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Three days after President Bush’s plan to stabilize Iraq with more troops extended the combat tours of 159 members of the New Jersey National Guard, the news had yet to be broken to the soldiers themselves, family members said.

Many of the soldiers, who will remain in Iraq for as much as 125 days longer than planned, still thought they’d be done in March and had already begun to pack for the flight home.

That, as much as anything else, was a cause for anger yesterday as dozens of parents and spouses of the citizen soldiers vented their frustration to Gov. Jon Corzine and senior National Guard officers, who organized three town-hall-style meetings to answer as many of the families’ questions as they could.

“I spoke to my son this morning. … He’s already packing. He said, ‘I’m coming home in March,’” Rosa Rosado of Newark, whose 23-year-old son Joseph Leon is one of the affected soldiers, said at the West Orange Armory.

Like other soldiers to whom loved ones tried to break the news, Leon refused to believe his mother, dismissing the extension as “rumor” because he hadn’t been told of it by his military superiors.

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Pentagon planners this week warned President George W. Bush that his “troop surge” plan could double U.S. casualties in Iraq in the coming year and result in 10,000 or more American deaths by the end of 2008.

In a classified assessment memo, military experts predicted violence against U.S. troops will increase “at a sustained pace” and concluded that increasing the use of soldiers for house to house searches in Baghdad will “dramatically alter” the “ratio of casualties to actions” in that civil-war torn city, says a military source familiar with the memo.

The Pentagon report admitted battle weary soldiers are more prone to mistakes that lead to casualties and noted that military personnel sent to Iraq for third and possibly fourth tours increase the odds that those soldiers will become casualties of war.

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