Appreciate our Guard members

Everyone even remotely connected to the National Guard knows about “Guard weekend.” That’s the nickname for the one weekend a month that the members of the National Guard officially spend maintaining their training.

It’s a misnomer, though. We should rename their commitment “Guard lifetime.” I’ve known thousands of these folks and worked closely with nearly as many, and they never stop serving their country or their community.

Since the 1980s when I first started working in the media, I’ve had the good fortune to work with the Army and Air National Guard. I have broadcast on location as members of the Guard loaded trucks with donated food, escorted ill and injured children, and orchestrated parade routes. I even spent a weekend in the Mall while the National Guard stood sentry over a mile of quarters that we laid on the floor to raise money and awareness for sick kids.

Over the last 20 years, I can remember only a handful of the thousands of Guard personnel that participated in any one of these events because someone told them to do it. No, most of these folks worked a civilian job in addition to their military service and had families at home, but still volunteered their free time.

The men and women who serve in the National Guard live by a code that makes them champions of others in need, no matter how small or individual the battle may be. Whether a neighbor kid fights for his life or a community food bank faces a harsh winter, the Guard shows up with reinforcements.

And then there are the official deployments when their work gets a lot less local. For nearly 400 years the Guard has responded when called.

The Guard provided security during the largest volunteer mobilization in the history of the globe. Because of my work, I spent time with various states’ Guard units in shelters in Louisiana during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

I’ve also had the heart-wrenching task of broadcasting the loving goodbyes of Guard members as they finished their training at Fort Drum and equipped themselves for deployment to Iraq. I stood beside them, knee deep in snow as they drilled – their teeth chattering, gearing up for a war they would execute halfway around the world in temperatures at least 100 degrees higher.

I may be a stickler for gratitude, but it seems more than a little unappreciative that this week one of the very finest Guard “life timers” has to move out of his house so that the bank can take it.

No real surprise. Our middle class is evaporating. The wealthiest have gotten wealthier over the last seven years, the number of people living in poverty has grown substantially and the vanishing middle has borrowed to maintain their increasingly fragile lifestyle.

The details are outlined in this week’s Wall Street Journal. “A record number of homeowners entered the foreclosure process during the first quarter, topping the previous high set in the final quarter of 2006,” and that otherwise faceless statistic included this Iraq war veteran and his wife.

Juxtaposed this week was the USA Today article that contained results of a study completed by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research concluding that “money problems related to deployment, which affected 26 percent of Guard soldiers, had a greater correlation with later mental-health disorders than combat.” The researchers cited the loss of income many Guard members suffer when activated as a cause for their higher level of concern over finances back home.

Back at the Wall Street Journal they cited big numbers, too. For instance, “in Ohio, nearly 20 percent of subprime adjustable-rate mortgages were either 90 days or more past due or in foreclosure.”

No-bid contracts for Halliburton, oil companies gouging profits, tax cuts for the wealthiest among us, unbridled government borrowing: the argument can be made that we should’ve seen this all coming and not enough of us stood up against the administration and Congress when they built this house of cards in the first place.

Still, it just adds insult to injury when the falling cards crush members of our National Guard as well.

Pat LaMarche of Yarmouth is the author of “Left Out In America: The State of Homelessness in the United States.” She can be contacted at PatLaMarche@hotmail.com.