BENTONVILLE, Ark. - As fighting continues in Iraq and Afghanistan, some U.S. employers are reluctant to hire National Guard members and military reservists, according to anecdotal reports heard Monday at a field hearing of a House Veterans Affairs subcommittee.

Federal law requires employers of reservists and National Guard soldiers sent on military missions to take them back on again after their deployment is over, in the jobs they held before.

But, as war in the Middle East continues, some companies are hesitating to hire reservists and National Guard members in the first place, witnesses told the hearing of the Veterans Affairs Committee's Subcommittee on Economic Opportunity.

They said the companies can thus avoid the prospect of holding those workers' jobs open if they are called up for service duty. Maj. Gen. William D. Wofford, commander of the Arkansas National Guard, was among those who said he had heard reports of such practices.

Reps. John Boozman, R-Ark., and Stephanie Herseth Sandlin, D-S.D., convened the hearing at Northwest Arkansas Community College.

"The committee will seek harder data on this," Herseth Sandlin said.

She said the reports of such practices were becoming too persistent to ignore.

Herseth Sandlin and Boozman agreed after the two-hour hearing that it would be surprising if the reports were not true.

"People are going back for their third deployments by now in Iraq and Afghanistan" Boozman said. "We haven't made demands like this on the National Guard since World War II."

But the two House members were also told that many employers continue to support veterans and their families to the fullest extent possible.

Paige Smith, the wife of a returning veteran, said her company gave her a week off with pay when her husband came home from a deployment, though she had already used up all her vacation days.

Herseth Sandlin said the nation's economic slowdown makes it more important that Congress consider changes to improve veterans' economic prospects and make sure they know what benefits and programs are available and what rights they have.

"One of my major frustrations with the Pentagon is how easy they find veterans when it's time to mobilize them and how they can't find them when it's time to explain the benefits they're entitled to," she said during the hearing.

Such changes, she said, might include paying attorneys' fees for veterans filing job-discrimination complaints, and providing health benefits to reserve troops even before deployment, making them more attractive as prospective employees.