The war in Iraq was officially over when I arrived in Baghdad last July and the troops were largely getting down to the business of installing democracy and rebuilding a nation. By the middle of summer, when the temperatures swelled to more than 130 degrees, electricity in Baghdad was erratic and many Iraqis were unemployed, but a general sense of hope filled the air – even among those angry at how slowly progress was being made.

My mission in Iraq was to look for Maine soldiers and talk to them about their lives in the desert. They were not easy to track down, but I was armed with a list of names from Sen. Susan Collins, who, weeks earlier, had visited Mainers in Iraq. Along with her warnings to be careful, she gave me leads on how to find Maine soldiers and administrators working there.

The person I had hoped the most to see, however, was not on the list. Richard DePaola, a sergeant with 19 years of service in the Maine Army National Guard’s 133rd Engineer Battalion, is the brother of a good friend. The day before he was deployed, DePaola and his wife Karel sat in the living room of their Milford home and talked to me about their hopes and fears. It was a bright May day, and toys were scattered around the front porch that DePaola had built onto his house and which was covered with patriotic bunting.

“Don’t forget to put the flag up before you go to school,” Karel called out to one of their four children that day. I remember, too, that DePaola’s eyes had welled up with tears as he spoke of the party his family had thrown for him the night before. A handful of the miniature American flags that Karel had passed out at the event were still on the dining room table next to DePaola’s gear.

“I signed up because I wanted to make a difference,” DePaola said that day. He had been 17, a junior at Bucksport High School when he joined the Guard. “It sounded good, like a good life experience. I liked the discipline and what they call military bearing, the way people see you and how you present yourself.”

DePaola wanted to go to Bosnia during the late 1990s, but his twins – daughter Bailey and son Cameron – had been born prematurely and were sick. So he opted not to go. He’s glad now he didn’t because one night Bailey stopped breathing and DePaola saved her life.

After the 9-11 attacks, DePaola was eager to serve and did an airport security mission in Bangor. When the war in Iraq began, he volunteered for his first official deployment.

“I felt it was the right thing to do,” he said. “This is what I trained for for 18 years. This is my chance. Not being able to go to Bosnia, I needed to do this for makeup.”

DePaola and I arrived in Iraq at about the same time in July, and we instantly e-mailed each other. He was in the southern city of Nasiriya, near where Pvt. Jessica Lynch had been famously rescued. And I was traveling throughout the country. The closest I came to Talil Air Field, where DePaola was stationed, was on a trip from Baghdad to Basra. I was within about 20 miles of DePaola, but my Iraqi driver Abu Mustafa, a decorated colonel in Saddam Hussein’s air force, would not make the detour. “Too dangerous,” he told me.

As a result, DePaola and I didn’t see each other again until last week, back in his home, with Karel, happy and smiling, by his side.

“It was OK in Iraq,” he said. “But I’m not the same person I was before I went to Iraq.”

In fact, DePaola was not OK in Iraq. DePaola did not see any combat, although once he raised his gun at a small Iraqi child he thought might be dangerous. (It turned out the boy was not dangerous, and DePaola lowered his weapon with great relief.) DePaola’s problems were constitutional. In Kuwait, while waiting to be deployed to Iraq, DePaola suffered two bouts of heat exhaustion. He was lightheaded and dizzy, nauseous and breathless. Each time, he saw the medics and was replenished intravenously. The second time, he spent three days in an air-conditioned tent.

Despite his inability to acclimate, DePaola headed into Iraq with his unit. “I had some very good boys with me – Maine boys – who kept an eye on me,” he said. “If I got sick, they would figure it out. I was comfortable with that.” Within two weeks, he was sick again. Both a doctor and a chaplain visited him during a fourth brush with heat exhaustion.

“I was told the same day I got sick that someone else had died and another person was acting like a 3-year-old in his head,” DePaola recalled. “I decided it was time to go home before something serious happened. I didn’t want to leave but I thought it was the right thing to do.”

