What is the Reserve or National Guard really like?

Lucky Lopez, an Army National Guard Veteran, mechanic and car business YouTuber, joined to work on vehicles. Then he landed in a Guard unit in Las Vegas that was, as he tells it, paper pushers, nurses and, somehow, mechanics.

“Nobody used the Hummers, the HEMTTs, nothing. We were just standing around twiddling our thumbs.”

Hear it at 5:39

Bored mechanics are a hazard. Lopez says they started finding out how much air a tire will take before it explodes. Somebody in charge noticed.

“It got so bad that they actually had me set up classes to teach people how to work on regular cars.”

Hear it at 6:05

He brought his own cars to drill for the lessons. One of them, he thinks, was a Ferrari. That was his one weekend a month.

It is a true story about the Guard, and it is nobody else’s story. That is the first thing nine Veterans taught us about part-time service, in interviews filmed by Vegas Veteran Voices, a Las Vegas nonprofit. There is no “the Reserve.” There is your unit, and the brochure does not know which one you will get.

What the brochure says

The official version is short. Military OneSource, the Department of Defense’s help desk, puts it at 48 drill periods a year, which for most units means one weekend a month, plus two weeks of annual training. You keep your civilian job or your classes.

Michael D’Angelo, a Marine Corps Veteran, machine gunner and stand-up comic, got a shorter version. He wanted to ship to boot camp early. His recruiter said he could, if he gave up his signing bonus and changed jobs. Then came the last condition.

“He goes, ‘And you got to be a reservist.’ And I was like, ‘What is that?’”

Hear it at 13:53

He says he was told he could put in paperwork to go active once he checked in. He checked in, at Nellis, and says his unit told him no. So he was a Marine machine gunner drilling on an Air Force base. We will let that sentence sit there.

It is never one weekend

Jamie Waterberry, an Air Force Veteran who works in corporate philanthropy, went from active duty to a reserve squadron while holding a full-time civilian job. The squadron was short of people.

“The reserve squadron that I was at really needed some help. So they kept asking me to go on orders. And that is incredibly difficult when it’s not where you live at.”

Hear it at 25:14

Sarah, an Army Reserve staff sergeant and medic who co-owns a restaurant, was asked what civilians get wrong about reservists.

“It’s never just one weekend a month. Like I said, it plays into your everyday life, especially when you do start making rank and you do hit E5 and above. I get phone calls. I get texts every day.”

Hear it at 6:57

So one unit had nothing to do on drill weekend, and one sergeant cannot get through a Tuesday without the unit calling. Same slogan.

Clayton, an Air Force Veteran and founder of Red Tails Racing, served in the Air National Guard and deployed more than once. Part-time units go to war too. His trouble was paper. He says two personnel offices never agreed on whether he was a senior airman or a lieutenant, and nobody could fix it.

“Couldn’t progress rank at all, couldn’t do anything because my paperwork couldn’t be corrected.”

Hear it at 24:41

He now says his commander had no power to change it. At the time, his answer was to learn how the points system worked and volunteer to be gone.

“I’m just going to stay deployed so that I never have to show up to drill.”

Hear it at 25:31

A man picked deployment over drill weekend. That is not on the brochure either.

The reputation

Waterberry noticed something the day she crossed over from active duty.

“There’s a reason why people have comments about folks in the reserve versus active duty. It was definitely a shocker for sure.”

Hear it at 27:02

She means the pace. Here is one of the comments. David Lonergan, a Marine Corps Veteran and fitness coach who served on active duty, compares it to exercise: train two or three days a month and you are not the person who trains 30.

“A reservist, basically, to me, like a civilian, because they only train like once a month for a weekend.”

Hear it at 10:52

He adds that he is not talking bad, “it’s just the mindset.” D’Angelo heard that for six years from the inside.

“It’s hard to have pride in being in the military when you’re in the reserves.”

Hear it at 17:40

He does not fully disagree. He says some of the people he drilled with earned the reputation. He also trained in the jungle in Belize and went to Okinawa as the youngest man in his cadre platoon. What turned it for him was a kind of Marine the Reserve collects: people coming off active duty, on their way out.

“They kind of validated me because I knew what I was doing.”

Hear it at 19:26

The door you can leave open

Those people are in the Reserve for a reason, and Waterberry is one of them. She knows what it cost her. She still tells everyone leaving active duty short of retirement the same thing.

“I really recommend, hey, take a look into the reserve. See how you feel about it. You know, it’s not that big of a commitment.”

Hear it at 26:10

Bruce Cardenas, a Marine Corps Veteran who went on to the LAPD, took that door and later closed it.

“Four years active. Then I ended up doing another, I think, seven or eight in the reserves. Kind of one of my regrets.”

Hear it at 11:09

The regret is the leaving. “The reserve thing was great,” he says. Then came police work, kids and a young family, and the weekends lost.

What it is for

Ask what the part-time military does when it is not at war and you get answers nobody recruits with. Robert “Gunny Claus” Porter, a Marine Corps Veteran of 21 years, wears the beard for Toys for Tots.

“It’s a mission of the Marine Corps Reserve. Not every Toys for Tots program is run by the reserve because we don’t have reserve units everywhere in the United States.”

Hear it at 27:00

And Ross D. Bryant, a U.S. Army Veteran who leads UNLV Military and Veteran Services, says about 200 of his students are Guard soldiers and airmen. He knows why many of them signed.

“School is free if you join the Guard and do all that extra work on weekends.”

Hear it at 1:10:33

He is also the one who picks up the phone and calls the chain of command when the Guard’s paperwork for those students runs late.

So what is it really like?

It is like your unit. Lopez got a motor pool where nothing broke. Sarah got a phone that never stops. Clayton got a paperwork error he could only outrun by deploying. D’Angelo got six years of proving a point, and the people who finally told him he had made it. Lonergan is not wrong that a weekend is a weekend. Cardenas would take the weekends back.

Nobody here can tell you which of those you would get. They can tell you the slogan covers about two days of it.