Nightline Thursday: Weekend Warriors (WW My A** sign mentioned)

[RamboLiberal]

From their email:

TONIGHT'S FOCUS: They used to be called "weekend warriors." That's pretty much out of date. Now they are just warriors, spending long tours in Iraq or Afghanistan, away from their homes, their families, and their jobs. And that brings extra costs. We'll look at the National Guard and Reserve forces tonight.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was asked today how long troops will have to remain in Iraq. He said the answer was "unknowable." Increasingly, many of those troops are drawn from National Guard units. One of our cameramen got a shot of a humvee in Iraq. Written on the side was "One weekend a month my ass." The idea that the Guard is made up of guys who are out of shape and just show up to hang around a base for a weekend now and then should certainly be put to rest. These men and women are on the front lines. And they pay the same price in lives as regular units. But they also pay different prices as well. Some have to leave their jobs, now for a year or more. As you'll hear tonight, in some cases, that means that their health insurance will be cancelled because they will be gone longer than expected. Policies regarding Guardsmen are out of date, designed for a different time when they didn't play such a major role. Many Guardsmen are already in public service in their civilian lives (police, fire, etc.). Their absences have put a burden on those agencies, too. How can they do without those personnel, and how can they hold those jobs open for that long? Dave Marash will report on all of these issues tonight.

When Ted and I were in Baghdad a couple of weeks ago, we rode with troops from the 82nd Airborne on patrol in the town of Fallujah. I noticed in the humvee we were riding, they had welded extra steel plates on the floor and the sides as extra protection. Some humvees are armored, designed for combat, others are not. The problem in Iraq is that every vehicle faces the potential of combat, an ambush, or a bomb. A reserve unit that left for Iraq yesterday was concerned about the lack of armor on their vehicles. They were able to get steel donated to them, and they set about armoring their own vehicles themselves. At first, the Pentagon was against this, but as more and more units started to do the same thing, the Pentagon is now taking a more positive position on this homemade armor. Correspondent Erin Hayes will report on this unit's improvised solution.

Ted will anchor tonight, and we'll also keep track of developments at the U.N. as they try to work out a schedule for elections in Iraq. With the U.S. still committed to handing over sovereignty to some form of Iraqi government on July 1st, it has yet to be decided who will govern Iraq until elections are held.