KALISPELL - When Ed Krause takes careful stock of the past 15 months, when he considers the snipers and the roadside bombs and the 140-degree days living in a tin can, it's not surprising that he comes finally to the conclusion that "there's been a lot of bad, bad, miserable days."
But what is surprising is that Staff Sgt. Krause believes his most miserable moment came not in Iraq, but in Kalispell.
Had he looked back, wife Amy said, he surely would have seen his family losing it. He would have seen 2-year-old daughter Jalynn hugging tight to mama's neck, 11-year-old son Tyler coming apart a bit around the edges.
"It's the hardest thing you'll ever do," Krause said, "turning your back like that. You have this duty ..."
Krause doesn't quite finish the sentence, so it's impossible to know whether he's talking about his duty to family, or his National Guard duty to the 639th Quartermaster Supply Company. Likely, it's a bit of both, and the struggle between the two may have been what clipped that sentence short.
"You just do it," Amy cut in. "It's not a choice."
The choice, for Krause, was made back in 1986, when he dropped out of the University of Montana to join the Army's infantry. He spent the next two years as a mortarman and sniper in Panama, where "it got really, really serious," he said. "I had to grow up fast."
He liked the military, he said, but the active-duty lifestyle was just a bit too structured for full-time work. "I like some fun and games on occasion," he said.
And so Krause found a middle ground. The day he left the Army in June 1990 was the same day he joined the Guard, becoming part-time soldier, part-time cop in Conrad.
Of course, 15 years ago Krause and the rest of the nation had no idea what was coming. The World Trade Center towers still cast their long shadows, and weapons of mass destruction were not yet part of the popular vocabulary.
"A whole lot has changed since then," Krause said.
Krause's big change came on Dec. 2, 2003, the day he left his job as a small-town policeman and shipped out from Kalispell with his Guard unit. Over the next 15 months, he ran fuel depots, stood guard duty, drove tanker trucks, ran convoys through "some very, very dangerous country."
Krause slides a picture onto his kitchen table, an image taken from his truck as he rolled down an Iraqi freeway. Overhead, the sign says "Baghdad Airport."
"That," Krause said, "is the most dangerous road in Iraq." He ran it "four times, as far as I can recall. We went where they told us to go."
In fact, he and his unit made national news when another supply company refused to make a fuel delivery, saying the route was too dangerous.
"We did it," Krause said. "We ran the fuel up north. God, that was a long, long day. I was running the machine gun."
The fuel tankers, he said, were not well-equipped. "We sacrificed armor for speed," he said. "You want to move fast on a convoy run."
Along the way, he said, the convoy hit two roadside bombs, "and the blast was just impressive. It blew up three trucks behind me, and all you could see was a big cloud of smoke and dust. But you keep rolling. Once you stop, you're a target."
"That was one of my worst days in Iraq," he said.
But there were good days as well. Krause tosses out pictures of newly built water canals, irrigation ditches built to carry water from the Euphrates to the Bedouins. He shares pictures of smiling Iraqi children clamoring for treats.
"That's the kind of stuff people don't see," Krause said. "There's a lot of good happening over there."
There are pictures of Krause guarding Iraqi workers while they rebuilt the country's infrastructure, pictures of locals packing off relief supplies.
"We had such a positive impact on those families by giving them clothes, giving them a job," he said. "It's the little things. I support what we're doing over there. I've seen the good."
And then there's the pictures of soldiers fishing behind an ancient mosque, soldiers playing video games, soldiers posing like tourists on the palm-lined Euphrates.
"This is what we do over there," Krause said. "We fish and play games. War is hell."
Actually, he's not entirely joking.
"We played a lot of X-Box and PlayStation over there," Krause admitted. "There were days when I was so bored I'd read a magazine backwards just for something to do."
The downtime, though, was essential, a calm oasis between long and frenzied days of dangerous work that frayed the nerves and demanded a focus that could not be maintained without a bit of X-Box, he said.
One of Krause's favorite ways to pass the time was "Dumpster diving."
"You wouldn't believe the waste over there," he said, walking into his small basement room packed with scavenged goods. "The waste is phenomenal."
