A Shrinking Base

Paul Rieckhoff fought with the division and has since left the Army. This week, he is launching Operation Truth, a nonpartisan group dedicated to telling the public about the war in Iraq from the perspective of those who fought there.

"People can deal with it if it's honest and up-front," he says about the deployments. "But they've broken their word so many times it gets frustrating. Everyone says they love George W. Bush, but when you get over there and see your buddies blown up and then think: 'What the hell are we doing over there?' You start to think: 'Who do I hold responsible?'

"My overall encapsulation is that the public will be overwhelmingly surprised at how many people coming back from Iraq will not vote for George W. Bush."

Yes, war is a fearsome enterprise, and yes, this is a new and dangerous world, but "how the deployment was handled made it worse," says Loren Thompson, a defense expert at the Lexington Institute, an Arlington think tank. Return dates are announced and canceled at the last minute. Missions are open-ended. For soldiers used to planned rotations, this kind of uncertainty crushes morale. Add to that the overall chaos in Iraq and "there's a lot of resentment," says Thompson. "If you're in the Army, you feel the institution is unraveling all around you."

"For the first time I hear officers openly debating against Bush," says Donald Vandergriff, an Army major and a professor at Georgetown University. "They don't want to vote for Bush and they don't want to vote for Kerry. What choices do they have? Zero, basically."

The Defense Department does not allow soldiers to be polled on their political opinions, and the culture still distrusts anyone who expresses those opinions too overtly. But it's clear that the military, famously conservative, hasn't pulled away from Bush. A recent poll of families with current and retired military members showed them supporting Bush 52 percent to 44 percent.

But at Fort Stewart, some of the support seems less of the enthusiastic than of the devil-we-know variety.

Aaron Symonette is in a transportation unit about to return to Iraq, and his wife, Judy, says this time she's "twice as scared, twice as nervous. To be honest with you, I feel it's unnecessary, that we should have pulled out once we captured Saddam."

Aaron Symonette doesn't think about those larger questions except "whenever somebody gets captured or killed. That's when we think, man, why are we really here?" To the families at Fort Stewart, the concept of exit strategy is not abstract. The families were expecting soldiers home on July 2, 2003, so Judy lost weight, got her hair done, hung white banners and balloons, ironed the kids' clothes, bought a bottle of her husband's favorite champagne. And then the night before, she was told, no, he wasn't coming home yet, and he didn't until October.

Still, "although I'm irritated, I still would prefer Bush over Kerry," she says. "Bush has already started this thing and he knows what's going on. The rapport is already established. A new person would just have to be briefed all over again and that makes me nervous."

Ballot Battles

Most experts assume officers will continue to vote Republican. But as for the other components that make up the military vote -- enlisted personnel, veterans, dependents -- their votes are "in play," says Christopher Parker, a former Army captain and a political scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

In an election in which national security is a prime issue, the morale of the troops takes on outsize significance. And it takes only small shifts to make a difference. If Eglin Air Force Base were in Alabama instead of Florida, says Thompson, Al Gore would be in the White House. A 5 percent shift in the veterans' vote would have given New Hampshire and Arkansas to Gore.

The people most likely to shift their support from Bush to Kerry are in the reserves and National Guard, says David Segal, a professor at the University of Maryland. "In the past the antiwar movement was rooted in college campuses," he says. "Now the major movement against the war is in reserve families."

Reservists, used to serving a weekend a month, are being called up for a year at a time, over and over. They leave homes to serve in jobs for which they feel unprepared, attached to commanders and units they don't know. "We are the stepchildren, here to be abused," says Michael Ray Gibbins, eating his lunch at Fort Stewart with two buddies from the Texas National Guard at the end of a day that started at 3 a.m.