GUARDSMEN

They both know what lies ahead and that while Kuwait is not a hot spot, anything can happen anytime.

“She’s not going to show any concern. She definitely has on the ‘everything is going to be ok’ face. She’s not letting me see the concern because she thinks that will make it tougher on me,” Moore said of his wife, a teacher at Starkville Christian Academy.

For Tim Tate, a West Point police officer who has been in the Guard almost 12 years, this will be his second deployment. But it’s the first for his wife of almost two years.

“It’s kind of sunk in for her, ‘you are really about to go overseas.’ She knows I can’t not go and she is very supportive but if she could break both my legs and get away with it, I believe she would,” he said of his wife, Susanie.

Moore and Tate both were members of the 2d Battalion-114th Field Artillery unit, which has armories in Starkville and Columbus. And while Tate still is attached to that unit, Moore now is part of the 155th’s infantry regiment based in McComb.

They both know technology will play a huge role in staying in touch on the home front.

“I’m hoping we have good internet and the time to use it. Those are the kinds of things I just don’t know right now. But any chance I have, I’ll be on it talking to them,” Moore said of his wife and threeand-a-half-year-old daughter.

Moore was in Officer Candidate School when the unit deployed in 2009, got injured and missed being deployed by three months. Tate shipped out in 2009 and knows the value of having contact back home.

“I could not imagine not having it. We did Skype all the time in 2009, it makes a huge difference. For my mom, it was peace of mind. I called her almost every night. And now, being able to see my kid and hear what she’s doing,” Tate described, speaking of his 2-year-old daughter.

Tate says he never thought about getting out of the Guard after his first trip overseas. And they both got in to help people.

“I didn’t think about being a hero or anything. It was the same reason I work on an ambulance, helping out, taking care of other people,” the 33-year-old Moore said, noting he’d wanted to be a medic since high school.

And their families, despite obvious concerns, are supportive. In fact, they say they’ve found support everywhere.

“She may be anxious, but she’s supportive, very supportive,” Tate said of his wife. ‘She’s there strong. You just look at it that nothing is going to happen and that we are prepared, we are trained.”

“We talked about me joining the Guard before I did it. We had the discussion,” Moore said of his spouse, who is moving from Winston County back to Starkville to be close to her family while he is overseas.

“She’s very proud of what we do. She had me come to her class in uniform and talk about being a medic. I haven’t run into anyone who hasn’t been supportive,” he continued.

They both have special pictures to take with them. In fact, Moore has a phone full of them. Tate has a wedding photo and a recent picture of the family taken after church. Both have prominent places inside the notebooks he uses regularly to take notes.

And while no one is taking anything for granted, Tate says he and his wife already have an idea what they want to do when he returns to the states.

“She is from Jamaica and we want to go there for a couple of weeks, hopefully we’ll be left along to do nothing before we try to get back into the swing of things,” explained Tate, a Noxubee County native who has lived in Columbus for most of the last 18 years and joined the West Point Police Department in August 2016.

The unit will be based at the huge American command center in Kuwait, which is on the Persian Gulf surrounded by Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia. While analysts say the region doesn’t have any regular “active engagement” for the unit, that could change at anytime given circumstances in all three of those countries, not to mention Syria.

Tate says his experience from 2009 tells him things are a little different this time. In that deployment, he and the unit did not focus on their artillery training and expertise. This time, they’ve been told that will be a large component of their service.

And based on their training, they’ve had indications for awhile that they may be deployed. In 2016, they took part in a largescale exercise in Ft. Hood, Texas, and last year, they took part in a National Training Center rotation in Fort Irwin, California.