National Guard families prepare for Afghanistan deployment
Reporter: Craig Smith
MARANA, Ariz (KGUN9-TV) - It's not easy to leave your family and serve your country. That's the reality for 37 Arizona National Guardsmen as they prepare to head to Afghanistan.
In Marana, at Pinal Air Park there was a ceremony of military precision, but high emotion. On August 25th, 37 soldiers from the Arizona Army National Guard will leave civilian jobs, home and family for training in Texas, then harsh dangerous work in Afghanistan.
They are Bravo Company, 1st Attack Recon Battalion, 285th Aviation Regiment, ready to fly and maintain the complex, capable, and deadly Apache Longbow.
Brigadier General Alberto Gonzalez told the soldiers: "It's gonna be a hard 12 months. You need to focus on the mission but rest assured, while you're focusing on the mission, we are going to be back here taking care of your families."
Captain Tyler Buck will be thinking about a big family, a long way away.
"You have to worries you associate with departure from your family for awhile, you know, I'm concerned for how I'm gonna take care of the family and Of course I want to go out and do good things for my country and hopefully be able to bring a lot of honor for the American people and serve them well."
Modern communications can make a deployment easier, and harder. A soldier can be on a home video screen almost every night.
Warrant Officer 1st Class Steve Trumbull says, "I think it's probably harder, because you're seeing what you're missing every day. When you only talk or get letters once a month or so, you keep in touch, but it's not as real. So we're gonna get to see each other on line, once a week, once a day, who knows. It'll also be good because you get to see the progress but it'll be that much harder to get used to it I think. Because it'll be so close but so far."
Trumbull's wife Brittany says, "I think it'll be more difficult for him but easier for us because when he can see his daddy on the Ipad screen or the computer it helps him a lot but I can see how it would be harder on Steve."
But that modern communication may make it quicker for these families to resume their usual lives when the soldiers come hone a year from now.
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