Moving Out

By Nancy Gibbs/Fort Stewart

D'Artagnan Beets, 3, is in the corner, dueling with his dad. He's thumping him with big red inflatable sock-'em boppers, squealing every time he lands a good blow. Corporal Tracey Beets is pretty skilled at protecting himself--quick eyes, good moves, bulging arms under a NO GUTS, NO GLORY tattoo--but this is one fight he's happy to lose, because defeat comes with a hug, and there's not time for many more.

The walls around him tell the story of how he got here to this second-floor apartment in a wooded subdivision at the Army's Fort Stewart, near Hinesville, Ga. There's the framed letter from New York Governor George Pataki, thanking the former Marine for his service as a National Guardsman on Sept. 11, which consisted mainly of preventing distraught fire fighters and cops from rushing in to try to find their lost comrades. There are letters from the White House and the Pentagon, responding to his campaign last year to be allowed back on active duty, which, since he was 36, required a waiver. And there are pictures of his wife Anna and their sons D'Artagnan and 7-week-old Alexander, whose world he wants to fix. Beets thinks it's time to take the fight to America's enemies. He does not talk about his unit's imminent deployment to Kuwait as just another training exercise.

It was one thing to slip past the Army's rules. It was something else to get past Anna. "I fought him all the way about re-enlisting," she says, as she sits on the couch rocking the baby, watching CNN. "Sometimes I get so mad at him," she says. "Why did he have to volunteer for this?" Then she looks at him and answers her own question. "He's a really good man, and it means so much to him." When he was seeking to re-enlist, the Army offered more options than the Marines, especially to an older soldier. "In the Marine Corps," Tracey notes, "the philosophy is, if they want you to have a family, they'll issue you one." So now this family finds itself at Fort Stewart, about to be ripped in half.

In living rooms across the base and in the towns surrounding it, tonight is all about packing--the canteens, the flak vest, the gas mask, the extra socks. "I have about 18 pair with me," Beets says, because "you can't put a price on comfort." On the closet door hang his desert tan fatigues, sharp with new creases. Members of Beets' unit, Charlie Company of the 2nd Battalion, 7th Infantry Regiment, got word today that they should switch from their standard Army green camis to tan, intended to make infantrymen like Beets invisible in the sand, except for the blindingly bright American flag they have to sew on the right shoulder when they're about to deploy overseas so that allies can distinguish U.S. troops at close quarters.

These soldiers are trained to move out fast and often, but not since the 1991 Gulf War has the entire 3rd Infantry Division, to which Beets' company belongs, been ordered to deploy at one time. The 15,000 troops plus all manner of support personnel that make up the armored force are just some of the nearly 100,000 U.S. soldiers now moving out from across the country to join the 60,000 already in the gulf. You can track the exodus in numbers. It's harder to track it in lives, unless you come to a place like Fort Stewart and watch a community melt away.

Fort Stewart sits on 280,000 acres of piney woods and swampy fields in the sweet-onion patch of coastal Georgia. This is as regular as regular Army gets: no frills, no illusions, lots of buildings that look as if they were meant to be temporary back in 1941. It's cold this week at Camp Swampy, down in the 20s in the morning as the last-minute training picks up and the clock ticks down for the company commanders. They must make sure that every soldier is qualified to handle his weapon, meaning he can snap-shoot a quarter-inch hole in a soccer ball at 100 yards. They must make sure the right equipment is shipped--from helicopters shrink-wrapped in plastic to protect them from the salt air on the ships heading out of Savannah, to flyswatters (a dozen for every 150 men, same for mousetraps).

"Try to imagine having 20,000 soldiers pick up and move out in a three-week period. It's a lot more complicated than it looks," says Colonel Louis Weber. The logistics aren't all military. "You got to get your lawn service done, get your pet taken care of, close out your rent, turn off your cable and phone," he explains.

