I know a few journalists who have been to Iraq, and they always come home with astounding tales to tell. But nothing can quite compare to the stories of the soldiers on the ground, who spend months at a time on the front lines, and make their living every day facing death. The Catholic Herald in Arlington, Virginia this week profiles one of them:

Six-year-old Eavan Snellings breaks her hand from her mother’s and points to a white arch-shaped slab with black lettering — the tombstone of a 25-year-old soldier who died fighting in Operation Iraqi Freedom this September.

Tracy Snellings crouches down at the edge of the grave — not yet covered with grass —and reads aloud the carved name, date of birth and date of death. Mother and daughter pause for a moment, then move on through the seemingly endless rows of identical white stones — a sea of sacrifice stretched before them.

The visit to Arlington National Cemetery is an emotional journey for Snellings, a Navy Reserve lieutenant who returned only six weeks ago from a six-month deployment in Anbar Province. In visiting the memorial, Snellings said she hoped to pass on some understanding of sacrifice to Eavan, a first-grader at St. Charles Borromeo School in Arlington.

“She’s really too young to get it,” Snellings said, but “I want her to understand for you to have what you have these guys are out there every single day.”

Though the cemetery has always held a special place in her heart, Snellings said that it wasn’t until stationed in Iraq that she finally understood what dying for country meant.

“It’s just different,” she said. “I’ve been in Iraq walking around. I get it. This is a tremendous amount of sacrifice right here.”

Since returning, that sacrifice has been constantly on Snellings’ mind, as are the troops back in the Middle East. Sitting in her Vienna kitchen on a recent Friday afternoon, a steady rain falling outside, Snellings glances at her watch, wheels turning in her head.

“Right now it’s 10 o’clock at night,” she said. “There are still people working, doing their job and going out on patrols. They’re going to be doing this through the night, and they’re going to be doing it tomorrow.”

That’s life in Iraq for American troops: 12- to 20-hour workdays, seven days a week, holidays included. For half a year, this parishioner of St. Charles Borromeo Church was one of them: living on Asian Standard Time, wearing Kevlar body armor and occasionally riding through the streets in a Humvee. Now she’s back home in Northern Virginia, and the 37-year-old first-time veteran is having trouble getting settled.

“It’s really a difficult adjustment,” Snellings said. “The hardest thing has been just getting back to a life.”

Snellings’ mobilization was a result of her 2003 decision to join the Navy Reserves, something she said she’d always wanted to do.

“I’ve always been interested in serving — being a part of something bigger and being able to make a difference,” she said.

Last December, she got the order to report for active duty. A week later she began three months of training, culminating with her April 5 deployment.

Now that she’s home, it’s the little things — unpacking, grocery shopping, paying bills — that are the most difficult to remember, she said. And she looks at almost everything with a changed perspective. That includes celebrity news, something Snellings said she can no longer stand.

“I talked to women in Iraq who couldn’t afford to feed their families and who lived in a mud shack that had been shot at,” she said. “All they want is to provide the next meal for their family and not have their kids accidentally touch an IED and get blown up. This is what it’s about — survival at the very basic level. Who gives a crap what happened with Britney Spears’ kids?”

No one in Iraq, anyway. All the troops care about are their jobs — and that’s all they had to worry about, which made life very simple, Snellings said.

“Your job responsibilities are obviously tremendous, but you don’t have to do anything else,” she said. “Somebody cooks for you. If you have free time, you sleep, you watch movies or you work out. You don’t have to pay bills. You don’t have any childcare responsibilities. If you’re married you have no spousal commitments. You have no parties, there is no social life, there’s nothing. And it becomes very monotonous, but at the same time, that’s all there is, so it’s very, very easy.”

But with that simplicity comes a loss of emotion.

“Lives depend on you to fulfill a job,” she said. “You have to emotionally disconnect from everything. If you get too bogged down you’re not going to be effective in your job — and that could end up getting people hurt.”

According to the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, this common mindset is known as “battlemind” — “the soldier’s inner strength to face fear and adversity in combat with courage” — and Snellings is not alone in her struggle to adjust from that mentality back to day-to-day living.

Sgt. Matthew Ragan was in Iraq for 17 months on two tours, the first at the beginning of the war and the second from May 2004 to February 2005 — a trip that 33 of his fellow Marines didn’t survive.

His transition home was rough, he said. Just like Snellings, Ragan suddenly had to remember to pay bills — and even talk to his family.

“A lot of the time you want to be alone, you want to reflect, you want to talk to Marines,” he said.

This detachment is all part of battlemind.

“Because (troops) have a different environment in Iraq, their mind is always set for what is to come,” said Father Roger Lumbre, Catholic chaplain at Fort Belvoir. Once home, that mindset has to slowly change.

“The solution is always open communication with their family,” so that loved ones can better understand and make necessary adjustments, Father Lumbre said. “The soldiers need help. It’s not their fault.”

Continue at the link for more. You’ll want to read it all, and then whisper a prayer this Veterans Day for all our veterans, and all those who are still overseas.

Photo: Iraq war veteran Tracy Snellings looks at a headstone with her daughter Eavan, 6, in Arlington National Cemetery last week. Photo by Gretchen R. Crowe, Catholic Herald.