Toll in Iraq Weighs on Tiny Town

Stacey Craig Brandon was a doting husband, married to a schoolteacher, and a loving father to two children, happy to let his wife play the disciplinarian while he roughhoused and made goofy faces. He went to church three times a week, listened to country music and enjoyed a good fish fry.

And like thousands of others across the nation, on weekends, give or take, he was a soldier -- a staff sergeant in the Arkansas National Guard.

Saturday morning, a sizable faction of the 715 families in Hazen crammed inside the First Baptist Church to mourn his death.

His funeral marked the beginning of a four-day expression of grief, pride and anger in this pocket of Arkansas, which is home to the 39th Infantry Brigade -- Brandon’s unit -- which has lost seven soldiers in Iraq, more than any National Guard division.

Four of them, including Brandon, died in a single day last weekend, when insurgents raked their Taji base camp with mortars. Another member of the 39th was killed the next day; earlier in the month, another lost his life. Their deaths, along with 10 others in separate incidents, made April the deadliest month for the National Guard since the Korean War.

On Saturday, as light poured through 18 stained-glass windows, those gathered in the church rose when Brandon’s 32-year-old widow, April, walked past his flag-draped coffin. Military representatives stood against the wall, the toes of their buffed shoes nearly touching the edge of the pews. Friends passed around boxes of tissues. “It just hurts,” one woman said to no one.

Brandon, 35, who worked as a prison guard, was remembered as a friend, a trusted confidante, a voice in the church choir who tried to hit both the low and the high notes and a family man who had so many framed pictures of his children in his house that they spilled into the bathroom.

The Rev. Ron Malone assured the crowd that Brandon was in a better place -- “transferred to another base of operation,” the preacher said. But the region’s loss was palpable.

“Five minutes after you met him, you felt like you knew him your whole life,” Lt. Col. Don Brooks, a friend and National Guard comrade, told the crowd. Brooks, in his dress uniform, wiped away tears with a white handkerchief. “There is a place in our ranks that will never be filled.”

At the end of the service, after songs and prayers and parables, those gathered stood and sang “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee.”

Later, hundreds of people huddled under umbrellas and waited for Brandon’s widow and the hearse to leave for the cemetery.

In what feels like a single procession, four more funerals will follow among the wheat fields and cornstalks of central Arkansas.

The next procession will be this afternoon in Mammoth Spring, near the Missouri border, for the funeral of Spc. Kenneth A. Melton, 30. Then it will wind back down to the National Guard Armory off Highway 63, where Billy J. Orton, a 41-year-old staff sergeant, will be remembered, before making two more final stops.

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The loss here was a stark and somber illustration of why civic leaders and politicians had been loath to send National Guard troops into combat for nearly 50 years.

“It’s just unreal,” said David Duch, 46, a Hazen crop-duster and the town’s part-time mayor for the last six years. “These are people we grew up with, went to school with. To get hit so hard ... what are the chances?”

They are growing.

National Guard police, engineers and civil affairs soldiers were used extensively as support personnel in Bosnia, Somalia and other hotspots in recent years. But in Iraq, as the invasion has degenerated into insurgency and unrest, with the U.S. military stretched increasingly thin, the role of the National Guard has changed quickly.

“Weekend warriors” have been deployed overseas for 12- and even 18-month tours, ordered to ditch their support roles and integrated into front-line combat positions, alongside “regular” soldiers.

The three “enhanced” brigades that have been sent to Iraq -- considered the best-trained and equipped in the National Guard, and including the Arkansas brigade -- were the first Guard combat soldiers to be sent overseas since Korea. In all, more than 43,000 National Guard troops are among the 130,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

U.S. presidents have long been reluctant to put the National Guard in harm’s way. Guard soldiers tend to be older; 22% of them are 40 or older, compared with 6% of active-duty Army troops. Many are rooted in their communities, assigned to a particular unit not because they got ordered there but because they grew up down the road from the armory. Many work full time as police officers or firefighters.

Casualties among National Guard units can have a different effect on the public than losses of active-duty service members, said Michael O’Hanlon, a defense expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

“The death of a 20-year-old soldier is just as tragic as the death of a 45-year-old schoolteacher, but we feel the deaths in different ways,” he said.

“The first is a young man who had his whole life in front of him and had it taken away. The tragedy of the citizen-soldier casualty is a loss of a member of the community who is usually a parent, husband or wife. It adds to the national pain when you see people from all different walks of life dying in combat. In that sense, the death of Guardsmen in Iraq compounds the national pain.”

Guard units also tend to ship out to their assignments en masse, which is largely why few Guard members fought in Vietnam. President Johnson was fearful of the consequences if large numbers of soldiers from the same community were killed. That was precisely what happened in Arkansas.

The five soldiers from the 39th Brigade killed last weekend lived within an hour’s drive and had served together for years. One was a youth minister, another the coach of youth sports teams. Brandon was not a cherub-cheeked soldier from a recruiting poster. He was four days short of his 36th birthday, with buff muscles but a receding hairline. The youngest of the five was 30, and the oldest, Chief Warrant Officer Patrick Kordsmeier, was 49 and the father of three grown children.

The other members of the 39th Infantry Brigade killed in Iraq were: Capt. Arthur L. Felder, 36, of Lewisville, Ark.; Sgt. 1st Class William W. Labadie Jr., 45, of Bauxite, Ark.; and Felix M. del Greco, 22, of Simsbury, Conn.

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As questions swirl over the decision to send National Guard and reserve troops to Iraq -- and as many question whether American soldiers should have invaded in the first place -- Hazen is trying to stand firm, to remain resolute in the belief that their Guardsmen died for a just and righteous cause.

“As far as me and my house, I serve this country, I love this country and I will do anything I can to help protect this country,” said Marvin E. Mathis, a sergeant first class in the National Guard who joined in 1987 and is based in North Little Rock. “You might think that’s just a saying, but it’s not. It’s the truth.”

More than half of Arkansas’ 8,000-plus National Guard troops have been activated, and that has taken a toll on the region’s children, said Bambi George, 35, of Searcy, Ark., whose husband, Jerome George, a sergeant first class, recently began a lengthy tour in Iraq. “Your daddy’s going to die,” one classmate told one of the couple’s three children recently.

“Children can be cruel,” she said. “You have to explain that what he is doing is necessary for our country to function as a whole. And my children are very proud. They miss their daddy. But they are very proud of him.”

In the wake of Arkansas’ losses, many in the region who have been supportive of President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq are beginning to question that assessment.

“When the first assault started, we didn’t lose that many troops. Now we’re losing a lot,” said Duch, Hazen’s mayor, who described himself as a fervent Bush supporter. “We’re losing all these troops and we aren’t even supposed to be in a full-scale war anymore. It makes you start questioning it. Are we protecting our troops? Do these people not want us there? Should we not be there? Something is not right. They are not telling us the whole story.”

In South Carolina, another state where more than half of the Guard troops have been mobilized, Gov. Mark Sanford, a Republican and a captain in the Air Force Reserve, said the future of the Guard could be at risk.

“In the short run, it’s meant that a lot of daddies who thought they’d be home at their son’s or daughter’s softball game ... or birthday party aren’t there,” he said.

“In the long run, the verdict is out. A lot of people who thought they were signing up for some college training or serving their country on a limited basis, it has proven to be a much broader role than they anticipated. They are not going to sign up again. That story will be told with how the story in Iraq plays out.”

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Seven guardsmen from the 39th Infantry Brigade of Arkansas’ National Guard were recently killed in Iraq. Guardsman Felix M. del Greco is not pictured. Five of the troops lived in communities within an hour’s drive of one another.