12/18/2001 - Updated 10:29 PM ET
Lawmakers to check on Guard
By Jim Drinkard and Dave Moniz, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — Two members of the House Armed Services Committee say they will look into charges that top National Guard commanders have engaged in a pattern of misconduct and that the Army Guard has routinely inflated its reports of troop strength. The chairman of the Armed Services personnel subcommittee, Rep. John McHugh, R-N.Y., asked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the General Accounting Office to look into those issues in letters sent Tuesday.
"The nation needs to be concerned if any allegation about impropriety is accurate, and if those circumstances result in the Guard's inability to perform its duties when called upon," McHugh said. But he noted that although the federal government pays for the Guard's operations, it has no direct command authority, making oversight "very challenging."
Rep. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a member of the personnel panel, said he believes the issue of inflated troop figures could be damaging to the Guard's credibility. "I think it will get some attention and oversight," he said.
USA TODAY reported this week that at a time when the 460,000-member National Guard is being called upon to play a vital role in defending the nation against terrorism, there has been a pattern of misconduct among its senior leaders going back more than a decade.
And interviews with dozens of officers and senior enlisted personnel in the Guard revealed that many states routinely overstate the numbers of troops on their rolls. In some units, as many as one in five are "ghost soldiers," the investigation found.
Michael O'Hanlon, a military affairs expert at the Brookings Institution, said the issue of troop strength has particularly serious implications. In the Persian Gulf War, the United States had the luxury of being able to handpick 200,000 Guard and Reserve troops for deployment from a total force of 1.1 million.
Should the country face two major conflicts at once, there might be a need to activate much larger numbers. If the Guard's ranks are filled with phantoms, "we're in considerable trouble," O'Hanlon said. "It could lead to additional casualties."
The high incidence of top-level misconduct also creates problems for the Guard, he said. Though most officers are ethical, the impression that the rules don't apply to adjutants general, the top commanders in each state, can create an image of "tyranny," hurting morale and recruiting, he said. "Who's going to want to join?"
Graham said the Guard's home-grown nature is its greatest strength, but can also be a liability. It means Guard units have great experience and cohesiveness. But it also "gets to be a good-old-boy system," he said.
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'Ghost soldiers' inflate Guard numbers
By Dave Moniz, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — Army National Guard units across the USA routinely exaggerate how many troops they have by including soldiers who are no longer in the Guard, according to more than three dozen officers and senior enlisted soldiers. In some units, the percentage of "ghost soldiers" has run as high as 20%, an investigation by USA TODAY has found. If those units were called up, high-ranking Guard officers say, some would be incapable of performing their duties. With 46,000 Guard troops already called out to defend the homeland against terrorism, the Army Guard's misleading troop reports raise questions about the integrity of some senior National Guard commanders and the reliability of their units. The head of the National Guard Bureau, a headquarters that distributes money from Washington to state Guard organizations, denies there is a problem. But Lt. Gen. Russell Davis says if states deliberately inflate their numbers, "it would be a pretty darn serious offense."
Most of the phantom troops, commonly called ghost soldiers, have stopped going to monthly Guard drills and are no longer being paid. They are kept on rosters for months, and sometimes years, while replacement troops are recruited or their official discharges are completed, according to government documents and interviews with more than 40 National Guardsmen.
Officials in many states create the phantom troops because of difficulties recruiting and keeping soldiers. They fear that the federal government will shift their understaffed units, and potentially millions of dollars, to states that can recruit enough troops to fill them.
State command, federal money
Day-to-day control of the Guard rests at the state level, but 95% of its money — about $13 billion last year — comes from the federal government. The government does not lose money as a result of ghost soldiers because they are not counted for salary purposes.
By exaggerating staffing levels, Guard commanders make anemic units appear combat-ready in official reports to the Pentagon and to the National Guard Bureau in Washington, former Guard personnel officers say.
The General Accounting Office (GAO), Congress' watchdog agency, has been investigating ghost soldiers for a year but has yet to determine the extent of the problem.
The U.S. Defense Criminal Investigative Service recently completed a two-year investigation of ghost troops in Arizona. Its report has been turned over to the U.S. attorney for Arizona for possible criminal action, the investigation service says.
