Washington ? The Army is spread so thin around the globe that when it needs fresh combat troops for Iraq this fall it will have little choice but to call on the same soldiers who led the charge into Baghdad last spring.

The 3rd Infantry Division already has been given an official “warning order” to prepare to return to Iraq as soon as Thanksgiving. When those soldiers flew home from Iraq last summer to their bases in Georgia, few of them could have known they were, in effect, on a round-trip ticket.

They are not alone in facing back-to-back deployments to Iraq. Some of the same Marines who teamed with the 3rd Infantry to topple Baghdad are assembling again in Kuwait, only a matter of months after returning home, and more Marines will go next year.

Other Army units that recently returned or are preparing to come home this spring, including the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky., and the 4th Infantry Division at Fort Hood, Texas, are candidates for a quick turnaround.

The Army has not announced which will join the 3rd Infantry in the next rotation, although it has notified three National Guard brigades and a National Guard division headquarters that they are likely to go in early 2005.

When the Saddam Hussein government collapsed, U.S. troops in Iraq figured the war was over, except for some mopping up.

But as the acting secretary of the Army, Les Brownlee, acknowledged to Congress last week, “we simply were not prepared” for the insurgency that developed in early summer, prolonging the war and taking the lives of hundreds of American soldiers.

One 3rd Infantry soldier, Sgt. 1st Class Eric Wright, put it this way in Iraq last June: “What was told to us was that we would fight and win and go home.”

It’s not that simple.

Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said recently that the Marines and the Army were going to share as equally as possible the burden of keeping forces in Iraq for the foreseeable future.

But it has been and will remain predominantly an Army effort.

Some are concerned the Army is being squeezed so hard that soldiers will quit in droves. Statistics on re-enlistments and recruiting don’t show that to be the case — not yet, anyway. And some who know the Army best say its soldiers are willing to accept the hectic pace.

“We’ve got an Army and we’re using it,” says retired Gen. Gordon Sullivan, a former Army chief of staff and current president of the Association of the U.S. Army, a booster group.