BANGOR (AP) – The soft-spoken Capt. Phillip Trevino has a calm delivery, but his even voice cracks as he describes the courageous soldiers with whom he shared a year at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.

Trevino’s presentation is part of a Maine Committee for Employer Support for the Guard and Reserve program. Headquartered at Camp Keyes in Augusta, the committee has one mission: Develop and maintain support from the public and employers for what soldiers are doing in their deployments.

Known as Bosslifts, the presentations give employers a chance to see the military lifestyle and learn exactly what reservists do when called to duty.

About 25 employers took off last week from Bangor International Airport aboard a Maine Air National Guard KC-135 for one such Bosslift.

Back at work a few days later, Rick Randall, operations manager for Pottle Transportation in Hermon, remembers vividly Trevino’s account of a year in Iraq.

He described the Bosslift as “the chance of a lifetime.”

Randall’s co-workers include a Navy Reserve safety officer, a reservist driver out of Massachusetts and a mechanic who was activated and served in Iraq with the 152nd Field Artillery Batallion.

With 180 drivers trucking all over the United States, Randall was impressed with the military’s ability to move men and material globally.

“It really was an eye-opener for me,” said Bob Foster, whose company, R.H. Foster, employs 360 people. “The military is a whole different culture compared to the world I live in.”

The question is tantamount considering Guard and reserve units make up nearly half the 142,000 troops in military theaters, and approximately 70 percent of the Maine Army National Guard has been deployed in recent years, some more than once.

John Simpson, chairman of the Maine Committee for Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve, said the organization’s mission to reach out with education, information and support to employers “has never been so important.”

“We obviously don’t know the future of foreign policy but can be reasonably certain we’re going to be out there, somewhere, defending freedom or in some kind of a conflict,” he said.

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