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The word these days to patients
of Las Vegas family practitioner Jeff Brookman is that the doctor is out — not on the golf course but in downtown Baghdad, where the reservist, 53, is a battalion surgeon doing trauma assessment and triage with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force. "He's three for three," says his wife Monterey, who has been taking his calls and referring his patients elsewhere for the past nine weeks. "First the Gulf War, then Somalia and now Iraq." This time, Monterey says, it has meant a pay cut of about 35%, and it will take months to get the practice going again. But, she acknowledges, that leaves them far better off than many other reserve families.
So much for the cushy life of the weekend warrior. It's a far cry from the Vietnam era, when draft-age sons of privilege (including the current Commander in Chief) sought out spots in the reserves and the National Guard as an alternative to facing combat. These days, 220,000 Guard members and reservists are stationed around the globe in peacekeeping operations, the battle against terrorism, homeland security and now the war in Iraq. Last month an Illinois Guardsman died in an ambush in Afghanistan; so far, at least eight members of the reserves and the National Guard have died in Operation Iraqi Freedom. And now that the fighting is over, the work is just beginning for reservists, who will provide the bulk of the military manpower for postwar reconstruction — bridge building, restoring utilities, decontamination — and peacekeeping. Deployment may last as long as two years. Some reservists in such sought-after specialties as military police have shipped out two or three times over the past few years.
To be all that they can be can cost them dearly: 41% report that they earn less while deployed than in their civilian jobs, according to the latest Pentagon survey, which predates the massive call-ups that began with 9/11. Employers are required by law to hold their jobs but are not required to make up the difference between what their workers were earning and what the military pays. Some employers do. When Tyson Foods CEO John Tyson learned last fall that about-to-be-activated employee David Rook was being forced to sell his family's dream house, the poultry firm instituted a policy — retroactive to Sept. 11, 2001 — of paying the difference in wages.
But Tyson is the exception. In Pensacola, Fla., Michelle Gale is struggling with the day-to-day challenges of raising eight children on less than half the $80,000 salary her Army reservist husband Randy was earning as a lineman for Sprint. He left three months ago for what could be two years with the 350th Civil Affairs Command in Hungary. Michelle fixed the dryer herself to save the service charge, but then the car broke down. Their savings account has shrunk to $175, and groceries alone cost $800 a month. When Randy asks how things are going, Michelle tries to change the subject. "I hate to tell my husband when he calls how bad things really are," she says.
Not even the Federal Government makes up the difference in pay for the 14,000 or so of its civilian employees who have been called up — a situation that Senators Dick Durbin, Mary Landrieu and Barbara Mikulski are seeking to rectify in recently introduced legislation. Landrieu is also fighting to give a tax break to companies that supplement the military pay of their workers while they are on active duty. And Senator (and presidential contender) John Edwards has introduced legislation to suspend interest on the student loans of activated reservists as well as to expand day-care services for their children.
A smaller paycheck is just the beginning of the adjustment for many families. Some live too far from a military base to take easy advantage of the benefits of military life. In Hammond, La., if Janet Wright wants to save on tax-free groceries at a military commissary while her husband serves in California, she has to load a cooler into her car and drive at least an hour. "What you save in tax-free," she says with a sigh, "you've just spent in gas." The families of activated reservists qualify for the same health plan as active-duty families, but that can mean finding new doctors and learning to navigate yet another bureaucracy. Their creditors' employees are not always aware that the Soldiers and Sailors Civil Relief Act requires interest rates to be reduced to 6% for deployed reservists. Monica Dana of Long Island, N.Y., the wife of a reservist deployed in the gulf, has been waiting five months for Capital One to retroactively reduce its credit-card rate from 15.9% — even after a lawyer for the reserves sent a stern letter three months ago warning the company that failure to do so is "a federal crime and a civil wrong." By contrast, some financial institutions — among them, Citibank — are forgiving all interest, minimum payments and fees for cardholders on active duty.
