Ron, for sure a lot of things have changed since then. The Illinois Adjutant General pushed for us to get a deployment. The current one is actually doing the same thing now. Basically what happened in our case was that our infantry battalion was attached to the 48th Infantry Brigade in Georgia in order for the 48th to be deployed. Once in Iraq, we Illinois guys outperformed the Georgia boys, so they pushed our battalion off to be attached to the 1st and 2nd Marine Expeditionary Forces for half of the deployment. The Marines liked us so much that they authorized us to wear their patches. As a guard battalion we ended up being under seven different commands all allowing us to wear 7 different combat patches, unlike the active duty guys who normally only get to wear their own division patches. As usual they had to take something simple and complicate the heck out of it.
One of my favorite sayings from the guard is that we crammed 30 days worth of work into two days a month.
