By Daniel Hartill,Staff Writer

Greg Vaillancourt sprawled on his belly, aimed and pulled the trigger of his machine gun.

The crackle in the air and the recoil were so familiar a year ago, when he carried the heavy gun on convoys in Iraq.

This time – in a firing range on a hillside in Gardiner – it made him jump.

“It’s the first time I’ve heard that sound since Iraq,” said the 28-year-old husband and father.

For just a moment, he recalled all those convoys, of driving through a hostile city at night with nothing to see by but the moonlight.

“It changes you,” Vaillancourt said. “I’m not the same person any more.”

Like so many soldiers who have returned, the Army specialist tries to make peace with the memories.

“I don’t know if I killed someone,” said Vaillancourt, sitting in a darkened classroom at the Lewiston Armory.

It’s a question he’s heard so many times since he returned last March. Usually, he doesn’t answer. He just walks away.

“Maybe I did,” he said. “I’m sure somebody from our company did.”

Too many bullets were fired from too many guns.

Since his return home last March – one of roughly 500 soldiers in the 133rd Engineer Battalion of the Maine Army National Guard – he has remembered and prayed and slowly adjusted to life after war.

“You think about it every day,” he said. “And it gets easier.”

It’s harder than he imagined, though.

In trouble

After a full year at home, the sacrifice continues.

In Vaillancourt’s unit, the Lewiston and Norway-based Charlie Company, the emotional toll of the war has led some soldiers to become heavy drinkers. There have also been incidents of spousal abuse and arrests, said Capt. Michael Mitchell, the company commander.

“Guys who have never been in trouble before have been in jail,” Mitchell said. Others have merely been accumulating speeding tickets as they relearn to drive on roads with rules.

The number of arrests and related problems within the company are tough to trace. Maine doesn’t track such statistics and Mitchell declined to talk about specifics.

However, he said the problems are serious.

“We all tried to prepare for this,” he said, but even he didn’t realize the emotional effects he’d endure.

“I thought the bad dreams would be gone in a year,” he said. “They’re not.”

On Feb. 28, the Journal of the American Medical Association released a nationwide study finding that one-third of all returning soldiers have had at least one visit with a mental health worker in their first year back from Iraq.

As part of the analysis outlined in the Journal, doctors questioned more than 222,000 Iraq veterans. Almost 10 percent screened positive for post-traumatic stress disorder.

Roy Driver, a counselor who runs the Lewiston Vet Center, dislikes such clinical language. The implications bother him, he said. And they frighten soldiers who might need his help.

“We come to believe there is something wrong with a person,” Driver said of people diagnosed with the disorder.

Instead, people ought to know that what’s happening to soldiers who have experienced combat is completely natural.

“There is a chemical response that is occurring and it’s for a good reason,” Driver said. “When your life is threatened, you adapt to a different type of thinking.”

It’s all about safety and control.

When they come back, they may know intellectually that they are safe, but they cling to their old behaviors. They may avoid crowds, withdraw from family or get angry easily

“It’s not that they don’t love their families,” Driver said. “They just don’t know how to change.”

Driver meets with soldiers every day. He teaches them techniques for relaxing. For some, medication also helps.

“It has nothing whatsoever to do with weakness,” he said. It’s about the trauma. And it’s applicable to veterans of every war.

“Each person will remember the moment they were traumatized, as if it were yesterday, for the rest of their lives,” Driver said.

In combat

One might think the Maine unit – a combination of equipment operators, plumbers and masons – faced few combat experiences.

However, during their year in Iraq, the battalion completed 877 missions in three provinces. Three members of the unit, Spc. Christopher Gelineau, Sgt. Thomas Dostie and Staff Sgt. Lynn Poulin, died there. Another, Sgt. 1st Class Michael Jones, died only days after his return.

Officers also awarded 42 Purple Hearts to soldiers who were injured in combat.

Tasked with building roads, schools, bunkers and medical clinics, the engineers faced few problems in peaceful areas of Iraq, such as the Kurdish mountains to the north where they were warmly greeted.

However, in Mosul, Iraq’s third-largest city, the engineers became targets whenever they left the relative safety of the American compound.

Getting to their work sites could be deadly.

Each work convoy was preceded by briefings that included information on which neighborhoods tended to draw the most sniper fire or where roadside bombs were the most plentiful.

“There were days when we’d know we were going to get hit,” Mitchell said.

On the road, soldiers would become hyper-aware, worried of every intersection and traffic jam. They learned to drive into oncoming lanes and on sidewalks, to shove stopped cars from their paths and avoid the trash in the road. Any piece might hide a bomb.

The fear could be overwhelming.

“I was nervous every time, from the first time to the last,” said Vaillancourt, whose job was to operate the heavy machine gun known as a SAWS, short for “squad automatic weapon.”

“I never left the base camp without the rosary around my neck,” he said.

Mitchell and Vaillancourt, like many other soldiers from the 133rd, survived roadside bomb attacks.

As someone might expect from watching TV, there was a loud explosion with a ball of flame.

“But what you don’t get from TV is the concussion, the feel of the blast against your chest,” Vaillancourt said.

Sometimes the explosion’s aftermath was worse, Mitchell said. A bomb that might not injure anyone might disable a vehicle by flattening its tire. Stopped trucks or Humvees would often draw sniper fire.

More than once, Mitchell was forced to order people to change tires while bullets pinged nearby.

After the first experience, he phoned home for a NASCAR-style floor jack and an air-powered drill.

“I don’t care what they cost,” he told the folks back home.

Mitchell, who works for the Maine State Police as a polygraph technician, recalled the attacks in his Augusta office, decorated with citations and photos.

As his descriptions went on, his face turned red and his hands clenched.

“It doesn’t feel like it was a year ago,” he said.

Leaving the Guard

Charlie Company’s soldiers have changed, too.

Since the return last March, about 40 of the 120 or so men and women have left, many following vows to get out when they could.

Maj. Gen. Bill Libby, in charge of the Maine guard, said the number represents the natural turnover the group might have seen even if it hadn’t gone to Iraq.

And new soldiers have replaced the old ones, he said.

Mitchell plans to be among the soldiers who stay, though he has served more than 20 years and could retire with full benefits.

But Vaillancourt plans to get out when he’s eligible in 2007, eight years before he could draw retirement. The possibility that he could be sent back to Iraq, something Libby insists is unlikely, is too great.

His family needs him too much, he said.

While he was away, his son, Trent, now 4, cried himself to sleep most nights.

Since returning from Iraq, he and his wife, Amy, have had a second boy, Luke. And Greg has been promoted in his job, working for a Sabattus drywall company.

“It’s about my family’s needs,” he said. “I feel like I’ve done my part.”