Army Stops Many Soldiers From Quitting

By Lee Hockstader The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36979-2003Dec28.html

Orders Extend Enlistments to Curtail Troop Shortages.

Chief Warrant Officer Ronald Eagle, an expert on enemy targeting,
served 20 years in the military — 10 years of active duty in the Air
Force, another 10 in the West Virginia National Guard. Then he decided
enough was enough. He owned a promising new aircraft- maintenance
business, and it needed his attention. His retirement date was set for
last February.

Staff Sgt. Justin Fontaine, a generator mechanic, enrolled in the
Massachusetts National Guard out of high school and served nearly nine
years. In preparation for his exit date last March, he turned in his
field gear — his rucksack and web belt, his uniforms and canteen.

Staff Sgt. Peter G. Costas, an interrogator in an intelligence unit,
joined the Army Reserve in 1991, extended his enlistment in 1999 and
then re- upped for three years in 2000. Costas, a U.S. Border Patrol
officer in Texas, was due to retire from the reserves in last May.

According to their contracts, expectations and desires, all three
soldiers should have been civilians by now. But Fontaine and Costas
are currently serving in Iraq, and Eagle has just been deployed. On
their Army paychecks, the expiration date of their military service is
now listed sometime after 2030 — the payroll computer’s way of
saying, "Who knows?"

The three are among thousands of soldiers forbidden to leave military
service under the Army’s "stop-loss" orders, intended to stanch the
seepage of troops, through retirement and discharge, from a military
stretched thin by its burgeoning overseas missions.

"It reflects the fact that the military is too small, which nobody
wants to admit," said Charles Moskos of Northwestern University, a
leading military sociologist.

To the Pentagon, stop-loss orders are a finger in the dike — a tool
to halt the hemorrhage of personnel, and maximize cohesion and
experience, for units in the field in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Through a series of stop-loss orders, the Army alone has blocked the
possible retirements and departures of more than 40,000 soldiers,
about 16,000 of them National Guard and reserve members who were
eligible to leave the service this year. Hundreds more in the Air
Force, Navy and Marines were briefly blocked from retiring or
departing the military at some point this year.

By prohibiting soldiers and officers from leaving the service at
retirement or the expiration of their contracts, military leaders have
breached the Army’s manpower limit of 480,000 troops, a ceiling set by
Congress. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee last
month, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, disclosed that
the number of active-duty soldiers has crept over the congressionally
authorized maximum by 20,000 and now registered 500,000 as a result of
stop-loss orders. Several lawmakers questioned the legality of
exceeding the limit by so much.

"Our goal is, we want to have units that are stabilized all the way
down from the lowest squad up through the headquarters elements," said
Brig. Gen. Howard B. Bromberg, director of enlisted personnel
management in the Army’s Human Resources Command. "Stop-loss allows us
to do that. When a unit deploys, it deploys, trains and does its
missions with the same soldiers."

In a recent profile of an Army infantry battalion deployed in Kuwait
and on its way to Iraq, the commander, Lt. Col. Karl Reed, told the
Army Times he could have lost a quarter of his unit in the coming year
had it not been for the stop-loss order. "And that means a new 25
percent," Reed told the Army Times. "I would have had to train them
and prepare them to go on the line. Given where we are, it will be a
24-hour combat operation; therefore it’s very difficult to bring new
folks in and integrate them."

To many of the soldiers whose retirements and departures are on ice,
however, stop-loss is an inconvenience, a hardship and, in some cases,
a personal disaster. Some are resigned to fulfilling what they
consider their patriotic duty. Others are livid, insisting they have
fallen victim to a policy that amounts to an unannounced, unheralded
draft.

"I’m furious. I’m aggravated. I feel violated. I feel used," said
Eagle, 42, the targeting officer, who has just shipped to Iraq with
his field artillery unit for what is likely to be a yearlong tour of
duty. He had voluntarily postponed his retirement at his commander’s
request early this year and then suddenly found himself stuck in the
service under a stop-loss order this fall. Eagle said he fears his
fledgling business in West Virginia may not survive his lengthy
absence. His unexpected extension in the Army will slash his annual
income by about $45,000, he said. And some members of his family,
including his recently widowed sister, whose three teenage sons are
close to Eagle, are bitterly opposed to his leaving.

"An enlistment contract has two parties, yet only the government is
allowed to violate the contract; I am not," said Costas, 42, who
signed an e- mail from Iraq this month "Chained in Iraq," an allusion
to the fact that he and his fellow reservists remained in Baghdad
after the active-duty unit into which they were transferred last
spring went home. He has now been told that he will be home late next
June, more than a year after his contractual departure date. "Unfair.
I would not say it’s a draft per se, but it’s clearly a breach of
contract. I will not reenlist."