Krause loosens the lids on crates of military gear thrown away by homebound soldiers limited to what they could carry. Brand-new coveralls, Leatherman tools, Gore-Tex jackets, body armor, boots, tools, anything and everything, most of it new with the tags still attached.
"The Dumpster diving was just a killing-time thing," Krause said. "We'd dig it out and ship treasures home."
Many soldiers even tossed out money, the paper "pogs" that serve as currency on the bases but are useless in civilian life. He collected them, many worth only 25 cents, and showed up one day with an ice cream bucket full to the brim, cashing them in for enough greenbacks that he bought an X-Box of his own when he got home.
Some of the scavenged gear he kept, some he traded and some he sold in the local markets - places, he said, "where you can buy anything if you know where to go and who to ask."
Krause bought everything from Iraqi tea to a drum clip for an AK-47.
"The insurgents love these big AK drums," he said. "It's just pray and spray."
He bought Muslim prayer flags and hand-rolled cigars.
But the war, finally, was no shopping trip. Between the downtime, Krause convoyed fuel, stood guard, built water systems and established far-flung depots in deadly corners of Iraq.
Some of the work felt like it could have been in Montana - "except that all you can see is a lot of hot, dry and dusty" - work like driving truck or digging irrigation ditches.
Other days, the work was distinctly Iraqi in nature. In Najaf, he said, "we drilled three wells for water, and hit oil every time at 40 feet. They were gushers; we had to cap them."
In the end, he said, they gave up drilling and trucked in water, which was far more precious than fuel.
"We worked our butts off," he said. "You were either so busy you couldn't keep up, nonstop around the clock, or you were so bored you were going crazy. There wasn't much happy medium."
The toughest times, Krause said, were the days of boredom, when his mind had time to wander home without him.
"You're always thinking about family," he said. "But it's frustrating; you don't have any control over anything. There were many nights when I'd just lie in bed and wonder what was going on at home."
What was going on, Amy said, was that young Jalynn - a "high-maintenance" 2-year-old - was "physically attached to me for 15 months. She wouldn't let go."
"And Tyler, bless his little soul, he tried to be the tough guy," she said. "He picked up a lot of the slack, things that Ed used to do. I could not have survived this without him. It probably wasn't fair, though, because he had to grow up way too fast."
At one point, Amy was laid off from her job at the local school, "and there I was in Conrad, with two small kids, no job and no support system. I thought, 'Do I want to sit here bored?' It's not good for my kids to have a bored mom."
And so she moved into her mother-in-law's house, commuting from Kalispell to Marion for a new school job.
"It was hard not having another adult around to talk to," she said, "someone to bounce stuff off of, someone to support you in a crisis."
The hardest parts, she said, were the weeks when Ed was on convoy or isolated in Najaf, because communication home was cut off.
"I was fine as long as I could hear from him," she said. "But when you don't hear anything for two or three weeks, well, your mind wanders."
Mostly, she said, it would wander to anxious places, dark spots where her imagination conjured up any number of disasters. She filled the time making home videos, months of family life on tape that Ed has been busily catching up on.
"But Ed will never be there for his son's first football game," she said. "He wasn't there when his daughter started speaking in sentences."
Ed made tapes, too, mailing them home to show his family what life was like in Iraq. Tyler, for one, loved to watch the military tapes made by dad, dressed in desert fatigues, hanging on to the camcorder in one hand and the machine gun in the other.
Some images, however, never made the tape, cutting too close to Krause's own life. Images like that of the young Iraqi boy, just about Tyler's age, who had been shot through both legs.
"He didn't do anything wrong," Krause said of the boy. "It was just a case of wrong place, wrong time. It's hard. We all loved the kids over there. It's hard to know that you have a family at home that has everything it wants and here these kids have nothing."
In the end, he said, he built a wall between the things he could control and the things he could not, and then went on about doing his job.
It is a job, he said, that will be repeated by hundreds more soldiers before the desert is left to the Iraqi people.
"Yeah," he said, "we'll eventually pull out. But it's not a quick-fix kind of place. Progress there is steady, but it's slow. Americans are so used to the quick fix, but that's not going to happen there. There's a big job still to do."
For now, at least, he's ready to leave the job to someone else.
"I've been there, done that," he said. "It's good to be home."
Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at mjamison@missoulian.com
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