Kat Lonsdorf, over at NPR, has spent the last few weeks trying to answer a question

that is both simple and very complicated. What is it like to be a member of the National Guard

these days?

I live in D.C., so there are 2,300 National Guard troops right now in the city,

and they are walking around the sidewalks with me and all the rest of the folks in D.C.

You see them pretty much every single day.

Kat sees them, but she can't talk to them, mostly because they won't talk to her.

In fact, Kat had to travel all the way to Ohio to get Guard members to open up.

I've only just started finding National Guard members, honestly, who will speak.

I think it's been, you know, all of us have happened both quickly and not, right?

And so I think a lot of National Guard members are coming to a point where they really are grappling with what's happening right now

and thinking about starting to talk.

Kat was looking to connect with guard members who'd faced a choice.

Deploy to an American city, a place like Washington, D.C., or Los Angeles, or refuse.

The people she found had decided to stay home.

It's a legitimate thing that they're thinking through, and the voluntary directive has come to their unit.

They just haven't taken it. But, you know, those deployments are voluntary until they're not.

If they don't get enough people to voluntarily sign up to take one of these deployments,

then they will start compelling people to take them.

You mentioned that the people you spoke to had seen pushback in their own communities

to how the National Guard was being pulled up in this moment sent to places domestically.

How had that changed how they thought about their service or how they communicated their service in public?

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