BANGOR – Members of the 1136th Transportation Company returned to Maine on Monday after spending a year in the Middle East.

More than 400 people cheered as the hangar door opened at the National Guard base and 100 soldiers walked off buses to be greeted by friends and family.

“Daddy’s coming,” one mom told her two young children just before the door opened.

The unit’s 140 members left Fort Dix, N.J., in four buses Monday morning after arriving at the base last week, said Maine National Guard Maj. Pete Rogers.

The 1136th is based in Bangor but has a detachment in Sanford. Family and friends greeted members of the southern Maine detachment at the Sanford armory around 6 p.m., and the remainder of the soldiers continued on to arrive in Bangor about three hours later.

After spending a year in the desert, the soldiers said they missed green grass and a soft, warm bed most of all.

Siblings Brian and Kristin Lee of Milo are both members of the 1136th. Although Kristin returned to Maine two weeks ago, she and a handful of others from the unit who also came back early drove to Newport to meet and join the 1136th caravan and walk off the buses as a complete unit.

The two were welcomed home by their parents, Scott and Kathy Lee, also of Milo, as well as other family members.

“It was comforting to be over there with [my brother],” said 19-year-old Kristin. She was still in high school when Brian, a 22-year-old University of Maine business major, joined the Guard.

“Kristin’s just always been our little G.I. Jane,” Kathy Lee, Kristin’s mom, said on Monday. “She’s always wanted to be in the military.”

Kristin wasn’t eligible to go overseas when her brother was first deployed, but after finishing her training she learned that two spots had opened up in the 1136th and she volunteered to go to the Middle East.

“They’ve always been close, but they’re much closer now,” Scott Lee said.

Both siblings plan to be at the University of Maine in the fall, where Kristin has been accepted as a communications major.

“I just always knew that they would do their duty,” Kathy Lee said. “We’re just always so proud of them.”

The company was among the first Maine units to be put on alert in February 2003. The guardsmen flew to the Middle East last April.

While overseas, members of the unit were in charge of hauling water, fuel and other cargo across Kuwait and Iraq, Rogers said.

More than 100 soldiers from the National Guard’s 112th Medical Company (Air Ambulance) of Bangor, which also spent more than a year overseas, returned to Maine two weeks ago.