This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2006, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
He'll be at a soldier's funeral today, one of many he's had cause to attend over the past several years.
Later this week, he'll welcome home a few more fortunate souls as they return to their families after 12 months of duty in Iraq.
And shortly thereafter, Brian Tarbet will make his fourth trip to the war-torn nation to meet his soldiers in combat, including a visit to one of that nation's most dangerous cities.
This is not the world that Tarbet knew when he accepted command of the Utah National Guard in October 2000. For that matter, it is not the world he's known at any time since joining the Army, 33 years ago this season.
For so long, the Guard was known as a "strategic reserve," Tarbet said Tuesday, shortly after Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr. announced another six-year term as adjutant general for the towering 56-year-old two-star.
"Now, four-fifths of my soldiers are combat veterans," Tarbet said. "That's an unheard of number. Even by World War II standards, it is a shift of monumental proportions."
Tarbet's first appointment came as Utah prepared for the 2002 Winter Games. It was not until after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, though, that the general knew the extent of the task he would be given. A security force of thousands of soldiers from dozens of states would be put under his command. Participants and spectators from all over the globe would attend. The world would be watching.
Meanwhile, Tarbet would oversee the deployment of hundreds of his own soldiers to Afghanistan. He would later lose a soldier there, and he would be among the first to learn of each additional Utah casualty after the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
"The costs of this business are enormous," said Tarbet, the father of five children, one of whom is an enlisted soldier who will be commissioned after his graduation later this year from Utah State University.
Tarbet said he felt heartbroken last week when he saw a photograph of the family of Ty John Johnson, an active duty soldier who grew up in Sandy and was killed in an April 4 roadside bomb explosion in Iraq.
Johnson left behind a wife, a 3-year-old daughter and a 23-month-old son. He will be buried today in Midvale, and Tarbet said he will attend the services.
But it is not only the so-called Gold Star families - those that have lost a service member in combat - that suffer in wartime, Tarbet learned in his first years as adjutant general.
"The burdens are borne, to some extent, by all of the isolated families," he said.
He learned that lesson firsthand in spring 2004 when he stood before military families in armories in Salt Lake City, American Fork, Blanding, Vernal, Price, Tooele and Spanish Fork, trying to explain why the Army had extended the war tours of the soldiers in the 1457th Engineering Battalion.
He promised those present to do all he could to bring the company home safely.
"Liar!" several of the soldiers' spouses repeatedly shouted during the Spanish Fork meeting. Officers who serve with Tarbet in the Guard's Draper headquarters said they had never before - or since - seen the general in such terribly morose condition as in those days.
Most of Utah's Army Guard and Reserve units have since been given clearer indication of how long they will spend in Iraq, as the Defense Department has fought to ensure that a one-year "boots on the ground" limit to combat tours is enforced.
Still, it was with great relief, earlier this week, that Tarbet learned the 115th Maintenance Company had returned to U.S. soil, as scheduled, after a year of duty in Iraq.
"I'm sure they're climbing the walls to get home now," he said of the 115th, which is in Fort Bliss, Texas, awaiting transportation back to Utah.
The unit finished its tour without suffering any combat casualties. Tarbet has similar hopes for all of his units - about 1,000 Utah National Guard members are in Iraq. But he also understands that not all of Iraq is as peaceful as the city of Najaf - where the 115th was primarily stationed - during the past year.
And so he worries, especially for the soldiers of the 222nd Field Artillery now in their 10th month of duty in Ramadi, capital of the volatile Al Anbar Province. More than half of the 32 soldiers killed in Iraq so far this month have died in Anbar.
When he visits, Tarbet said, he will plead with his soldiers to remain attentive to their duties in the final weeks of their deployment. Having already lost one member of that battalion - an officer from Pennsylvania who had joined the group during pre-deployment training - Tarbet doesn't want to sacrifice another.
"This is the most dangerous time, for them, as they begin to withdraw from contact and lose focus," Tarbet said.
This is not the message he has been trained to deliver. For that matter, this is not the war he was trained to fight. A German linguist by trade, Tarbet spent most of his career training other interpreters to assist in battle against a Cold War foe. And even if that fight had materialized, he knew the National Guard hadn't been called into war service in great numbers since decades before he joined the Army.
Not even the 222nd's celebrated predecessor - the 213th Armored Field Artillery Battalion - faced repeated deployments, as Tarbet's units have.
"You can go back and look at what that unit did in Korea and those men were heroic," Tarbet said. "But when you look at their successor today, it is different. These soldiers have mobilized twice in three years."
And the future holds no promise that this will be the last deployment for the artillery men of southern Utah.
Current Army deployment schedules suggest the 222nd will deploy at least once again before Tarbet's latest term expires.
"There has been a sea change," Tarbet said. "The Guard of yesterday was terrific in the role that it played.
"But it has changed."