Some Individual Ready Reserve Soldiers Refusing the call

[Future Preacher]

Well, this disgusts me. The army has a plan so that some of the soldiers who have been in iraq for a while can come home. its a great plan. Get these IRR (which is like army reserve, but I guess it has less of a chance of getting called on) to go to Iraq and take their place. It's great cuz it gives some of our soldiers a break. Anyways, some of these IRR are protesting and dont want to go to Iraq. Its pretty messed up. When your country calls, I'd think you'd be up and ready to serve, especially if you were signed up for something in the military. But my goodness, I wish these ppl would just answer the call. oh well. let me know what you guys think. God bless.

 

[daveleau]

It is sad. It is not all that unexpected, though. People on inactive reserve are all-but told they will not be called up. Usually, those on IRR are there finishing out a commitment. I agree that this is a great way to relieve our soldiers and they are a resource that should be used, or else the IRR would continue to be a joke. A guy that commissioned with the Army my sophomore year of college was so poor in his duties after signing that they gave him a 6 year IRR commitment rather than have him serve active duty. This was the first time that had been done at my college according to one of my ROTC instructors. They should not protest, but should accept the call. They signed up and should live up to the commitment they made without public displays.

 

[Zoot]

When your country calls, I'd think you'd be up and ready to serve, especially if you were signed up for something in the military.

Your government is not your country. I'm not any government's servant. If my government calls on me to do something I disagree with or consider criminal, I'm not ready to serve it.

However, for that reason, I wouldn't sign up to anything like the IRR in the first place. Is their objection moral? Or is it that they don't want to go get mortared? Or they don't want to get mortared for something they think is foolish?

 

[pinqy]

Zoot, almost no one "signs up" for the IRR. When you enlist, you sign a contract for a specified number of years of active duty or the National Guard, or the Active Reserves. But every contract is really an 8 year contract with the remainder of the time in the IRR. For example, someone who joins the Army for 4 years active duty is really signing a contract for 8 years of military obligation. At the end of his/her 4 years, unless they reenlist or join one of the Reserve forces, they are automatically in the IRR for the remainder of their commitment.

Some of the difficulties people who are activated from the IRR have are that their skills are gone. If you haven't performed a job/function for 3 years, you might not be qualified for it anymore. You might now be out of shape or your personal situation may have changed so that a deployment could be a severe hardship. I knew some IRR people mobilized for OEF/OIF where it was a waste. They no longer had any skills, and were not really needed but were only called up to boost numbers. There are legitimate reasons for people to protest being called up from the IRR.

pinqy

 

[xMinionX]

I think a lot of them might not want to go back because their ETS dates (date of return) are set so insanely far off that they have no real way of knowing when they'll be back, if ever. I said before in another thread, my co-workers brother is a guardsman in Iraq, and he got 30 days leave on a base in Louisiana before they sent him back, and his new ETS date is something like forty years from now.