LEWISTON — He’d rooted for Afghanistan.

She’d rooted for Iraq because it was safer — precisely why he hoped against it.

“I enjoy, I guess, getting shot at,” Scot Mackenzie said. “Iraq just seems boring.”

Three months before deploying for his third tour of duty with the Maine Army National Guard, which war zone he would find himself in was only one of the questions Scot and Stacey Mackenzie were grappling with in early December.

They wondered whether he ought to come home for the birth of their third child in May or wait to use his only leave for later. They wondered how she would juggle three little ones. And they wondered what Scot would be like when he got back.

Wednesday night he got the call that stopped the guesswork.

Scot was staying put.

“That was very much a blessing in disguise,” he said. “At least I’ll be home for the birth.”

But, he admits he’s disappointed. The news begins a new wait.

They’re both convinced he’ll still deploy. It’s a new matter of when.

Scot, 37, had volunteered for the tour with the 133rd Engineer Battalion that was called off this week. He volunteered for the first two tours, too, both times to Iraq.

“If it wasn’t me, someone else would go in my place, and I don’t want that,” Scot said. “The unit and country calls to go.”

He joined the Guard his senior year of high school. His father and grandfather had been military men.

Scot and Stacey met in 2003, three months before he was deployed. She remembers they laughed a lot and had fun. Things got serious when he came home on leave. Letters and contact that first time were sporadic.

“The first (tour) it was very fast-paced,” Scot said. “We were always, constantly moving.”

He traveled across the desert a lot, part of a military police unit out of Arizona. Early on, Scot said, someone suggested they wouldn’t need tents, so soldiers ditched them. They found themselves sleeping on cots, staring at the stars, for the next eight months. He can remember seeing latrines dug in the sand, lit up with flashlights, beams of light comically askew. They’d been dropped by people with no desire to retrieve them.

There weren’t too many improvised explosive devices, such as roadside bombs.

“Mostly, we were just getting shot at,” Scot said. “Morning, noon and night they were mortaring us. We played a game: Who could get the farthest outside the bunker while the mortars were coming in. I always won.”

He didn’t share details like that with Stacey, in the midst of it.

“I didn’t want her to get scared or think that I was nuts,” he said. On the second tour, working convoy security in 2006, “they wouldn’t mortar us. It was waiting for that next pothole to explode.”

The couple got married right before his second tour. They have a daughter, Avery, 4, and a son, Aiden, 2. Stacey found out she was pregnant again four months after Scot volunteered for this third tour. Until then, she supported him going. That’s when she started worrying about handling everything at home.

She also worried about the toll the tours take on them.

“You just kind of learn to do everything on your own,” she said. “He says I’m a little bit controlling now. There’s only so much people can take, family and the soldiers. You come back a different person every time, and it’s not always for the better.”

Scot agreed that he’s more anxious now. He doesn’t like crowds or loud noises.

“It just changed me from the person I used to be,” he said. “Apparently, I used to be a lot nicer. You shut off; you feel like nothing matters. It’s just hard to explain sometimes.”

A corrections officer at the Maine State Prison in Warren, Scott said he likes the purpose of being in the Guard. He likes being busy and having people depend on him.

“The military aspect I enjoy a lot and the war aspect I enjoy a lot,” he said.

He wants to go fight one more time.

“I’m sure I will get a third tour,” he said. “It’s just a matter of (with) whom and when and where.”

This week, they found out they’re expecting a baby boy.

[email protected]

Scot Mackenzie, a member of the Army National Guard, is pictured with his family: wife Stacey, son Aiden, 2, and daughter Avery, 4. Mackenzie is scheduled for deployment overseas.