When Maj. Gen. Janson Boyles, adjutant general of the Mississippi National Guard, told Starkville Rotary Club Tuesday that the state’s armed forces were hard at work administering COVID-19 vaccinations throughout Mississippi, they didn’t have to take his word for it. They could clearly see him speaking from a vaccination site in DeSoto County in the background of his Zoom call.
“What you see behind me is where we have medics actually putting needles in arms, similar to how we’re doing in (the Mississippi Horse Park) in Starkville,” he told the club at its weekly virtual meeting on Monday. “I’ve been out at both sites. I will tell you that this week, we are now putting about 67,000 shots in arms. … That is an increase from doing 30,000 shots two weeks ago.”
Boyles, who joined the military through the Reserve Officers’ Training Corp while studying at Mississippi State University in the 1980s, is commanding general of the roughly 12,500 men and women who serve with the Mississippi National Guard. That force — made up of roughly 2,500 Air Force and 10,000 Army troops — stays busy, attending annual training throughout the county and many of them being deployed overseas to places like Kuwait and Eastern Europe for months at a time. Roughly 2,000 of those troops were deployed last week, 500 overseas, 300 training and 1,200 “supporting the COVID mission.”
“We’ve been very busy this past month,” Boyles said.
Almost since the pandemic started, Boyles said, the state has been utilizing the National Guard to help administer COVID-19 tests and, once they were available, vaccines. When shutdowns first began in March 2020, about 750 officers lost their jobs.
“I said, ‘Let’s put them to work,'” Boyles said. “So I went to the governor, and I said, ‘Look, Governor, we’re a solution for you.'”
He said Mississippi has more guardsmen per capita involved in COVID-19 operations than any other state thanks to his and Gov. Tate Reeves’ quick deployment of the Guard after the pandemic began. The Mississippi National Guard has set up 17 of the state’s dozens of vaccination sites, and hundreds of guardsmen, all volunteers, have been deployed. Boyles said he feels Mississippi is a “model” for the rest of the country in how the National Guard can be deployed to support the medical community during the pandemic.
“Whoever thought that our medics in the National Guard … would be our infantrymen of today,” he said. “But these young men and women are on the front lines right now putting shots in arms. That’s the way I’d characterize it.
“We ask them to do the same thing every day,” he added. “Sometimes we ask them to go one place or another, but what resonates with me is that they’re all very excited about what they’re doing, they’re enjoying what they’re doing. In fact, a lot of them will say, ‘This is why I joined the National Guard, to protect my community. Not just go to Afghanistan or Iraq, but to help my community.’ So this really is an example of what the National Guard was established to do, was to protect our homeland and protect our communities.”
The pandemic has not stopped the National Guard from supporting the country in other ways, Boyles said. Mississippi sent 100 military police officers to Washington, D.C., following the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, to help with the inauguration of President Joe Biden two weeks later.
“I will tell you, before they ever asked us to support the inauguration, Gov. Reeves directed me to make sure that we were doing that,” Boyles said. “So Mississippi was one of the first states to step up and say, ‘We are willing to support the Pentagon as they get through this difficult inauguration this year,’ so you can be very proud that Mississippi stepped up and did that.”
You can help your community
Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 41 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.