Today, Explained - The National Guard is tired

Episode Date: March 29, 2022

And in Texas, they’re trying to unionize. This episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlin, engineered by Efim Shapiro and Paul Mounsey, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and edited by Matt Collette and Sean Rameswaram, who also hosted. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When the heavens thunder Maybe you don't think about the National Guard too much. Come on! Find yourself at the Army National Guard serving one weekend a month and two weeks a year. And you'll find an extra paycheck, money for college, and all the adventure you can handle. They're just there whenever you need them to... I don't know. Some National Guard soldiers are leaving San Diego for a year-long deployment in Afghanistan. National Guard members driving school buses.

A third straight day of protests in Philadelphia. The National Guard is now patrolling the streets. New Mexico's governor has called out the National Guard just to keep the kids in the classroom. Call 1-800-GO-GUARD. But now, some in the National Guard have had enough. And there's one mission in particular that pushed the Texas Guard so far over the edge that they're going the way of autoworkers and Starbucks baristas. They're going to try and unionize.

The mission? Operation Lone Star. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. Today, today, today. The National Guard is America's part-time fighting force. Davis Winkie reports on the National Guard for the Army Times. We're an independent news organization that covers the U.S. military.

And just to get it out of the way, he's also in the National Guard, so he can identify with what's happening to the Texas National Guard at the border. We asked him to help us understand how members of this division of our military reached their breaking point and decided to try and unionize, which is an unprecedented move for the Guard, by the way. Over the past few years, America has been increasingly relying on the National Guard, a force of part-time soldiers, in order to solve just basic societal needs. But in Texas, what we've seen is Governor Greg Abbott has deployed 10,000 of them to tackle what he calls a failure of the Biden administration's immigration policy at the border. Because the federal government is failing to act to respond to these dangers, Texas is stepping up to secure the border and to keep our communities safe. As a result,

those troops are sitting at the Texas-Mexico border right now trying to observe and report and stem migration. For people who aren't aware, what's the National Guard supposed to do? The Guard is available to deploy overseas and fight the nation's wars, and they've done so at a huge rate over the past 20 years. They're also at the same time on call for missions under the direction of their respective governors. Each governor has the authority to activate and use their national guard for virtually whatever purpose they see fit. So things like responding to hurricanes, crowd control with riots, providing proactive security for key events.

But Operation Lone Star upends that balance by taking this state mission concept and making it long term. In effort to keep enough personnel patrolling the river and across the valley, the Texas National Guard will be sending more soldiers to the southwest border to help with Operation Lone Star. Operation Lone Star story begins in March 2021. volunteers to assist with the Texas Department of Public Safety and to set up extra observation posts to help spot migrants along the border. But it was in the fall of that year that Abbott really decided to massively increase the National Guard presence at the border, activating thousands more troops involuntarily in many cases, and sometimes with as little as 72 hours notice that these part-time soldiers needed to drop

their lives and show up to the border or else face possible arrest and prosecution for not showing up. What are the conditions like at the border? A lot of them showed up to find nothing. Their base camps where they were going to live were still in progress in a lot of cases. There wasn't infrastructure set up yet to feed them. And there weren't clear directions yet on what they would be doing once they got there. There's some that are working on a task force that is trying to build barriers along the border. Abbott calls it a wall. My sources out there call it more of a fence. There have been widespread pay issues that have improved over time, but guard troops down there have had an issue getting paid on time or getting paid the right amount. They were crammed into these trailers that have bunk beds going three

high. Others have reported shortages of equipment like ballistic plates, like medical equipment, like cold weather gear. But at the same time, these are people who signed up to be in the National Guard and protecting the border sounds like an essential National Guard kind of thing, if that's what the government needs, right? That's true. And there's actually another set of National Guard troops along the border who are assigned to a mission controlled by the Pentagon right now.

Those troops are there directly supporting the Department of Homeland Security based on a request that DHS made to the Pentagon where they said, hey, here's what we think we actually need from the National Guard, from the DOD. Can you provide it? And the troops on that mission, in contrast to Operation Lone Star, are all living in hotels. They all had ample notice of their deployment that was going to happen. And because they're out there on federal orders, as opposed to the state orders that Lone Star troops are on, they're getting all kinds of benefits that are commonly associated with military service, like the GI Bill, like free health care for them and their families.

