The Soldiers' Stories: The war after the war

The squad mates paused for a snapshot before their patrol on the night of the roadside bomb attack in Baghdad. From left to right: Jeremy Regnier, Dustin Jolly, and Andy Wilson.

It was circled on his calendar, a day he'd looked forward to for months. But as Andy Wilson stood on the wind-swept airfield and the chartered plane glided out of a leaden Texas sky, he was anything but upbeat.

An unsettling cocktail of emotions swirled inside. The balloons and marching bands, the confetti and welcome-home banners were not for him, though they could have been. Should have been.

As a noncommissioned officer, Wilson had sworn to stick by the men he led in combat, no matter what. And to bring them all home.

But after that night in Baghdad when the bomb went off and his friend and comrade slumped against his shoulder, Wilson's war was over.

He left Iraq on leave in late 2004, his mind and spirit broken, and never returned. Doctor's orders. "It gnaws at me," he said.

Three months later, as the troops he served with stepped off the plane at Fort Hood after a year at war, the emotional torque of it all bore down on him again.

The grapevine had carried the whispers from the war zone: Wilson's lost it. Wilson's a coward. And when some of the returning officers refused his outstretched hand or grabbed it limply with looks of disappointment or disdain, he knew who the whisperers were.

But for now, it didn't matter.

As the troops lined up to return their weapons, their gas masks and the other gadgetry of warfare, Wilson searched the crowd for a single face.

Dustin Jolly was the only other soldier who really knew what happened that night in October 2004 when Jeremy Regnier, the cocksure gunner from Littleton, N.H., died.

Like Wilson, Jolly had felt the blast and seen the unspeakable injury -- and knew how easily that memory reel could unspool.

But unlike Wilson, who sought help and went home, he had bottled up his demons and gone back out on patrol.

And so as Jolly -- near the front of the line -- stepped into view, the reunion sequence was anything but certain. Wilson held his breath.

"I saw him," Wilson said, "and once he gave me that dumb-ass Jolly look, I knew he was OK."

The men hugged and smiled and shook hands. They made promises to drink beer and catch up.

"It made me feel good," Wilson said. "It made me feel proud. It made me still feel loved, I guess."

In the months to come, what the two men shared, the darkness and the love, would come to mean everything.

The war after the war had begun.

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