But he acknowledged the hardships employers face. "Remember, this is not easy on your bosses," he said.
Eugene Duplissis, a state police trooper and a sergeant in the Guard, said that many of the misdemeanor cases he and nine other troopers who have been called up were working on would be dropped. "It is just too much of a pain for the state's attorney to try to coordinate with all of us," he said.
"We lost two out of 14 troopers in one barracks," said Maj. James Baker, field force commander for the Vermont State Police. "When you are trying to fill 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, it becomes a challenge."
Vermont's lone military college, Norwich University, has also seen its ranks shrink as the Guard units deployed. In the past six months, the school, with 1,800 students, has sent 30 cadets in the middle of their undergraduate studies and one staff member overseas.
"We recently had our first graduate killed in action in 10 or 12 years," said Gen. Mike Kelly, Norwich's commandant and vice president of student affairs. "This has become very personal and touched every aspect of university life."
Despite Vermont's liberal reputation, the state's politics were long dominated by a conservative agrarian community, and the state had never elected a Democrat to the U.S. Senate until Patrick J. Leahy took office in 1974. But politics here have been inexorably altered by an influx in the 1960s and 1970s of more liberal residents from East Coast cities such as New York and Boston.
This split personality was on display last summer when a dispute arose over how to memorialize Army Pfc. Kyle C. Gilbert of Brattleboro, who was killed in Iraq in August 2003. Town officials rejected the initial design for a bridge over a local river, when some residents argued that the slogans picked to mark the structure -- such as "Freedom Isn't Free" -- were too jingoistic.
As the fatalities have mounted, opposition has grown.
"Considering how unpopular the war is here, it is certainly ironic" that so many Vermonters are serving there, said Sister Miriam Ward, a Roman Catholic nun who is one of several local activists who have kept a nightly antiwar vigil on a shopping street in Burlington since Sept. 13, 2001. On the eve of the soldiers' send-off in January, her sign read "Bring Back Our Guard."
Petitions circulated in recent weeks by a group called the Vermont Network on Iraq Resolutions are aimed at accomplishing that.
"The Constitution says the Guard is meant to be used only to repel insurrection or invasion or defend the laws of the nation. This doesn't qualify," said Ellen Kaye, a grass-roots organizer. To get their resolution on the March 1 town-meeting agendas, the network said members collected signatures from at least 5 percent of voters in about four dozen Vermont towns.
The resolution calls for the legislature to study the effect on Vermont of numerous deployments and asks Vermont's congressional delegation "to work to restore a proper balance between the powers of the states and that of the federal government over state National Guard units." It also asks the president and the Congress to withdraw the U.S. military from Iraq. Other New England towns, including Arlington, Mass., are mounting similar efforts aimed at trying to stop Guard deployments through town meetings.
"I think that a lot of Americans, and that a lot of Vermonters in particular, don't support the war," said Nancy Brown, a teacher in Rochester, Vt., who helped circulate petitions in neighboring communities. Her son, Spec. Ryan Maloney of the Army National Guard, has been based in Iraq for a year.
"Town meeting is a great place to have some dialogue around what we can do about this," she said.
The debate about the war is one that Sandy Hill of Lyndonville said he had engaged in almost nightly with his son, Kristopher, who deployed with the Guard last month.
"We have had some healthy discussions, that is for sure," the father said at the send-off here. "I feel like we don't have any business being over there, but he sees it as his duty."
His wife, Kim, interrupted. "The truth is," she said, "at this point, we just want him to come back safe."
