I'm waiting for my husband to come home from the war in Iraq. Bring the dog, he wrote in his last letter. So I'm gripping Rosie's leash, standing on the edge of a crowd of wives and children and aging parents in a Camp Lejeune parking lot at midnight, all of us listening for the deep rumble of diesel bus engines.

Finally I hear it. Everyone hears it, every head turning, the sound growing louder and louder before the first bus emerges around the barracks -- white glaring headlights, festive amber running lights and a long row of lighted windows. From beneath a nearby tent, a deejay's speakers blast "I'm proud to be an American" as the towering buses roar in one after the other. They pull up in a line in front of us, stop with a hiss, and a mass of men in desert tan uniforms spill out into the crowd.

My husband is a chaplain. His job is to serve in the background, but he can't do that if the spotlight's on him, so instead of using the name by which most people know him, I'll use my nickname for him. I call him Frank because he's frank in every way.

The last time Frank deployed, he came home in the daylight. His Marine battalion had been among the first into Afghanistan after September 11. So a satellite television truck joined us in the hot, sunny parking lot where we families waited, beaming out to the rest of America close-ups of Marines hugging their wives and hoisting their toddlers. This is what people outside the military community see when the troops come home. Then the cameras switch off, and to the outside world the homecoming appears to be over. In reality, the homecomings go on for months. In some ways, they go on for the rest of our lives.

Tonight, I'm surrounded by a crowd of overjoyed people, just as I was when Frank came home from Afghanistan, and when he came home from the Persian Gulf before that. I feel the same joy now. I also feel alone. Because while whole armies go to war, it's the individual soldier who comes home. In a few minutes, it will just be him and me, trying to muddle our way through the very personal consequences of our nation's huge impersonal policies.

As a chaplain, Frank briefs the sailors and Marines as they near home, preparing them for the stresses of homecoming. His advice: Have no expectations and put your spouse's needs first. If you both do that, you can avoid most of the disappointments and fights.

The first time Frank came home, it was the spring of 2000. He'd spent six months in the Persian Gulf aboard a ship packed with more than 500 men and women. I'd celebrated Christmas and the new millennium without him. I had discovered I liked the freedom to come and go as I pleased, eating when I felt like it, letting the dishes pile up in a sink full of water. It was like being single without the stress of dating. By the time that massive gray ship overshadowed the pier, sailors lining the rails, a brass band thumping, the tugboat in the harbor fountaining water, I had schooled myself to expect the worst -- we might have grown into strangers, I might find I was happier when he was gone.

Instead, we had a two-month honeymoon. Our time apart had given us the breathing space we hadn't even known we'd needed, time enough to kick the bickery habits that can emaciate a relationship, time enough to remember why we loved each other. So I was looking forward to another honeymoon after his second long deployment, the one that took him to Afghanistan. After seven months he came home in the spring of 2002. In the weeks that followed, people would wink and ask me how this second homecoming was going. They'd look surprised when I admitted, "A little rocky." Even that was an understatement.

Within days of his return, I was crying in the kitchen, reciting all the times he'd hurt me most in the nearly 17 years we'd been married -- not the most romantic exercise. He leaned against the counter, as far away from me as possible, shouting, "Well, maybe it's over! Maybe we should just call a lawyer!"

"Don't be stupid!" I shouted back. Just because he's a chaplain doesn't mean either of us is a saint.

We had good days, but even they were booby-trapped -- at any moment, a fiery rage could ignite us both. I remember thinking: If we're having this much trouble, knowing what we know, married as long as we've been married, no children to add to the pressure, how on earth are those young couples with babies and money problems surviving? We fought at home. We fought driving down the highway. I threw a Styrofoam cup in lieu of slugging him. He threw it back.

Waiting for his return this time, early in the summer of 2003, I know better than to assume what to expect.

This time, after four months in a war zone, he's flying home.

Back in Vietnam, when troops first began flying straight home from war zones, they discovered the abrupt change from machine guns to McDonald's could be destabilizing.

