In Iraq and Idaho on Monday morning, there were small ceremonies with larger consequences for bank managers and auto dealer reps, college students and construction workers from Bonners Ferry to Boise. In Baghdad, according to news reports, only about a dozen people were present when L. Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, handed a packet of documents – including a letter from President Bush – to Iraq's Chief Justice Midhat al-Mahmoudi, granting legal sovereignty to Iraqis to run their own country. Local soldiers have a stake in this, too, but soldiers don't send letters on fancy stationery. Soldiers send postcards. Here is one tacked to a bulletin board in the National Guard armory in Post Falls, sent to his buddies by a North Idahoan now in Iraq: "We only get mortared once a day. It's May and it's 110 and my AC's out. Wish you were here." Across the world from Baghdad, a few dozen North Idahoans mustered at the armory of the 116th Combat Engineering Battalion of the National Guard on Monday morning. These were the men – and they are all men – of Charlie Company, who filled out their own packets of documents as their deployment as a security force in Iraq grows ever more real. It was the same at the armory in Moscow, Idaho, where Josh Swearingen, a 20-year-old University of Idaho student from Kooskia, spent Friday morning helping his fellow guardsmen brush up on common tasks such as administering first aid and using the radios. A few feet away, Spc. Tracy Hostetler of Caldwell, Idaho, packed his black plastic footlocker, where he had DVDs, two baseball gloves and a football tucked in with a Bible and his favorite Denver Broncos cap. He's leaving behind a wife and five kids, the youngest just 1 1/2. It's not easy saying goodbye, he said, adding that he keeps in touch with frequent phone calls. The 116th Engineering Battalion will fly from Lewiston on a chartered plane on Saturday. This wave of citizen soldiers from Idaho – some 1,250 in all – will spend the rest of this week making final preparations as they head to Texas for combat training. The Pentagon has not said specifically where the battalion will be stationed. The soldiers, of course, buzzed with speculation about the morning's developments in Baghdad. "I heard we were turning everything over to the Iraqis," said Sgt. Jon Bucher. But it's pointless to speculate about what this means for the 116th, he said "Every day, something changes over there. All we can do is train as best we can." Training is important for 42-year-old Bucher, sergeant in charge of Charlie Company's 28-man 3rd Platoon. "My biggest job is I want to bring everybody back. I think about that all the time," Bucher said. With piercing eyes, Bucher looks at the younger soldiers, some as young as 19, lining up to take turns driving an armored off-road fork lift or gathered around the deafening roar of the all-purpose hauler known as the Hemmet. "We're just getting into active duty mode," said Spc. E4 Craig Williams, a recent high school graduate and one of the unit's 19-year-olds. The platoon is tuning its skills not so much for Iraq, he said, but to make a good first impression at Fort Bliss, Texas. Idaho's Guard unit leaves Saturday for about three months of training. For the honor of the brigade, they can't go into training looking like rubes. "We don't want to look all ate up. We're a high-speed company," Williams said, citing the combat engineers' duties of breaching obstacles – including clearing out minefields. "That's the worst part of it," Williams said. Whether it's clearing a minefield or building a bridge, the engineers are up to it, said Capt. Kory Turnbow, commander of the 100-soldier Bravo Company in Moscow. "We're like an infantry on steroids," he said. "There's not a whole lot we can't do." "This is a big responsibility," Bucher said from his command spot near a shoulder-high stack of pallets, which made a handy surface to do paperwork. "I got 27 guys I'm responsible for – and that's just them. Then you add the parents and the spouses and families. There are a lot of people out there I could be answering to." But after a pause to regard his platoon, standing in easy camaraderie, Bucher cocked his head. "Nowhere out there in the civilian sector is there anything like that. And that's a point of pride; it helps me get through," Bucher said. He's proud of his military service, having served as a squad leader for a different engineering unit in the first Gulf War. Bucher points out with some amusement that had he remained in the regular Army, he could be retired by now. "I got caught up in the downsizing that followed the Gulf War. I had 15 years in," he said. A soldier can retire after 20. Counting his Guard service, Bucher has been 23 years a soldier – longer than Williams has been on the planet. Williams said he joined the Guard after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks because the guard would take him underage and the regular Army wouldn't. "I joined not so much to fight, but we are going to need people there," Williams said. "I have a lot of hopes. I hope no one gets hurt." "People want to work as a team now. I didn't get along with too many people here before," Williams said, citing a number of old-timers who always let the rookies know who had rank around the armory. Now, the 116th's once-provincial world of weekend drills and a weed-encircled equipment lot that backs up against Interstate 90 extends to patrols and possible combat on the other side of the world. The 116th's world is now linked to a place where people the soldiers once only saw as distant figures in the news are handing each other important documents and where the opposition registers its disagreement through the use of rocket launchers. Back in Post Falls, Bucher was talking about risk and preparation. "It's like being a parent," said Bucher, who recently became both a husband and a stepdad. "You raise your kids and hopefully you did it right and everything so they can go out on their own. "A lot of these guys, they joined for a reason. And whatever that reason is – be it college money or be it wanting to be part of a team – inside each one is a sense of duty," the sergeant said. "This is payback time." True enough, added Williams "I don't want to take for granted all that we have in this country – and we have a lot. I want to earn it."
