AHOSKIE - Late at night, after the moon has settled into the swamps and cotton fields surrounding Army Sgt. 1st Class Chad Stephens' home, the soldier puts down his last drink.

He pulls himself off the sofa, leans over the television to snap quiet his latest war movie and lies in bed next to his wife of 12 years.

The dream never takes long to arrive. Stephens' platoon of Bradley fighting vehicles is somewhere in Iraq, pinned down by the enemy.

Grenades fly at them. Bullets ding off metal. His troops holler into their radios, and Stephens, the platoon leader, feels the danger.

On this night in his dream, like every night, Stephens will keep a promise -- to his soldiers and, in particular, to the mother of a blue-eyed gunner named Danny.

Nearly four years ago, in January 2004, the N.C. National Guard platoon sergeant stood in an Army classroom facing that mother and the families of the 40 men he was about to lead into war.

He stood 6-foot-4 and infantry-lean, and in the confident voice familiar to his men, he made a promise: I'll bring your sons home.

He had wanted it to be true.

Even then, Stephens knew he was lying.

A new role

When Stephens' N.C. National Guard unit left for Iraq in February 2004 with the 30th Heavy Brigade Combat Team, its warriors were among the first Guard units from the Tar Heel state to face combat since World War II. The part-time citizen soldiers left behind their full-time civilian jobs. They had typically trained just a few days a month and responded to natural disasters such as hurricanes and forest fires.

But with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, President Bush began to federalize National Guard troops, putting them in the same combat and support roles as their active-duty counterparts. Nearly 173,000 citizen-soldiers have served in the war.

Of those, 512 have died.

Countless more have come home with injuries, some immediately visible and others that only come to light over time.

Within the brigade, the National Guard's 1st Battalion, 120th Infantry from North Carolina would prove itself within months of deploying to Iraq, in a battle that would become legend within the state Guard and be memorialized in a print that hangs in the governor's mansion and on Capitol Hill.

Stephens, 40, would be anointed a hero, praised by the Pentagon and the media, earning one of the nation's highest honors for a day of valor that left him weeping under a desert night, his uniform soaked in another man's blood, his lessons about sacrifice and heroism only beginning.

In the years after his deployment to Iraq, Stephens would see how a single firefight would change his soldiers, change himself and fundamentally alter the life of one Jacksonville mother. He would come home from war to find he had become a different man, one seeking help from an Army that didn't know how to give it. He would try to fulfill a promise he had no right to make and shoulder the wounds of a grieving woman and a platoon of haunted men.

Signs of his father

Growing up in tiny Como in northeastern North Carolina, Stephens never understood his father's rages. The old man was a veteran of the Korean War who had lost soldiers in a famous battle, swilled beer with his buddies and sometimes cried when he drank.

Everyone thought he was mean.

But he always hoped one of his boys would make a career out of the military. Stephens, average in school and uninterested in college, figured it might as well be him.

Years later, back from Iraq, the country kid with an easy laugh finds himself fighting an inner anger that surges out of nowhere but reminds him of the familiar rages of his father.

Next page >