When Frank came home from Afghanistan, he came slowly, by ship. That deployment was long but included only one month in-country in Afghanistan, one experience of coming under fire, with no casualties, and several months to decompress during the voyage home, albeit with a difficult roommate. "We didn't do anything," he says of that deployment. "They shot, we shot, we came home."

In Iraq, by contrast, I know his battalion lost two men in the battle of Nasiriyah. I know from his letters that a few hours later he himself passed through there on the way to Baghdad, that he's seen the dead and the dying. If Afghanistan left him so brittle, what must he be like now that he's been through something so much worse?

We wives have been given a little trifold brochure. It tells us: "Returning home can be every bit as stressful and confusing as leaving." Our Marine or sailor may have changed, may feel claustrophobic, may feel awkward about closeness, or overwhelmed by the everyday noise of home life. Go slowly in making changes, we're told, make time for our spouses and remind them they're still needed. "Be patient in rebuilding your relationship."

I picture myself a quilt on a clothesline, moving with the wind, giving way when pushed, wrapping myself around him when he falls down, exhausted, to sleep.

I wonder how long I'll be able to keep it up.

Then at midnight the buses round the barracks, and the wives and girlfriends scream and point, and a mother from Ohio holds a welcome home sign high over her head. And the mass of men in desert tan uniforms step off and the crowd enfolds them.

Now it's 1 a.m. The first thing I want to do is make sure he's okay. "I'm fine," he reassures me. "We didn't do anything. All I did was sleep in the dirt and ride several hundred miles in a Humvee."

The first thing Frank wants to do? Go to McDonald's.

After months of eating out of foil pouches, he wants a large order of fries and a chocolate shake. Driving him home, I stop by the late-night drive-through. We're following the advice he himself was trained to give the Marines. Don't drive, he told them. Not for a few days, anyway. The accident rate among returning service members is always higher. They haven't slept properly in months, or driven civilian vehicles according to civilian rules of the road. Alcohol is always a problem, too -- after the mandatory teetotaling of a deployment, their tolerance may be lower than they remember.

The second thing he wants to do is soak in the tub. Actually, we both want him to do this. Back in the parking lot, before we hoisted all his gear into the car, we manhandled it into oversize trash bags to contain the dust and the smell of sweat, and dirt, and the murk at the bottom of a trash can. Frank himself is only slightly cleaner. We drove home with the windows down. When he climbs out of the tub, the water is brown with the dust of Iraq.

The third thing he wants is me.

In the morning, he stares out the window. "I forgot."

"Forgot what?" I ask.

"How green it is here. It's so green."

He's lost 20 pounds. I saw that right away in the newly sharp line of his jaw, the bag of his uniform.

He's browner, a farmer's tan from the hot days of T-shirts after they were finally allowed to shed their head-to-toe chemical and biological suits.

And he keeps turning down the A/C thermostat. Our apartment feels like winter. He says apologetically, "It was just so hot over there." What can I say? I dig out my fleece vest.

But the next day I don't have my fleece in the truck. The battalion's been given four days of liberty and we're driving up from Camp Lejeune to Richmond to see family; we're having one of those little unspoken battles over the interior temperature. He twists the control knob colder, into the blue. A few minutes later I twist it into the red. Blue . . . Red . . .

All of a sudden he gasps. "Heat! Dust! It's closing in, it's so hot -- flashback! Flashback!"

We both burst out laughing, but for me, it ends the battle. I twist the knob back to blue. And shiver.

In Richmond, my sisters have baked a red-white-and-blue cake and the brothers-in-law are out back grilling yabba-dabba-doo-size steaks. The nieces and nephew come running. They hug Frank, then rebound, staring up at him from a distance and giggling, bouncing on their toes, unsure what to do.

"I know why you have no hair!" our 5-year-old nephew finally blurts. " 'Cause it was dirty!"

That's another change -- he's bald. At some point he shaved off what little hair he had left because it was easier to keep clean; I can't decide if he looks like an assassin or a cancer patient.

