LEWISTON — The big, important details were out of the way.

Nicholas Theriault had already stacked or split the 15 cords of wood their apartment building burns in a winter. He’d made sure a friend could handle the furnace, that his dad’s snowblower was snow-ready.

A day before saying goodbye to his wife, Erin, for a year-long deployment to Afghanistan, the 26-year-old was trying to find room in his bag for slippers.

“For me, it’s the packing. I’m stressed that I’m forgetting something,” Nicholas said.

He and Erin were high school sweethearts at St. Dominic Regional High School. They’d done the saying goodbye thing before. Nicholas went to Iraq with the Maine Army National Guard from August 2006 to July 2007.

“I always equate (being in the field) to playing hockey,” he said. “You’re with the guys. When you’re on the mission, it’s game time. When you’re not, it’s like being in the locker room — eating, watching movies, working out.”

He heard whispers while he was still overseas about being sent to Afghanistan. In a sense, he’s spent the past two years getting ready.

“I imagine this time, we will be engaged far more than in Iraq,” Nicholas said. “In Iraq, it was shoot and flee or (improvised explosive device) attacks. In Afghanistan, they’ll stay and fight; they’re not going to shoot and run. I envision it being a lot more dangerous.”

Nicholas joined the Guard four years ago, after graduating from the University of Maine with a mechanical engineering degree. Both of his grandfathers had been in the military.

“I didn’t see anyone in my generation in my family serving and I wanted to be part of what seemed like a tradition,” he said.

Born in Germany when her father was stationed there, Erin remembers saying she was never going to be with an Army man. She smiled, sitting next to Nicholas and their big black cat, Willow, and added, “Never say never.”

An oncology nurse at Central Maine Medical Center, Erin wrote him every day during his first deployment, always right before bed.

“I recall about every letter had, ‘I’m completely exhausted right now,'” Nicholas said. “Almost every one is, ‘Willow’s being crazy right now. School is tough.’ I’m not one for writing too much. I liked it. I usually shoved a letter in my breast pocket and I’d read it when we had a minute on our mission.”

In Iraq, he had been a gunner on a rotating turret, keeping his eyes peeled on long treks escorting 55- to 60-truck convoys.

As a squad leader staff sergeant with the 172nd Mountain Company, this time he went to nine training schools (leadership, tactical) in the past year to get ready and jogged with bricks in his backpack up Bartlett Hill and Pleasant Street.

He knows he’s being sent to work near the Pakistan border, but that’s it for now. The soldiers had moaned to each other, after all that training, “We’ll probably end up being gate guards or tower guards,” Nicholas said.

Wherever he’s posted, he and Erin were bracing for less contact, the reality of deploying to a country without reliable Internet or mail. She’d have to make sure her frequent care packages to him could handle being air-dropped. In Iraq, he’d been able to surf the Web and e-mail home from his tent.

“Realizing what it is to say goodbye to your entire family for a year, that’s the hardest part,” Nicholas said.

Erin said she’d miss having that person in her life with whom she shares everything. She’d have to shoulder double the responsibilities at home. And she’d worry about making sure her husband knew she was thinking about him all the time.

“I support him 100 percent,” she said. “There’s not too many guys who say, ‘I’ve got my degree; I just feel the obligation to support my country.'”

Before he left, Nicholas found room for his slippers.

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Dec. 4, 2009 head and shoulders of Nicholas Theriault of Lewiston, Maine.

Nichoals Theriault and his wife Erin cuddle on their couch just prior to Nicholas leaving for a mission in Afghanistan.