When a service member comes home

Spc. Brent Goolsby says hello to his son Jonathan Aiden Goolsby for the first time during a Fourth of July reunion in downtown Atlanta. Goolsby is home on leave from serving in Iraq. (Photo courtesy of U.S. Army / Spc. Bryce S. Dubee)   Ways to welcome home your loved one Buy a beautiful journal and have the service member’s family, friends, and neighbors write their hopes for him or her in it. At the homecoming party, give the book as a gift. Have everyone make up posters and banners welcoming your service member home. Place them along the street, in the yard, in front of the house, and inside the house. Display the family photo album and your service member’s yearbooks at the homecoming party. You might also put up big collages of photos of family and friends. The images will help reconnect your service member to his or her foundations and home. Click here for a free family prayer service!

Corporal Emilio Sanchez* struggles to get comfortable in seat 26D. The flight from Dallas to Los Angeles is tedious, but it’s the final leg of a journey that started two days ago in Fallujah, 35 miles west of Baghdad in Iraq. It was there Sanchez lived for 18 months with his Marine unit, in the midst of some of the most violent fighting of the Iraq War. Now Sanchez is coming home.

He leans back and closes his eyes. The drone of the jet engines is a welcome departure from the hollow diesel clatter that accompanied his daily Humvee patrols in Fallujah, or the slapping whack of the helicopters that came and went from his base.

He thinks about what it will be like to be home. He thinks about waking up next to his lovely wife, making a pot of coffee in the kitchen, and holding his daughter on his lap. But memories of the last year and a half crowd out his thoughts of home. He can’t help recalling Fallujah, remembering the horror that is the war in Iraq.

A weapon of death
Like every American service member stationed in a battle zone like Iraq or Afghanistan, Sanchez was dedicated to accomplishing his mission and staying alive. To that end, he carried a loaded M-16 assault rifle wherever he went. He knew it intimately and could take it apart and put it back together again in less than a minute, blindfolded. He slept with it nearby. It could fire a burst of three 5.56 mm, high-powered bullets in a split second, and do it over and over again as oft en as Sanchez pulled the trigger. Each bullet could inflict massive and deadly destruction on a human body.

For the last year and a half, Sanchez and his M-16 had become a deadly fighting unit; he was always ready to aim the rifle and fire. And on more occasions than he cared to count, he did just that. He can picture in his mind the fate of each enemy combatant he’d fired on. He doesn’t forget it.

Hyper-vigilance
There was the constant threat, too, of the hundreds of insurgents in and around Fallujah who were equally deadly. Their AK-47 assault rifles could do as much damage as an M-16. He remembers vividly the day a bullet ripped through the cloth of his trouser leg and left a long, burning furrow on the skin of his calf before it tore off the heel of his boot. The scar is still on his leg, a painful reminder of how much difference an inch makes.

This constant state of readiness kept Sanchez on edge 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Every sound, every movement around him sparked a sharp twist of his gut. You know how it feels when you lose sight of your child in a crowded mall or have a close call on the freeway. Sanchez felt just like that for a year and a half. The approach of every person, every car, set off alarms in his body, because people and cars were sometimes rigged with explosives to be set off near the Americans. Sanchez knew guys who were killed by

* Sanchez is a composite character created by the author, representing all troops.