Anchorage Daily News

Seventy members of the Alaska National Guard will ship out for Iraq this week, the third Guard deployment to the Middle East in four weeks and a growing example of how things have changed for Alaskans serving in the state's military forces.

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As of next week, approximately 580 members, or 15 percent, of the Alaska National Guard will be on active duty around the globe, officials said. Most of those troops -- nearly 400 Alaskans -- are serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. Others have already gone to the desert and come back.

The Alaskans join thousands of Guard and Reserve members nationwide who have been federally activated to go fight in the Middle East since the September 2001 terrorist attacks. Many of the troops, accustomed to serving only a few weeks a year, leave behind civilian jobs and families.

The hundreds of federally activated Alaska troops serving overseas are from all over the state, said Guard spokeswoman Kalei Brooks. Some are on four-month assignments, but most are slated to stay in the desert more than a year.

The infantry group leaving Wednesday is largely from Anchorage and the Valley, with about a dozen coming from the Nome area, where news of their departure caught many in the town of 3,500 by surprise.

"It's kind of shocking that our local boys are going," said Mitch Erickson of the Nome Chamber of Commerce. In a small community such as Nome, he said, the soldiers are neighbors and friends to many.

"Going to the desert from this part of the country too," he said. "The whole world of the National Guard sure has changed -- from going out to Savoonga or Shishmaref to shore up for when the next storm hits to going to Iraq to dodge bombs.

"It certainly hits home."

Nome Mayor Denise Michels agreed.

"This makes it real. Instead of watching it on TV, we're part of it now," she said. "I can't imagine being a wife or mother and having them go over there for a whole year. ... I just wish them the best of luck. I know they are proud to serve our country."

In a lot of cases, the Alaska National Guard is last in line for federal call-ups overseas because it is already responsible for national defense missions here, such as guarding the missile defense site at Fort Greely, said Mike Chambers, a spokesman for Gov. Frank Murkowski.

"We're sort of a different duck," he said.

Still, more deployments to the Middle East from Alaska are likely, Brooks said.

"Three in four weeks is more than normal," she said. "But we expect to keep our deployment rate steady ... We plan to keep up with the pace of the Department of Defense. If they need us, we will be available."

Just how many of the Guard's roughly 3,775 members the state is willing or able to send overseas is unclear. Brooks said there is no hard cut-off number but said the state will not be left understaffed or under-equipped to handle a large local emergency, such as an earthquake.

That was what some critics said happened along the U.S. Gulf Coast when Hurricane Katrina hit. Thousands of Guard members from Louisiana and Mississippi were fighting in Iraq at the time, which critics said hampered the initial local response.

Brooks said the Guard here tries to balance the needs of the country with those of the state. For example, if the Guard's para-rescue squadron were needed overseas, she said, the state wouldn't send every person in the unit or all their helicopters, because they are also needed here for rescues.

"I think it's safe to say that if something like (an earthquake) happens, we have adequate numbers of equipment and personnel available," Brooks said.

Depending on the severity of the event, additional help may be needed, she said, but that is not unusual for a large-scale disaster. She noted that even if all of Louisiana and Mississippi's Guard had been home when the hurricane hit there, "They would still need additional help from other states."

Michels said one of her chief concerns after learning Nome Guard members were shipping out was whether the town could still call on the Guard for help. It played a pivotal role during the fall 2004 Bering Sea storm, which caused so much damage in and around Nome that the region was declared a federal disaster area, she said.

Michels said she got assurances recently from the Guard that they would still be there to help.

"We shouldn't see a drop in a response here," she said. "We'll just miss those familiar faces."

Between September 2001 and January of this year, just over 1 million American military personnel have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the Washington, D.C.-based think tank The Brookings Institution. About 290,000 of the troops, or 28 percent, have been Guard or Reserve.

Close to half of the forces currently fighting in Iraq are from the National Guard, according to Michael O'Hanlon of Brookings. That's a big change from the Guard's traditional role over the last three decades as a support force, he said.

"The pace of the deployments has grown dramatically (since September 2001)," O'Hanlon said. "There's no more sense of the weekend warrior."

The Alaska National Guard has long helped on missions in far flung places, but it hasn't seen federal call-ups like those it's experiencing now since World War II, Brooks said.

Where Alaska Guard members 10 or 20 years ago might have expected to serve a short stint overseas on a humanitarian mission or help dig out an Interior village from a bad winter storm, they now face the very real possibility of also heading into combat for a year.

That risk hasn't had a negative impact on recruiting, Brooks said.

"Alaskans tend to be very patriotic," she said. "Getting people to enlist in the National Guard in Alaska isn't as big a hurdle as it might be in other states."

Brooks said the Guard tries to observe one year of down time before re-activating soldiers to go back overseas. But oftentimes people volunteer to go on a mission right after they get back from one, she said.

That's the case with 24-year-old Spec. Logan Haller, a medic in the Guard who also works as a stocker at Office Depot in Anchorage. Haller, who has EMT and other medical training, recently returned from two assignments for the Guard, to Haiti and to Kosovo. Now he's volunteered to go to Iraq with the battalion leaving Wednesday but won't get to unless another person bows out.

Haller said he joined the Guard partly for the benefits, such as school tuition assistance, but mostly because "I still buy into the whole idea of duty to country."

He said that if he gets to go to Iraq, he would likely work alongside infantrymen, responding to any emergencies they might have, like if one of their vehicles hit an explosive device and someone was injured. It's also possible he'd work in a clinic, he said.

There are obvious drawbacks to the assignment, Haller said. "There's the whole 'I might die' aspect of it," and the "?'Holy crap, I could be gone from my life for an entire year,'?" he said.

But there's also the opportunity to do something meaningful.

"I find my Army (Guard) job way more rewarding than my civilian job," Haller said. "I'm definitely doing more for my fellow man as a soldier than I am just stocking shelves."

Daily News reporter Tataboline Brant can be reached at tbrant@adn.com or 257-4321.