Ky. Guard will assist on border
By Tom Loftus
The Courier-Journal
FRANKFORT, Ky. — About 665 members of the Kentucky National Guard will go to Arizona for three-week hitches starting this month to build roads and fences and monitor the Mexican border, state officials said yesterday.
Kentucky is responding to President Bush’s request in May that states provide up to 6,000 National Guard troops to help secure the border with Mexico.
Yesterday’s announcement came as nearly 500 guardsmen prepare to leave Kentucky for missions in Iraq. With the Arizona deployment, nearly 1,800 members of the Guard will be out of state through Aug. 19, said Kentucky Adjutant General Donald Storm.
But Storm said enough guardsmen remain in Kentucky to respond to emergencies and other duties.
“We’re more than prepared and fully equipped to handle anything that happens here at home,” Storm told reporters.
Sgt. 1st Class Darold Riley, 43, of McLean County, said he is excited about the mission.
“It gets us involved in things we’ve been trained to do in the past,” Riley said. “If you don’t throw a real mission in at times, troops can start losing interest.”
Riley said his wife, Lannette, was relieved to learn his deployment would be brief — and to Arizona rather than overseas.
“Spouses and families have come to expect word of a deployment at any time, so when they get word of a mission such as this that’s only 21 days instead of 365 they sort of wipe their brow,” he said.
Guard ‘is always willing’
Storm said all states have been asked to participate, although they are not required to do so. But he said Kentucky volunteered. “The Kentucky National Guard is always willing — and will continue to respond to — our nation’s call,” he said.
He said he wants to see other states do their part.
“Everybody needs to participate,” Storm said. “We’ve got 54 states and territories. I’ll be frank with you. We want to get in this early and get through.”
Yesterday, on the deadline to have 2,500 troops along the Mexican border, the National Guard said that only 483 were in position and working with the Border Patrol as the Bush administration had directed.
But Guard officials said more than 2,000 others were somewhere inside the four southwestern border states, training or helping plan the deployment. Bush administration officials argued yesterday that the presence of troops in those states spelled success in the first stage of the mission.
Bush’s plan called for all 50 states to send troops. But so far only six states other than the four that share the border with Mexico have signed commitments to send troops — Kentucky, Arkansas, Delaware, Montana, Tennessee and Wisconsin.
Storm said the Kentucky Guard has 7,944 soldiers and airmen. The most deployed at one time in recent years was 3,000 near the beginning of the war in Iraq, he said. For the foreseeable future he expects no more than 1,800 Kentucky guardsmen to be deployed at one time, he said.
Impact called minimal
Most of the Kentucky guardsmen going to Arizona will be sent there on dates when they had been scheduled for two weeks of annual training.
“So the impact on families and employers will be minimized,” Storm said.
The Kentucky units will be in Arizona between July 8 and Aug. 19. The federal government will pay the cost of the deployment, Storm said.
Storm said Kentucky engineer units are likely to be asked to build some fences and roads. Other units will monitor the border from observation posts.
But the guardsmen will not be authorized to make arrests, he said. “The Border Patrol will be the only personnel that will take people into custody.”
He said: “Our main mission in Kentucky is engineering assets and engineering tasks. The other mission will be setting up initial entry teams, which is nothing more than running observation points and reporting back to the Border Patrol what we observed.”
Riley, a father of six, said he’s not concerned about the danger of the border assignment.
“There’s always that possibility any time you’re sitting out where people aren’t used to seeing troops, but compared to other missions it’s not a great concern,” he said. “I told my 7-year-old boy I was going on vacation. He asked if he could go with me.”
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
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