Other soldiers retained by the Army under stop-loss are more resigned
than irate, but no less demoralized by what some have come to regard
as their involuntary servitude.

"Unfortunately, I signed the dotted line saying I’m going to serve my
country," said Fontaine, 27, the mechanic, who said he spent "20 or 30
days" fruitlessly researching legal ways that he could quit the Army
when his contractual departure date came up in February. "All I can do
is suck it up and take it till I can get out."

The military’s interest in halting the depletion of its ranks predates
the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. American GIs in World
War II were under orders to serve until the fighting was finished,
plus six months.

Congress approved the authority for what became known as stop-loss
orders after the Vietnam War, responding to concerns that the military
had been hamstrung by the out-rotations of seasoned combat soldiers in
Indochina. But the authority was not used until the buildup to the
Persian Gulf War in 1990 when Richard B. Cheney, then the secretary of
defense, allowed the military services to bar most retirements and
prolong enlistments indefinitely.

A flurry of stop-loss orders was issued after the terrorist attacks of
Sept. 11, 2001, intensifying as the nation prepared for war in Iraq
early this year. Some of the orders have applied to soldiers, sailors
and airmen in specific skill categories — military police, for
example, and ordnance control specialists, have been in particular
demand in Iraq.

Other edicts have been more sweeping, such as the Army’s most recent
stop- loss order, issued Nov. 13, covering thousands of active-duty
soldiers whose units are scheduled for duty in Iraq and Afghanistan in
the coming months. Because the stop-loss order begins 90 days before
deployment and lasts for 90 days after a return home, those troops
will be prohibited from retiring or leaving the Army at the expiration
of their contracts until the spring of 2005, at the earliest.

The proliferation of stop-loss orders has bred confusion and
resentment even as it has helped preserve what the military calls
"unit cohesion." In the past two years, the Army alone has announced
11 stop-loss orders — an average of one every nine or 10 weeks.

Often in the past year, the Army has allowed active-duty soldiers to
retire and depart but not Guard and reserve troops, many of whom have
chafed at the disparity in policies. Some Guard troops and reservists
complain their release dates have been extended several times and they
no longer know when they will be allowed to leave.

"We don’t ever trust anything we’re told," said Chris Walsh of
Southington, Conn., whose wife, Jessica, an eighth-grade English
teacher, is a military police officer in a National Guard unit in
Baghdad. She may end up serving nearly two years beyond her original
exit date of July 2002, Chris Walsh said. "We’ve been disappointed too
many times."

For many soldiers who had planned on leaving the military, the sudden
change of plans has been jarring.

Jim Montgomery’s story is typical. Montgomery, an air-conditioning
repairman in western Massachusetts, did a three-year hitch in the Army
in the ’90s and then signed up for a five-year stint in the National
Guard. His exit date was July 31, 2003, after which he planned to
devote himself to getting his electrician’s license — and to the baby
he and his wife, Donna, expected in November, their first.

"I felt like I’d honored my contract," said Montgomery, 35, a beefy,
affable man who holds the rank of specialist E4 in the Guard. "The
military had given me some good things — friendships and the
opportunity to take some college courses — and that’s where I wanted
to leave it."

The Army had other plans. In March, Montgomery’s maintenance unit was
sent for training to Fort Drum, N.Y. In April it deployed to Kuwait,
and since May it has been stationed in southern Iraq. With each move,
it became clearer to Montgomery that his July exit date from the Guard
would not materialize. The latest he has heard is that the unit may be
coming home in April, but even that is uncertain, he said.

Last month Montgomery rushed home on a medical emergency when Donna
had complications in childbirth. She and the baby are fine now, but
Montgomery is frustrated by his cloudy future.

"Some guys who are Vietnam vets are with us," he said in an interview
at his home in Holland, Mass., shortly before he was to return to his
unit in Iraq. "They said even in Vietnam, as difficult as it was
there, you knew from the time you hit the ground to the time you
returned it was one year — whereas with this it’s really up in the
air."

Some military officials have acknowledged that stop-loss is a
necessary evil. When the Air Force announced it was imposing a stop-
loss rule last spring, an official news bulletin from Air Force Print
News noted: "Both the secretary [James G. Roche] and the chief of
staff [Gen. John P. Jumper] are acutely aware that the Air Force is an
all-volunteer force and that this action, while essential to meeting
the service’s worldwide obligations, is inconsistent with the
fundamental principles of voluntary service."

More frequently, the military response to griping about stop-loss is
bluntly unsympathetic. "We’re all soldiers. We go where were told,"
said Maj. Steve Stover, an Army spokesman. "Fair has nothing to do
with it."