Guardsmen return in tears

The 1132nd Military Police Company, based in Rocky Mount, spent 10 months in Iraq and suffered the heaviest losses of any N.C. National Guard company since World War II

ROCKY MOUNT -- If grief and numbness could be squeezed out of a soldier, the homecoming that the 1132nd Military Police Company got Tuesday would have erased its 10 months in Iraq.

After they got off the planes that flew them home, the 120 troops were swarmed on the tarmac of Rocky Mount-Wilson Airport by a relieved crowd of nearly 400 people.

Most were family and friends. Some were just locals who cared enough to come out during a hellishly hot workday to honor the men and women who had just lived through the deadliest deployment by any N.C. National Guard company since World War II. The unit is based at the Rocky Mount armory, but its members are from communities across the state.

Everywhere, people were bawling and hugging harder than they had ever hugged. Wives, husbands, moms, dads, kids and then soldiers started embracing each other.

Pfc. Edward D. Faircloth of Dunn stood and took his hugs, one long crush after another, while clinging to the staff bearing the unit's colors.

His mom, Cathy Harrington, clung and cried. Then came men from his own unit, who had themselves just stepped off one of the planes. First to grab him was Sgt. Jerry Davis; then the strapping Sgt. Ben Parrish, his face red, locked onto Faircloth and held him for a long moment.

"Doing OK?" was all Parrish could manage between snuffles.

"Good as could be expected," came the reply.

Then Faircloth's bawling 16-year-old brother, Anthony Harrington, slammed into him and tried to speak as he cried:

"... glad to ... see you."

There have been hundreds of unit homecomings across North Carolina in the past six years, as troops returned from Iraq and Afghanistan. Few, if any, though, were as emotional as the 1132nd's Tuesday.

The 1132nd lost four men in action in three attacks this spring, all in less than a month. More than 20 troops were wounded, some of them badly. The unit's dead accounted for nearly half the state Guard total of nine killed in action in Iraq. More than 7,000 Guard troops have served there since the beginning of the war.

A fifth soldier attached to the company was also killed. Spc. David S. Stelmat was among a handful of New Hampshire Guard troops brought in for the mission, and had come to seem like part of the company, said several soldiers.

Their dangerous job

The losses weren't just bad luck. The unit was doing a particularly dangerous job in a bad place at a bad time. It was training Iraqi police officers on the edge of the Baghdad slum called Sadr City, a vast stronghold of the Shiite insurgents loyal to anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The insurgents waged a campaign of attacks against U.S. forces this spring.

The 1132nd troops were often out on the streets, checking with Iraqi officers and showing them how to patrol. That left the 1132nd troops exposed to improvised bombs.

Capt. Leland Pearson of Wake Forest, the 1132nd's commander, tried to hold hands simultaneously with 2-year-old Logan, 5-year-old Korey and his wife, Dana, as he struggled to find the words for such a deployment.

"I just kept doing my job and told them we have a job to do," he said. "We don't forget our friends, but we've got a job to do, and we're going to go forward."

"They started getting numb," he said. "Unfortunately, you start getting used to death. You don't accept the fact that it happened, but you learn to deal with it."

As news of each attack and each death spread among their families, anxiety soared on the home front, too.

The unit deployed in September, and about a month later, Sgt. Adam White, 33, of Lenoir County, called home from Iraq to check on his pregnant wife, Crystal, 26. She had already left for the hospital.