The investigators say that in Arizona, one of every eight soldier discharges took longer than 200 days to process. One former Guard soldier from Arizona says he was kept on the rolls for two years after leaving the Guard.
The problem with ghost soldiers is limited to the almost 350,000-member Army National Guard. The Air National Guard, which has 110,000 airmen, typically does not have ghost troops.
There is no indication that any of the Guard units called up since Sept. 11 have insufficient numbers of troops. In some cases, however, the mobilized units have been created from Guard soldiers pulled from several units.
USA TODAY interviewed current and former Army Guard troops who range in rank from sergeant to one-star general. They provided similar accounts of how Guard units inflate their reported troop numbers, often without consequence. Some spoke publicly despite fear of retribution.
The experiences of three states illustrate how games can be played with the numbers:
California has the nation's largest National Guard force, with about 20,000 Army and Air Guard troops on the rolls. But several Army Guard soldiers say that number is misleading and padding troop numbers is a common practice. Sgt. 1st Class Tom Petry says his 200-man infantry company, mobilized to go to the Middle East in September, listed 70 soldiers on its roster who seldom if ever attended monthly drills.
"I will stand in front of a congressional committee if I have to tell them about this," says Petry, who has been unable to perform his duties as a unit administrator since May because of chronic medical problems. He is due to be discharged early next year. He says the ghost soldiers were being carried on the books to make his infantry company appear combat-ready.
Guard officials in California deny Petry's allegation. They say their records show 50 unpaid soldiers in the 800-member battalion that Petry's company is part of. They also say that statewide, the number of unpaid soldiers is declining rapidly as a result of a new emphasis on discharging troops quickly.
Several other California Guard officers and enlisted men say the state has a history of inflating troop levels, however. Although not able to confirm Petry's charge, four other Guardsmen — former Staff Sgt. Ed Green, former Staff Sgt. Rick Ortega, Maj. John Kanaley and retired Col. Bill Wenger — say padding troop numbers is common.
Kanaley, a police officer in Long Beach, Calif., who left the Guard last month to transfer to the Army Reserve, says that when he was an officer in California's 40th Infantry Division from 1996 to 1998, up to 20% of his 800-man battalion were ghost soldiers.
Frequently, Kanaley says, soldiers who never showed up were marked on pay records as present, having made up the drills or were given excused absences even though they shouldn't have been.
"You feel like you're betraying the system talking about this, but sometimes these things need to be brought out," Kanaley says.
Kanaley says he believes the same practices continue today.
Maj. Gen. Paul Monroe, who took command of the California National Guard two years ago, acknowledges that 5% of the troops listed on statewide rosters exist only on paper. He did not comment on the number of ghost soldiers in individual units. Monroe says one of his biggest challenges is fixing a culture that tolerates officers filing misleading reports to make their units seem combat-ready. Monroe says he recently fired several senior officers because he didn't believe their troop reports. He also says ghost soldiers are a problem all across the Army National Guard.
In Illinois, state officials say that 3% to 5% of Army Guard troops statewide are being carried on the rolls as they await discharge. But Dave McGinnis, a retired colonel who helped National Guard headquarters develop methods to track ghost soldiers several years ago, reviewed personnel summaries from Illinois for USA TODAY and came to a different conclusion.
McGinnis says that based on monthly averages for 2000 and 2001, nearly 20% of Illinois' 10,200 Army Guard troops are not regularly participating Guard members. They're either absent without leave, absent with an excuse or transferring to another unit.
Maj. Gen. David Harris, commander of the Illinois National Guard, says McGinnis' assessment is "preposterous and not in the realm of reality."
However, one week after Harris discounted McGinnis' assessment, Guard officials in Illinois and at National Guard headquarters in Washington called USA TODAY to acknowledge inadequacies with the troop numbers that Illinois had provided the newspaper.
Illinois officials said there were inaccuracies in the data because of "bad chartsmanship," and they said an unspecified number of troops who had previously left the Army Guard had not been removed from statewide troop rolls. They were unable to provide the percentage of ghost soldiers on their rosters.
Frank Jourige experienced the ghost soldier phenomenon personally. He left the Illinois Guard five years ago, but discovered last year that he was still on the rolls as a member of a transportation unit in Chicago. Jourige learned he was a ghost soldier after he got a letter from the federal government saying he owed four years' worth of payments on a Guard life insurance policy. He says his credit rating was nearly ruined because someone forged paperwork to keep him on the rolls even though he wasn't getting paid.
