Finding The Way Home

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Mayor Paul Bunn paces the parking lot in front of Bradford's city hall, barking out orders on his cell phone while smoking a cigarette. The puffing and the posturing are habits honed by a year of leading troops through hellfire in Baghdad. "People do what I say, when I say, how I say, and no questions asked," says Bunn in his staff-sergeant mode, stubbing out the cigarette. The city staff—all two of them—ruin the effect, however, by peering out a city-hall window and smiling indulgently at the boss. It is his first day back at work. They're just glad to have him back in one piece.

A year and a half ago, the mayor, the police chief and eight other men from this Arkansas town of 819, an hour's drive north of Little Rock, were called up for duty in Iraq by the Arkansas National Guard; one more was called by the Air Force Reserve. It was a blow not just to the weekend warriors—who were more accustomed to tornado cleanup than fighting—but to their families and Bradford's civic life as well. The town's big projects—to update the water system, jail the local methamphetamine dealers and make a clean sweep of the junk in people's yards—slowly stalled. Given fears for the town's soldiers, it was as if Bradford held its breath for the year they were in combat, hanging on every newscast, every e-mail and call home. "Nothing progressed," says Farrah Chambliss, 28, wife of police chief Josh Chambliss, also a staff sergeant in Iraq. "We ... just floated."

The "Gunslingers" of Arkansas' 39th Infantry Brigade are home now. All the Guardsmen from Bradford survived, their lives and limbs intact after a year of hunting insurgents on the streets of Baghdad's scariest neighborhoods, like Sadr City and Adhamiyah. Wherever you go in Bradford these days—down to McCall's Family Restaurant for lunch or up to Edens Quick Check for some gossip—faces light up as the mayor and the police chief turn up, making their daily rounds. But like the estimated 226,000 other weekend soldiers who have returned from service abroad since the 9/11 attacks, Bradford's men came home to new and jumbled emotions as well as huge celebrations. The mayor, his own business near bankruptcy because of his absence, is edgy and angry. The police chief, his hands noticeably shaky, fears he is quicker on the draw. Their wives, relieved, bemused and touched, notice that their men hug more. But it's not just their families the men are holding close. It's also their fears. Here's how two men and a town are finding their way home, tentatively, from the horrors of Iraq.

The Police Chief

What can you say about a man who shows you a picture of a human heart lying on the road after a bombing in Baghdad, then turns to his whiny 9-month-old daughter and calms her with a gentle "Hey, Toots"? Bradford's boyish police chief, Josh Chambliss, 30, is sitting in his neat-as-a-pin living room with wife Farrah and baby Chloe, clicking through an electronic album on his computer of photos he took of life in Baghdad: the palace of Saddam Hussein's son Uday and his infamous rape bed. Bloody, blown-up bodies on a street, a severed head, the heart blasted from an Iraqi's chest lying in the street. "It freaks Farrah out," Chambliss says with an apologetic look her way. He's not quite sure why he keeps those pictures or why he keeps looking at them.