After spending almost a year in Iraq the 143rd Military Police Company of the Montana National Guard was welcomed home Saturday afternoon by a large and boisterous group that gathered at Arlin's Aircraft Service at Gallatin Field Airport.
The 45 Montanans that make up the unit were greeted under cloudy skies by family, friends and members of the community who gathered at the airfield in Belgrade.
The group stopped in Fort Lewis, Washington before flying back to Montana for what Sgt. First Class Patrick Mulhill described as "decompression time." They are there for a week, undergoing physical and mental health evaluations, filling out paperwork and taking care of other matters before heading home.
"It's just decompression time. Soldiers just wind down from everything that was going on over the past year," Mulhill explained.
Soldiers said the time spent in Fort Lewis was an anxious time for them.
"It's been unreal, just the anticipation has been killing a lot of people to come home, then we know it's the final end of our deployment for the last year," Mulhill said.
"Just being back here in America, it's a great feeling," 143rd member Danelle Wolfblack said.
Now that they're here many of the soldiers say they are just looking forward to getting back to normal life.
"Just getting back in the swing of things, seeing my boys grow, getting home hunting done," Ray Cichosz, a human resource specialist with the 143rd, said.
"Spending time with my nephews, I got three nephews. I got a niece that was just born. I can't wait to see her and meet her, just getting back into the family life I guess," Wolfblack said.
The men and women of the 143rd most likely won't face redeployment for another five years. Until then they will return to everyday life and continue training.
"Right now everybody will go on leave for a period of time then we'll start back to doing all our briefing and we have what's called the Yellow Ribbon Campaign, which is a series of briefings we have to go through. We'll do that for the next three-plus months and then we'll start back into the same old thing of training back every weekend, you know, the weekends we have drill," Mulhill said.