This year, after an internal investigation, state Guard officials told USA TODAY that Jourige's story is true. Jourige says Illinois investigators told him they had discovered four similar cases.
Larry Metcalf, who worked in the personnel section at Arizona Guard headquarters, says he saw stacks of discharge papers sitting for months. The soldiers, though no longer attending drills, were still counted on the state's rolls without pay, Metcalf says.
After he left the Arizona Guard in January 1999, Metcalf says, he was carried for two years as an unpaid ghost soldier. At the time, the 3,800-member Arizona Army Guard was claiming "hundreds" more soldiers on the rolls than it had, he says.
Dean LeVay, a former Army Guard colonel in Arizona who is now a federal immigration judge, says that when he retired from the Guard in 1998, it was common for the state to inflate troop reports. LeVay says he doesn't know how many ghost soldiers there were, but he attended meetings at which senior officers bragged about how they prevented the state from losing units by manipulating discharges. "It shocked and angered me," LeVay says. He didn't report it, he says, because "I didn't think anybody would pay attention."
The Arizona National Guard denies loading its ranks with ghosts. Officials declined to be specific but said they have greatly reduced the number of unpaid soldiers on the rolls and have one of the lowest rates in the nation.
Guard officers from Texas, Maryland, Wyoming, Virginia and South Carolina say their states also have counted soldiers on the rolls after they have left the Guard — for up to two years in some cases.
Two officers in South Carolina say that in 1999, state officials delayed discharging nearly 500 members of a 4,300-soldier combat infantry brigade. They say state commanders wanted the brigade to appear adequately staffed, even though nearly one in eight soldiers was a ghost. South Carolina Guard officials say the allegations are untrue. They acknowledge problems with backlogged discharges in 1999 but say they never had more than 200 in the combat brigade.
Jeffrey Goldfarb, a former sergeant in the Wyoming Guard, says that from 1989 to 1996, ghost soldiers were common in his state. Goldfarb says 10 of the 65 soldiers in his headquarters company were phantoms. The problems continued after Goldfarb left. Two officers say an Army Inspector General investigation in 1999 found dozens of ghost soldiers on the state's rolls, including troops who had died. Wyoming officials, citing privacy concerns, declined to discuss the case.
Bill Burkett, a former lieutenant colonel in the Texas National Guard, says that four years ago, he and a group of officers informed Adjutant General Danny James, the state commander, that 7% of the Texas Army Guard's 16,300 troops were ghost soldiers. Burkett and others say that despite promises to fix the problem, the Texas Army Guard continues to include soldiers who shouldn't be on the rolls. According to figures provided by the National Guard Bureau, over the past two years, Texas has had anywhere from 1,300 to 1,800 unpaid soldiers on its rolls, more than 11% at its peak.
Asked about the number of unpaid soldiers on the rolls, James' office replied with a brief e-mail saying that 3.7% of Texas Army Guard troops are waiting to be discharged.
A question of readiness
Each state recruits its own National Guard soldiers and is responsible for reporting troop levels monthly to the National Guard Bureau and quarterly to the Pentagon. Both the bureau in Washington and the Pentagon use the reports to keep track of how many soldiers each state has in each unit, so they know whether the units are at battle strength.
However, it's easy to pad those reports because most Guard troops are part-time soldiers who typically are required to show up for drills only one weekend a month and two weeks during the summer. If the soldiers don't show up, the Guard often keeps them on the records by classifying them in one of several categories of excused absences or by authorizing make-up drills.
A unit that can't fill 70% of its ranks is categorized at the bottom of a readiness scale as incapable of performing "most of its wartime missions." Certain kinds of units, such as infantry, may have more difficulty keeping their ranks full than other kinds. If a unit can't regularly fill at least 70% of its ranks, the Pentagon could transfer that unit's function and federal funding to a state that can.
Last year, the Guard Bureau took troops from Indiana and Massachusetts because of personnel shortfalls. Indiana lost 1,300 Army Guard soldiers and Massachusetts about 550.
A state's National Guard is funded each year based on a formula that counts how many soldiers are showing up for drills and being paid. The formula is designed so it does not reward states that pad their rolls with unpaid ghost soldiers. However, funding levels are not adjusted to reflect soldiers who leave the Guard after the money has been allocated.
