By Tim Jones and Michael Kilian 
Chicago Tribune

MariAnn Curta said she was "freaked out" during much of her son's recently completed nine-month tour of duty in Iraq, where he drove a fuel truck in the Sunni Triangle.

But when she got the call from a recruiter last weekend warning that her 22-year-old son, Bill, now on the Army's inactive reserve list, could be headed back to Iraq quickly unless he enlisted in the Illinois National Guard, her emotion changed from fear to rage.

"It's devious, it's deceptive, it's dishonest, it's valueless," Curta said. "I can't believe they'd pull this kind of fast trick on kids who have already served."

As part of an aggressive effort to bolster the dwindling pool of available reservists, Army and National Guard recruiting units throughout the country have called thousands of inactive reservists in hopes of persuading them to re-enlist in the active reserves or join their local Guard units.

If they don't, many recruiters warned, they could soon be headed to Iraq. The warnings come by telephone, and they have been concentrated in four areas: Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis and Louisiana.

"It then spread through the country, with the exception of New England," said Army Reserve spokesman Steven Stromvall.

Stromvall said some National Guard recruiters heard about this and then began using similar tactics.

The calls have generated a slew of complaints from veterans and their families.

Stromvall acknowledged that there has been a widespread problem with misleading, inaccurate and intimidating retention efforts throughout the nation in the past few weeks but added that the Army Reserve is moving quickly to fix it.

"They went a bridge too far," he said.

Stromvall said the problem stemmed from misunderstandings on the part of the reserve's 700 retention sergeants about a new drive to get service personnel in the Individual Ready Reserve, whose members do not have to belong to units or attend drills and meetings, to switch voluntarily to an active reserve branch known as the Selective Reserve.

There are now 169,000 reservists and National Guard members of all kinds on active duty, an increase of about 3,000 from last week but down from the more than 200,000 on active duty last year. The stress of the Iraq occupation and insurgency clearly is causing a crunch.

"There is no question the Army is stressed," Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, told a congressional committee earlier this year.

Adding to the problem is that the Pentagon can't find about 50,000 reservists who moved without notifying the government.

The reserve call-ups for tours of active duty in Iraq have largely been by unit. Individual Ready Reserve members have been called up during the war, but in relatively small numbers. Only about 6,500 such individual recalls have been authorized by the Pentagon.

Stromvall said the misleading methods included telling Ready Reservists they likely would be called up individually for service in Iraq if they did not join a Selective Reserve unit by a certain date. He said there was one case at Ft. Bragg, N.C., in which a soldier who was leaving active duty with the regular Army was told by a retention sergeant in the processing line that he would be sent to Iraq automatically if he did not join the Selective Reserve.

One Illinois National Guard veteran who asked not to be identified said the tactics disturbed him.

"They did call my wife and threatened that I'd be taken away from her," the Guard veteran said.

"Ethics are important to me. This bothers me a great deal. If it's an all-volunteer Army, it's just that," he said. "It's not something you should be tricked into."
 

Minimum commitment

Those who enlist in the armed forces have a minimum commitment of eight years of service, of which only a portion need be on active duty.

The remainder can be spent either in the Selective Reserve, which includes both the active reserve and the National Guard and requires assignment to a unit, or the Individual Ready Reserve, in which the serviceman or woman merely remains on call.

Curta said she was contacted last weekend by a recruiter from the Illinois National Guard who said it was "urgent" that her son get in touch with him.

"They put the fear in me that he was going back in 48 hours," Curta said.

Maj. Steven Rouse, who is responsible for National Guard recruiting in the northern Illinois region, did not return phone calls from the Tribune. A spokesman for the Illinois National Guard in Springfield said he had no knowledge of calls being made on behalf of the Guard.

That was news to Kelly Akemann of Elgin, who said she received repeated phone calls in recent days from a Chicago-area Guard recruiter warning that her husband, a Guard veteran, could be sent to Iraq if he did not re-enlist quickly.

"I told him I thought these were scare tactics and he told me they weren't scare tactics, these are the realities of life," Akemann said. "I told him you don't need to raise the blood pressure of a three-month pregnant woman. . . . Then I hung up."

Of the 1.1 million or more reservists in the U.S. military, about 820,000 are in the National Guard or active reserve components of the Selective Reserve and 282,000 are in the Individual Ready Reserve.

According to Stromvall, Army Reserve commanders decided to try to identify members of the Individual Ready Reserve by pay grade and military occupational specialty and contact them about voluntarily filling vacant slots in the Selective Reserve.

For each of the past few weeks, about 1,000 or more inactive reservists nationwide have been moving to the active reserve, a much higher number than usual.

Lt. Col. Bob Stone, an Army Reserve spokesman, said the Defense Department has asked Congress for authority to use the Internal Revenue Service to help track down members of the Individual Ready Reserve whose whereabouts are no longer known.

"This has been a concern for some time," Stone said. "Two years ago the Defense Department began working with the Treasury on this, and legislation has now been proposed in the Congress."

He said the military is not attempting to use the nation's chief tax collector for any Orwellian "Big Brother" purpose.

"The only information they would be seeking is an address," he said.

Though the numbers fluctuate, the Pentagon is now missing addresses on 50,217 of the 282,574 members of the Individual Ready Reserve force, or about 18 percent.

Stone said failure to notify the military of a change of address is a violation of military regulations, but no prosecutions will be sought.

"This is not a punitive measure," he said. "This is a way to effectively manage the reserve force."

Stone said he knew of no mass mobilization of reserves under way or planned and said reserve call-ups thus far have been a simple matter of meeting the needs of commanders in the field.
 

'This is unethical'

Bill Curta, who enlisted in the Army after the September 2001 terrorist attacks, declined to be interviewed for this story. He served in Iraq from March to December 2003, received his discharge in March and will be on the inactive reserve list for six years. Curta's father, Bill Curta, said his son does not intend to re-enlist.

"This is unethical, it's immoral, especially with kids who have already served," Curta said. "It's an ugly story."

Stone acknowledged that retention rates for both the National Guard and the reserves have been slipping. But he said the services have been able to maintain their authorized strength, largely by relaxing their "up or out" rules and allowing personnel to stay in the military even though they have not been promoted to their next grade within a prescribed period.

Stone said that, overall, the military has achieved 94.5 percent of its retention goal and is at 99.8 percent of authorized strength.

The Army National Guard, however, has reached just 93 percent of its retention goal and the Army Reserve 95 percent of its goal.

He said the Army Reserve has ordered a stop to intimidating retention methods and informed personnel of the proper procedures to follow in dealing with reservists.

"It was a mistake," he said.