Later, I come up behind him when he's sitting on the couch, put a hand on his shoulder. He startles like a rabbit. But that's not a new change; he startled easily for a while after Afghanistan, too. For too long he was listening to booms and crackles, automatically cataloguing each one: threat, non-threat, threat, non-threat. "Even when it was quiet," he says, "you were listening for it."

One day it rains, and he walks outside and lowers his head, lets the downpour beat against the back of his smooth skull. "Rain. I love rain."

I huddle just inside the door. I'm sick of rain. "It's been raining the whole time you've been gone."

His shirt and his shorts darken. "In Iraq, if we saw clouds coming, it was almost always a dust storm. When it did rain, which wasn't often, there was so much dust in the air it rained mud." He tips his face up into the downpour, his body relaxed. "I love this rain." Yes, he has changed. He's balder, thinner, tanner, more averse to heat. But the biggest change of all -- he's mellow.

Mellow is not a word I ever would have used to describe him before. He's intense about details, a stick-it-out-to-the-bitter-end kind of guy. He's still that way. Just softer somehow.

The four-day liberty is over and he's back at work, back in his office at Camp Lejeune every day, and I'm borrowing his truck to run an errand. Before going into the store, I remove one of his electronic gadgets from the windshield, a global positioning system device, so it won't get stolen. It's a pain in the neck, pulling off the suction cups.

At the end of the day when I pick him up from his office, he looks at the blank spot where the GPS is supposed to be. "I'm going to have to show you how to take it off the windshield. You don't have to remove the suction cups."

"Oops. Sorry." I steel myself, because he's particular about his gadgets. I'm waiting for the lecture on the Correct Procedure for the Removal of the GPS. I'm reminding myself he just returned from a war. I should let him vent without venting back. Quilt, I'm thinking, teeth gritted, be a quilt.

After a minute he points at the blank spot and says, "That would have annoyed me before." He sounds a little surprised.

I look at him, surprised myself.

"But after all the death I've seen, it's no big deal."

I don't know what to say. I'm pleasantly surprised at the change in him, yet painfully aware that this mildly pleasant moment in my life is due to the unspeakable suffering of others.

That evening, I sit with Rosie on a nearby beach. It's misty from the surf and nearly empty this late in the day, this early in the season. I watch Frank wade into the white-crested waves and just stand there, gazing out at the ocean as if he's gazing all the way back to Iraq.

In Iraq, his was a support unit, supposedly in the rear with the gear. But the enemy attack on part of the Army's 507th Maintenance Company, Jessica Lynch's unit, proved there really is no rear anymore. As Frank's battalion roared north to Baghdad, it rolled through the immediate aftermath of battles, bodies scattered, windshield wipers on a blasted minivan still ticking back and forth. I've told him it's okay with me if he wants to talk about it, and it's okay with me if he doesn't. He talks about it, a little at a time. A near miss from friendly fire. A dead girl next to a burned-out bus. A body run over by heavy vehicles. A dying man squatting nearby, in shock and staring into space. It's common for soldiers to take pictures of death, but these images are not among the snapshots Frank brought home.

The tide's coming in, crashing around Frank's legs. He stands out there in the waves a long time. I can see him breathing deep. I wade out to join him, Rosie behind me.

"I feel like I don't deserve to be here enjoying this," he says. "Not when other people still have to endure all that misery. There are Americans over there who won't be home for a long time. And the Iraqis can never get away."

I'm expecting Frank to be busy. He was busy last year after Afghanistan, responding to suicide threats, domestic disturbances, Marines getting into fights in town. Back then, the emergency calls for help averaged about one a week in his battalion. That was in addition to the steady stream of people who came knocking on his door. Technology is to blame: Armies used to need daylight to stage a battle, so at night, soldiers had time to sit around the campfire, compare stories, try to make sense of what had happened to them that day. But with the technological advances of the last hundred years, war has become a 24-hour-a-day business. There is no built-in downtime for what is now called critical incident stress debriefing, and even with chaplains making the rounds of the front lines, it's not always possible to find the time.