If states get money for soldiers that aren't showing up for drills, they are allowed to use the money for training or other purposes.
The GAO is trying to determine how much money the Guard has received for troops it doesn't have.
Counting ghosts
Officials at the National Guard Bureau acknowledge the Guard had problems with inflated troop reports several years ago. But, they say, they have cracked down on the problem.
The Guard Bureau commander, Lt. Gen. Davis, says some states leave discharged soldiers on the rolls because they don't have enough clerks to do the paperwork.
In the late 1980s, officials at the bureau in Washington began developing databases designed to catch states that were harboring ghost soldiers. The databases use pay records from Guard drill attendance to count how many soldiers each state has.
Guard soldiers are paid based on the number of drills they attend. Those who miss more than three consecutive months of weekend drills without a valid excuse are typically supposed to be discharged.
The Guard Bureau developed a name for these unpaid soldiers: "No Vals," which stands for "no value." Guard Bureau personnel officials say they are confident their databases make it impossible for states to hide phantom troops.
But McGinnis, the former director of force management at National Guard headquarters who examined Illinois' troop data, says the National Guard is naïve at best. He and others say some states have figured out how to hide ghost soldiers with administrative sleight of hand, by simply classifying troops in a temporary no-pay category such as excused leave.
That way they are counted as part of the unit but aren't paid. "Anytime you give them an opportunity, someone will figure out how to beat the system," McGinnis says.
McGinnis says he believes the number of ghosts in the Guard as a whole is double the 5% figure that Guard and Pentagon figures show.
Ed Green, a former staff sergeant in the California Guard, agrees with McGinnis that Guard commanders know how to beat the system.
When he left the California Guard in 1999, Green says commanders employed a variety of tricks to pad their rolls. One was to authorize soldiers absent from drills to show up at a later date to make up missed training, even when they knew they wouldn't.
Mark DePue, a former lieutenant colonel who retired from the Illinois Army Guard in April, says he discovered his state was issuing orders to discharge soldiers but was not deleting the soldiers' names from personnel databases. The practice greatly inflated the state's troop numbers, DePue says.
"The real harm is when units get called up, and ... we have given a grossly false picture," he says. "When we get to combat, and we are not ready, the unit pays the price, and the nation pays the price."
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People who blow whistle 'get crucified'
By Dave Moniz, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — When Capt. Alison Ruttenberg complained to investigators that Colorado National Guard commander John France was using Guard fighter jets for personal joy rides, France didn't appreciate it. The two-star general blocked Ruttenberg's promotion to major and tried to bar her from working as a lawyer in the Air National Guard. Unfortunately for France, he picked on someone who knew something about the law. Ruttenberg, an attorney who once had commanded a ballistic missile silo for the Air Force, knew that under federal "whistleblower" guidelines, France was prohibited from retaliating against her for making complaints, even if they couldn't be proved. Unfortunately, Ruttenberg and others say, state National Guard commanders frequently ignore whistleblower rules.
Pentagon investigators in 1995 found that her allegations had merit. A Defense Department investigation vindicated Ruttenberg and forced France to reinstate her as a judge advocate general, the military term for a lawyer, with back pay.
And France, who left office in 1995, was sued by the U.S. attorney for $10 million for taking hundreds of unauthorized flights in government aircraft. The case was later settled for about $50,000.
But none of that mattered for the several months that France threatened Ruttenberg's career.
"People who blow the whistle get crucified in the National Guard," says Ruttenberg, now a private attorney in Denver. "I was lucky. I knew what to expect and how hard to keep pushing it. People like Gen. France think they are invincible, and historically they have been able to do whatever they want to their subordinates to shut them up."
Part of the reason for that feeling of invincibility, Ruttenberg and others say, can be found in the power that state National Guard commanders have to derail investigations and punish whistleblowers. State Guard commanders, known as adjutants general, have virtually unchecked authority to hire, fire and promote troops in their states.
For that reason, Ruttenberg and others say, most misconduct at the senior levels of the National Guard is never investigated. Ruttenberg says that although France left office six years ago, little has changed in the Guard.
Cases reviewed by USA TODAY support Ruttenberg's contention that even legal officers or the Guard's own investigators can suffer when they look into corruption.
