Long Guard stays in Iraq spawning complaints

New complaints are accumulating about the long stay of Utah National Guard troops in Iraq.

Last week the Deseret Morning News reported unhappiness among some members of the Guard's 142nd Military Intelligence Battalion, a linguist group that probably will have to stay in Iraq until April 2004. This week, two relatives of soldiers deployed to Iraq with the Guard's 1457th Engineer Battalion contacted the paper independently.

The unit is a combat engineering group based in American Fork. According to the Pentagon's latest list of mobilized troops, 521 soldiers of the battalion have been called into active duty.

A relative of one of those soldiers said on Monday that he has heard the 1457th will have to stay in Iraq until August 2004.

But a Utah National Guard spokesman replied that as far as he knows, they should return around April 2004, a year after they arrived in Iraq. The spokesman believes the Utahns are doing work that the Army deems important.

A policy announced last week by the Pentagon said that Guard and Reserve units will spend one year overseas. The clock started ticking whenever they reached the Middle East — in military parlance, "boots on ground" — and not when they were activated, which in some cases was months earlier.

"I'm very angry," said the relative, who believes the combat engineers will have to stay in Iraq until August 2004. "I'm going to do and say what I can, and yell and scream at anyone who will listen."

He believes the proportion is far too large compared with the citizen soldier contributions of some other states like California. "Why Utah? Where's everybody else?" he asked.

Also, he thinks regular Army combat engineering groups were not sent overseas.

"Isn't there any rotation?" he wondered. Other relatives he talked with are "genuinely angry, because we're all getting the same news" about an extended deployment.

A relative of a soldier with the 142nd Military Intelligence Battalion sent along information to the newspaper and added, "Hopefully you will put it to excellent use and get the real truth out there about all of our troops and of the corruption that is occurring."

A wife of another soldier in the 1457th said she feels intimidated about raising concerns, so she asked that she and her husband not be identified.