FORT CAMPBELL, Ky. - Every time Staff Sgt. Frank Mooney leaves the house, his 6-year-old son is wary.

        “When I leave now, I get that look like, "Are you coming back?' ” said Sgt. Mooney, a 101st Airborne Division soldier home after battling al-Qaida fighters in the mountains of Afghanistan.

        One year after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the effects of war are still being played out at Fort Campbell. The post is home to the 101st, the 5th Special Forces and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, all of which sent soldiers to Afghanistan and elsewhere in the war on terrorism.

        Twelve Fort Campbell soldiers have died in the war. Many of those who came home say they look at life differently now.

        “When we left, there was no telling when you were coming back, or if,” said Staff Sgt. James Harris. “You no longer take life for granted.”

        But some say tasks like mowing grass and paying bills seem insignificant now. Some of the same fighters who returned with tales of living in Afghan caves on meager rations, and killing al-Qaida fighters, are learning to change the diapers of babies born while they were gone.

        “You went from being very important to just being a normal Joe,” said Lt. Col. Jim Larsen.

        Fort Campbell is a close-knit community on the Tennessee line, 50 miles north of Nashville, with about 20,000 soldiers. At the height of the involvement in the war, nearly everyone knew someone deployed.

        “These are our friends and neighbors,” said Jean Leavell, mayor of Oak Grove, the small Kentucky town bordering Fort Campbell.

        In November, five members of the 5th Special Forces were injured in a friendly fire bombing during a prison uprising outside Mazar-e-Sharif. On Dec. 6, three members of the same unit were killed in a friendly fire incident in southern Afghanistan.

        Eight members of the 160th were killed in February when their helicopter crashed during counterterrorism exercises with Philippine troops.

        A ninth member of the 160th was among seven U.S. soldiers killed March 4 while fighting in eastern Afghanistan when al-Qaida and Taliban fighters fired on troop-carrying helicopters.

        Even now, the children of returned soldiers remember hearing about the deaths, said Col. Lilton J. Marks, the head chaplain at Fort Campbell.

        “There's more anxiety to it now,” when a parent leaves for training or just to go to the grocery store, Marks said. “They've seen and read ... where some dads didn't come back.”

        For seven months and seven days, Becky Walter worried about her husband while he was fighting in Afghanistan. Her fears shifted once he returned home in late July.

        “He didn't feel like he belonged,” Walter said of her husband, Maj. Tim Walter. “It was awkward.”

        Finally, after four days, things started to feel normal again, she said. “Now it seems like he wasn't even gone.”

        But not everyone makes a smooth transition back into home life.

        Shirley Herbert, a military spouse who has worked with soldiers' wives - some just teenagers - said after the initial “honeymoon” of the husband returning, couples must then focus on problems they had before deployment.

        “All the problems that were there have to be dealt with,” Mrs. Herbert said.

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