Lt. Col. Gordon Schukei, a Guard lawyer in Wyoming, found his job threatened in 1998 after he recommended that Adjutant General Ed Boenisch be investigated for his part in a scheme to improperly promote a subordinate. Schukei, recently assigned to National Guard headquarters in Washington, declined to discuss the case. But Guard members familiar with the incident confirm that Schukei barely survived Boenisch's attempts to fire him before Schukei transferred to Washington.
An Air Force investigation later determined that Boenisch had wrongly promoted the officer Schukei had complained about and that Boenisch had "condoned the backdating and falsification of official transfer and promotion orders."
A separate Air Force investigation found that Boenisch had improperly retaliated against Lt. Col. Roger Nyberg, another Wyoming Guard officer. Nyberg had tried to report misconduct against senior officers in the Wyoming Guard.
Scott Winne, a private attorney in Maine and a former Air Force judge advocate general officer who represented Nyberg, says he has never encountered a worse case of retribution against an employee. The Air Force inspector general found that Boenisch had improperly used discharge boards, tried to stop Nyberg from reporting misconduct and that he "abused his authority" to try to remove Nyberg from the Guard.
"It was textbook retaliation," Winne says.
Boenisch declined to be interviewed, but a spokesman says a separate Pentagon investigation cleared him of charges that he retaliated against Schukei.
Boenisch remains in command of the Wyoming Guard.
In Colorado, Army Guard Capt. Craig Temmer faced retaliation by the state's National Guard commander, Maj. Gen. William Westerdahl, for questioning his conduct when Westerdahl served as an aviation commander for the state. Temmer, now assigned to a National Guard headquarters job in Washington declined to discuss the specifics of his case.
A 1998 Army inspector general investigation concluded that Westerdahl had allowed a general serving under him to retaliate against Temmer by blocking his promotion and improperly ordering a mental health examination for him.
The inspector general report said Westerdahl had committed a list of other misdeeds, including improper relationships with Guard members, using aircraft for personal vacations to resort areas, failing to properly report aircraft accidents, improperly accepting gratuities from government contractors, and improperly firing subordinates.
Westerdahl left office in February 2000.
In Illinois, National Guard investigators were threatened by the state's chief of staff after they began looking into sexual misconduct allegations against him. According to Guard officers in Illinois, Col. James Burgess made threats against Air Force Lt. Col. Rick Cox and Army Col. Jack Edwards after they began investigating allegations that Burgess had solicited sex from numerous enlisted women in the Illinois Guard.
After the inspector general officers began their investigation, Burgess made obscene gestures to Edwards and on several occasions walked into Edwards' office and asked him, "Are you afraid?" Guard sources say. Another officer familiar with the Burgess case says that Edwards and Cox were "treated like lepers" by senior officers in the Illinois Guard after they began investigating Burgess.
Cox and Edwards were military investigators assigned to Illinois. Both are still in the military and declined to discuss the Burgess investigation. Burgess also declined to comment.
Ruttenberg and other officers who faced reprisals say the system for reporting misconduct often breaks down, and that not even investigators for the inspector general or judge advocate general have any guarantee they will be able to root out corruption.
"The longer some of these adjutant generals stay in power, the more invincible they feel," Ruttenberg says. "Gen. France was confident he was going to be able to squash me like a little bug."
John Raschke, a former Army inspector general in Illinois, says the sometimes fuzzy lines between federal and state oversight of the Guard leaves an investigative vacuum.
Raschke says governors and state legislatures, who have the authority to police Guard corruption, rarely exercise oversight of the Guard, even when they are notified of problems.
"It leaves the adjutant general as this little potentate," Raschke says.
Mike Feeley, a former state senator from Colorado and former Marine, agrees. Feeley says that in Colorado, "the actions of the Guard are routinely rubber-stamped by the Legislature because it's something most state legislators know nothing about."
Feeley says some state senators were informed of Ruttenberg's case and expressed concern but did little else.
"Our legislators are not prepared to deal with military issues. The military speaks a unique, cryptic language, and most lawmakers are afraid they'll make fools of themselves or appear unpatriotic," Feeley says.
