Troops Return, Elated but Changed

Reservists Worry About Picking Up the Pieces of Their Old Lives

Scott Halbleib of the 443rd, surrounded by family members, gets a long-awaited hug from daughter Lindsey, 12, after he and his fellow MPs are dismissed to their families at Fort Lee. (Michael Lutzky -- The Washington Post)

CAMP ARIFJAN, Kuwait

U.S. Army Capt. Jonathan Bennett counts them as they board the buses to the airport, tapping them on the shoulder as if to confirm their presence. The mood is giddy and raucous -- part kindergarten class, part college fraternity -- and they cheer as the buses lurch forward.

"When I get home, I'm going to sit in a bathtub with a bottle of champagne," a sergeant announces.

Bennett is in the front row -- one eye on the road ahead, one eye on his soldiers -- and he's smiling. All 116 of the men and women under his command are safe. Every day for the last 10 months, he had worried that the members of the 443rd Military Police Company would not all make it home from the war in Iraq intact.

Now the plane waits to carry them home to Maryland, a prospect that at the beginning of their deployment held nothing but unimaginable joy. But after all they have been through during their time in Baghdad -- the mortar attacks, the hostile prisoners, the roadside bombs -- there is a sense of unease beneath the palpable excitement.

Bennett cannot tell how much the experience has changed each of them. But he knows that the home they left is not the home they are returning to. What has the time away done to them, their families, their regular jobs? How hard would it be to resume their old lives and leave the war behind?

The 443rd is a unit of the Army Reserve, the part-time wing of the military that in peacetime trains one weekend a month and two weeks a year but otherwise allows for normal 9-to-5 civilian jobs and regular family lives. Life for many reservists has been far from routine since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The 443rd, based in Owings Mills, Md., has spent almost two years on active duty. Its members were called up a month after the attacks and did guard duty for a year at a military base in Texas. When they got home from that deployment, in October 2002, they knew it was a matter of time before the next call-up; military police are in great demand and short supply. The call came in February, and they were sent to Iraq.

When Bennett, 31, left for the Texas deployment, he had been selling advertisements for a local newspaper, making $75,000 a year -- enough to buy a comfortable Centreville house with a wraparound porch. His son was 6 months old, and his wife had been supportive about his leaving.

More than two years later, everything at home sounds uncertain, unsettled. Although he knew his wife has been in therapy to deal with her fears about his safety, he does not know what the time apart has done to her. Or to them. And having been around for just six months of his son's life, he knows he is something of a stranger to the boy. He has missed so much -- Chase's first words, his first steps.

Just behind him on the bus, Staff Sgt. Regina Lucas begins the trip home with a similar set of worries. When the unit shipped out for Texas, the 42-year-old single mother from Fort Meade sent her daughter, Phranci, to stay with her grandmother in Mississippi. And when the Iraq call-up came, Phranci headed south once again. Now, Lucas wonders how the 10-year-old will handle the move back to Maryland.

She also worries about how much she has changed in the desert. Who is she now: A soldier? A mother?

The first night at the Baghdad camp, where they guarded enemy prisoners of war, a riot broke out, rousing them from their cots in the middle of the night. Lucas, one of the more experienced soldiers in the unit, grabbed her rifle and confronted hundreds of prisoners yelling and shaking the barbed wire of their holding cells. She was terrified.

Later, on one of the Army medical forms, she checked the box to say she wanted to speak with a counselor when she gets home.