The combat veterans, for whom deployments are routine, know that what the Army requires its soldiers to bring with them is not the end of what is necessary. Weber still has grateful memories of the Army wife who told him to pack clothespins when he first deployed to the gulf, lest the wind toss his drying uniform in the sand. At the base PX and Wal-Mart, extra tent pegs and shower shoes are selling fast. So are watches with alarms that give the time in two time zones. Twizzlers. Extra thick boot insoles. Liquid laundry soap, because the water will be cold. Extra thermals, because the nights will be too. "Think of being in a tank," says Weber. "For a three-man crew and the tank commander, that tank is your home, and you don't know how long you're going to be there. You don't know when the shower and laundry guys might catch up with you. You don't know when you'll get hot water to shave with. So you take care of yourself, and you better take care of your vehicle, because that's your way back home."

Over at C Company headquarters, Beets' unit, the captain is Todd (T.K.) Kelly, who manages to appear both sharp and relaxed, as close to cool as regulations allow. Not that it touches his ears, but his hair is probably the longest in the company. At 31, he is a dozen years older than some of his 140 men--women can't serve in infantry units like this--and has been a soldier longer than that if you count his years at West Point. C Company Private Adam Harting is six months out of high school, with wide blue eyes in a still forming face. He knew that joining the Army could mean going off to fight, but he didn't really expect that to happen this soon. "I just figure there's a lot of people here who take care of me," he says. It's Kelly's job to see that men like Harting have ticked off of everything on their list, from their teeth to their shots, from their weapons to their wills.

Kelly has served long enough to know that deployment also requires all kinds of emotional equipment that the Army doesn't supply. He has been breaking in his suede desert boots at home, walking his new daughter Olivia round and round the house. He's not the only soldier leaving a new baby or a wife with one on the way, so even as his men prepare to go, he tries to prepare them to come back. "They need to know, if they're married, that their spouse is going to become fiercely independent while they're away," he says. "You weren't there to pay the bills or discipline the kids. So you can't come home and kick your feet up and expect that your kids are going to listen to you." Some experienced Army wives recommend making a lifesize photo of Daddy and hanging it where the kids can see it every day, to show he's coming back.

The library invites deploying parents to record their children's favorite books on tape, for the kids to listen to while Mom or Dad is gone. The lines have been long at the Wal-Mart portrait studio. "We tried to do a walk-in yesterday and sat for almost three hours," says Melissa Wiechelman, whose husband Chad is set to move out. At the courthouse in town, there were 39 applications for marriage licenses in the first two weeks of January, up 77% over the same period last year. The yellow ribbons around the lampposts outside are so fresh, they haven't even been rained on yet.

Soldiers are told to get their finances in order, so the Super Pawn and Mr. Cash are doing a good business in used stereo equipment, and lines at fast-tax-return shops stretch out the door. Specialist Erin Gibson, 22, a 4-ft. 11-in. medic and single mother, is waiting outside Jay's Tax Service, hoping for a check against the $2,900 refund she's expecting. She has been told she will be gone by the end of January, which means "my mom has to come get my son. He'll be 2 tomorrow." Over Christmas, she made a videotape for her little boy. "I told him I love him and I miss him. I tried to explain that Mommy has to go help people that get sick or hurt but I'll be back soon."

An exodus this big takes a toll on the town as well. Shop owners are hoping that an influx of Reservists and National Guards will provide enough cash to keep Hinesville alive, but a Wendy's has already closed, and other small businesses may follow. If the troops are gone for more than a year, as many were in 1991, says Realtor Angela Powell, the Chamber of Commerce chairwoman, "we'll all be eating peanut butter." The department of family and children services is bracing for more parents looking for aid and food stamps and for more families in trouble. During the Gulf War, child-abuse cases in the county went up 10%. The key is intervention. "Our goal is to get the word out," says county director Cornelius McCrae. "If you're stressed or having trouble with the kids or the bills, come get help."

