LEWISTON — Maine’s highest ranking soldier will leave office when the governor does.

Maj. Gen. John W. “Bill” Libby, the leader of the Maine Army National Guard, plans to step down at the end of 2010 after nearly seven years of wartime service.

“This is not my last job,” the fit-but-graying soldier said last week, dismissing retirement. “This is my current job.”

It’s a job that he might have lost.

Last Christmas, Libby reached Army’s “mandatory removal date” when he
turned 66.

“Technically, I am out of the Guard,” he said. However, the Pentagon gave him permission to continue to lead Maine’s 2,000-plus soldiers. He still wears
two stars on the collar of his omnipresent battle dress uniform.

“The Pentagon knows what kind of person he is and what kind of leadership he gives,” Gov. John Baldacci said in a recent phone interview.” I don’t think they wanted to get rid of him either.”

The permission lasts only as long as Baldacci, a close friend, stays in office. A new governor will be elected in November to replace Baldacci, who is prohibited from running again due to the term limits law.

When that date comes, Libby is unsure what he’ll do. Part of him is ready for a less pressure-filled life.

“I imagine cutting grass at a golf club in the summer and driving a Zamboni in the winter,” joked the die-hard hockey fan. 

Then again, he has been out of uniform before.

A native of Lewiston, Libby began his career at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. After only one year, he left.

“West Point was a different place then,” Libby said in a 2004 interview with the Sun Journal. “I didn’t like the system, the hazing that let students abuse other students. It wasn’t for me.”

So he transferred to the University of Maine, where he majored in education and enrolled in ROTC. After graduation in 1966, he was commissioned. Two years later, he volunteered for service in Vietnam.

The Army made him a battery commander in the 1st Cavalry. For a time, he fought near the border between North and South. He also became a liaison officer, traveling with a lieutenant colonel.

After the war, Libby taught ROTC at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He even left the Army for a while, spending three years as Fryeburg Academy’s dean of students before joining the Army National Guard as a full-time soldier.

But it was in Vietnam, traveling with the lieutenant colonel, that Libby learned about leadership.

“If the troops know that you care about their welfare first, they will do anything for you,” he said.

It’s the kind of sentiment that led Baldacci to appoint Libby to Maine’s top military job more than 30 years later in 2004.

“We were at war,” Baldacci said last week. “I knew how critical it would be to have a leader who our soldiers looked up to.”

The last six years have seen many goodbye ceremonies to local troops, trips overseas and too many funerals. In all, six members of the Maine Army National Guard have died in the Middle East. Thousands more have gone and safely returned home.

“The National Guard is playing its biggest role since World War II,” Libby said. “I know it makes me visible.”

It’s been Libby’s role to prepare his men and women for service abroad and help them adjust when they get back. He has worked to give soldiers as much warning as possible prior to deployment, and he has been an outspoken proponent of counseling for returning veterans, opening up about his own personal nightmares that followed his service in Vietnam.

The caring shows, Baldacci said.

The governor said he has also appreciated the years of service, longer than most adjutant generals in the country. And though he believes Libby has built a strong staff of leaders, he would have been “tremendously concerned” if he had to appoint a successor.

“I couldn’t have had a better friend,” Baldacci said.

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Maj.
Gen. John W. “Bill” Libby, the leader of the Maine Army National Guard since January 2004,
plans to leave office at the end of the year.