Keep the Maryland Guard Home
Submitted by twillard on January 4, 2009 - 9:06pm.
Over 1,300 Maryland Army National Guard and 250 Maryland Air National Guard personnel were deployed to Iraq last year; altogether, 5,900 Maryland National Guard members have been called up since Sept. 2001. These deployments caused financial and emotional suffering and disruption to many Maryland families and impaired our state's ability to respond to emergencies.
Moreover, these deployments are illegal.
It is past time to end them. We ask Gov. Martin O'Malley to review the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, the legal justification for sending our National Guard members to Iraq, and then to refuse to federalize any more Maryland Guard members.
We ask Gov. O'Malley to uphold the law of our land.
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National Guard
My name is jimmahon. I am concerned about the problems that our National Guard members face when they return from a tour overseas. Some of these problems are specific to the National Guard and do not typically apply to service members in other branches of the military.
First, there are economic difficulties. Unlike the regular military, Guard members live in the community and hold regular jobs. Veterans for America did a report on the Pennsylvania National Guard and their findings most likely apply also to the Maryland Guard—although such a study has not been done in Maryland by anyone.
The law requires companies to keep a Guard member’s job for him or her, but the Pennsylvania study found that small businesses were finding it difficult, if not impossible, to retain the same position vacated by employees who are deployed with the National Guard. In addition, Veterans Affairs and congressional staffers reported instances of some businesses avoiding hiring Guard members because of the great likelihood that they will be deployed abroad and the possibility that they could “freak out” on the job. Both of these actions are a clear violation of federal law. That said, a poor economy compounded by repeated deployments creates great stresses for small business owners and their employees. Thanks to excessively long and repeated deployments, many employers are simply incapable of keeping those positions open. In the current economic environment, this is a particularly difficult problem.
With civilian jobs on hold, and possibly lost for good, many families are forced to get by on severely reduced incomes and oftentimes lose employer-based health insurance.
Another problem is that Guard members are twice as likely to have a veterans’ disability claim denied as other veterans of the same operations, even though they are only half as likely to file claims in the first place. It is unclear why this is so.
And finally, the regular military comes home to a base where they are surrounded by people in the same situation. And of course, they come home to a job on base. National Guard members, on the other hand, being in the community, have little access to support services, medical care, and mental health care because of physical distance.