Until recently, all the press I read had Army officials denying that IRR soldiers were being activated, claiming rather that IRRs were only being screened. However, the New York Times reports:

Also, for the first time in more than a decade, the Army is combing through the Individual Ready Reserve, the nation's pool of former soldiers, looking for specialists with critically needed skills. So far, 618 soldiers have been called back to duty under the program.

I guess I must be one of those special few. The complete story I got here, but unless you have a military AKO account you probably can't read it. The article appeared on June 3rd, titled Army Extending Service for G.I.'s Due In War Zones, by Eric Schmitt.

Regarding the recent stop-loss policy (the main focus of the article), here's another excerpt I find interesting:

In an Op-Ed article in Wednesday's New York Times, Andrew Exum, a former Army captain who served in Afghanistan with the 10th Mountain Division, called the stop-loss policy "a gross breach of contract."

"Many if not most of the soldiers in this latest Iraq-bound wave are already veterans of several tours in Iraq and Afghanistan," Mr. Exum wrote. "They have honorably completed their active-duty obligations. But like draftees, they have been conscripted to meet the additional needs in Iraq."

It really irks me that the government, in particular the military, is allowed to ignore their end of military contractual agreements at will, but if a soldier ever considers doing so, they are forced into compliance with threats of prosecution. But as General Hagenbeck says in the next paragraph of the article, "I regard that as being a soldier in the United States Army. This is what we do." Often, we have to sacrifice more for our country than we agreed to, and that's just part of the deal.

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• individual-ready-reserve
• IRR

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• iraq