For most Illinois National Guard soldiers just home from a yearlong deployment, the one thing on their minds was what they most dreamed of in the Iraqi desert: a decent steak, a cold beer or time with their family.
For Lee Lane, all that can wait. The Blackhawk helicopter pilot will sit for the Indiana bar exam in a week, and she can’t waste a moment.
“I’ll pretty much be studying all the time,” she said, standing in a National Guard hangar at Midway Airport Tuesday afternoon with about 50 fellow soldiers of the 106th Aviation Regiment.
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For part-time soldiers like Lane, getting home means getting back to their civilian lives.
When they set off for Iraq in January 2004, they left behind partly built homes, budding families and their education.
Now they are back–world-wise and weary–from the kind of conflict that few expected to see while wearing a uniform.
Spec. Greg Parker, 21, a Blackhawk mechanic from Westmont, joined the Illinois National Guard in January 2001, a few months before he graduated from high school.
The young man was intent on a career in aviation and saw the service as a way to get experience, mechanical training and benefits for college.
Going to a war zone seemed like a remote possibility.
His father knew better.
Dan Parker, 58, piloted a helicopter gunship in Vietnam alongside National Guardsmen who never thought they would see a battle.
“You can get in a real mess,” his father warned Greg before he signed up.
On Tuesday, Dan Parker wore his old flight jacket stitched with his unit and the name of the aircraft he flew, the Cobra.
Greg Parker said he now understands better what his father faced in Vietnam. But he acknowledges, “I had it a lot easier than he did.”
In Vietnam, Dan Parker might get word from home in the daily mail call. Greg Parker and his parents communicated almost every day via e-mail.
In Westmont, his mother, Cindy, 53, would tap out a daily message over her morning coffee.
His father, a commercial pilot, caught up with his son from wherever he could get online: Hong Kong, Tokyo.
Parker himself would send dispatches from his laptop computer hooked up in his cabin at Camp Anaconda on Balad Air Base, about 60 miles north of Baghdad.
Now that he is home, Greg Parker wants to get back to the studies he postponed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he hopes to pick up his junior year.
Lee Lane barely let deployment disrupt her studies.
She finished her coursework at Valparaiso University School of Law via the Internet from Iraq.
When she graduated in May, Lee Lane’s husband, Carl, took her place in the commencement and marched in the procession to receive her diploma.
In November, while she was on a two-week leave in Indiana, Lane registered to sit for the bar exam.
As much as she could, Lane kept the war from disrupting her life. But its grim reality intruded.
Tammy Duckworth, the only other female pilot in their battalion, lost her legs when her Blackhawk helicopter was downed a few days before Lee flew home for Thanksgiving.
“Our lives have paralleled in a lot of ways,” Lee said of her friend. “You do feel guilty when your life can return to ordinary while she has to make some adjustments.”
Sgt. Taylor Kennedy, 50, never spared his wife, Juanita, from the realities of soldiering.
“That was the deal we made when I deployed,” Kennedy said.
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The couple had never even talked about the possibility that he could be deployed when Kennedy joined the National Guard in 1998–just six months before he was to turn 45 and would have been ineligible for service.
But through occasional phone calls and frequent e-mail messages from Iraq, he kept his wife informed about the dangers he faced.
Kennedy’s base came under rocket and mortar attack about three times a week, he estimated.
When something big occurred–something that he knew would make news back home–he would drop Juanita a one-line note: “Everything is OK.”
Kennedy remembers a lot of talk over chow in the canteen and before lights out in the bunks among National Guard troops wondering how they ended up in Iraq, Kennedy said.
But for soldiers safe at home, those thoughts seemed as distant as their former base in Iraq.
Before formally releasing his troops, 1st Lt. Shane Yackley, the company commander, called the unit to attention for the last time.
Standing in formation wearing their desert fatigues, the soldiers snapped erect.
“Fall out,” Yackley barked and the soldiers broke with abandon into their loved ones’ arms.