On the line: National Guard plugs gaps for Border Patrol in the Southwest.

SAN LUIS, Ariz. -- Sgt. Elgin Cofield, and two other National Guard members stood under a canopy along a dusty road overlooking a road leading to the U.S.-Mexico border.

It was 107 degrees and the three were dressed in full body armor.

Cofield looked through a pair of binoculars for any sign of movement.

The U.S. Border Patrol has asked the Guard members participating in Operation Jump Start to serve as their eyes and ears by manning spots along the road. Local residents have been known to collaborate with illegal aliens by leaving bicycles in the nearby brush. After crossing the border, the intruders retrieve the bikes and make a mad run for the nearby border town of San Luis, Ariz., where they can quickly blend in with the local population.

The presence of the National Guard at the end of the road, for the time being, has put an end to the tactic.

Cofield is a long way from Elizabeth City, N.C., where he serves with the 690th Support Battalion in the state's National Guard.

He and thousands of other men and women in the service have volunteered to leave their homes and family to boost the Border Patrol's mission. Some like Cofield are standing watch on the lines, or flying air patrols, to stop incursions. Others are serving at headquarters to free up agents to go to the border, thus increasing the manpower to staunch the flow of illegal immigrants and drugs. Engineering battalions are building all-weather roads or double fences that will remain long after the operation ends.

Operation Jump Start has so far been a resounding success, according to Border Patrol agents. There have been dramatic decreases in the number of apprehensions in some Border Patrol sectors, which indicates that fewer immigrants are attempting to cross. Illegal drug seizures are also up. The mission has been in place for one year, and will run until the summer of 2008.

"We attribute most of our 68 percent decrease [in apprehensions] to the National Guard being here and allowing us to put boots on the ground and more men in the field," said Border Patrol Agent Eric Anderson.

As the operation's name suggests, the National Guard presence will "jump start" an overall plan to bolster the numbers of Border Patrol agents in the south. Current plans call for the agency to rapidly double its numbers to 12,000 agents by next year. As the Border Patrol stands up, the National Guard will stand down.

However, questions remain as to whether the Border Patrol will be able to reach its recruitment goals before the end of Operation Jump Start. The academy in Artesia, N.M., is operating at full capacity. Recruiters are competing with the military, local law enforcement and other agencies for a small pool of candidates.

Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano (D) was the first of the four southern border state governors to ask the White House to deploy the National Guard from other states. The Bush administration answered in 2006 with the manpower and the funds to assist the Border Patrol with its missions.

The governor said her office is keeping Careful tabs on the Border Patrol's numbers.

"The problem is that the Border Patrol hasn't been staffed up in concurrent numbers," she said at a briefing in Washington sponsored by the Center of American Progress.

Arizona in the beginning of the decade was on the short end of two crackdowns in California and Texas. Arizona didn't receive equal resources and illegal aliens saw the state as a weak link and flooded sectors such as Tucson and Yuma. "They left us virtually unprotected," she said.

If the patrol fails to fill its ranks before the end of 2008, Napolitano said she will ask the White House to extend Operation Jump Start.

"If we see any sense of backward movement--if more trafficking is coming through our state--you can bet I'm going to shout pretty loud about it," Napolitano said.

Meanwhile, Border Patrol agents said they welcome the help the Guard is bringing them.

When National Defense visited Yuma sector in early 2006, the detention center was processing about 500 illegal crossers per day. Those numbers are down to about 100, said Anderson.

Critics of the program when it was announced in 2006 said the Guard and Army Reserves were already stretched too thin with deployments to Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom.

Some units come to the desert as part of their annual two-week training. But thousands of individual soldiers and airmen have volunteered. Their reasons for traveling to the Southwest vary, said Master Sgt. Laura Bosco, spokeswoman for the operation in Yuma. Some want to accrue active duty time, retirement points or higher education benefits through the GI Bill. Some wish to see another part of the country. Others might be out of a job at home and simply need the work and extra pay. And there are those who believe in the mission.

"It takes a lot to volunteer to sit out in the hot sun and be the eyes and ears of the Border Patrol ... that's not an easy task, so there has to be that dedication to serve," Bosco said.

Cofield, who served in Iraq, said Arizona is much easier duty. It's not war, he said. "When you're getting shot at, it's no fun. This is much better."

In Arizona, the operation has four components.

The men and women serving as the Border Patrol's "eyes and ears" are called "entry identification teams," or EITs.

The Border Patrol identifies certain hot spots where it needs Guard members to monitor. If a team spots an incursion, they radio Border Patrol agents who pursue the suspects and make the apprehensions. Normally, lone agents sitting in trucks would be at these spots.

"We just look and see what's going on and allow them to do their job," Cofield said.

The Guardsmen and women must carry weapons when leaving their post, but they are only used for defensive purposes. So far, no one in the Guard has fired their weapons, Bosco said.

Another component is the "badges-to-border" program, which brings in Guard members or reservists to do administrative work or other jobs at sector headquarters. Mechanics, for example, work on Border Patrol vehicles, which frees up agents so they can work on the front line.

Operation Diamondback is the construction and engineering facet, in which civil engineering units on rotation build fences and roads. In Yuma, the fence infrastructure is remarkably different from what was there in early 2006. A secondary fence stretching east and west of the border town of San Luis is making illegal crossing much more difficult, Anderson said.

