Yupik villagers brace for Iraq

KONGIGANAK, Alaska — For nearly 50 years during the Cold War, being in Alaska's National Guard meant a potential front-line deployment — right at home. "Our greatest adversary was our next-door neighbor," said Guard Maj. Mike Haller. Guard units around the state trained regularly for a Soviet invasion.

The Soviets never did invade, and units in the far western reaches of the Alaskan bush were never activated.

But now, for the first time since World War II, Guard reserve troops in tiny Yupik Eskimo villages such as Kongiganak are being called up, and this time they are being sent halfway around the world — to Iraq.

Their deployment comes at an especially poignant time: Late spring is known as "breakup" in the Alaskan bush, when the ever-lengthening days finally melt the snow and ice that have blanketed the tundra for more than half the year and kept it eerily quiet.

But as the Yupik men at the mouth of the Kuskokwim River ready themselves for the hunting, fishing and seal-catching that still provide a significant component of people's diets here, they find themselves preparing for a breakup of an almost unfathomably different sort.

In this village of 386 people, six men have been notified to report for duty next month. Although all the men knew they could be called when they signed up years ago for Guard duty — an important source of cash here — several said they were struggling to adjust to the reality.

"When I signed up, I never thought I would go to war. I mean, you never really think of Alaska being at war with anybody," said Harold Azean, 23, a Guard specialist.

Ben Lupie, 30, a Kongiganak carpenter who also is going to Iraq, said he was optimistic that all the men would come back.

"Us being a hunting people, I think it gives us an advantage," he explained, going into an impressive series of mimes: the light prancing of a caribou, the ripple of a fish just below the surface of a river, even the flapping wings of the ducks, cranes and geese that are just arriving on spring migration.

"We notice the tiniest motions," Lupie said. "So I think we'll be aware if something suspicious is up, and we'll know how to react."

The call to Kongiganak comes as the National Guard's involvement in Iraq is set to wind down. There are now 23,000 Guard troops there, and the Pentagon announced recently that it was hoping to phase out Iraq rotations of the National Guard, perhaps as early as 2007.

The call-up of the Kongiganak men has not been affected by the recent news; once a unit is activated, it has to be on duty for at least a year, with two weeks' leave time for each person.

Kongiganak and other bush villages are hardly a hotbed of support for the war in Iraq. When prodded, many say they think the war has made the world less safe, not more.

But that doesn't mean they are protesting the call-up.

"The Yupik are a 'don't-go-against-the-flow' people. You learn how to move with the current of the river or you don't survive," said Karen Phillip, 35, a teacher and the wife of Eric Phillip, a guardsman due to leave. "So nobody is actually speaking out against the war. It's like speaking out against the weather."

Previous National Guard call-ups have drawn from Alaska's cities and towns. The call here in the marshy delta country to the west reaches villages so remote that there are no roads to them.

So in places with Eskimo names such as Kongiganak, Kwigillingok and Manokotak, elder leaders and wives find themselves planning how to carry on.

There are no cars or trucks in Kongiganak, but people here are hardly opposed to modern ways. They get around on snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles and live in low-slung homes with corrugated steel roofs, some painted a bright red, green or blue.

They watch CNN and Fox News via satellite television.

Phillip said he has never lived away from Kongiganak, unless you count the three months he once spent on a crab boat on the Bering Sea.

"It's certainly going to be different," Phillip said. "It's my big chance to see a whole different part of the world, is the way I try to look at it."

Phillip and his brother, Tommy Jr., who is helping build a water pipeline to serve the village, said that they were deeply conflicted about going but that they knew they made a binding commitment.

"We all raised our right hands and told the Army we were capable of serving the country if called," Eric Phillip said over a dinner one night of fresh-caught caribou and dried, salted pike.

"I can't just walk off this deal like you can walk off a job. It doesn't work that way."

For Karen Phillip, the hardest moment was during a family-preparation meeting in April, when a National Guard sergeant asked her and her husband to measure the heights of their two children and mark them against a wall.

Then they had to guess how much higher the lines would be when Eric came back.

"I think it's the military way of getting you to try to adjust to the reality of being away," Karen Phillip said.

"I guess that's what it is. But when I had to think about it in those terms, I really lost it."