CAMP McGREGOR, N.M. — Some 3,200 Wisconsin citizen-soldiers are training in the desert here, preparing their bodies and minds for a tough, year-long overseas deployment of historic proportion.

The last thing their military bosses want them worrying about is the home front.

So when two Air Force KC-135 Stratotankers landed this weekend at Biggs Army Airfield on the outskirts of El Paso, Texas, the 57 civilian-world bosses on board were an important reminder that these service members have some people back home looking out for them.

“It takes weight off your mind,” said 1st Sgt. Carl Petrick of Janesville. The wind snapped through his green-grey uniform as he chatted outside the camp’s jam-packed dining hall with two co-workers from the Prent packaging company in Janesville and their boss, manufacturing director Ron Steurer.

“I don’t want to do that juggling act of worrying about what’s happening here and what’s happening there,” Petrick said.

The 32nd Infantry Brigade Combat Team, with members from all corners of Wisconsin, is heading in a few weeks to Iraq in the largest Wisconsin National Guard combat activation since World War II. As the war enters its seventh year, part-time soldiers such as these are playing an increasingly important role — as are their civilian employers, left to make do without them.

That’s why the brigade’s commanders in Madison gave employers the chance to hitch a ride on an air-refueling training mission to see how the 32nd is preparing in this outpost about 20 miles of cactus and tumbleweed northeast of Fort Bliss.

“Employers could look at it as a sacrifice that they have to do without key employees for long periods of time,” said Mike Smith, executive director of the Wisconsin committee of the Defense Department’s Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve organization.

“We certainly have empathy for the employers. But the sacrifices that the soldiers make are what makes it possible for the employers to do business in a safe environment, which isn’t true everywhere in the world,” Smith said.

Broad range of employers

The employers, who arrived Friday and were to return today, were diverse: An engineering supervisor from a factory in Racine. A warehouse manager from Milton. An executive from a large health care provider in La Crosse. The operator of a small business in Stoughton.

Operation Boss Lift is part of a National Guard-run effort to keep things running smoothly at home so the soldiers have less to worry about when they return from the combat zone.

Federal law forbids employment discrimination against those with military commitments. It also requires that soldiers return to all the benefits and raises they would have received if they had not deployed.

But some employers go further, continuing benefits so family members don’t have to change providers, supplementing the soldiers’ National Guard paychecks, or continuing full pay.

Air Products Performance in Milton has one of its 48 employees deployed with the 32nd. For more than a decade, the company has made up the pay differential when warehouse worker Willie Lipke trained with the National Guard.

Over the weekend, Lipke’s supervisor, Jon Mageland, shared a meal and a few laughs with him in the blowing red dust of Camp McGregor.

“Willie is very well liked here,” said Air Products site manager Greg Linder. A collage of military images, featuring a portrait of Lipke, hangs in a public area of the company administration building. “He’s important to us, and I highly value what all these people do for us, putting their lives on the line, fighting for freedom.”

Hard to go the extra mile

It can be tough, especially in trying economic times, for an employer to go that extra mile.

At On Track Communications, a telecommunications brokerage employing seven, president Bill Mansfield said he’s had to hire someone to replace Andrew Phelps, a sales director who has been with the Stoughton company two years.

“To lose roughly 15 percent of your workforce for a year, we’re not in a position to extend pay,” Mansfield said, noting the company did pay Phelps when he was at a previous seven-week training mission.

Mansfield, who visited with Phelps this weekend, said he has challenged his staff to increase sales enough so when Phelps returns, the company will be able to keep both him and his replacement on the payroll.

The employers on the trip this weekend have tried hard to accommodate their employee-soldiers.

But sometimes things go poorly between the two, Smith said, especially when a soldier returns from a long tour. His Madison-based office, which has three paid staff members and 125 volunteers, mediates about 30 disputes a year. About 9 out of 10 are settled without a lawsuit or action by the Department of Labor, Smith said.

Employer Support volunteer Chris Campbell said he recently confronted a manager in Janesville who told two workers, both members of the 32nd, that they would have to reapply for their jobs after returning from Iraq. The manager checked with the company’s home office, was told Campbell was right about the federal law and quickly changed her stance.
Gauging the effect

About two-thirds of the employers who took part in the weekend’s Operation Boss Lift have soldiers in the 32nd, and most of the rest have military personnel assigned to other units, Smith said.

Don Weber, CEO of Logistics Health in La Crosse, said two of his 700 employees are deployed with units other than the 32nd. Weber, a former Marine, sent one of his executives on the trip.

Logistics provides deployed soldiers with full pay and their families with full benefits, including access to the company child-care service. The company has grown rapidly, largely because of military and other government contracts, and can absorb losses to deployment, Weber said.

At Modine Manufacturing in Racine, the work of two engineers — one deployed with the 32nd and another with the Navy Reserve — has been picked up by other employees.

Modine employs 500 in Racine and 7,500 worldwide. But both men on active duty are from Nick Siler’s team of 12 engineers working on fuel-cell technology.

Siler knew what he was getting into when he hired National Guard Lt. Ryan Traxinger, but his Guard experience of working on complex projects helped him stand out.

“We hired him last spring, just a few weeks before he found out he was deploying,” Siler said. “We already knew we’d be losing him every Friday for training.”

Traxinger was on the job long enough to get a difficult project into production, and he’ll return as another big job is ramping up. In the meantime, the tight-knit fuel cell engineers at Modine pass around e-mails from Traxinger and Capt. Mike Edlund, the Navy reservist, who might be back at work in August.

The Wisconsin National Guard’s top general used the weekend trip to help gauge the effect on employers.

Brig. Gen. Don Dunbar said the state Guard has become an operational force that fights on equal footing with the regular full-time military. But he asked the employers how frequently they can afford to lose workers for the long deployments that have become the norm. Every three years? Every five?

“How often can we do that without affecting negatively the families or employers?” Dunbar asked. “We’re in uncharted waters. We’ve never done this before.”