Shipping Out

After the soldiers spill out, the Humvee is righted and the next squad piles in. Sheets takes a break and offers a simple equation: If a Humvee rolls over in Iraq, soldiers will die.

Stationed nearby in case of trouble, medic Jeremy Thompson watches.

"I've heard more cuss words today than I have in my entire life," Thompson says. "A lot of panic, more than you'd think."

This is not the National Guard of the early 1990s, when Indiana veterans remember drill weekends as little more than bull sessions broken by sporadic bouts of push-ups. Back then, fuel for the vehicles and ammunition for the weapons were limited. The notion of overseas combat was at best abstract.

More than 60 percent of the Indiana soldiers, who range from teenagers barely out of high school to veterans topping 50, have served in Iraq or Afghanistan. Some crossed into Iraq in March 2003 with the invasion force that toppled Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, while others, such as the Walters brothers, guarded Afghan bases. But few have experienced the steadily morphing insurgency, with its elusive enemy and complex rules of engagement.

National Guard armories scattered around the state draw soldiers from all over -- urban Fort Wayne and Indianapolis, college towns and regional centers, and sleepy burgs such as Salem, bounded by cornfields and serenaded by freight-train whistles and Friday-night football crowds.

In a place where military tradition is strong and Guard membership is a matter of pride and opportunity, the 76th Brigade includes father-son, father-daughter and husband-wife pairs who will deploy together. A 47-year-old letter carrier and pastor joined the Guard as a paymaster when he learned that his 21-year-old son would deploy. Now the son is staying home to attend college under a ROTC provision, and the father is heading to Iraq.

Kurt and Brett Walters, born 18 months apart to a military mother who enlisted when she was 17, said they always knew they would join. Their mother, Dani Sabens, was a big part of that certainty. She spent 28 years in uniform, mostly working supply and logistics and looking after her soldiers. Three years after formally retiring as a master sergeant, she still works at Camp Atterbury, the state's principal training facility.

"She always joked with us that when we were born, she forged our names on the forms," said Brett, who remembers the way his mother would come straight from work and head with them to the grocery store, still wearing her fatigues.

"Even as a little kid, I would see all the other kids staring at my mom with that look on their faces," Brett said. "I always wanted to be an inspiration like that."

Kurt was asleep one January morning in 2001, a few days after his 17th birthday, when Sabens woke him up and said they had to get going to the Salem armory. Sleepily, he asked why.

"We're going to enlist," she said.