By Daniel Hartill,Staff Writer

LEWISTON – The Army National Guard is running out of Mainers to send to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Men and women from virtually every Maine unit – 1,600 soldiers in all – have either served overseas or will soon, so many that there are few groups remaining in the 1,954-person force to order abroad.

“We’ve sent just about everybody we’ve got,” said Maj. Gen. Bill Libby, who leads the Maine Army National Guard.

Unless the rules change, they cannot be ordered to return.

“In a year, we will literally be out of the fight,” Libby said Thursday.

The reason is a 24-month cap on how long citizen soldiers can be ordered into active duty. Guard members may volunteer to go back, and Mainers have, but they can’t be forced to go.

On Monday, Libby and his counterparts from across the country met with Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff.

Many states are feeling the pinch, Libby said.

The Lewiston native worries the Army may begin cherry-picking new recruits from the Guard to create ad-hoc units of soldiers from several states.

“That’s the way it was in Vietnam,” said Libby, who served in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969. “When I got there, I didn’t know a single person. There was always somebody coming and going.”

He compared the routine to a football team that chaotically changes players before every game.

The only other way the Guard could keep fighting would be to change its rules, Libby said, but that would be tough.

In 2004, top officials from the Department of the Army tried to convince Congress to loosen the active duty cap to merely 24 months of consecutive service. The change would have allowed guard units that had served in Iraq and Afghanistan to return to duty for up to two more years after they spent a period back home.

Congress didn’t budge, though. Lawmakers said it would too drastically change the mission of the citizen force.

Of the 138,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq, about 46 percent belong to the National Guard, Libby said.

That percentage is forecast to fall, though.

Schoomaker has announced plans for a smaller Guard force and a shrinking of its overall presence in Iraq and Afghanistan.

By year’s end, leaders plan to shrink the Guard to about 30 percent of the U.S. forces in those two countries, The Associated Press reported earlier this week.

The 24-month cap is a big part of the reason, Libby said.

Only a few small Maine units, such as the 195th Army Band, have yet to serve overseas.

Currently, about 140 members of the Maine Guard, mostly members of the Augusta-based 152nd Maintenance Company, are serving in Iraq. About 80 people from the 240th Engineer Group, also based in Augusta, are serving in Afghanistan.

Another 170 Brewer-based soldiers from the 172nd Infantry (Mountain) are currently on active duty at an Army post in Indiana while they prepare to go to Iraq.

The unit includes about 35 Maine soldiers who have been to Iraq before and volunteered to return, Libby said.

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