The spouse left behind often faces an anguished choice: work more, to help ease the financial burden, or less, to help ease the emotional one. Barry Esteves has been in Afghanistan with the National Guard military police for three months, but in West Boylston, Mass., his daughter Melanie, 8, told her mother, "It feels like Daddy died." Mindy Esteves decided to leave the beauty salon where she had worked for 14 years, and she found a job at which she could put in fewer hours on a more flexible schedule.
Small businesses are also feeling the stress. When National Guardsman Robert Harrington, 43, was called up in March, Roy Harrington lost more than just his son; he lost half his two-man staff at Roy's Repair Service in Clinton, Iowa. The elder Harrington doesn't know how to work the computerized diagnostic equipment in his shop, so he will have to cut back significantly on the jobs he takes.
Some reservists who own small businesses have come home to find that their operations have collapsed. Erica Srednicki, 29, hopes that won't happen to her. Srednicki's orders came through in February, just when the Army reservist was getting her one-woman Morgantown, W.Va., catering service off the ground. With only two days' notice, she did some recruiting of her own. Her friend Chris Pigott and her mother Linda Srednicki have stepped in, and so far, it seems to be working. Though Linda lives 2˝ hours away and has a full-time job, she knew she was her daughter's best hope. "What do you do? Let the business fold?" she asks.
The call-ups have also taken their toll on the communities of Guard members and reservists. A disproportionate number are police officers or fire fighters — the very people whom cities are counting on for homeland security and as first responders. "We have hollowed out our homeland-security force and deployed them around the country and around the world," says California Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher. The call-ups after 9/11 swept up 15% of the Fargo, N.D., police force. Even small losses can have a big impact on cities and states that are staggering under their worst fiscal crises in generations. With three of its 68 police officers deployed, Tukwila, Wash., has had to put members of its crime- prevention team back on patrol and may have to reduce its detective force.
After Vietnam, when the U.S. military felt isolated from the American public, the idea was that the nation would never again go to war without putting its reservists on the line along with active-duty troops. That concept of guaranteeing that a broad spectrum of Americans was part of the nation's combat missions has worked. Reservists logged 2 million days of duty a decade ago; last year the total climbed to 15 million. But lawmakers have begun to wonder about the implications for a future in which military missions that might once have been temporary begin to look permanent. "You have to be realistic as to how much you can continue to ask them to do and how often you can ask them to do it," says worried Congressman John McHugh, the New York Republican who chairs the Armed Services Total Force Subcommittee.
In January, McHugh and members of his panel interviewed reservists on duty in Europe, and what they heard was sobering. The reservists said their status is becoming a liability with employers, and some have begun to omit any mention of their service in their résumés. They complained that their families are not treated like those of active military personnel. When reservists sign up for a second year in Europe, for instance, they have to pay tuition to send their children to schools on military bases, and when their families come to visit, they are not eligible for the free travel afforded to families of active military when space is available on military aircraft.
To many in Congress, the inevitable answer is to increase the number of full-time personnel, an idea the Pentagon has resisted. But Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last week that it was "not a good thing" to rely so heavily on reservists for peacekeeping. "You're going to call people up every other year," he noted, "which isn't what they really sign up for."
Despite all the hardships involved, reservists and their families say service pays in ways that may not be so easy to understand for those who have never had the experience. Monterey Brookman estimates that her physician husband's service in Somalia "probably cost us a million dollars." But, she adds, "we would pay every penny of that because it was, for my husband, worth a million and then some to be fulfilling his mission as a doctor and an American."
When Gerald McIntyre returned home to Waynesboro, Pa., last week after a year of active duty at Fort Lewis, Wash., waiting for him were wife Pam, son Jacob, 6, and a house that is two-thirds the size of their old one. McIntyre is starting to look for work — he left his civilian job so that he could cash in his retirement and profit sharing to pay off the family's debt before going into active duty. Pam quit her job to be home for Jacob. Rather than go out to eat as they used to, Pam and Jacob will share a new routine with Gerald: get the good china out, light the candles and pretend they are at a fancy restaurant. "It's really weird," Pam says, "because even though I feel poor, I feel rich. I feel content. This year has made me stronger."
- Karen Tumulty
- They signed up to be weekend warriors. But now reservists are pulling long tours on the front lines