Guard member called to Iraq loses his job with Idaho

BOISE – An Idaho National Guardsman was fired from his state job a day after being called for active duty in Iraq.

The firing of Pfc. Britt Haustveit is indicative of a larger problem that citizen soldiers have with employers, Guard and military reserve advocates said.

Haustveit, 23, had been working for the Transportation Department for nearly a year when his Guard unit was put on alert in late February. He told the Lewiston Morning Tribune on Monday that his supervisors asked him almost daily if he was being called up, and he kept telling them it was unclear because he was in a support, not a combat, unit.

But the Guard assigned him to a vacant combat spot, Haustveit said, and on April 8 he was told he would be mobilized for Iraq.

The next day, he said his supervisors told him he was dismissed, citing low scores on his evaluation and his probationary status.

“It was a personnel decision totally unrelated to his call-up to active duty,” department spokesman Mel Coulter said Tuesday. “He was a probationary employee. It’s really unfortunate, the timing happened when it did.”

Coulter said the department has a number of employees in the Guard and Reserves, citing one who spent a year in Iraq and was promoted shortly after returning to his job last year.

Haustveit will be transferred to Fort Bliss, Texas, this week for training before being sent to Iraq this fall. He was not immediately available for comment beyond what he told the Morning Tribune.

Gov. Dirk Kempthorne looked into the firing but declined to comment on the case Tuesday, deferring comments to the Transportation Department

But Kempthorne spokesman Michael Journee said Haustveit’s firing does not lessen Kempthorne’s pledge to maintain employment commitments.

“The governor’s still committed to ensuring that the servicemen have the security that they deserve in their jobs,” Journee said.

Kip Moggridge, the volunteer state chairman for the group that intercedes with employers for reservists and guardsmen, said the number of employment complaints being filed with Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve has increased markedly with the major role the National Guard and Reserve are playing in Iraq.

“There’s all kinds of discrimination,” Moggridge said, and mobilization of 2,000 members of the Idaho National Guard for deployment to Iraq this year “just exacerbates it because the numbers are bigger and the impacts greater because people are going to be gone for more than two or three weeks.”

Moggridge said most cases are resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.

“Many companies, they don’t have policies or their policies are 20 years old and they realize it’s the law and change the policies,” he said.

Last year, he said, his group handled 16 job discrimination cases statewide, but in the past eight months the employer support group has processed 40 cases and is dealing with dozens more.

Employer attitudes run the gamut, he said. There are companies like Micron Technology and Washington Group International, which were honored Tuesday for going beyond their minimum legal responsibilities to guardsmen.

“And then there’s others who say, ‘If you’re in the Guard or Reserve, I wouldn’t hire you,’ ” Moggridge said.

But the real crunch will come in 18 months or so when the 116th Cavalry Brigade comes home, and members look for their old jobs, the vast majority with small businesses.

“Everybody’s patriotic when the parade starts,” he said.

“When the real problem occurs is when 3,000 citizen soldiers come home.”