April 13, 2006

Interview by TIMOTHY HARRIS
Staff Writer

Stacy Bannerman is a member of Military Families Speak Out and the wife of a National Guard Reservist serving in Washington State’s 81st Battalion. His 2004 active duty mobilization to Iraq created conflicting emotions for Bannerman—a long-time peace activist— that still have not settled. Her new book, When the War Came Home: The Inside Story of Reservists and the Families They Leave Behind (Continuum, 2006) describes Bannerman’s efforts to support her troops while opposing the war, and explores the many issues raised by the largest wartime mobilization of the National Guard in American history.

Real Change: Tell me a little bit about the history of the National Guard and why the deployment to Iraq has been so unusual?

Stacy Bannerman: The National Guard is this country’s oldest militia force and they are the only one who is cast with a dual mission. Their primary focus is serving their state and communities under the command of the state governor and typically that is what they do. However, they can be federalized and then deployed by the President. At this point over 400,000 of them have been deployed in the war on terror. It is absolutely unprecedented.

RC: What are some of the strains that long-term deployment creates for families?

Bannerman: When the mobilization began in 2003, the National Guard was nowhere near prepared on multiple levels. They were not prepared at all to deal with and meet the needs of the families who are left. The military medical care that is offered to soldiers and families once our national guard is federalized is really a broken system. And there are all manner of discrepancies in pay, benefits, training, and provisions between regular active duty soldiers and their families and what happens for the National Guard soldiers and their families.

Once these guys are federalized, even though theoretically and by law, our Guard soldiers and families have got the same exact pay across the board, the reality is that they do not. At least 20% of the National Guard Reserve families took a significant pay cut with the mobilization. There are a number of citizen soldiers that come back from their year in Iraq to find they no longer have a job, or that their business is out of business.

The other reality is that the unemployment rate of young Iraq War veterans—guys in their early 20’s—is 3 times that of the national average.

RC: You’ve said that the government has grossly underestimated the needs of returning soldiers. What are you talking about there?

Bannerman: Actually, just last year, the Veterans Administration turned down over a quarter of a million of veteran’s requests for services. Right now, the demand from returning vets is approximately four times what had been anticipated.

RC: What sort of services?

Bannerman: Anything from mental health screening and counseling, assistance in post-traumatic stress disorders, to job placement assistance, to some of the physical challenges in injuries and recuperation. The reality is once the National Guard soldiers are back in the states, they get 30 days paid leave, and then they’re dropped from the active duty payroll. 30 days after that their dental expires. 180 days after being dropped from active duty, the medical benefits expire, so for these guys with lingering injuries and things, the veterans’ hospitals, or VA, is really their only avenue. Another reality is that National Guard Reserve soldiers who are wounded in action are coming back and getting significantly lower disability award benefits than their active duty counterparts with similar injuries.

RC: I’ve heard that, in comparison to past wars, the casualties coming out of this war tend to be more serious.

Bannerman: Soldiers that would have bled out before are getting into intensive care more quickly and technology has advanced. People that would have unquestionably died in earlier wars now often live. And also one of the things the Iraq war has contributed to the arsenal of weapons is the IED, improvised explosive device, and that is creating a different type of injury than we have seen before.

RC: What about the Gulf War syndrome issue? With the first Gulf War you heard a lot about people coming back with radiation poisoning. I know that this is still an issue for the people of Iraq, but is it still an issue for U.S. soldiers? Is there sort of a Gulf War syndrome waiting to happen?

Bannerman: Unquestionably. The use of white phosphorous and depleted uranium is still an issue. We’ve got boys who have come back from Iraq, and in less than a year they’ve got cancer. We have opened up a Pandora’s box of medical challenges and illnesses in this war that our soldiers are bringing back home, the likes of which we have never seen.

RC: You described how you and your husband’s family, with your own resources, worked to equip your husband with things like body armor and a GPS system and other sorts of gear. Is that still typically going on?

Bannerman: Yes, in fact there’s a website, bakesalesforbodyarmor.org. And they get requests from soldiers currently in Iraq, in fact, I don’t know if it was a captain, lieutenant, or sergeant, but a leader of one unit actually contacted them and said that all of the men in my unit need side armor plates, can you please send them.

RC: In your book you cite one study that says 50-80 percent of Guard marriages ultimately don’t survive the experience and elsewhere you say that 56,000 of army marriages have ended since the war on terror began. Is this domestic fall-out true of all wars or is this one somehow different?

Bannerman: One of the reasons specific to this war is that, comparatively speaking, very few soldiers are fighting it. These guys are serving two, then three and four years of duty, back to back. A few months home in between and they’re sent back to the sand box.

RC: I think one of the interesting things about this book is your dual perspective as somebody who is married to a guard member and also very much involved with the peace movement. I’m just curious, would most military families today see you as an ally or a threat? How welcome would you be at a National Guard picnic?

Bannerman: It depends on which family you’re talking about. One of the problems is that there’s a tendency to not look at or be aware of all of the work that I have done and that Military Families Speak Out has done in drawing attention to and demanding for support for our troops. I know for a fact that I am the only wife of a soldier in the 81st brigade who has gone to Congress, met with Senators, written letters, and who has continuously made requests for properly outfitting our troops.

RC: Why aren’t people putting more pressure on their elected officials?

Bannerman: I don’t know because I’m not that person, I don’t understand that either. What I’m doing is making sure that our soldiers have got everything they need, that the promises that this government had made to them are being kept. I am making sure that when my soldier, and our soldiers, are sent to combat, that this government is going to send them based on the truth. That they send them because it’s absolutely necessary; that they don’t send them based on lies, and that they don’t send them without proper equipment and training, and they don’t bring them home and forget them.

RC: Military Families Speak Out says that there are now 2,900 military families that are members, and there are other veteran’s organizations as well that are speaking out against the war. My impression is that it was well into the Vietnam War before this sort of thing started happening. How has this affected the debate on the war?

Bannerman: I think that by having the military families and the veterans at the front lines of this anti-war movement, we bring to it a level of credibility and dignity that could not be found elsewhere or otherwise. We speak the truth because we have lived it. Just like in the sixties in the civil rights movement, it was critical and compelling because the people at the front of it were the people that were most directly paying the price for this nation’s failure to guarantee equality and human rights for all. We are the ones that are paying the price for this war, and we also, I think, in standing up and speaking out, have made it safe for other people to do so. We’ve also demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt, and this is something that didn’t happen during the Vietnam War protests, we have demonstrated and shown the way that it’s possible to oppose a policy and support the troops.

RC: Your book ends on a note of ambiguity over whether your husband was going to reenlist, and whether your marriage was even going to survive. Is there good news there?

Bannerman: The book is authentic. I didn’t hide anything. Lorin just signed a new contract with the National Guard just two weeks ago. So, that’s where that’s at, and so for me and my husband, and hundreds of thousands of other military families, that dance continues. How is it that we find a way to support our loved one and speak out against this war, and break this code of silence in the military? There are no easy answers or easy solutions. n