Operation Lone Star, because it's under state control, because it's directed by Abbott, doesn't have those same protections and benefits. If they're hurt, they actually don't even get Veterans Affairs disability coverage. We've seen incidents where troops on Operation Lone Star have had to use their weapons in what was described as self-defense situations. Workers' compensation is the only way that they can be covered long-term if they're injured in a situation like that. The way that Operation Lone Star is designed just goes against a lot of that traditional balance between, yes, the guardsmen have signed up for this, but the state and leaders have a duty to take care of them when they do call them. You say this has been bad on morale, but these are people who have, in some cases I'm sure, been to war.

How exceptionally bad has it been at the border? We've started to see some signs that the Texas troops on Operation Lone Star have finally been pushed a little too far. More and more of them, based on data that was leaked to me, have been deciding not to reenlist and continue their service in the National Guard when their contracts have been ending. That is something of a lagging indicator though, and we'll see how many of them continue to vote with their feet about their experience on the border. But another phenomenon is a concerning level of mental health issues. There have been dozens of troops who have been reported as experiencing suicidal ideation and have needed to have weapons confiscated from them or in some cases have needed to go have inpatient behavioral health treatment. Four troops linked to the mission have died by suicide since October of last year. Did anyone notice?

Did anyone respond to these suicides? Leadership in the Texas National Guard? Governor Abbott? Texas officials responded by trying to downplay the potential link. To be fair, suicide is extremely complex. But at the same time, I can't overstate the amount of stress it can put on somebody to be told that they need to drop their entire life for an unknown period of time on just day's notice. Public Affairs Officer Colonel Rita Holton really lays out their logic in a shocking way. Holton said, quote, Suicides among the nation have risen and we are part of the general population.

We've had suicides in our organization. There are suicides in every organization. Unless the individual left a note and said, I'm going to kill myself because I'm serving on this mission, there's no way anyone can say it's due to their service on the mission. So after all this, what do officials in Texas have to say about the effectiveness of having the guard at the border? They claim that it's having a deterrent effect on migrants and that they're contributing to large numbers of migrant apprehensions. But I don't know if those claims hold up.

We're still seeing high levels of migration at the southwest border, large numbers of apprehensions in Texas by Border Patrol. And if you look at the statistics that Texas officials are putting out about Operation Lone Star, it looks like they're accounting for less than 10% of the migrant apprehensions in Texas, despite throwing 10,000 troops disrupting their lives at this problem. And this is part of why there's a unionization effort. There's a lot of reasons why there's a unionization effort. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, And Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an AuraFrame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating

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please contact Connex ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge bet mgm operates pursuant to an operating agreement with i gaming ontario in the army national guard you can davis the producer this episode victoria chamberlain she was in army Army. These are my awards, mother, from Army. The seal is for marksmanship, and the gorilla is for sand racing. And back when she was in Army, when you didn't like something, there wasn't a whole lot you could do to change it. But these Texas National Guard people,

they're doing something to change the situation, is that right? They are, and it's because they're taking full advantage of a legal loophole that exists with the duty status that they're currently activated under. A National Guard member can be called up, broadly speaking, in one of three ways. One is what's called Title 10, which is federally funded, under the Pentagon's control. You don't belong to your state anymore, and you're more likely than not going overseas for a deployment. That's Title 10. Okay. Title 32 is you're under your state's control, but it's the federal pocketbook that's paying for it.

And you've got full pay, full benefits. You're considered a soldier while you're under Title 32. But then you've got what's called state active duty. It's basically a program under which these troops are activated as temporary state employees. Pay varies from state to state. Benefits vary from state to state. And in the eyes of the courts, they're not soldiers when they're activated on state active duty. And state active duty has its advantages. It's really flexible. It can be used really quickly. If you just need a few troops for a few days to do something like pull cars out of ditches after a winter storm, state active duty is great. But this kind of channels back to what you said earlier, where like Texas National

Guardsmen who are at the border under Operation Lone Star didn't have the same benefits as the federal National Guardsmen who are down there. But in this case, it might work to their advantage because they figure out they can unionize. State funded, state controlled, all the way, the buck stops with Greg Abbott. What that also means, according to a January federal court filing from Justice Department attorneys in Connecticut, is that federal laws prohibiting troops from organizing and joining unions don't apply to guard troops when they're in a state active duty status. As a result, these troops in Texas are able to organize into the Texas State Employees Union. And we should note here that you don't often hear stories about the U.S. military unionizing.

