Good to be home

There’s something about a member of the National Guard. Part volunteer firefighter, part highspeed/low-drag infantryman, part public beach lifeguard, part soup line worker.

All that stuff that you read on recruiting pamphlets errs by omission: This isn’t a one-weekend-a-month and two-weeks-in-the-summer gig. First, you have to go off to learn how to be a soldier (basic training first, then off to school to learn your military job), and that can take months to complete. Maybe longer. Then to be promoted, a soldier may be sent off again, weeks away from family, at more schooling centers.

After you’ve learned how to move, shoot and communicate, you end up wading through waist-high water to rescue folks after a flood. Or passing out water bottles after a tornado. Or flying to the Gulf Coast with food supplies after a hurricane.

Sometimes you’re deployed. And all those dentists and lawyers and school teachers and mechanics once again are pulled from families and sent to helland-gone.

They volunteer for this.

More than 160 members of the Arkansas National Guard came home from Germany over the weekend. And this wasn’t a 10-day ReForGer mission from the 1980s. These men and women were gone for about eight months, leading a group to train Ukrainian soldiers to defend their homeland.

They were stationed in Grafenwoehr, Germany, and helped train more than 7,000 Ukrainian soldiers.

From handing out water bottles to training 7,000 Ukrainian soldiers. In this day of over-specialization, the members of the American National Guard have to multitask. And adapt on the fly.

As Congress debates on whether to continue to fund Ukraine’s fight against a much bigger foe, we’d remind members that there is more than dollars at stake. A lot of man hours—American man hours—has been put into the Ukrainian defense of its own borders. It would be a shame for all that to go to waste because the two political parties were launching their own (figurative) sorties at each other.

cc: The Arkansas delegation