LEWISTON – Charlie Morin came to know Iraq at night, dodging bombs in mile-long convoys on desert highways and ignoring road rules.

Every mission – eight to 10 hours of hauling groceries, sand bags, fuel oil or drinking water to another U.S. base – meant someone might die.

“We were all nervous,” said Morin, who returned to Lewiston at the end of August, following nine months on the ground in Iraq.

Back at his old job at a local supermarket deli counter, Morin said he thinks about returning to the war.

As a platoon sergeant who supervised 43 men and women, he spent every day keeping them safe. Some, like him, were older, but many were young, 19 and 20 years old.

“Lives depend on your decisions,” he said. “It was important.”

At home

Perhaps if he’d been less skilled in the Army job – he earned a promotion from 1st sergeant to master sergeant – it would be easier to return to work at the supermarket.

It’s a good job, but it’s not an important one, he said.

“All I can say is, ‘It’s low,'” he said.

The desire to return to war and the comfort of home is a push and pull he feels every day.

He doesn’t want to be apart from his family again. “It’s harder on them than anyone,” said the 43-year-old husband and father.

His son is 16. His daughter graduated from high school last spring.

“I missed her whole senior year,” Morin said. “The prom and everything.”

But he left a job in Iraq that made him feel good.

“I think I’ll be going back,” he said, sounding uncertain.

His feelings of ambiguity have spread to the war, too.

Morin has trouble imagining how commanders can safely scale back troop numbers. A drawdown would leave ripples of problems.

He has imagined fewer patrols along the roads he once drove. Without the manpower to check for explosives, roads would become too dangerous to drive, he said.

As for the war itself, “there is no end in sight.”

Over there

His job there was something he never trained for until after the war broke out.

A veteran of the Persian Gulf war, Morin spent almost 20 years as a medic with the Army Reserve. He learned how to give first aid on the battlefield and how to set up a hospital.

In 2003, when the war in Iraq began, he figured he’d be called up with so many other part-time soldiers. But the call never came. The Army already had plenty of units like his over there, he learned.

He decided to change his specialty.

Though he had no experience, he learned that truck drivers were in short supply. So in 2005, he volunteered to attend a truck-driving school. One year ago, he arrived in Iraq.

“I don’t regret going at all,” he said.

The adjustment was rough, though.

First came the heat, which sometimes reaches 140 degrees in the summer. Even in November, the heat felt oppressive, “like 10,000 hair dryers on high.”

Then, there were the missions.

He was assigned to a unit that supplied U.S. bases. Quickly, he learned about the rhythm of the work.

They drove at night, when most people are confined to their homes under a standing curfew.

The average convoy had 20 trucks, with two people assigned to each. Convoys would stretch for a mile or two, with drivers spacing the trucks to avoid being targets.

Among them, gun trucks would keep watch, escorting the way, blocking off intersections from oncoming cars and searching for improvised explosive devices, or IEDs.

To anyone watching the trucks, they’d appear to be little more than noisy ghosts. Like London’s blitz-era vehicles, they shielded their headlights and covered side lights and reflectors to make it tougher for them to be seen at night.

Most often, the convoys would start at 8 or 10 p.m. and continue until past dawn.

“Everybody’s scared,” Morin said. “And you’d go 50 or 60 mph.”

Both men in the cab, the driver and the passenger, spent their nights peering through the windshield looking for signs of IEDs or the craters of past bombs.

A crater might be 4 feet across, Morin said. And an IED might be given away by little more than a mound of freshly dug earth, a trash bag or a dead body.

“They are getting more sophisticated,” he said of the Iraqis. Some IEDs are now triggered by cell phones or laser beams.

On his worst night, he avoided an IED on the way to his destination and picked out two more on the way back. He had just pulled away from the last one when the cab of his truck was struck by sniper fire.

An armor-piercing round tore right through the metal.

“It was so loud, it sounded like it exploded,” he said. “It was the scariest thing in my life.”

Morin took pictures of the hole and moved on.

Only time will tell how much he leaves it behind, though.

The decision to go back or to stay home, unlike so many soldiers, will be his. With 23 years of service, he can retire at any time. There would be no loss of benefits. No shame.

“I can resign and stay home,” he said.