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Members of a Tucson Army National Guard unit are shipping out late next week for a year-long tour in Afghanistan.

More than 80 members of the 158th Combat Sustainment Support Battalion will help provide food, water, ammunition, fuel and other necessities to U.S. and allied troops in the war zone.

The citizen soldiers will spend several weeks training at Fort Hood in Texas before heading overseas. They are due to return to Tucson in October 2010, said Maj. Paul Aguirre, a spokesman at Arizona Army National Guard headquarters in Phoenix.

About half of the unit's 84 soldiers are from Southern Arizona; the rest are from elsewhere in the state.

For many, it's their second time overseas. About 30 unit members have been previously deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, Aguirre said.