Back in the spring or early summer of 2004, when the fight against the Mehdi Army was heating up, I read about a unit that had aleady left and was called back from Kuwait to fight in southern Iraq.  On the scale of unpleasant surprises, that's surpassed by the Stryker Brigade that was recalled after some of its men had already landed back in the United States.

Pete covered those guys for a while up in Mosul and we bumped into a group of them this afternoon.  All things considered they're not in a terrible mood.  They've now been in Iraq a year and will be here for another four months, so they have a decidedly philosophical outlook.  One of the guys arranged a leave to be home for the birth of a child.  The due date got pushed back and he was able to extend his leave to witness the birth.  He opened a pocket on the upper sleeve of his uniform and pulled out a set of pictures—the baby, his wife with the baby, him with the baby.  The new duty in Baghdad will keep him from his family during his kid's first few months.

The captain in charge of the MiTT team I'm with is a guy named Ben Shaha.  He's 31, but has a grin and a mild manner that makes him seem younger.  He's on a year-long deployment; in the middle he returned home to Utah, got married, honeymooned in-state, and then returned to Iraq.  Sgt. Maj. James Clinton, who showed me and Pete around the old government complex two nights ago, is a lean guy with a creased face and close-cropped thinning hair.  Out on the balcony, where sometimes the smell of the morgue ruins your cigarette break, he spoke of retiring when he hits the 30-year mark so he can live in Tennessee and ride around the country on his motorcycle.  He recalled driving from Tennessee to Kansas City for lunch with a friend, then driving home—an 18-hour roundtrip for a meal at Appleby's.  A while back he, his wife and some friends rode from Tennessee down to Key West, then up to DC, then back home, all in a few days.

I've only covered the military in Iraq.  So what for them is an extraordinary situation—six months or a year or 16 months in Iraq away from their families—seems to me like the only reality for American soldiers and Marines.  When these guys talk about their homes and their families they aren't complaining about their lot in life.  They're just talking about who they are, and what they're going to do when they get home.