Yet the first time she saw him, he had been riling the people in the holding area, his brown eyes angry and wild, and the soldiers feared a riot. They tried to calm them down, to keep control. But the boy refused to comply. Finally, one of the soldiers shocked with him an electrical stun gun, and he was left writhing on the ground for a couple of seconds.
Bennett is haunted by images, too. There are the charred skeletons of vehicles that were hit by bombs, the memorial services for fallen soldiers. Then in Kuwait, he ran into an officer, Capt. Charles Leas, who had been stationed with them in Baghdad but was transferred to another unit farther north, where he investigated car bombings and led raids -- and took photos for evidence. He showed them to Bennett: a pile of brains, a leg severed at the shin, the body of a dead girl, an empty orange slipper in a pool of blood.
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)
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_____News from Kuwait_____
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6 Court-Martialed After Taking Vehicles (The Washington Post, Dec 13, 2004)
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Reporter Prompted Query to Rumsfeld (The Washington Post, Dec 10, 2004)
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Brothers in Arms Fuel A Second Olympic Run (The Washington Post, Nov 16, 2004)
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Arab Leaders As Divided On Arafat Dead as Alive (The Washington Post, Nov 12, 2004)
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Ex-Adviser Reportedly Hurt Embassy Aide (The Washington Post, Nov 12, 2004)
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Only Leas spoke.
"She was 5 years old."
"The driver still drove 10 miles to the hospital with his arm blown off."
An hour later, Bennett still couldn't shake the images from his mind.
"If we had a mission like that, there's no way we would have come back with 100 percent of our unit," he said. "Guaranteed."
After that, how could he go back to selling ads for a newspaper? Of course, the job is there waiting for him -- if he wants it. But after Iraq, he finds himself thinking about a career change -- perhaps the Department of Homeland Security or the Federal Emergency Management Agency, something with more at stake.
There have been other changes, too. Changes that even Amy could sense, half a world away. He has become hardened by war. She felt it when she called him during the summer and he said he was upset that a mortar explosion had shaken the ground and ruined his game of Scrabble.
"You're [upset] about the Scrabble board being knocked over and not being bombed?" Amy asked incredulously.
Amy Bennett has changed, too. She told him about the counselor she has been seeing, but not about the incident in the bookstore. And he doesn't know how fragile she has become. Lately, she had been on the verge of falling apart, stretched by all her different roles: mother, graduate student, caretaker of the family finances. It was getting to be too much, and so she sat down to write her husband a letter to say so.
"In general, I feel like I have little joy in my life and little sense of myself," she wrote. "I'm spread so thin I can hardly see myself."
It felt good to get the emotions out. But she felt guilty for complaining. She needed to be strong. And so she tucked the letter into a folder and did not mail it.
Finally, at 3 a.m. on a December Saturday, they touch down on U.S. soil for the first time since February.
