Coming home

Even a stone would choke up at the image: The towheaded boy with the temporary stars-and-stripes tattoo, one hand on his father's face, the other grasping his uniformed shoulder, their noses nearly touching.

At the welcome home ceremony for Army National Guard members in Coralville on Monday, 3-year-old Jackson's eyes locked in so intently on the face of his father, Spc. Andrew Anderson, it was as if he was trying to memorize each whisker.

And while the details might differ, the powerful emotions are echoed in a half-dozen hometown homecomings this week - in Cedar Falls and Coralville, in Grimes and Shenandoah - as about 1,000 Iowa soldiers, finally, come home.

They're among the first to be relieved of duty as part of the drawdown in Afghanistan, ending military operations that have lasted nearly a decade, part of the largest deployment of Iowa National Guard troops since the end of World War II.

In a lot of ways, those troops' experience would be foreign to their Great War counterparts, not only because of technology and time.

Osama bin Laden is dead, but President Barack Obama's plan to bring home 10,000 troops by year's end and 23,000 more by next summer isn't in response to decisive victory.

There'll be no ceremonial surrender, no treaties to close this chapter - which began nearly a decade ago with a handful of madmen killing innocent civilians and is winding down with no clear sign of its lasting impact on a terrorist movement that has been weakened, but not destroyed.

In other ways, soldiering hasn't really changed: Long missions, long days, short supplies. You use what you've got, you do what you can, you put your life on the line.

And when you've done all you can, you come home.

Sgt. 1st Class Terryl Pasker joined the Army right out of high school and spent the rest of his adult life as a Guardsman. He'd been deployed to Afghanistan in 2004-05, but went back last year for one more tour.

When he came home to wife, Erica, to his parents, his brother and sisters, it wasn't to a celebration in a public school gym. They buried him Monday. He was 39.

Then there was Staff Sgt. Joseph Hamski, of Ottumwa, killed on May 26 when his unit was attacked in Kandahar. Staff Sgt. James Justice, of Grimes, killed in Kapisa in April, the same month Spc. Donald Nichols, of Shell Rock, was killed by an IED in Laghman.

We remember those men and others as operations wind down in Afghanistan.

And to all of our troops: Welcome home.

Comments: (319) 339-3154; jennifer.hemmingsen@sourcemedia.net