By CHRIS WILSON

Senior Writer

AMORY - Amory's National Guard soldiers are among the thousands of Mississippi Army National Guardsmen who will be heading back to the Middle East this summer. The deployment comes as no surprise to the soldiers as the Pentagon had put them on alert for the deployment in December of 2007.

According to Col. William Glasgow commander of the 155th Brigade Combat Team (BCT) headquartered in Tupelo, there will be about 3,300 to 3,400 soldiers deployed to Iraq who are part of the 155th. The deployment will be for one year.

Amory's 1-98th Calvary Regiment is under the 155th BCT.

There are about 100 soldiers in the Amory unit who will be deployed on May 1. They will be heading to Camp Shelby in Hattiesburg to finish training for 40 to 60 days before deploying to Kuwait and then on to Iraq.

The 98th includes soldiers from Amory, Nettleton, Pontotoc, Booneville, Fulton, Iuka, Corinth and Ripley.

The 155th will serve as a security force in Iraq. The soldiers will be conducting convoy security operations there as well as base protection. At Camp Shelby, the soldiers will do what Glasgow refers to as "collective" training, preparing them to work together as teams.

According to the Pentagon, more effort is now being made to deploy entire brigades at once to the battlefronts where they can work more effectively as teams. Brigades generally have about 3,500 troops.

Currently about a fifth of the troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan are National Guard soldiers.

Amory's 1-198th deployed to Iraq in 2005 when the soldiers conducted operations in four of Iraq's provinces where they primarily conducted counter-insurgency operations as well as stability and support operations.

Amory National Guardsman Sgt. Chris Coker, who is employed as a full-time guardsman, will be working in public affairs during the deployment. He was among those soldiers who served in Iraq in 2005. He said that he feels prepared to return. "We've been training a lot and we just returned from our annual training that is usually done as summer camp," Coker said. "We trained for mobilization."

Coker said he thinks this time the troops' role in Iraq will be quite different from their earlier deployment. "The country has changed a lot," he said.

Coker said he doesn't mind going back. "I supported the mission at the beginning and we need to see it out to the end," he said.

The 1-98th's soldiers are a mixture of about half veteran soldiers who have been to Iraq before and half young new soldiers. Coker said many of the soldiers from the Amory unit who went to Iraq in 2005 have either retired or have transferred to another unit.

The deployed soldiers have had plenty of time to get their household and family affairs in order before leaving the country for the war zone. But Coker said it is still not easy leaving family behind. Coker left a wife behind last time, but this time also has a 2-year-old son who he won't be seeing in person for a year.

"To me, it's harder for the families at home than it is for us. We've got all our duties there to keep us busy, but they are at home handling everything."