As troops return home, a changing of the Guard

National Guardsman Scott Light was one of 150 anxious troops who returned stateside to wild cheers on the parquet floors of a Fort Bragg gym Wednesday - a tired smile lighting up his face.

Against his wife's wishes and the loss of some $60,000 in civilian income at a Caterpillar plant, the Chapmanville, W.Va., carried out his military duty - proudly. During a 10-month stint, he saw the first combat of his life, spending most of his days patrolling the Iranian border and dodging roadside bombs.

Now, as part of the largest group of national guardsmen to return from Iraq, the tank mechanic is quitting the National Guard, having made his mark and his point. "The Guard gets some abuse from people who don't think we can fight, but I think we proved them wrong with this mission," he says. "I'm proud of my duty, but now ... I'm going home to the mountains."

This graduating class of Iraq veterans - thousands of whom are returning to North Carolina and New York this week - reveals the resolve that has helped erstwhile "weekend warriors" fulfill difficult and vital missions in Iraq. But for many, a sense of duty coexists with disillusionment over long and hazardous deployments.

For these men and women, homecoming is a moment of celebration, but also the start of a challenging adjustment back to civilian life. And for America's armed forces, it punctuates new difficulty in maintaining the Guard ranks that are now so vital when the nation goes to war.

"The Guards and reservists are a great American story," says Stephen Cimbalo, a political science professor at Pennsylvania State University. "You have these part-time ... citizen soldiers, and who would have thought they'd take so effectively to a war of indistinct fronts [and] a confused political and cultural milieu?"

Before their endless debriefs and connecting flights, the 3,100 returning soldiers of the 30th Heavy Separate Brigade had been part of a vast band in Iraq. The National Guard now accounts for about 40 percent of troops there and has taken nearly 20 percent of casualties, an unprecedented role. Though at least one Guard unit was left stateside in the Gulf War because it wasn't battle-ready, this time the Guard has "surpassed expectations" overall, says Cimbalo.

Today, some of these soldiers, 75 percent of whom live in small towns, come home to business challenges or feelings of irrelevance at work. Then there's the psychological readjustment and the trauma of battlefield memories. After all, many of these hometown cops, accountants, and mechanics found they hardly fit into the "hooah" military culture.

"Being a citizen soldier is kind of tough," says First Sgt. William "Buddy" Byrd, a Laurinburg, N.C., salesman whose recent Iraq deployment was his first in a 34-year career. "After all, we've got careers back home, and I've seen in some cases where deployments can have very adverse effects."

The result: a rash of retirement requests and no-shows at stateside barracks as new call-ups are announced. While a shortage of armor for the National Guard was big news last month, much of that could be attributed to decades of budget cuts, which tend to show up most in the part-time companies. (The 30th, on the other hand, was fully "armored up," soldiers here say.)

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