So sometimes the stress gets tucked away. It festers. Eventually it may boil over into headaches, nausea, guilt, depression, nightmares, memory problems, emotional outbursts. An increased startle reflex. In the First World War, they called it shell shock; in the Second, battle fatigue. Now it goes by the less poetic name of post-traumatic stress disorder. Not everybody suffers from it, and some just experience a mild case. Sometimes the trouble takes years to surface, sometimes a couple months. Sometimes it rears up before the fighting stops.

It's a chaplain's job to help his Marines and sailors cope with coming home, and if they come apart, get them the help they need to put the pieces back together. It's all confidential. He has never told me anything specific. But after Afghanistan he worked late, came home tired, and at midnight the phone would ring. He'd climb out of bed, pull on his uniform, and drive back to the barracks or the hospital. Meanwhile, he was trying to cope with his own rocky homecoming. He knew exactly what they were going through.

This time around, none of that seems to be happening. It's the third week since he's been back, and our days and nights have been peaceful. The rest of the battalion seems peaceful, too, everyone settling into familiar routines -- Marines servicing amphibious assault vehicles, sailors conducting physicals at the clinic. I'm starting to wonder why this homecoming is so easy when the last one was so hard.

I ask around for a statistical study on homecomings, some data to compare why some go well and some don't. But both Frank and the social workers at the base shake their heads. As far as they know, no such study exists. All they know is that couples tend to pick up where they leave off. If they had trouble before, they'll have trouble after.

But Frank and I didn't have trouble before Afghanistan.

We're crammed into the bass-thumping bar at the officers' club, all the battalion's officers and staff noncommissioned officers and their wives. We're getting half-lit on empty stomachs while we wait to be let into the dining room for the Wife Appreciation Dining In. The dress is casual but the men still look like they're in uniform, a whole company of belted khakis, neatly ironed shirts, little white triangles of T-shirts, and haircuts high and tight.

I stoop to shout to the tiny dark-haired woman beside me. "So how's it going, Sylvia?" Our husbands drove across Iraq together; her husband is a staff sergeant.

"It's just so wonderful to have Paol home again!" she shouts back.

"Has he changed?"

"Yes! He's thinner!"

"Frank, too!"

"And much more relaxed!"

"You're kidding! So's Frank! I wasn't expecting that!"

"Me either!"

We sip our drinks.

"Why do you think that is?" I ask.

"Maybe seeing how people lived over there just puts things in perspective?" She frowns. "He keeps saying people here in America are so lucky."

Frank has said the same thing. Americans don't appreciate how good they have it.

"A little ice," says Sylvia, "a little air conditioning, and he's happy."

After dinner I run into Jennifer. During the war, she was my connection with the battalion. She's fit and tan and looks younger than she is, a mother of three, a Marine officer's wife for 14 years. This was their third deployment, too. She reports her husband also hasn't changed as much as she expected. "A little more patient maybe."

The following week, when I stop by Michelle's house on base, she agrees. "Maybe he's a little more mature," she says. Her husband is a corporal. "But he was mature before he left. I changed more."

Personally, I don't feel like I've changed at all.

Michelle's been married less than a year. She's 20 years old, cute and blond. A week after her husband left for Iraq, she gave birth to their first child. "When John was home, I never did the bills, never went out alone. So I did all that stuff. I had to be more strong, for him and for me, and the baby. And now it's kind of hard, too, because you've done everything by yourself, and then here comes someone just stepping in."

As we're talking, John passes through the living room with the baby in his arms. He tells me his son is awesome. Michelle looks happy. "I love being able to hand the baby off to him now. It's nice. I get to sleep in a little bit."

A few streets away from Michelle and John, I knock at the back door of Frank's assistant's tiny house. Tony's gear from Iraq is still piled on the porch.

"It's too stanky to keep inside," says his wife, Jody, young and coltish as she waves me in. "At least till he cleans it." Frank has been cleaning his, too, climbing into the shower each night with another piece of gear to wash it down.

