More than 40 percent of the soldiers in Iraq are what used to be called "weekend warriors" - members of the National Guard and Reserve. They're not part of the regular Army, but you could have fooled them. Many of them have been exposed to the risks of combat for months on end.

They're suffering plenty of casualties. Since Feb. 1, they've accounted for a quarter of all combat deaths. In the Army itself, it's a third of all combat deaths.

These aren't just citizen soldiers; they are our neighbors. In recent months, The News Tribune and other news organizations have provided extensive coverage of the Washington reservists and Guard troops serving in Iraq.

What emerges is a portrait of astonishing diversity. There is a schoolteacher who becomes a sergeant when mobilized; a police officer who becomes a battalion commander; a minister who becomes a chaplain; a financial advisor who leads a company.

The diversity encompasses age. The News Tribune's Adam Lynn, reporting from Iraq, profiled on Monday several Vietnam veterans who've been deployed there with the Washington National Guard's 81st Brigade Combat Team. The youngest was 53 years old; the oldest, 57. They'd served in Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s. Imagine World War I doughboys called up for the Korean War; the span of years is roughly the same.

An accompanying photo taken in Baghdad by The News Tribune's Peter Haley shows 57-year-old Staff Sgt. Richard Lask, once a Marine in Vietnam, joking with a very youthful-looking second lieutenant. Lask's nickname is "Grandpa." The lieutenant outranks him, but the younger man knows - if he's smart - when to lean on the experience of veteran noncoms like Lask.

Much controversy surrounds the long deployments of so many National Guard and Reserve units. The Defense Department's extraordinary dependence upon them in the Middle East does suggest that America's regular forces are too small, its military commitments too many.

The so-called weekend warriors are also sorely missed at home - by their loved ones, their employers and even governors accustomed to relying on Guard units to battle wildfires.

Still, there is something fundamentally democratic about an army that includes so many ordinary citizens, people who may be police officers, carpenters or doctors one day and soldiers the next. Americans must never come to enjoy the waging of war, and seeing our neighbors exposed to enemy fire will help ensure that we never do.

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