He just wishes they'd stay: Many are making plans to bail out of the Army as soon as they can.

"All they see in the future is us being back in Iraq and here, and they've had enough," Bartleson, a platoon sergeant with Fort Bragg's 82nd Airborne Division, said last week during a five-day patrol in eastern Afghanistan's mountains.

At a time when the Army is routinely missing its monthly goals for raw recruits, another problem is looming: a potential brain drain of highly experienced troops to the civilian world.

Soldiers who re-enlist generally do so as noncommissioned officers -- corporals or sergeants -- said Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, the spokesman for the Army's chief of personnel. And so far, the Army is exceeding re-enlistment goals -- 107 percent in fiscal 2004. But, he said, overseas missions are taking a toll.

"We're concerned about repeated deployments," he said Friday. "I myself have deployed to Afghanistan twice."

Bartleson, 38, named three of his sergeants who have been overseas much of their last four years in the Army. "All they've done is go back and forth since they've been in," he said.

Bartleson's unit was one of the first to arrive in Afghanistan for the yearlong tour that's just beginning for about 2,200 Bragg soldiers. He said his group knows how to fight, can solve endless logistical problems, and is adept at dealing with the Afghan people -- a particularly useful skill in a conflict where there's little shooting but much emphasis on olive-drab diplomacy.

"I just say what needs to be done, and they know how to go and do it without a lot of baby-sitting," he said.

Commissioned officers -- lieutenants and above in the Army -- have specialized training and formal commissions, or certificates of office, from the government. As the military's senior managers, they delegate responsibility to noncommissioned officers, who serve as junior managers drawn from the ranks. They advise officers, and oversee and represent enlisted soldiers.

Sergeants are the authority figures whom grunts encounter most. They generally command units of about 10 soldiers, and it is their know-how and will that gets officers' orders executed crisply. It has been so as long as men have borne arms.

"The choice of noncommissioned officers is ... of the greatest importance," wrote Baron Frederick von Steuben in 1779, in a manual for George Washington's Continental Army. "The order and discipline of a regiment depends so much upon their behavior. ... A spirit to command respect and obedience from the men, an expertness in performing every part of the exercise, and an ability to teach it, are also absolutely necessary."

This is still true today. Alpha Company's sergeants were indispensible for the officers who led last week's patrol, Lt. Kenton Komives and company commander Capt. Ed Hollis. Neither had been on a combat deployment before.

"It definitely makes command a lot easier," Hollis said. "They can inspire confidence in their young soldiers because they know they have been there two or three times and with so much experience.

"Instead of reading books about the lessons learned, you're getting it from the guys who wrote the books," he said. "Finding a way to keep these guys in is pretty crucial for the Army."

But, even apart from the separation from family and home, overseas duty is hard. Bartleson's platoon has alternated between the drudgery of guard duty at Forward Operating Base Salerno on the edge of Khowst, a town near the Pakistan border, and long-range patrols.

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