Troops Return, Elated but Changed

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)

The pilot dims the cabin lights, and the passengers stare out the window at the sun setting over the desert. The plane gathers speed.

"Here we go," Bennett says.

The plane moves faster.

"Come on, come on," says a sergeant.

The entire cabin bursts into applause as the 443rd lifts into the darkening sky. Soon the cabin falls quiet and still. Lucas curls up with two pillows and a red blanket. In the front row, Bennett falls asleep with his mouth open, his head bobbing up and down. A picture of Chase, now 2½, kept in a pouch around his neck, rests on his chest, rising and falling with each breath.

Bennett has labored to remain a presence in Chase's life. When he left for Texas, Bennett made his son a videotape in which he reads Dr. Seuss's "Green Eggs and Ham" and plays with a puppet. Whenever he called home from Iraq, Amy would hold the phone up to Chase so that he would not forget his father's voice. But it was not until September that Bennett could get him to say something back.

This deployment has been particularly hard on Amy Bennett. A few months ago, she had been in a used-book store when a woman walked in with boxes of books she wanted to sell. The store's clerk said he could not take all of them, and suddenly the woman started sobbing. Her husband was a pilot who had been killed serving his country, she said. These were his books. Amy watched, speechless.

"That could be me," she thought.

The possibility that her husband might be killed felt so real that she began preparing for it. He would want to be cremated, that much she knew. But who would speak at the funeral? Some part of her started to believe that his death was inevitable, and she began to dwell on her own mortality. She carried an emergency card containing her parents' phone numbers and the name of Chase's day-care center. If she died, if she were hit by a car or broke her neck slipping down the stairs, who would look after her son?

Lucas is confident that Phranci is mature enough to understand that Mom had to go when duty called. Phranci knows about Sept. 11 and the war in Iraq. She knows her mother is a soldier; Lucas has been in the Army for Phranci's entire life. Like Phranci, Lucas was raised by a single mother, to whom she is extremely close. That is why everyone was so surprised when she joined the Army right out of high school, hoping to prove that she could make it on her own.

She served in the Persian Gulf War, managing a computer database of maintenance equipment in Saudi Arabia. But this deployment was different. She has a daughter, who wrote letters asking, "When are you coming home?" She also was getting regular reports from her mother that made her realize how quickly Phranci is growing up. When Lucas left, Phranci was allowed only to stir eggs in a bowl, while someone else cooked them. But now Phranci is the one standing over the stove. And when she has questions about puberty, it's her grandmother who handles them.

The grandmother sends almost exclusively good news: Phranci is on the honor roll. Phranci has made a lot of friends. But a few days after Lucas arrived in Kuwait, her mother woke up in the middle of the night and heard Phranci calling out in her sleep, "Mommy. Mommy."

During the long plane ride home, out of the Middle East, over Europe and then the Atlantic Ocean, there is plenty of time to think about Phranci's nightmares. But Lucas has decided she cannot go to her daughter just yet. She needs some time to herself when she gets home, a few days to shake off the deployment, "to get all this tension from Baghdad out of my system," she says. And so she asked her mother not to tell Phranci she is coming home.

It wasn't the prison riots that bothered her so much, or the mortar explosions that rocked the camp, or the trips off the base clutching her rifle. What had stuck with her was the face of a prisoner. He could not have been older than 16. The skin on his face was smooth; he had no whiskers or scars like so many of the other prisoners. What he did to merit a prison sentence she did not know.