Who comes up with this idea? The idea actually came out of the pandemic response. You had a small group of National Guard troops in Connecticut who were on state active duty in the early days of the pandemic, working alongside state employees who in Connecticut are unionized and are able to collectively bargain for benefits, for workplace protections, and other stuff like that. And the Guard troops were like, hey, we're temporary state employees when we're on state active duty. Why can't we join a union as well? They teamed up with the Veterans Law Clinic at Yale and a couple of state employees

unions and filed a lawsuit seeking an opinion from a federal judge on whether they could unionize while on state active duty. So how does this movement to unionize the Texas National Guard build? How does it gain steam? There's this junior enlisted soldier in Texas. Specialist Hunter Shuler. I'm a medic in the Texas Army National Guard, currently serving on Operation Lone Star here in Del Rio, Texas.

In the military scheme of things, he's fairly low ranking. But on his civilian side, he has a master's in statistical analysis, and he works as a law clerk for a judge in Texas. He watches this case closely and decides that, hey, if the Justice Department says this is cool, we're going to press forward with trying to organize something. Well, it started as a joke, really, between soldiers. We joked about, well, what if we all just like didn't come to work? You know, what could they do? You know, so we said, oh, yeah, like go on strike or something. If only we could unionize or something. That's kind of how it started, just as a joke. And then we looked into it and realized that it was maybe going to be a possibility with that lawsuit up in Connecticut. Shuler leapt into action and joined the Texas State Employees Union as the first known National Guard member to join a union while in a state

active duty status. How's the state responding to this effort? Basically slapping Texas state law down on the table and saying like, hey, y'all. Service members should not be misled by union agitators into believing that Texas law allows them to engage in collective bargaining. It does not. I wish it didn't have to be so adversarial.

We're not fighting a war with our own soldiers. You know what I mean? Like we're all on the same team. It should never feel like somebody in the same uniform as you is your enemy. When really it's being led by a E4 soldier with 10 years service. The idea that we're some outside, you know, carpetbaggers who've come in to just stir up trouble because it hurts the governor politically or something we're some outside, you know, carpetbaggers who've come in to just stir up trouble because

it hurts the governor politically or something is just nonsense. So is he still pushing for this union, even though it might not really have teeth? Yeah, he is. And the logic behind it, he explained to me, is that right now without a union, they really don't have any options to have their voice heard by their senior leaders. We'd like to hold TMD's feet to the fire and get a definitive answer on end dates. On our orders, it has an end date, but right now it's just the end of the state fiscal year. And that's kind of just a formal placeholder for paperwork purposes. We don't know for sure if that's when we'll be able to go home. And what Shuler and others believe is that a union can offer a centralized, clear, authoritative way of broadcasting the issues that they're experiencing.

Counterargument, though, you know, there was a recent primary election in Texas. It felt like most of the news we've been hearing out of Texas is about gerrymandering and trans rights and abortion rights. Like, where is National Guard on the list? It's way down there, isn't it? Perhaps people don't care about the National Guard per se, but people in Texas care about the border. You had Allen West, one of the right-wing primary candidates, arguing that the top general in Texas should resign. Major General Tracy Norris, if you have any honor, integrity, or character whatsoever, you should immediately submit your resignation. It has turned into something of a political issue out there, which means that while people might not care about the troops, they care about the border.

And right now the troops are the border, thanks to what Abbott's been messaging. And for all the everyday people who go about their lives and don't really think a lot about the National Guard, why should they care? The National Guard has been and will continue to be here on America's worst days. The National Guard plays an integral part of response to any disaster that happens on American soil. We're unionizing so that we don't have to live in an 18-wheeler with 30 other soldiers. We're unionizing so that we have port-a-johns, you know, so that you don't have to work 12 hours without having access to a toilet. You know, we had soldiers who were defecating on the side of the highway because that's where the observation point was and there was no restroom facility and no way for them to get to it. We're unionizing so that we can go home and, you know, resume the rest of our civilian life.

That's why we're unionizing. And if you want the Guard to stay ready for America's worst day, you want to take a really hard look at how they're being used, how they're being treated, and why. Davis Winkie writes for Army Times. You can find his work at armytimes.com. On March 14th, Texas Governor Greg Abbott replaced the head of the Texas National Guard. 72 hours later, two more generals in the Texas National Guard abruptly stepped down.

Our show today was produced by Victoria Chamberlain, engineered by Afim Shapiro, and fact-checked by Laura Bullard. It was edited by me, from Sean Ramos' firm. It's Today Explained. you