CAMP ARIFJAN, Kuwait, 5 January 2004 — US 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.
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 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, Va., home with a wraparound porch. His son was three 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, Md., 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 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 2-1/2, 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 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.
* * *
Finally, at 3 a.m. on a December Saturday, they touch down on US 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 is 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 is 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.
