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Troops return after 2 years { January 4 2004 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52174-2004Jan3.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A52174-2004Jan3.html
Troops Return, Elated but Changed
Reservists Worry About Picking Up the Pieces of Their Old Lives
By Christian Davenport
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 4, 2004; Page A01
CAMP ARIFJAN, Kuwait
U.S. Army Capt. Jonathan Bennett counts them as they board the buses to the airport, tapping them on the shoulder as if to confirm their presence. The mood is giddy and raucous -- part kindergarten class, part college fraternity -- and they cheer as the buses lurch forward.
"When I get home, I'm going to sit in a bathtub with a bottle of champagne," a sergeant announces.
Bennett is in the front row -- one eye on the road ahead, one eye on his soldiers -- and he's smiling. All 116 of the men and women under his command are safe. Every day for the last 10 months, he had worried that the members of the 443rd Military Police Company would not all make it home from the war in Iraq intact.
Now the plane waits to carry them home to Maryland, a prospect that at the beginning of their deployment held nothing but unimaginable joy. But after all they have been through during their time in Baghdad -- the mortar attacks, the hostile prisoners, the roadside bombs -- there is a sense of unease beneath the palpable excitement.
Bennett cannot tell how much the experience has changed each of them. But he knows that the home they left is not the home they are returning to. What has the time away done to them, their families, their regular jobs? How hard would it be to resume their old lives and leave the war behind?
The 443rd is a unit of the Army Reserve, the part-time wing of the military that in peacetime trains one weekend a month and two weeks a year but otherwise allows for normal 9-to-5 civilian jobs and regular family lives. Life for many reservists has been far from routine since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The 443rd, based in Owings Mills, Md., has spent almost two years on active duty. Its members were called up a month after the attacks and did guard duty for a year at a military base in Texas. When they got home from that deployment, in October 2002, they knew it was a matter of time before the next call-up; military police are in great demand and short supply. The call came in February, and they were sent to Iraq.
When Bennett, 31, left for the Texas deployment, he had been selling advertisements for a local newspaper, making $75,000 a year -- enough to buy a comfortable Centreville house with a wraparound porch. His son was 6 months old, and his wife had been supportive about his leaving.
More than two years later, everything at home sounds uncertain, unsettled. Although he knew his wife has been in therapy to deal with her fears about his safety, he does not know what the time apart has done to her. Or to them. And having been around for just six months of his son's life, he knows he is something of a stranger to the boy. He has missed so much -- Chase's first words, his first steps.
Just behind him on the bus, Staff Sgt. Regina Lucas begins the trip home with a similar set of worries. When the unit shipped out for Texas, the 42-year-old single mother from Fort Meade sent her daughter, Phranci, to stay with her grandmother in Mississippi. And when the Iraq call-up came, Phranci headed south once again. Now, Lucas wonders how the 10-year-old will handle the move back to Maryland.
She also worries about how much she has changed in the desert. Who is she now: A soldier? A mother?
The first night at the Baghdad camp, where they guarded enemy prisoners of war, a riot broke out, rousing them from their cots in the middle of the night. Lucas, one of the more experienced soldiers in the unit, grabbed her rifle and confronted hundreds of prisoners yelling and shaking the barbed wire of their holding cells. She was terrified.
Later, on one of the Army medical forms, she checked the box to say she wanted to speak with a counselor when she gets home.
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.
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.
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.
It is almost 6 a.m. by the time the soldiers reach Fort Lee, just outside Richmond, where they will spend their last week on active duty finishing up paperwork and going through psychological counseling called "decompression." Bennett assembles them in the parking lot. It's dark and freezing, a damp, heavy cold they had forgotten in the desert. Bennett says they will line up outside the gym where their families are waiting. When the band starts playing, that's their cue to march inside.
The gym has been decorated with red, white and blue signs that say "We've Missed You!" and "Hooahh! Well Done 443 MP." Lucas knows there will be no one to greet her. But the family members of many other soldiers -- parents, spouses, children -- are sitting anxiously in the bleachers, their eyes on the door. Amy Bennett is sitting in the front row with her in-laws.
While an Army official gives a speech about the history of the unit, the soldiers wait outside, huddled together, shivering shoulder to shoulder.
Finally, the band begins to play. The door opens.
They are officially home.
"You'll be old news in a matter of days," the counselor says.
It is two days later, a chilly Monday morning. The welcome-home decorations have come down; the families have gone home. But before they can leave, the soldiers are cautioned about what lies ahead.
Soon the novelty of the homecoming will wear off, says Kimberly Evans, an Army counselor. Your families and friends won't keep clamoring to hear your stories, she warns. You won't be treated like a war hero forever.
"You have to figure out, 'Where do I now fit in?' " she says.
Lucas shifts in her chair.
"I don't think I'm crazy or anything," she says. "But I need some time. I have to get back into my routine. I have to become Mommy again."
Even after just a couple of days back in the United States, there are signs that the war is sticking with the soldiers. Some of them spent the day after the welcome-home ceremony at the mall but found it strange and disconcerting. There were too many people, one soldier complains after leaving one of the counseling sessions. "One guy cut my mother off. I wanted to kill him," a specialist says. "I had to leave."
Later, at lunch, another says she wanted to strangle the waitress at Red Lobster who couldn't seem to get anything right. How hard is it to take down a few orders?
That pent-up anger, that tension, is going to stay with them for a while, chaplain Jim Robinson says to another group of soldiers. You don't just leave it behind once you get on the plane, he says.
"You have a road to travel," he says. "You saw death and you saw destruction. Some of that is going to stick with you."
Robinson, who counseled the sailors who survived the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000, speaks slowly in a soft tone. He says that even at home, the place they have been dreaming of for months, everything may seem so backward that the war may feel more familiar.
"About three or four weeks from now, you are going to hit a wall and you're going to say, 'I wish I were back in Iraq.' "
The last day of active duty. The soldiers line up in formation, and Bennett turns to face them. He tells them to watch out for each other. They are a family, he says, and no one else can really understand what they have been through. Bennett dismisses them and they disband, leaving in spurts and rushed goodbyes, taking their own road home.
That afternoon, Lucas slips the key into the front door of her Fort Meade home. Her neighbors have looked after her house for her, and they have turned on the heat and some lights and even left a few things in the refrigerator, bottled water and cans of Sprite. Lucas almost dances through her living room, into her kitchen, past the couch, the dining room table, over her hardwood floors, delighted to have running water so close by.
The photograph of Phranci taken at Easter four years ago is still on the wall by the stairs. She is frozen in time, a picture of happiness in pigtails.
The house is warm and tidy, almost exactly as Lucas left it. Almost, but not quite.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
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