When it comes to summer vacation, three months slips by pretty quickly. But if it's three months stationed in Iraq, Army Sergeant Johana Pilkington says three months is a long time.

"It's a relief to know that you're gonna go home in twelve months and not fifteen months. And it's also something to celebrate, because it's pretty much you're gonna come home early or it's pretty much you don't have to do any more."

 

Major Jay Adams at Fort Hood says the credit goes to the troops for making the reduced tours possible. "Those soldiers and their families who sacrificed so much over the course of the surge period, over the last fifteen to eighteen months, have made the conditions on the ground such that we can adjust the policy."

 

Retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Fowkes says the surge worked. "It certainly seems to have worked. I mean what it really is is not so much adding troops to solve a problem, it was changing the way those troops were used in a rather large way."

 

Lieutenant Colonel Fowkes says twelve month tours were standard in Vietnam and 15 months is too much.

 

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