Tony is a young enlisted sailor from the hills of North Carolina. He looks like he could have carried Frank over his shoulder without any trouble. In Iraq Tony's job was to protect Frank, who, as a chaplain, is not allowed to carry a weapon. Frank likes to tell the story of how Tony would bellow, "Sir! Get your ass down!" and then crouch over Frank with his M-16 pointed in the direction of danger.

Tony saw what Frank saw. He's only 21. I ask Jody, "Are you and Tony all right?" Before he left, I know, they were fighting. It's common, a subconscious way of coping with the sadness of separation -- pick a fight so you're glad to say goodbye. Frank and I did it the first time he went away, too.

"We're closer than ever," she says. "Now it's -- if he's in the bathroom, I'm in the bathroom."

"Really?" I'm surprised.

"I wasn't expecting it to be like this." Jody shrugs, as mystified as me. "He lost a bunch of weight. But he just seems like the same old Tony to me." Like Michelle, Jody claims she's the one who changed the most during this, their first deployment. Looking back, I guess I changed the most during our first deployment, too. And maybe I changed as well during our second deployment, in the aftermath of September 11. Maybe Frank wasn't the only one who was brittle for that homecoming.

While Tony was in Iraq, Jody bought new furniture, the first major purchase she'd ever made by herself. In the four years since she and Tony met in high school, she's grown six inches. In the four months since he went to war, she's grown up.

"He's noticed that," she tells me. "He's a little more aggressive, a lot more protective over me. He's like, 'You're supposed to be off at 11, it takes 30 minutes to get home, why aren't you home?' It's weird. I'm used to not being home till 1, 2, 3 o'clock in the morning from work. I figure if I'm getting paid for it, what does it matter? I guess he's trying to control me." She laughs. "But it's not working!"

Jody, Michelle, Jennifer, Sylvia -- they're all so different from me, their husbands are different, and yet, talking to them I don't feel alone in this anymore. We're all going through the same thing, more or less.

Pushing a grocery cart through the commissary with Frank, I ask, "Why does this homecoming seem to be so much better than the last one? For everyone?"

He shrugs. "It's a different battalion, for one thing."

The mission of this battalion is to move infantry from point A to point B in amphibious assault vehicles that can swim out the back of a ship, then rumble up onto the beach and across the land on tracks like tanks. The Marines call them Amtraks. Every Marine is a rifleman, but most of this Amtrak battalion has never had to fire a shot off the firing range. They're mechanics and drivers and clerks.

The battalion Frank went to Afghanistan with was different. That was an infantry battalion, special operations capable, trained in reconnaissance, assaults and defensive maneuvers, intensively drilled in the months leading up to deployment. An infantry battalion attracts people who are already gung-ho, and then the training and the deployment wind them even tighter.

So this Amtrak battalion is different. Still, I don't entirely trust the apparent tranquillity. I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Frank lets his hair grow back, which for him means a patch of stubble on top of his head. It's the Fourth of July, and his battalion's been given another four days of liberty. We drive home to D.C. this time, shuffle through the metal detectors onto the Capitol lawn and stretch out to listen to Dolly Parton. She sings "When Johnny Comes Marching Home" while old newsreel footage plays on the big screens, soldiers coming home from the World Wars, a POW stepping off a plane from Vietnam and kneeling to kiss the ground, more recent footage of soldiers, Marines and sailors running to hug their families.

Looking up, I sense that I'm part of a long history of sacrifice, part of something noble and bigger than my small self, and yet also tragically repetitive. It makes me cry.

Frank pats my hand. He seems melancholy, too. "You okay?" I ask.

He shrugs. "I love my country. But . . ." He shrugs again, looks at the people on the grass around us, civilians mostly. "All the patriotism feels a little bit alienating, coming from people who did nothing but wave a flag. We weren't patriotic over there. We never knew what was going on, it was just one big slog. We wanted to get it over with and get out. We weren't allowed to wave flags anyway."

Neither of us is in the mood to stay for the fireworks.

