By Howard Wilkinson
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Ohio National Guard Master Sgt. Tina Sunderhaus (from left) of Anderson Township, Spc. Charissa Hayden of Loveland and Specialist Chantia Pearson of College Hill study a blueprint at Camp Atterbury. The Cincinnati Enquirer/GLENN HARTONG

EDINBURGH, Ind. - It has been a long goodbye for Master Sgt. Tina Sunderhaus and fellow soldiers of the 512th Engineer Battalion the past 10 weeks, and a restless wait for the plane that will take them to Iraq.

"I've said goodbye to my husband and the kids three or four times now; it gets harder every time,'' said the Anderson Township mother of two.

She is standing in the middle of the 512th's quarters at Camp Atterbury, an Army training camp in central Indiana that has been sending soldiers off to war since World War II.

"It's time we got on with it,'' Sunderhaus said.

That time may be as soon as today. The nearly 40 members of the Cincinnati-based Ohio National Guard unit will leave the Indianapolis airport for a tour of duty in Iraq that could last a year.

Their training - putting up buildings, digging wells, building bridges - was, for the most part, completed weeks ago. Each man and woman was given one four-day pass to make the trip back to Ohio to say the final goodbyes.

It is a scene that will be repeated often in the months to come, as about 110,000 National Guard and military reserve members leave for Iraq to replace some 130,000 colleagues who have done their year's service there.

The 512th has been through this before. On the eve of war a year ago, the unit was called to active duty and waited for weeks at Camp Atterbury for a call that never came. The original Iraq war plan had them accompanying the 4th Infantry Division through Turkey into Iraq, but when the Turkish government banned U.S. troops, the 512th was sent home, back to their families and civilian jobs.

This time, it is for real.

"It's nice to be training here in Indiana, just a couple hours from home, but there comes a point where people start getting antsy; everybody wants to just go and do it,'' said Maj. Lee Coyle of Columbus, the unit's executive officer.

With tens of thousands of troops coming and going from bases in Kuwait and all over the United States, units like the 512th often have to wait long after their training is complete to catch a ride.

In addition to engineering training this time, there was more emphasis on learning how to search vehicles, and to recognize the homemade, roadside bombs that have taken so manyAmerican lives since the fall of Baghdad last April.

As of Wednesday, 543 U.S. service members had died since the beginning of military operations in Iraq, the Department of Defense says.

Coyle said the unit has had more combat training with M16 rifles than the engineering unit usually gets during its weekend-a-month or two-weeks-in-the-summer stints.

Camp has storied history

The 512th from Cincinnati is, by no means, the only unit training now at Camp Atterbury for deployment to Iraq.

Dozens of other units from the Midwest - thousands of soldiers - have moved through the sprawling base - 12 miles long by about 7 miles wide - in recent months.

They live under corrugated-steel roofs of Quonset-style barracks lining a grid of streets in the north end of the camp, which is about 30 miles south of Indianapolis.

Atterbury's roots go back to the early days of World War II, when it was a regular Army base that trained raw draftees for service overseas. Today, Camp Atterbury is operated by the Indiana National Guard. The largest part of the camp is the artillery range, which stretches for miles along the Clifty Creek Valley.

One morning last week, about 20 soldiers of the 512th, clad in Kevlar vests and combat helmets, filed out of the day room and into vans to make the 10-mile trip to one of the most remote parts of the base, in the middle of a mortar range where the snow-covered forest floor is pock-marked with bomb craters.

There, in a sheet-metal building, they were greeted by their commanding officer, Lt. Col. Mike Ernst, who led them through a pitch-black room into an area with three large projection screens and 20 M16 rifles spread out on the floor. They were just like the standard-issue rifles they will carry in Iraq, except these were connected by cable to a computer room behind them.

Each of the soldiers dropped to the floor, grabbed a rifle, and assumed a firing position, as the screens lit up with images of human figures - some armed, some not; some with their hands in the air, others running toward them.

"This is a 'shoot-don't shoot' exercise,'' Ernst explained. "It is not unlike the simulated training police officers get. The idea is to know when to shoot and who to shoot at.''

The guns blazed away, the sound of the blanks echoing off the sheet-metal walls, creating the kind of noisy chaos the soldiers would face in a real firefight.

"We're engineers,'' Ernst said. "But we're soldiers first. We have to know how to use a weapon.''

Enjoy the food while you can

After the practice session - which the commanding officer proclaimed to be "excellent'' - Ernst rode back to the main base in the back of a van, talking about his unit.

"We are going to have to work on 'drive and fire,' said Ernst. "We have to be able to use the heavy machine gun from a moving Humvee. But we can't do that here. We'll have to use those two or three weeks in Kuwait for that."

At the noon hour, Ernst, a former Marine and Milford resident, sat down in the Camp Atterbury mess hall with fellow officers, chowing down on meat loaf, mashed potatoes and gravy, steamed vegetables - washed down with plenty of chocolate milk.

"A lot better than we'll probably get over there,'' Ernst said.

Only about a quarter of the long rows of tables in the mess hall were filled with camouflage-clad soldiers. It is large enough to hold 1,000 soldiers at a time.

"If you had been here a week ago,'' Ernst said, "every seat in here would have been taken. They're going fast. We won't be around much longer.''

Ernst, his staff officers and the 512th's company commanders are marking their final days on American soil by sending small groups of soldiers out for more training on the unit's principal mission - construction of temporary buildings, roads and bridges.

That morning, Sunderhaus, Spc. Charissa Hayden of Loveland and Spc. Chantia Pearson of College Hill climbed into a van for a mile-long trip to a training area to inspect construction work done by another local unit, the 216th Engineer Battalion, which has companies headquartered in Fairfield and Felicity.

The three soldiers climbed in and out of three large wooden storage sheds, lined up in a row on a windy, icy field.

"I don't think we're going to need the winter gear over there,'' said the 20-year-old Hayden, pulling off her camouflage hood as they checked out the cross-beams inside the shed.

Hayden and Pearson are both University of Cincinnati students; both were babies when Sunderhaus joined the Ohio National Guard 19 years ago.

The young soldiers remind Sunderhaus of her oldest daughter, Mandy, a senior at Turpin High School who has already joined the Guard and will undergo basic training this summer at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri.

"I can't believe she wants to do it,'' said Sunderhaus, who has three more years before she retires from the Guard. "This is my first deployment in all the years I've been in. But if my daughter had to be deployed, I'd want to go with her.''

Bittersweet week for new dad

The 512th is a unit with a wide range of experience, from 19-year-olds just out of basic training to one 54-year-old veteran. About two-thirds of the unit is made up of married people, many of them with children.

One soldier, Capt. John Detling of Symmes Township, spent last week worrying about when his wife, Katrina, would deliver their first child. She was several days overdue, but at 10:42 a.m. Tuesday, his wife gave birth to Lisa Marie, 8 pounds, 6 ounces. Detling, the only soldier allowed to bring his personal car to Camp Atterbury, rushed home to be with his wife and new daughter for seven days.

By the time he gets back to Camp Atterbury, the 512th will be gone and he will catch up with them later.

"It's kind of nerve-wracking,'' Detling said before Lisa Marie was born. "But the Army is good about it. Their attitude is, 'we're not going to make any soldier go when there's a baby on the way.' ''

But even Detling is as anxious to go as the rest of the 512th.

"I'll catch up with the outfit ... ,'' Detling said. "Then I'll go help get the job done. Being a daddy will make the homecoming even sweeter.''

E-mail hwilkinson@enquirer.com