On the base, the task of emotional preparedness falls to the social workers and the wives who lead the family-readiness groups attached to every company. They explain how to get car-insurance rates lowered without dropping the deployed spouse from the policy. They've arranged for the local department of motor vehicles to offer driving tests in the many languages of Army wives, like Korean. They instruct families about what not to stick in the care packages they send over: any overtly religious books or objects likely to give offense to Kuwaiti Muslims, any pork products, any magazine with revealing pictures of women, whether it's Maxim or Vogue; absolutely no alcohol.

And don't send anything special that you want to keep forever, First Sergeant Robert Wilson advises at a meeting Wednesday night. He explains that before his unit went into action in Desert Storm, the soldiers bulldozed an eight-foot trench in the sand, tossed in every piece of personal gear they owned and set it on fire. That way captured soldiers would not have family photos or letters that could be used against them by interrogators--and it also insured that any space in their vehicles that could hold water, ammo or food would not be wasted on a Walkman or Tom Clancy.

Anna Beets generally avoided the Charlie Company family meetings, but she went to the last one, because she knew she needed to hear about how the deployment would work. "They started talking about making wills," she says, and her eyes fill. "I wanted to burst out, How can you talk like this? I know I have to stay strong for the kids. We all know we have to do wills. But it just slaps you in the face to hear people talking about it that way." She knows that her husband's job is as dangerous as any other. Beets is a grenadier, in charge of four other soldiers who would go into battle crammed, like bullets in a magazine, into the tiny, noisy, jouncing rear compartment of a Bradley fighting vehicle. Their job is to clear enemy forces before the rest of the unit arrives.

"It's so devastating," Anna says of the prospect of deployment, "because once they get over there, it takes so long to hear from them." Like many other wives left behind, she thought about going home to her family while Tracey is away. But she is grateful for what the Army offers to families: the health care, classes and play groups. "I want the kids to have some kind of normal life," she says. "If I changed his environment," she says of 3-year-old D'Artagnan, "he might not think Daddy is coming back." His father was away for a month last fall at the National Training Center in Fort Irwin, Calif., and D'Artagnan stood at the window every night, watching for him.

When Tracey was in the National Guard, he served in the honor guard at Calverton National Cemetery on Long Island, N.Y. He would hand the folded flag to the widows of the Korean War and Vietnam vets who are starting to fill that graveyard. "If something happens to him," Anna says, "I don't want the flag. Let them give it to his mother. If you can't give me my husband back, you can keep your flag."

The mood is raw in part because uncertainty is the enemy now. "Your kids ask, 'How long will you be gone, Daddy?'" says Colonel Weber. "And you say, I don't know. 'Will you have to kill anybody?' 'I don't know.' 'Will you go to Iraq?' 'Dunno.' And all that uncertainty weighs on you. In a deployment like this, you just don't know." The soldiers all talk about logistics and training and tying up loose ends. This is what we do. This is what we've trained for. But they hardly ever talk about war.

"They want you to believe it's an exercise," Anna says. "Well, we all know the President will declare war. I come from a military family, and I know how it goes." One of her brothers is a master sergeant in the Marines; the other is now a police officer but was a Marine in Desert Storm. "They said Desert Storm was an exercise, right up until you turned on the TV and saw they were bombing Baghdad. I know it's his job and he has to go. But D'Artagnan doesn't understand, and he asks all the time."

Tracey is proud of his family, proud of the little boy who has an American flag sticking out of the roof of his little camouflage tent, who when he sees a gun at the toy store says, "Dad, can I get that weapon?" Even a child knows the drill, knows the words, and tonight in the living room, D'Artagnan sings them for his dad:

"I'm just a dogface soldier With a rifle on my shoulder, And I eat raw meat for breakfast every day. So feed me ammunition, Keep me in the 3rd Division, Your dogface soldier's A-OK."

Even his mom has to smile. These men in her life, large and small, love her, but they love the Army too, and that's just what she will have to live with, as the long winter unwinds. --With reporting by Mike Billips/Fort Stewart

With reporting by Mike Billips/Fort Stewart