We're curled together on the couch, watching "Gangs of New York." A Navy ship is shelling the 19th-century slums of New York. Wounded characters stagger through the chaos of smoke and dust, flickering flames, blackened buildings. Frank was tired when the movie started. I expected him to be asleep by now. Instead, he's wide awake and staring at the TV.

"This scene reminds me of An Nasiriyah." He rolls the tape back. He points to one character, so covered in soot and dust you can't distinguish blood from sweat. "That's what that dying guy sitting in shock near the burned-out bus looked like."

He talks for the next hour, inside in the living room, outside as we walk the dog. He talks through details I haven't heard before. He wishes he had offered the dying Iraqi water, though they were under orders not to stop. He wishes he could have helped the civilian he saw gathering bodies by the bus, arranging them with stoop-shouldered care. He wishes he'd done more for his Marines, though what more he could have done he doesn't know. He wishes he could go back to Iraq so he'd have an opportunity to redeem himself in his own eyes. He's always good in a crisis. But this time there were no crises. Just low-grade fear and horror.

I begin to realize that as relaxed as he's seemed, part of him has been on guard against himself. Now, more than a month home, he's finally feeling safe enough to open up and look inside.

Frank's workdays are getting longer. Each morning another Marine or sailor sticks his head in Frank's office. Hey, Chaps, you got a minute? Post-traumatic stress is finally starting to surface in the battalion.

We're standing at the window in the dark before going to bed, watching a mountain range of storm clouds that lines the horizon to the west and north. The plane that brought Frank home came in from the north after flying over the Atlantic, and over Europe and the Middle East before that. Frank was on that plane for 20 hours.

"Who were you sitting next to all that time?" I ask.

He names an officer I don't know. He didn't know him well either. I ask what he was like.

"Didn't matter. By the time they put us on the plane we'd already been awake 24 hours. We slept half the trip. It was heaven compared to the last deployment." He shakes his head. "Tom."

All he says is the name, but suddenly, I remember. And I understand. Tom was one of his roommates on the ship that took them to Afghanistan, then brought them home. Officers work out of their tiny staterooms, so Frank spent the better part of each day with only inches between him and Tom. Tom read Frank's computer screen over his shoulder. Tom inserted himself into Frank's private conversations with his assistant. Tom nattered at him from his bunk at night. There was no downtime from Tom. Frank spent six months living on a ship with Tom and one month living away from him in a tent in Afghanistan. To this day he looks back on Afghanistan not as a time of fear, and dirt, and discomfort, but as a vacation from Tom.

The storm clouds light up from within. "Compare the stresses of this deployment with the last one," I say.

Frank doesn't even hesitate. "The biggest difference is Tom."

Apparently, for Frank, a bad roommate is more stressful than being shot at.

When we finally get into bed, we lie there, his hand on mine, and watch the distant storm flickering on the walls.

Jennifer, the Marine officer's wife, once said to me, "I think people in the civilian world can never imagine how extreme the feeling of relief is when he comes back." Just the mention of it left us both shiny-eyed with tears.

When the war started, now and then a vague, monstrous cloud of worry would descend on me and I'd have trouble breathing. The only way to get a deep breath was to imagine the Worst That Could Happen, walk myself through every detail, make it real, and ordinary, and manageable. I imagined the knock at the door. I imagined the sober faces of the chaplain and the casualty assistance officer as they announced the news that my husband was dead. Then I worked through the logistics -- I'd need to call Frank's brother, so he could go tell their mother in person. I'd need to get out the funeral plans Frank had left behind, contact his church and, the morning of the funeral, have a good cry by myself before I had to sit through a public service, ride behind the hearse to Arlington and listen to a bugler play taps. Imagining the Worst That Could Happen was like taking practical action, like scrubbing clean a festering wound. It helped keep me calm and strong. I clutched the Worst That Could Happen to my heart, where its weight kept me grounded when the ups and downs of the daily news threatened to spin me head over heels.

Once most of the combat was supposedly over, I was still careful not to let giddy relief unbalance me. Relief makes you weak. I noted the ongoing fatalities -- the snipers, the Humvees overturned in traffic accidents, the plane that crashed full of Spanish soldiers headed for home from Afghanistan. I was determined not to let myself feel relieved until Frank was actually in my arms.