The area was the scene of occasional "banzai runs"--the informal term used when up to 100 migrants would flood over the walls and make a run for a nearby neighborhood. Human smugglers would throw rocks at Border Patrol vehicles to create a diversion and prevent agents from arresting individuals.

Such mass incursions are down dramatically now that a secondary 16-foot chain link fence has been installed, said Anderson.

Yuma sector as of June had 9.4 miles of primary fencing. The secondary fences reached 4.29 miles, with more being added as units from as far away as Guam come in to carry out additional construction.

"Even after the National Guard leaves, we will still have the fence," Anderson said.

Gaps have been built into the secondary fence so crossers are funneled to spots where agents can more easily make apprehensions.

"I'm always blown away by how fast these construction units work," said Agent Jim Hawkins as he drove along a new all-weather road to the east of Nogales, Ariz.

The terrain in the Tucson sector is dramatically different from the flat sandy desert ill Yuma. Nogales, which sits across a Mexican town of the same name, was built on steep, rocky hills. The sector south of Tucson has traditionally been the busiest for the Border Patrol. Apprehensions there are down 11 percent since the arrival of the Guard, which is not as dramatic as Yuma, but a sharp reversal of the upward trend the area saw before the operation began, said Napolitano.

The new road goes through a spot called Smugglers Gulch, which says it all as far as the activity that normally takes place there. On the hills overlooking the gulch, Guard teams watched the hills and valleys through high-tech cameras or low-tech binoculars.

Members of the 200th Red Horse squadron based at Camp Perry, Ohio, worked on installing a cattle guard.

Only a few short months ago, the road consisted of two well-worn wheel ruts. Pursuing suspects at high speed was tricky business.

"This road can literally save one of our lives some day," Hawkins said.

Engineering units also installed bollard-style fencing at several hotspots, which will allow agents to see who is on the other side of the border. The solid corrugated steel fencing used along most parts of the city allows human or drug smugglers in Mexico to anonymously throw rocks, Molotov cocktails or other deadly projectiles at agents as they attempt to make apprehensions on the U.S. side. The new fence, which has gaps between thick steel tubes, will allow agents to fire non-lethal rounds filled with pepper spray at assailants.

Nogales is a densely packed town on both sides of the border. An elaborate underground drainage system is sometimes used to smuggle people and drugs. In late June, federal agents discovered a tunnel linking two residences. Border Patrol agents and smugglers play a non-stop cat-and-mouse game on the twisting streets.

A member of the Red Horse squadron stopped Hawkins and asked if he saw the group of kids who jumped over the fence. He hadn't, and asked when it happened. About a half hour ago was the response. Hawkins shook his head. "Body carriers," he said. The term is used for teenage boys who jump over the fence with relatively small amounts of drugs. They make a dash into a nearby safe house where they deliver the drugs and cool their heels waiting for an opportune time to jump back into Mexico. Thirty minutes was far too long to make an apprehension in such a case. With residences sitting only yards past the border, agents have only seconds to nab fence jumpers, not minutes.

Hawkins said marijuana interdictions by June this year in Tucson sector were up to 600,000 pounds, which is 100,000 pounds more than at the same point in 2006. Beyond the fence in Mexico, drug gangs were fighting a bloody turf war. More than 100 have been killed in related violence, according to media reports. Hawkins said the violence in Mexico is a direct result of the tighter security on the U.S. border. When illegal migrants find it too difficult to cross a section of the border, they can simply move to another spot. Drug cartels don't have that option. They can't smuggle drugs on another gang's territory;

"The more we expand, the more we interdict," Hawkins said.

The fourth component of Operation Jump Start in Arizona is Task Force Raven, which flies helicopters to give the Border Patrol extra eyes in the air, and also assists in search and rescue missions.

Col. Patrick McCarville, Task Force Raven commander, said he has had no difficulty finding volunteer pilots and flight crews from other states willing to travel to the border with their aircraft.

"Pilots love operational missions," he said. The duty is considered much more exciting than routine training missions in their home states, he said. Young pilots see it as an opportunity to log flight hours in real-world scenarios. "You're actually executing what you've been taught to do."

The pilots are flying UH-60 Black Hawks for search and rescue or insertion missions and OH-58 Kiowa Warrior scout helicopters with infrared and night vision sensors for spotting smugglers. Each flight has at least one Border Patrol agent riding along, he said. More than 420 pilot or flight crew members have participated so far from 31 different states. They normally serve 90-day rotations.

From August to June, Task Force Raven has assisted in more than 8,000 undocumented alien apprehensions and helped seize nearly 45,000 pounds of illegal narcotics worth $36 million, he added.

One crew in April tracked and led Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to a notorious drug smuggler a man they'd been hoping to arrest for years, McCarville said. ICE officers found 980 pounds of marijuana in a truck the smuggler and his partner had stolen.

Search and rescue missions give the crews the most satisfaction, McCarville said. So far this summer, 120 illegal migrants have died in the extreme heat.

"We have authorization to transport them, get them out of there and get them to a medical facility to save their lives," he said. The operation has carried out 16 such rescue missions as of June, he said.

After the National Guard wraps up Operation Jump Start, many of the duties will fall back to the Border Patrol. Border Patrol agents will have to staff the EIT sites. Road maintenance will have to be done by the Patrol or contractors, Hawkins said.

Anderson in Yuma and Hawkins in Tucson said new recruits are showing up every day.

"Our recruiters must never sleep," Hawkins said.

Operation Jump Start and the influx of new agents has boosted morale in the agency.

"Those troops have been a godsend to us," Hawkins said.

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