Local guardsmen answer call

Jeffrey Libby

Wednesday, Oct. 3, 2001 | 10:46 a.m.

Sgt. Joseph Perez was rooted to the back seat of the station wagon, his three young girls, ages 9, 4 and 2, gathered in his arms as his wife stood by the open door, biting her lip.

Morning traffic hummed by about 20 feet away on Horizon Ridge Parkway, loud with nothing but the low-slung Henderson Armory between it and Black Mountain. Perez was crying, but also managing to smile at the same time.

"I just don't like leaving my wife and my daughters," he said. "It's just the initial having to leave. My wife's trying to be strong."

Perez, a resident of Logandale who works in Las Vegas for the federal Bureau of Prisons, was one of about 100 members of the Army National Guard's 72nd Military Police Co. to go on active duty this morning. It was the first Nevada unit deployed as part of homeland defense.

The unit was scheduled to travel by bus to Nellis Air Force Base at 10 a.m. and board a C-130 Hercules transport plane to an undisclosed location on home soil. The mission is expected to last from four to six months.

The unit is responding to a Sept. 14 call-up of 50,000 National Guard and Reserve troops by President Bush in the wake of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

Perez's oldest daughter, Ariel, a fourth grader, said her dad told her "that he was going to serve the country."

"And that I'll be back," Perez said. "And you believe that, right?"

She nodded that she did.

Other goodbyes appeared to be easier, more circumspect, as fathers leaned up against the beds of pickups smoking cigarettes, having dropped off a son. Other family members helped soldiers carry duffel bags and pull wheeled luggage through the dirt parking lot.

Some soldiers struggled to get heavy packs slung onto their backs as girlfriends looked on. Another couple strolled the armory parking lot inside the chain-link fence, the soldier in full fatigues and the woman, dressed in shorts and a tank top, rubbing his arm.

Megan Saylors, 19, a UNLV student, was dropping off her boyfriend. She said she wasn't worried.

"He'll be fine," she said.

Had they talked about his departure? "We didn't really have time," she said.

Rick Ash, 53, a 22-year veteran of the Army who did three tours of duty in the Vietnam War, found time to talk to his 18-year-old son before driving him to the armory.

"I told him to just pay attention. Attention to detail is the main thing," said Ash, who was drinking a glass of orange juice and smoking a cigarette. "Always be alert. Always know what's going on around you. There's an old Army saying: 'Keep your head down and your morale up.' "

His son, Anthony, had been home less than a week from a year of basic training at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri. He'd had time to unpack, pack and to call his employer, the Nike factory on Las Vegas Boulevard, to say he was back, but heading off for another four to six months.

Anthony said he was bringing four bags of military-issue equipment and nothing else.

"Everything that's on my packing list," he said. "That's it."

Earlier in the morning, around 4 a.m., 40 members of the state National Guard 1864th Transportation Co. returned from two weeks of routine NATO exercises in Egypt, putting to rest rumors that military units participating in the exercises might be deployed directly to a war zone. The annual exercises had been planned before the terrorist attacks.

Spc. Jean Bourassa, who was sitting on his two duffel bags waiting for his wife to pick him up, had been driving a tow truck much of his time in Egypt. So unlike most troops landing in Egypt, Bourassa spent much of his time driving through in the open country between the port of Jiyanklis and the base camp.

Some Egyptians came down to the streets to hoist negative signs, Bourassa said, but mostly he saw children with no shoes, children guarding farms with rifles and others begging for food.

"It's good to be home," the computer technician said.

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