300 soldiers home for a month recalled to Iraq

WASHINGTON - About 300 Alaska-based soldiers sent home from Iraq just before their unit’s deployment was extended last month must now go back, the Army said Monday, setting up a wrenching departure for troops and families who thought their service there was finished.

The soldiers — all from the 172nd Stryker Brigade — are among the 378 troops who had gotten home to Fort Wainwright when Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld ordered the unit to serve four more months. About 80 will not have to return to Iraq.

The commander of U.S. Army Alaska said the news was “difficult” for the soldiers and their families.

Maj. Gen. Chuck Jacoby said that the 301 soldiers, primarily cavalry scouts and infantrymen, understood that this decision made "all the sense in the world" considering their experience. They will head back to Iraq early next week.

Several family members spoke about their feelings, generally saying that the news was tough, but that they support their husbands. One woman said that her husband and his fellow soldiers were “in shock” when they got the news.

Two flights carried the 378 soldiers from the 172nd Stryker Brigade back home from Iraq to Alaska in June and July of this year. The day after the second flight landed in Alaska, the brigade was extended in Iraq.

‘Bending over backward’
Army officials have sent a team of personnel and pay experts to Alaska to help sort out all of the soldiers’ vacations, school enrollments and other plans torn apart by the decision to return them to Iraq. The unit is now being stationed in Baghdad, one of the most violent parts of the country.

Lt. Col. Wayne Shanks, a service spokesman, said the Army fully realizes the hardships triggered by the move and is “bending over backward to accommodate” the families.

The bulk of the 172nd Brigade, which has about 3,900 troops, was still in Iraq when Rumsfeld extended the deployment as part of a plan to quell the escalating violence in Baghdad.

Another 300 soldiers from the unit had left Iraq and gotten to Kuwait and were about to board flights home when they were called back.

Before Monday’s announcement, the troops who had already returned home to Alaska had been told that decisions on their fates would be made on a case-by-case basis.

Army officials said they don’t recall another time during the three-year-long Iraq war when the Pentagon so quickly recalled soldiers who had served a year on the battlefront and gotten home.

Other units have had their deployments extended anywhere from a week or two to a few months.

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