The following day, the relief among the soldiers was palpable. With nothing to do but pack and wait, they watched movies, read, slept, smoked or wandered aimlessly on the base. The infantrymen lived on bunk beds in an encampment called Tent City, a cluster of tan, canvas tents packed with 20 soldiers each. Rain had turned the area into a swamp. Hot showers were rare. No one seemed to care.
"Sir, how the hell are you?" a soldier yelled, smiling and waving to Capt. Chris Loftis, of Honolulu, who speaks fluent Arabic and served as the battalion's liaison to the Iraqi security forces.
Before heading back to the United States, soldiers live in Tent City, a cluster of canvas tents in Kirkuk with about 20 troops in each.
(Steve Fainaru - The Washington Post)
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"I'm great, sergeant," Loftis shouted back.
"I love you," yelled the soldier before disappearing into one of the camp's reeking portable bathrooms.
At the evening meeting for senior officers, the unit's commander, Lt. Col. Dave Miller, asked the battalion medic, Maj. Joel Meyer, for an update on his activities.
That afternoon, Meyer, who is normally a family practitioner at Tripler Army Medical Center in Hawaii, had removed two locks from a black box that he had carried for the past year. He methodically took out the contents -- vials of morphine, dozens of bottles of pharmaceutical-grade Demerol, a painkiller, and Ativan, an anxiety-reducing medication -- and spent the next two hours destroying them. Meyer dumped the pills into a toilet, where they dissolved. He injected the morphine into the mud.
"Well, I disposed of tens of thousands of dollars worth of controlled substances," Meyer reported. "I had three square meals. I'm planning on turning in early."
All of the soldiers were taking reintegration training to help cope with what senior officers predicted would be a difficult transition, especially for those with families. "A year deployment is not healthy for nobody," Agueda said. "Every single man in this company has been through a crisis, I guarantee that. Right now, it's going to take some time to repair, and that includes myself."
"We've all aged tremendously," Hussey said.
Each soldier seemed to carry a memory of his own brush with mortality. Passing a filtered-tipped cigar among friends outside his tent, Johnson, the specialist from Chicago, said his came last October during a U.S. offensive 65 miles north of Baghdad. He was outside an Iraqi police station occupied by U.S. forces in Samarra when a rocket-propelled grenade came hurtling toward him.
"It was just a white streak, and it was screaming your name -- Johnson! Johnson! Johnson! -- all the way down the street," he said as his friends dissolved in laughter. The grenade hit a tank about 15 yards away and pitched him to the ground, he said, shaken but unharmed.
Baker said his defining memory came during the same operation. "There was this family walking down the street, and, you know, it's a war," he said, staring into space. "There's bodies tore in half and stuff all over the place and this barefoot kid comes walking up to me. He's holding his father's hand. I was just thinking, 'How will this kid possibly get over this?' He had brains and pieces of guts between his toes. I took out a piece of candy and I gave it to him, and he started smiling like absolutely nothing was wrong."
Baker paused.
"I just want to get home and see my girls," he said.
Capt. Chris Duncan, 28, a Johns Hopkins University graduate from Kingsland, Ark., said he staunchly supported the war. But when he heard a soldier had been killed, or saw one of his friends wounded, he occasionally found himself asking, "What was it for?"
On election day, Duncan said, he stood near a precinct and watched Iraqis stream to the polls. "First you had one, then two, then 50," he said. "Then the line was around the polling site. And this was in a neighborhood where people really had a reason to dislike us -- former Baath Party members, former military regime guys."
Duncan, who has spent 20 months in Iraq over the past three years, said the image solidified his resolve.
"Now I know what it was for," he said.
