"You're still in" - "No, I'm out"

Army to Halt Call-Ups of Inactive Soldiers

The Army has suspended plans to expand an unwieldy, 16-month-old program to call up inactive soldiers for military duty, after thousands have requested delays or exemptions or failed to show up. Despite intense pressure to fill manpower gaps, Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey said the Army has no plans for any further call-up of the Individual Ready Reserve (IRR) beyond the current level of about 6,500 soldiers. The IRR is a pool of about 115,000 trained soldiers who have left active-duty or reserve units for civilian life, but remain subject to call-up for a set period. Paul Davison, a 1995 West Point graduate, served six years as an infantry officer and two more in the IRR, ending in 2003. Now a freelance television producer, he thought there was some mistake three weeks ago when he opened the mailbox at his apartment on New York's Upper East Side and pulled out orders summoning him to report for training and deployment to Iraq. The next day, Davison, 32, dialed a phone number printed on the Mailgram to correct the error, giving a clerk his Social Security number. "You're still in," he recalled the clerk telling him. "No, I'm out," Davison replied. "You're in." "It was the most shocking, stressful, horrible thing," Davison said.