My friend Ben came back from where he was stationed in Iraq last week. Ben is 25, and already he has thick lines in his forehead and when you look into his eyes, he always seems like he’s looking at you and at something else that you’ll never be able to see.

I met Ben when his sister and my sister were roommates about 10 years ago, and he and I naturally became friends a few years later when we both went to the same college.

I was in the hospital with Ben a couple of years ago on the day before Thanksgiving. He and his sister had started their drive home to Florida, and gotten in a crash on the interstate. He had awakened in the ER with broken bones and cuts, and was screaming for the doctors to take care of his sister first. He fought them off of him, yelling at them that he was stronger than her and he could take it, to please help his sister first. They had to sedate him to set his bones and stitch him up. He didn’t know that it was too late for them to do anything for her.

Then he stopped talking to me. We stopped having lunch together or going to hear bands or have coffee. A couple of times I said something about never seeing him around, and finally, on the third or fourth time I said something, he looked at me and said by way of explanation, "You’re from before."

He turned away because he was choking up and couldn't say anymore.  But I understood. I was our only friend away at college who knew his sister, and she was the reason I knew him, and therefore, he couldn’t bear to talk to me.

So we spent the rest of college with perfunctory hellos in the hall, but not much more.

His mother, on the other hand, attached herself my sister Christina with a ferocity that is sometimes painful and sometimes beautiful. So Ben and I stay updated on each other through his mom, and see each other once in a while at family functions.

I was at his wedding, and heard about his divorce, and got an announcement when he got remarried.

And I heard him talk about coming home last week.

He stepped onto American soil in California. He’s very different than when he left, unnaturally tan for a redhead, although the sun has made his hair more blonde than red. He was tired and hungry and irritated that the plane had been delayed three times.

But he was back.

He and the other boys who had been stationed with him jumped off the plane quietly. They weren’t expecting a crowd, because most of their families live in Alabama.

But gathered on the tarmac, just inside the gate, was a small cluster of old men. Some were standing, a few in wheelchairs, some had walkers or canes. But every one of them was wearing an aged uniform, worn but freshly pressed, or a VFW cap, or something that identified them as a veteran. Every one of them had been waiting for three days, coming back every morning, when the plane was delayed. And every one of them was saluting.

As the boys walked through the gate, these old men surrounded them and started pushing cell phones on them. Cell phone after cell phone came out of every available pocket. And the old men got louder and louder and more insistent: "Call your mama, boy, let her know you’re back in America." "Call your wife and let her know you’re coming home."

So they stood there on the tarmac, these boys who are old before their time, and these old men who were suddenly young soldiers again, and they leaned against each other while holding their breath waiting to hear female voices.

Ben called his mama.  And then his mama called everyone she knows.