3,300 ordered back to Mideast; 550 only home 2 weeks

Members of the 82nd Airborne, 2nd Brigade have been ordered back to Iraq

One of the 82nd Airborne Division's four brigade combat teams was abruptly ordered to Kuwait, where it will be poised to jump into the Iraq war if U.S. commanders decide it's needed.

The order Wednesday was unexpected -- 550 soldiers in the unit had been home from Iraq less than three weeks -- and comes amid speculation and debate in Washington about a potential surge in troop strength in Iraq. A division spokesman, though, said the move is not part of a boost in troop numbers.

"I'll tell you as emphatically as I can," said Maj. Tom Earnhardt in a phone interview Wednesday. "No, it's not part of any surge."

Typically talk of a short-term injection of troops has referred to a jump of 20,000 or 30,000.

If this deployment were part of a surge, the Pentagon would surely be sending more than the 3,300 paratroopers of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, Earnhardt said.

Instead, he said, they will replace the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which had been kept in reserve in Kuwait before being sent to Iraq last month.

"This is just a move to re-establish flexibility," he said. "Current events being what they are in Iraq, at this point, obviously it's a good time to maintain as much flexibility as possible."

Still, the Marine unit's move into volatile Anbar province raised the number of U.S. troops in Iraq. Once in Kuwait, the paratroopers would be positioned to quickly boost the numbers even more.

According to a Pentagon news release, the paratroopers are expected to leave Fort Bragg in early January.

For most of the Iraq war, brigade-sized units have been notified months in advance as part of regular rotations designed to give the hard-worked U.S. military regular breaks.

The 2nd Brigade Combat Team hasn't been deployed as a full unit since 2003, Earnhardt said, but parts of the brigade have been deployed four times since then on short-notice missions such as bolstering security for Iraqi elections.

The most recent of these deployments, by the 1st Battalion of the 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment, began in August and ended two weeks ago.

News of the deployment was a blow to the soldiers of the battalion and their families.

"My family didn't take it well," said Sgt. Brian Mundey, 25, who has parents and three siblings in Austin, Texas, and a girlfriend in Arizona. They will suffer through Mundey's third deployment since 2004.

"There were a lot of whys," he said. "Why is this happening? What's going on? I think they're as confused about it as a lot of people are."

Mundey said that several men in the unit had returned to newborns and wanted to spend time at home.

Read the rest at the News Observer

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