THE HORRORS OF WAR REMAIN BOTTLED UP INSIDE

We got a glimpse, but only a glimpse, into what our returning soldiers went through in Iraq when they heard the names of their two fallen comrades.

In two separate ceremonies in a cavernous hangar at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport a week ago, the 180 Ohio National Guard soldiers stood in formation as the officer onstage recited the names of the two men who died: Spc. Todd Bates and Staff Sgt. Aaron Reese.

Many of the hundreds of family members and friends surrounding the soldiers began to tear up, staring at them as the Cleveland Police Pipes and Drums Corps played “Amazing Grace.”

The soldiers of the 135th Military Police Company, though, were true professionals. The women, shorter and more diminutive, stood out like black keys on a piano, but otherwise the camouflage uniforms and rigid postures rendered them all nearly identical.

They wore the expressionless faces of returning warriors. Except for the blinking. Dozens of them were blinking, blinking, blinking as the bagpipes wailed. When the song finished, a few made quick swipes at their eyes, and that was that.

Only it isn’t, and only now their families may be finding out just what these young men and women went through in Iraq. For all their worrying, many of them had no idea just how awful it was because their soldiers protected them.

That’s what soldiers do.

I learned that after sharing a flight last month with a young man the same age as my son, twenty-nine, who recently had returned from Iraq.

I didn’t know he was a soldier until I offered him the bag of Doritos from my lunch tray. He snatched them up.

“I haven’t had these in more than a year,” he said. “I can’t get enough of them now.”

He laughed at my confusion. “I just got back from Iraq,” he said, grinning. “They don’t have these there.”

His name is Brendan, and he is a corporal in the National Guard. With little prodding, and without bitterness or anger, he described the hell he’d just seen.

The heat, I’d heard about. The lack of adequate water in a place where you can never drink enough, I’d also heard about. I’d even heard that some soldiers, particularly those in the National Guard and the Reserves, lacked adequate protective gear. I had a hard time believing that, though, until Brendan started telling his story.

His job was to attract sniper fire as he drove a light-armored vehicle in the dead of night. The idea was to draw lone gunmen out so they could be killed or captured before the Army convoys drove through.

His flak jacket was designed to carry protective plates in the front and back of the chest. Each jacket in his company, though, arrived with only one protective plate.

“Each of us had to decide whether to wear it in the front or back,” he said, laughing. “We figured, we’re not going to run away from them, so we decided to wear them over our hearts.”

When I asked him if he had been scared, he laughed again. “You’re scared all the time. You’d better be.”

Over the next two hours, we talked. He was a handsome, animated man. He told his stories as a soldier on an adventure. I heard them as a mother. When I asked how his own mom dealt with his hardships, he shook his head.

“I didn’t tell her. I didn’t tell anyone until I got home. None of us did. You don’t want to put your family through that, you know?”

Brendan came home from Iraq in October. He brought his stories with him, in a dusty journal he wrote in nearly every day. One by one, his family members read it. Their reactions, he said, were always the same.

“I didn’t know,” they said, usually with tears in their eyes.

“You never told me.”

“I had no idea.”

I thought of Brendan as I watched the soldiers of the 135th flood into the hangar and into the arms of their tearful families. I thought of his stories when I saw many of them tear up for their fallen comrades.

They, too, have their stories.

My prayer is that they also have someone willing to listen.