Pemberton Township Schools Superintendent Michael R. Gorman recently spent an afternoon on a windswept piece of Oklahoma prairie experiencing what it feels like to go to war.

     Wearing a body-armor vest and Kevlar helmet, Gorman climbed into a Humvee for a training patrol at Fort Sill with members of the 1-150th Assault Helicopter Battalion of the New Jersey Army National Guard. The veteran educator was in the thick of things when a mock roadside bomb explosion forced the Soldiers to shoot their way out of an ambush before linking up with a medical evacuation helicopter.

     “The whole training exercise makes it very graphic – and very easy for me to understand how these Soldiers get ready,” Gorman said.

     Allowing Gorman to reach that understanding is the reason an organization known as the Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve brought him and nearly two dozen other government and business officials from New Jersey to Fort Sill on March 12-13 to watch the 1-150th train for its deployment to Iraq next month. The group included school officials, police commanders, a power company executive and the owner of an excavation company. The one thing every member of the group had in common was that one or more of their employees are part of the assault helicopter battalion.

     In Gorman's case, that employee was Staff Sgt. Patrick Fry, 43, a special education teacher at Pemberton High School as well as a football, track and bowling coach.

     Fry, a flight operations specialist in the Guard, said he was glad that Gorman took the time to get a better understanding of what he does when called to military service.

     “The fact he's here shows he cares,” Fry said.

     The trip, known as a “Boss Lift” was sponsored by the Pentagon-backed ESGR, which protects the employment rights of military reservists One of the ways it does this is by making sure bosses know what their people do when they get called to military duty – whether it's to train at a military base in Oklahoma or to deploy to war in Iraq or Afghanistan.

     The employers who went on the boss life last week flew from McGuire Air Force Base to Fort Sill on a New Jersey Air National Guard KC-135 tanker jet.

     Before the employers boarded the tanker, Maj. Gen. Glenn K. Rieth, the state adjutant general, told them that by supporting their employees, they are making a direct contribution to the state and nation's defense.

     That's because nearly half of the combat strength of the U.S. military is in the reserves, which includes the National Guard. And unlike the other reserve components, the National Guard can also be activated by the governor in state emergencies.

     “The nation and our state are asking a lot of our citizen Soldiers,” Rieth said. For example, two-thirds of the Soldiers in the 150th Aviation have served in Iraq at least once before.

     Although Fry has been in the military off and on for nearly two decades, this will be his first deployment to Iraq.

     “This is what we train to do,” Fry said. “Everybody is working hard and we'll be ready when we get there.”

     The Soldiers expect to be in Iraq through the end of the year.

     Fry said he's going to miss his students – and his own kids, who range in age from 7 to 3 months old.

     It was Fry's concern for his children that convinced him to end a six-year break in military service and rejoin the National Guard after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

     “Everything I do in the military is for the safety of my kids,” Fry said.