From the building of ball fields at home to the rebuilding of villages and defending themselves on battlefields abroad, the mission of the Maine National Guard is undergoing a fundamental change, prompting authorities to rethink deployment strategies and some soldiers to rethink plans for re-enlisting.

Military officials in Maine said this week that with continued missions in Iraq and other countries, deployments aren’t what they once were, and require a reordering of duties and responsibilities of Guard resources. One third of the state’s guardsmen and women have been called up, making Maine second only to New Hampshire in the percentage of deployment from a single state in the United States, according to Brig. Gen. John Libby, Maine’s adjutant general and commissioner of the Maine Department of Defense, Veterans and Emergency Management.

“We find ourselves in different types of environment than we planned for 25 years ago,” said Libby.

The mission change has placed more demands on activated and deployed personnel and their families. It also is taking its toll on enlistments and re-enlistments.

Maine National Guard numbers are down 20 percent from what Guard officials would like, a statistic they attribute at least in part to the increased activation and deployment of military personnel overseas.

Libby’s department oversees the 3,250 Maine Army and Air National Guard personnel. As of this week, nearly half of the Army National Guard – 1,007 – were mobilized in Iraq, Kuwait and Guantanamo Bay, as well as serving as security at the Air National Guard base in Bangor, said Maj. Peter Rogers, director of public affairs for the Maine National Guard based in Augusta. Although the number doesn’t currently include Air National Guard, their units have been deployed a lot, Rogers said, performing refueling and communications missions.

Those who enlist and who remain have gone well beyond the “weekend warrior” status that once categorized duty in the Maine National Guard.

Ten to 15 years ago, in addition to weekend training, Guard deployments likely involved disaster relief, laying sandbags to keep swollen rivers at bay or cleaning up roads after severe winter storms. Their community service also meant helping to build baseball fields or building storage sheds, Rogers said.

Once considered a strategic reserve to be deployed months after the main troops were in place, the National Guard, under directions from the Bush administration, is being deployed alongside regular troops.

“We’re now part of the total force,” Rogers said. “The active duty doesn’t go anywhere without the National Guard.”

The increased and more immediate side-by-side role of the National Guard can be traced back to the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Libby said, when one lesson learned was the need for public support. That war lacked support because there was no personal connection; people weren’t seeing their neighbors or co-workers being deployed.

“The war didn’t really come home to middle America,” Libby said of the 1991 Gulf War, in which four Maine National Guard units were deployed in a military conflict that engendered much wider public support.

The greater reliance on the National Guard for the war in Iraq has brought other issues to the surface, prompting military officials to rethink many things, from recruitment and retention to the roles of the military units themselves.

Military branches are reconfiguring some of their units, a fairly regular process, Libby said, but one that has been more dramatic in light of the present war and efforts to maintain peace in the Middle East.

“What we found is that the mix of forces today is not correct,” Libby said.

The changing needs were evident in January, when 124 members of the 152nd Field Artillery unit left Maine, eventually headed for Iraq, but not before being retrained as military police. The need in Iraq is not for more firepower, but for police power, he said.

One year after the war began, the deployment changes are creating other concerns. Some Guard members have said that with the extended deployments, redeployments and other uncertainties, they may leave the Guard or reserves.

Rogers said it’s too early to tell exactly what effect the deployments have had on the plans of military personnel, but military officials are taking the matter seriously. Some Guard personnel have been deployed three times in the last 10 years. But with only a small fraction of those deployed having returned, Rogers said, officials haven’t been able to fully gauge the sentiments of the Guard personnel.

“Maine is looking at a real challenge in the years to come,” Rogers said. “It remains to be seen at this point, but we’re looking at that as a real serious problem.”

Mainers have joined the Guard out of a sense of duty, pride and patriotism in the past, although it’s no secret that some joined the Guard for the benefits it provides: additional money, education, training and retirement. Although they knew at sign-up the possibility of being activated and of seeing combat, many may have thought there was only a remote chance of it happening, Rogers said.

Now, some currently in the Guard who are up for re-enlistment and some who are considering enlisting for the first time are waiting to see how the whole thing shakes out, he said.

In the past, the enticement of a retirement package after 20 years of service helped to draw many people into the Guard and served as a steppingstone for some to serve longer, Libby said. But the threat of mobilization is making some rethink that service, cutting short their National Guard careers, in some cases even before they get their 20 years in.

Some guardsmen and women were enticed by the prospects of a Guard-funded college education, and in fact 156 students have been mobilized for the war against terror, he said.

In an effort to retain existing personnel, as well as attract new recruits, Rogers said, the Guard is developing a regular rotation in which personnel would know specifically when they would be called up for duty, allowing them to plan ahead. Once they finish their deployment, it would be a specific number of years before they are deployed again, although no time frame for that has been established yet, he said.

Numbers of recruits and efforts to retain current Army reservists are up nationwide, according to Douglas Smith, spokesman for the U.S. Army Recruiting Command at Fort Knox, Ky. Retention of Army reservists – the so-called beans to bullets units that provide logistical support – are slightly ahead of goals, continuing a three-year trend, he said.

Ron Kilby, a spokesman for the Army Reserves in Maine, said he knows of no one who has left the Army Reserves because of the war.

“We’re still maintaining strength as much as we ever did,” Kilby said.