I'm standing on the edge of a crowd in a dimly lit parking lot. Rosie is hiding behind my legs, tired of being petted by strangers. A woman pushes a stroller past us, wearing a red-white-and-blue miniskirt. Children lunge at each other, wielding tiny American flags like swords. Then the deejay interrupts the music: "Your men have touched down at Cherry Point!"

Your men have touched down at Cherry Point.

The crowd screams. For a moment I feel overstretched with emotion, as if I might pop, my eyes pricking with tears. But even now that Frank's plane has landed safely, I remind myself that he still has to get from Cherry Point to Camp Lejeune, over 40 miles down the North Carolina coast. At any moment a bus can blow a tire and slam into an embankment, or run off a bridge and sink straight to the bottom of a river.

Over the next 31/2 hours the deejay announces the slow progress of our husbands and sons and brothers and fathers toward us through the night -- there are no women in this battalion. "Your men are on the buses and pulling out of Cherry Point!" The crowd cheers, then cheers again as the buses roll through a nearby town ("They've made it to Swansboro"), cheers when they pass the guard gate at the edge of the base ("They're onboard Camp Lejeune"), closer and closer ("They're at the armory"). They're just a few blocks away now, filing off the buses to turn in their weapons, filing back on.

Then I hear it. Everyone hears it, the deep rumbling hum of diesel engines. The headlights round the barracks, and the deejay's speakers blast a soundtrack as the towering buses roar in. It's nearly midnight; I've been on my feet in this parking lot for four hours; I've been rushing around for days, up at dawn getting the apartment ready because we'd been warned they might be gone a year, and yet here they are coming home after only four months. I should feel exhausted, but I don't. I feel like I could run up a mountain. The buses pull up in a line in front of us, stop with a hiss, and a mass of men in desert tan uniforms spill out into the crowd.

They all look the same. I try to make out faces coming off the buses, but I can't seem to see past the uniforms. After a few minutes, I spot a face I know -- Tony, tall and searching over the heads of the crowd -- and I see Jody rushing to him, then stopping, suddenly shy. I hang back with Rosie and hope Frank can find us. I watch one Marine after another bow into the arms that love them.

Behind me, Rosie explodes into a fury of barking, the deep throaty bark she reserves for strangers. I turn to shush her, and there's a Marine wearing a backpack and carrying a pair of heavy-duty cases woofing at her, egging her on. And I'm thinking, if this guy's going to act like an idiot, I'm not going to call her off. Then he drops the cases and bends over, crossing his arms over his chest the way Frank and I do when we want her to jump up and greet us, and he says in a high, baby voice, "Rosie, come here, girl."

At the sound of Frank's voice, Rosie stops barking, and I am so overwhelmed I am numb. Rosie strains toward him, trying to catch his scent. Automatically I unhook her leash. She leaps for him. He drops to his knees. She licks his face, then zings around him, whimpering and yelping.

Frank reaches for my hand to help him up, but I'm already on my way down, on my knees with him, my arms around his neck. I bury my face in his shoulder and cry.

For millennia, men have been leaving home to go to war: More than 2,000 years ago, 59,000 men left their homes in Carthage to go to war with Rome. Seven hundred years ago, 40,000 men left their homes in Japan to go to war with Mongol and Chinese invaders. Two hundred years ago, hundreds of thousands of men left their homes in France to go to war with the rest of Europe. Within the past year, more than 100,000 men, and women, too, left their homes in America to go to war with Iraq. And then, war after war, the survivors come home, and those of us who love them hold them in our arms and cry with terrible relief.

And when the day comes and we wake up and feel him warm beside us again, we raise up on one elbow, careful not to wake him, and look down at every feature of his sleeping face. And we whisper to ourselves in joyous disbelief: This is my husband.

Kristin Henderson's memoir, Driving by Moonlight: A Journey Through Love, War and Infertility, was published this month.

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