In August, DePaola was sent to Fort Stewart, Ga., in the middle of a blazing summer. The irony of having heatstroke and being sent from the deserts of the Middle East to one of the hottest spots on the East Coast was not lost on DePaola. That, and a four-hour wait at the airport, began to shake his faith in his employer.

At the beginning of October, DePaola was transferred to Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah, but a media-inspired controversy had broken out about Fort Stewart, where the accommodations had been so bad that DePaola’s loyalty and spirits plummeted further.

By the middle of October, Mark Benjamin, an investigative reporter for United Press International, broke a story about sick and wounded U.S. soldiers living in substandard conditions. Additionally, Benjamin wrote, the soldiers were suspicious that the Army planned to reduce their benefits because of ailments. Benjamin’s story set off a chain reaction of whistle blowing and media inquiry about the diagnosis and treatment of ill soldiers once they were stateside again. CNN was on the scene, as was The New York Times and The Washington Post, calling the neglected soldiers victims.

“I saw people who were broken, with shrapnel in their legs, on crutches or with canes, and they weren’t being treated,” said DePaola, who continued to go to meetings at Fort Stewart until he headed for home at the end of February. “Honestly, it was like being a second-class citizen. You were not treated like a soldier. You were treated like you couldn’t handle it because you came back. It was very humiliating and degrading.”

Karel, who had cared for the children alone at home since May, went to see DePaola in Georgia, but the long distance and DePaola’s downward spiraling moods compounded an already difficult routine for her.

“Whenever he called, I didn’t want to talk to him because it was depressing,” said Karel. “It would bring me down and it was hard enough taking care of the kids.”

“That’s OK for a few weeks,” DePaola said of the hot cement barracks, “but not for six months.”

That’s how long he was in Georgia, he said, first at Fort Stewart and then at Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah, where the accommodations were considerably better. Still, DePaola’s main occupation was waiting for the results of physicals and the decisions of his superiors.

DePaola had hoped the doctor would recommend deployment with restrictions. By the time all the medical tests were administered and the paperwork prepared, DePaola just wanted out. He was unhappy and bored, he said, and had lost 30 pounds since leaving home. The final paperwork indicated that he was nondeployable.

“I really didn’t care,” said DePaola, who shared a stack of release forms and other official documents with me. “I didn’t want to stay. For all I know, all those papers I signed could have said I have four toes. No one should ever have to go through what I went through at Fort Stewart.”

DePaola was offered a severance package of $9,133.20, minus federal and state taxes. Or he could retire. He retired.

While Chris Merrill, the warrant officer at the Maine National Guard office in Augusta, declined to discuss DePaola’s case specifically, he said the difference between the financial package for 19 and 20 years of service is small. But he would not give numbers, not for DePaola, not for a hypothetical case similar DePaola’s.

DePaola’s retirement will be prorated to his years of service, Merrill explained. And as for DePaola not being reassigned to an area where the heat is not as intense, Merrill said the military has narrowed its rules in recent years.

“With the world situation, active duty has changed,” said Merrill. “In general terms, it’s all or nothing in worldwide deployment.” In other words, snow or sand, a soldier must be in top form.

Having been a man used to giving his all when it comes to the military, DePaola now has nothing, as he sees it. He is taking some time off to be with his family before deciding what is next in his life. He is less bitter about retiring, it seems, than about the way he was treated at Fort Stewart. And he is devastated by separating from the 27 other members of his Alpha Company still in Iraq, soon to leave Nasiriya for Mosul, where they will be joined by the 400-strong battalion en route from Fort Drum this week.

Like many soldiers, DePaola has little to say about the politics of the war. He has never voted, he said, and has no intention of starting this year. So when the question came up of what he and the Alpha Company were doing in Iraq – defending democracy? fighting terrorism? searching for weapons of mass destruction? helping the Iraqis? – DePaola grew silent. He thinks WMDs may still turn up.

“I honestly don’t know. I honestly don’t understand the whole concept,” he said. “But if I could go back to my unit, I’d go back in a heartbeat.”