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Most adjutants make more than governors
By Dave Moniz, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — The active-duty military takes great care in training its future generals. They must rise slowly through the officer ranks from lieutenant to colonel, take rigorous courses at military colleges and command units as large as 5,000 troops. Not so in the National Guard. The Guard is the only place in the U.S. military where the top general isn't required to have had senior commands or led large numbers of troops. State Guard commanders can even skip two or three ranks to get the job.
And yet the National Guard's commanding generals usually make more money than the governors who are their commanders-in-chief. In the case of Connecticut, the National Guard commander earns more than twice as much as the governor.
Welcome to the rarefied world of the adjutant general, the official name for America's 50 state National Guard leaders. Together, the size of the force they command is larger than the military of every country in NATO except Turkey. And they rule their state militaries with unrivaled autonomy.
"Becoming an adjutant general is like being coronated," says Maj. Gen. Paul Monroe, who commands the 20,000-member California National Guard, the nation's largest.
Soon after taking the adjutant general post in May 1999, Monroe made what he thought was an innocent remark about the carpeting in his office to several subordinate officers. The next day when he walked in, the carpet had been replaced. "You just can't believe how you are treated all of the sudden. It can really go to your head," Monroe says.
The nation's National Guard commanders are the most powerful yet anonymous military leaders in the nation. It's a safe bet that most people don't know the meaning of the title "adjutant general," let alone the name of their state's National Guard commander.
Adjutants general lead National Guard contingents in 50 states plus the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Together, these two-star generals command an Army and Air Guard force of about 460,000 troops.
Few military commanders anywhere are compensated so well.
A review of adjutant general salaries by USA TODAY shows that 41 state Guard commanders earned more than their governors last year. Thirteen of them earned more than the nation's top active-duty general.
Gen. Hugh Shelton, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, commanded 1.4 million regular troops and was paid about $132,100. Maj. Gen. William Cugno, the adjutant general of Connecticut, earned about $166,300 while commanding a force of 5,000.
Adjutants general aren't chosen the same way as active duty or Reserve military officers, who must rise through the ranks and compete nationally for promotions. In all but two of the 50 states, governors appoint their National Guard commanders. In South Carolina and Vermont, adjutants general are elected by the people and the Legislature, respectively.
Sometimes, the selections backfire.
In the past decade, adjutants general from at least nine states have committed offenses that include strong-arming subordinates for campaign contributions, using military aircraft for personal vacations, improperly retaliating against officers reporting misconduct and lying to federal investigators.
The litany of problems can be blamed partly on how state commanders are chosen, argues Buddy Stroud, the former adjutant general in Louisiana. Some adjutants general are appointed to the position without having climbed a career ladder that would properly prepare them for a top command and the perks that come with the job, Stroud says.
"All of the sudden, they have 10,000 soldiers and airmen, cars, airplanes — you can go anywhere in the world you want," he says.
Stroud says that many adjutants general know that even if they violate military regulations they probably will stay in office until their terms are up. Instances in which governors have relieved their state Guard commanders are rare, Defense Department documents show. Of the nine top commanders who were found to have committed serious violations of military rules in the past decade, only one was removed from office by a governor. Two others were removed from office after the FBI or state criminal investigators uncovered corruption.
Sometimes even their own commanders-in-chief can't get rid of them.
In one little-noticed case a decade ago, an adjutant general who had been relieved of command by his governor tried to take back command of the Mississippi National Guard when the governor traveled out of state.
Gov. Ray Mabus demoted Adjutant General Jim Farmer in 1990. Mabus said Farmer had quietly bought a share in a convenience store venture near one of two gates to Camp Shelby, a military training facility south of Hattiesburg, Miss., and used his authority to close the other gate.
At the time of his investment, Farmer also had insider information about a planned expansion of the camp, which amounted to a conflict of interest, Mabus charged.
The power struggle wound up in federal court; Farmer never regained power, although he continued to draw a salary and wear his uniform. Mabus says he enlisted the help of National Guard headquarters in Washington to get rid of Farmer but was unable to remove him.
A federal judge reviewing the case later wrote that the dispute seemed "more at home in the plot of a class B movie about a fictional coup d'état in a third-world country than to present-day happenings in a sovereign state."
Farmer later used his clout to get revenge: He mobilized the state's 16,000 Guardsmen against Mabus in the 1991 election, and Mabus lost.
Contributing: Jim Drinkard
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