HARRISBURG — Nearly 4,000 Pennsylvania National Guard members – including some from Mercer County – are being notified that they could be sent to Iraq within a year. The deployment, if fulfilled, would be the state Guard’s largest to Iraq.
The soldiers are members of the 28th Division’s 56th Stryker Brigade, headquartered in Philadelphia but spread across roughly 30 armories statewide.
An element of the 56th, the 1st Battalion, 112th Infantry, based in Erie, has units in Crawford and Butler counties.
“I’m sure there are some soldiers out there from the Mercer area,” said Maj. Timothy J. Foor, battalion executive officer and full-time administrative officer.
The Guard just recently received notification for training and are being told they will get an “alert order” today, Capt. Cory Angell, a Guard spokesman, said Thursday.
A deployment would also mark the first time that Guard-controlled Stryker vehicles would see combat, Angell said.
“These soldiers have received equipment and training that some regular Army units haven’t received, and I think it just shows that the National Guard is no longer a strategic reserve — it’s an operational force,” Angell said. “I think this will be historic.”
A 2,200-member deployment to Iraq in the summer of 2005 — the largest since the Korean War — returned to Pennsylvania in June 2006.
A number of Mercer County soldiers with the Guard’s 107th Field Artillery, which includes Battery A in Hermitage, also have served in Iraq.
Roughly 14,000 guard members from Pennsylvania were deployed during the Korean War.
The Pennsylvania National Guard, regarded as one of the nation’s largest and most deployed state Guards, is the only one with a Stryker brigade.
The first Stryker vehicles arrived here in June 2006. There are 10 variations of the 19-ton, eight-wheeled vehicles to meet different needs, such as troop carrying, medical evacuation, mine detection and heavy artillery.
The vehicles, which can travel up to 75 mph, are viewed as one of the ways to make the Army lighter, faster and more technologically savvy.
The Stryker can climb over boulders and heat up a soldier’s meal. Its periscopes and television monitors allow the driver and gunner to operate it without opening the hatches. It detects the presence of chemical and biological agents and has an air filtration system.
Its computers can run diagnostic tests to pinpoint malfunctions or show a real-time, interactive map that allows the soldiers to track the location of other Stryker vehicles and program in enemy positions.
Foor said his solders started the transition to Strykers in October 2004, and participated in a major training exercise over the summer. The soldiers have made good progress in learning how to operate the Strykers and the sophisticated equipment they contain.
“We have some challenges, particularly in the maintenance,” Foor said.
If the timeline he has heard holds true, and given the guard’s training schedule of one weekend a month, soldiers will have only about 20 training days before they are put on active duty.
“That’s not a lot of time,” Foor said.
The Pentagon is in the process of alerting eight National Guard units nationwide that they should be ready to go to Iraq or Afghanistan beginning late next summer. The units are needed to maintain troop levels, ease some of the strain on the active-duty Army and provide security for ports, convoys and other installations.
Because the announcement looks far into the future, there is always the possibility that plans could change, based on conditions in Iraq.
To date, about 5,000 Pennsylvania Guard troops have served in Iraq and 750 have served in Afghanistan, Angell said. The state Guard currently has 650 deployed worldwide, with the vast majority of them assigned to Operation Iraqi Freedom, he said.
No Pennsylvania unit has served in Iraq or Afghanistan for more than one year, Angell said.
Herald Staff Writer Joe Pinchot contributed to this report.
