To it's credit the Army has set up programs for soldiers returning from deployments to Iraq to help them to "decompress" for lack of a better term. It's an unintended consequence that the drunken Fratboy Coward and the NeoCon draft-dodgers never forsaw. A big "Bravo Zulu" to the Army for doing the right thing. A middle finger salute to the NeoCons for there ever having to be such a program.

At Fort Riley, this is the last stop before home for soldiers returning from Iraq. Mandatory "debriefs" like this one, to be conducted for thousands of soldiers in training rooms and auditoriums at bases across the country, are a novelty for the United States military. The sessions were begun in response to a spate of deaths at Fort Bragg, N.C., in 2002, when four soldiers were charged with killing their wives in unrelated cases. The sessions reflect the realization that for soldiers and their families, the burdens and sacrifices of deployment go far beyond fighting overseas and waiting at home.

As these re-entry sessions show, coping with war is a long-term struggle, a way of life, falling hardest on a sliver of American society: the men, women and children of the military class, hundreds of thousands of them, many clustered in and around bases like Fort Riley.

But it's not all sweetness and light for some soldiers who will get back to the world:

Christa Dannenberg, 20, had never lived alone until her husband, Staff Sgt. Robert Dannenberg, went to Iraq in March 2003, six months after they married. She had moved from her parents' home into his. Everything got so quiet when he left.

By the time he returned last July, Ms. Dannenberg had learned to handle the checkbook, to wake up in bed alone, to make friends. At first, she said, it was odd to have him back. "I had to initiate every conversation," Ms. Dannenberg said. "It was like he wasn't there. He wouldn't talk."

But they pushed through that, they said. They laugh about it now. "It was hard to deal with," she said.

Sergeant Dannenberg, 23, said he had not even noticed his own silence; it was all a blur. "I guess I just thought she had a lot to tell me," he said. "You get that way in the desert."

He said he hoped he and his wife would get to spend a full year together now, something they have yet to do as a couple.

Not long ago, Sergeant Dannenberg and 700 other soldiers were ordered to return to Iraq.