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Jerked back

As you were? Go back to what you were doing as a citizen before you were a soldier in combat?

Easier commanded than done.

“Citizen-soldier” is separated by a hyphen, but “citizen=soldier,” combined with an equal sign, might be more accurate.

That’s the message from Washington Post reporter Christian Davenport, who tells the stories of a handful of soldiers to illustrate what he sees as the country’s dependence on and frequent indifference to the National Guard.

All the war’s a stage, but the women and men profiled in the book are not merely Davenport’s players. Statistics and sympathy are not what make “As You Were” work. Empathy is. There are no photographs of the soldiers from the Virginia Army National Guard, 2nd Battalion, 224th Aviation Regiment, but the author provides word portraits:

• Miranda Summers, a history major at the College of William and Mary, deploys a month before the semester ends — and volunteers as a door gunner. One of her sorority sisters thinks the Guard is “an odd little hobby.”

• Mark Baush graduated from Virginia Military Institute and three years later enlisted after surviving a whim to complete a marathon. (He finished in seven hours.) His fiancee “didn’t want to be a military wife” and leaves him the day he is ordered to Iraq.

• Craig Lewis enlisted during his senior year of college and then taught and coached baseball at his high school alma mater. The principal “wasn’t thrilled with the fact that he’d now have to find a replacement for the last few weeks of the school year” when Lewis got orders to depart in June. The June departure became March. March became February. The principal became frustrated.

Preparing to deploy for Iraq was only half the fun. What about homecoming?

• Summers qualifies for a bonus of up to $40,000 for transferring from the Guard to a reserve unit near Brown University’s graduate school. At semester’s end, she learns she must serve three years’ inactive duty to be eligible for a bonus of only $15,000. “We really screwed you,” the recruiter admits.

• As a medic, Kate Broome treated a 19-year-old Marine with “dirty-blond hair and blue eyes” and “a mess of blood and tendons and bone.” She receives a Bronze Star and a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. The Veterans Affairs Department refers her to a smoking-cessation clinic.

In telephone attempts to reach VA, she spends “six hours on hold but never got through.” However, to the Guard she is an “asset” who is briefly on a list to go back to Iraq just six months after she returns.

• Baush also receives orders to redeploy. His father suffered two strokes during his first deployment, but Baush is committed to go. His mother admonishes him, “If you get killed this time, I’ll never speak to you again.”

Then Baush discovers unofficially that his August deployment has moved up to a May departure and that he will not be the battalion’s aviation officer. Instead, he’ll “check people’s IDs” inside the Green Zone. “Sir,” the Ranger tells his commander, “if this is sitting at a desk for 12 hours then I’m not your guy.” Exit Baush.

• Lewis learns that “as soldiers were called to active duty again and again, the word ‘reservist’ suddenly had a stigma attached.” After applying to employers who are “painfully aware that if they hired a reservist, they might very well be without that person for long stretches of time,” Lewis finds work — after 19 months without a job.

Since 2001, “the country’s oldest military institution” has begun “to buckle under the weight of both its domestic and foreign responsibilities. The damage would take a long time to repair,” Davenport said.

Ray Johnson, a 58-year-old grandfather of seven and veteran of Vietnam, might agree. He tells CNN when the 224th returns that his Iraq tour enabled him to “see a lot of suffering,” and Davenport says this view is the ongoing plight of “this entire generation of soldiers.”

J. Ford Huffman is a contributing writer for Military Times.

As You Were: To War and Back With the Black Hawk Battalion of the Virginia National Guard by Christian Davenport. John Wiley & Sons. 260 pages. $25.95.