not and the Army hadn’t been able to find them. Eighty others did not report even though they had been contacted, so the Army is moving to discharge them.
These 80 soldiers — and possibly more, if other IRR soldiers choose to ignore their orders — will go before review panels known as separation boards. If the soldiers are found to have deliberately failed to obey a mobilization order, they face one of three discharges: honorable, general or other-than-honorable.
The Army chose not to pursue criminal charges or bad-conduct or dishonorable discharges.
“We think that’s the appropriate response,” Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, an Army spokesman, said of the action taken against the 80 soldiers.
But some soldiers think that’s just a slap on the wrist.
Those soldiers should receive, at a minimum, a dishonorable discharge, said 1st Lt. Jason Piccolo, an IRR officer who’s in Kuwait as executive officer of Battery C, 1st Battalion, 121st Field Artillery, of the Wisconsin Guard.
In Piccolo’s opinion, a dishonorable discharge carries about the same weight as a felony conviction. “If I left now, I would be considered AWOL,” Piccolo said. “So because I showed up, I could be punished a lot more severely than having a general discharge on my record.”
Piccolo, 33, entered the active Army in 1993 as an enlisted soldier. The infantryman served in the Minnesota Guard from 1997 to 1999, before he was commissioned as an officer. He spent some time in the Army Reserve before becoming an IRR soldier.
The former U.S. Border Patrol agent was a special agent with the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement division in San Diego when he was mobilized Feb. 28, 2005.
After getting a brief extension so he could sell his house while his wife moved to Philadelphia for her job, Piccolo reported for duty at Fort Benning, Ga.
Piccolo’s wife, Eileen, was a military intelligence captain in the Reserve who deployed to San Antonio for Operation Noble Eagle. She recently was hired by the FBI to be a special agent in Philadelphia.
When Piccolo arrived at Benning, officials didn’t know what to do with him, he said.
“It wasn’t all that organized,” he said. “Pretty much, I think they weren’t expecting us.”
Piccolo was moved to Camp Shelby, Miss., after spending a month at Benning. He was attached to the 1/121st Field Artillery almost a month later.
“There were 63 of us that went from Benning to Camp Shelby, and they called us the Benning 63 because they really didn’t know what to do with us,” Piccolo said. “A lot of us thought they’d call us up and have an actual job for us and an actual slot for us. It didn’t quite work that way.”
Piccolo said ignoring his orders wasn’t an option for him. He said he also feels fortunate that he was picked up by the 1/121st, which has more than 30 IRR soldiers in its ranks.
“The battery I’m with, I feel like I’m an integral part of it,” he said.
But he’s irked that the Army appears to be letting soldiers off the hook after not obeying orders.
“They’re really not doing anything to them,” he said. “All that says is maybe we made a mistake calling up IRR soldiers, [so] let’s cut our losses now.”
Piccolo hasn’t decided if he’ll resign his commission after this deployment. He has more than 12 years of military service.
“I guess it all depends on the taste in my mouth at the end of the deployment,” he said. “I’m frustrated with the system and how it treats IRR people, especially the enlisted people.”
IRR mobilization orders are based on requests from major commands, Hilferty said. Those requests are double-checked and validated by the Army’s G-3, operations and plans; G-1, personnel; and the assistant secretary of the Army for manpower and reserve affairs before orders are issued.
“We don’t just issue mobilization orders for the IRR,” he said. “We work really hard to make sure they’re the right people in the right job. We recognize the sacrifices that soldiers, their families, communities and employers continue to make … and we work hard to ensure we mobilize IRR members only for valid, justified requirements.”
The correct way to fill holes in units that are ready to deploy — typically Guard and Reserve units — is by using the IRR, Hilferty said. “This is what the IRR is for.”
Bray, a 37-year-old from Los Angeles, said he, too, found disorganization when he showed up for duty.
Bray was in the active Army from 1999 to 2001, and his eight-year service obligation is up in April 2007. In May 2005, Bray was working as a teaching assistant and finishing his master’s degree at the University of California-Los Angeles. He had plans to start on a doctorate degree but was mobilized.
On June 16, he left home and reported for duty at Benning, where he sat through a variety of briefings.
“Dental hygiene in a combat zone is one I’ll never forget for the rest of my life,” he said sarcastically.
After a month at Benning, he, like Piccolo, was shipped to Camp Shelby, where it started all over again with briefings, medical and dental screenings and in-processing.
“We all showed up thinking we were going to Iraq,” Bray said. “It took five months before we got to Kuwait.” There, Bray works in a training office, where he keeps track of vehicles.
“I maintain a list of serial numbers,” he said.
It’s a far cry from being in the infantry.
Ignoring his orders wasn’t an option, but Bray still said he’s disappointed.
“I could be working on a dissertation right now,” he said. “I would be home with my wife. When I look at the work I do, I don’t see any signs the Army couldn’t have survived without me. But, what the hell? I’m here, and I’ll do the job.”
The entire experience reeks of a lack of planning, Bray said.
“They threw a few thousand of us to the wall to see how many would stick,” he said. “I do think the shoddiness, the sloppiness with which the Army handled the recall list needs to be addressed.”
Bray said he has written letters about his experience to Lt. Gen. James Helmly, chief of the Army Reserve; officials at the Defense Department; and members of the Senate and House Armed Services committees.
“I hope that someone will bother to inquire, to look at the planning process, and to figure out how the Army planned this and what went wrong, because from here, it looks like they didn’t plan it at all.
“I regard [obeying the mobilization order] as a duty, and I would assume that everyone would regard it as a duty, including the Army. But apparently not.”
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