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Shipping Out
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"Jesus Christ," one soldier muttered. "Wiped us all out."
Five screens went black, and white letters appeared: "You are dead."
Don't Forget the Xbox
It didn't take a war, Kurt Walters learned, for Army life to change him.
He was more serious about football than his studies at Salem High School, 30 miles northwest of Louisville. After graduation in 2003, he headed to boot camp, where he worked hard and made closer friends than he had imagined he would, "because of what we went through."
"You come back," Kurt said, "and get together with your friends and drink beer, and you realize how immature they are -- and you were."
"And are," added Chelsea Walters, 21, his wife. The couple started dating three years ago and married last year.
For the Walters brothers, preparing for Iraq means arranging leave from their jobs as guards in a Kentucky psychiatric detention center and making sure the mortgage payments will be drawn from their combat pay. It means getting new laptops equipped with webcams and arranging to have an Xbox 360 in their Iraq hooches to play Guitar Hero II and Halo 3.
It also means squeezing in some fishing and drinking.
A frequent companion is Joe Steepleton, who sometimes seems like the third Walters brother. They met as teenagers working at Hardee's. A motorcycle accident that shattered his wrist required four pins and a metal plate and kept him out of the Marines. Now 24, married and a father, Steepleton oversees liquor supplies at a casino in nearby French Lick. The deployments -- Kurt and Brett served in Afghanistan in 2004 and 2005 -- leave him worried, feeling as though he has no friend to call on his days off.
"I think he gets more emotional in missing him than I do," Chelsea said of Steepleton's friendship with Kurt. "They're the married couple."
As the clock ticks down again, Steepleton aims "just to hang out and have a good time, man, because you never know if it's the last time you'll see them. I try not to think about it, but I know it could happen. But we have a motto: You live for the day."
'It's for Keeps'
"When you know you're going to be going, the intensity level goes up. It's for keeps," said Todd Baker, commander of Salem-based Charlie Company and a radio account executive in civilian life. "If we don't do our jobs, soldiers are going to suffer."
