Back in the Vietnam era, the National Guard was a nice quiet place to wait for the war to end. According to one military historian, President Lyndon Johnson stopped sending the Guard to Vietnam in 1969, for fear of alarming the public. Though it had seen combat previously, the Guard’s reputation was for fighting fires, floods, and freaks at home. Even the chief publicist of the Guard admits there was a time when “people would chuckle” if they heard the Guard was going to invade a country.
A number of other governors don’t. Their opposition to Central American deployment of their state Guards led to the creation and passage of the Reagan-backed Montgomery Amendment in 1986, which limited governors’ power over the Guard. Now governors can object to deployment only if their Guards are needed at the same time at home. Ever since this amendment passed, the Pentagon has been applying pressure to recalcitrant governors. When the National Guard Bureau, the Defense Department office that directs the Guard, told Ohio governor Richard Celeste that he could keep his Guard from going to Honduras as long as he was willing to sacrifice its $223.6 million in federal funding, he gave his permission, reluctantly, for his Guard to train there in 1989. (Some officials say Ohio was scheduled to go down in 1987, and that Illinois substituted.) Two governors, Rudy Perpich of Minnesota and Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, have filed suits challenging the constitutionality of the Montgomery Amendment. Perpich has lost and appealed; a decision is expected in late April. Dukakis hopes for a judgment before May, when 13 Massachusetts Guardsmen and women are scheduled to leave for Panama and then Honduras. (Nine states endorsed a Massachusetts-authored amicus brief in the Minnesota case; three later dropped off. On the other side, Thompson and 17 other governors signed on to an amicus brief filed by the National Guard Association of the United States, which is a nonprofit lobbying and support group.)
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The Guard says Central American deployment is a way of getting realistic training. “We were down there doing a real job instead of putting on a show for some evaluator from Georgia,” said Staff Sergeant Karen Hon of the Northwest Armory. Hon and her fellow Guards were in Oso Grande, a temporary base in north-central Honduras, some 100 miles northwest of the Nicaraguan border. She was there for five months, much longer than most. She told me she didn’t feel contra presence: “The only thing I was looking out for were scorpions.”
No one can prove that any Guardsman has ever fired a shot at a Sandinista. The only reports that even come close are newspaper stories from 1986 claiming that Texas Guardsmen were five miles from the border during a Sandinista-contra confrontation, and that Iowa Guardsmen were giving medical care six miles from the border. In December 1986, volunteers from the group Witness for Peace said a Florida Guardsman told them his unit had “kicked ass on those Sandinistas.” The National Guard Bureau discounts this as “braggadocio.” No Guards have died in combat–though two Air Guards, from Aberdeen, New Jersey, and New Hope, Pennsylvania, died in a plane crash off the northern coast of Honduras in April 1985, and a Guardsman from Florence, Alabama, drowned the same month in Panama while off-duty.
Some say this LIC has already begun in Central America–using both Guard and regular troops.
Writer Sara Miles sides with Ortega. “In retrospect,” she writes, “the U.S. [Big Pine II] maneuvers should indeed have been cause for alarm–but not because they heralded a direct military invasion. The maneuvers were not a preparation or cover for war: they were the embodiment of war.”
