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BACK FROM IRAQ
"One of the best parts of deploying is the welcome home." -- Sgt. Brandy Moreland, transportation specialist, served in Iraq March-September 2003 after landing at Biggs Army Airfield at Fort Bliss, Tex., in 2003
(By Vladimir Chaloupka -- Las Cruces Sun-news)
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They met generals and were thanked by congressmen. Some even shook hands with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and President Bush. Waitresses and gas station attendants refused their money.
Army Reservist Chris Bain threw out the first pitch of the Little League World Series.
On the airplane home, wearing his Navy uniform, Clint Davis sat in the same row as a 5-year-old boy who got out his crayons and drew a picture of the American flag. "It says, 'Thank you for fighting for our country,' " Davis said. "I'll hang it up on my refrigerator till I die."
They came home grateful for their country, for their freedom, for hot showers, flushing toilets and blissful quiet. When Chris Arndt's plane touched down, it was 3 in the morning. A slight drizzle was falling, and the air just felt different.
"You could smell the grass," the Army reservist said. "I hadn't smelled that smell for a year. It hit me and made me realize I was home."
* * *
When they were out of uniform, everything was different.
One day they were in a war zone. Then, suddenly, they weren't. Home for the first time in a year, Dan Ward woke up in his bed, went to the kitchen and fixed himself a bowl of cereal. And that's when the Marine Reservist realized: His war was over. It was almost surreal how something so familiar could seem so strange.
"Almost the most nerve-wracking thing was how normal it was when I came back," he said. "I'd been gone for 11 months, and it's like I've been gone for 11 hours. Then it hit me: This is so normal."
They came home driving scared, scanning the interstates and the back roads of their home towns, looking for bombs that weren't there. They got jumpy in crowded public places and let the war go little by little, like muscle spasms after an intense workout.
Jeramey James "Jay" Lopez was working under the hood of his car with his dad in New Mexico when one of the noisemakers designed to scare the birds out of the nearby pecan orchard went off. It sounded "just like a round coming out of a tank," he said. Lopez's head snapped up and smacked the inside of the hood.
"My dad put his hand on my back, and he just said, 'Son, you're okay. You're home.' "
