An Easy Chair At Day's End

As 1st Sgt. Barry C. Adams' family stood at the gate with their welcome-home banner, each of the passengers coming off the plane spoke to them. Many said how much they appreciated what Adams - as well as his wife, Tammy Adams, and the children, Dalton, 9, and Garrett, 8 - had gone through for their country.

And, when Adams, dressed in his Army uniform, emerged from the plane, everybody in the waiting area applauded.

"That was just amazing - the public support," Tammy Adams said.

Adams' parents, Roy and Selena Adams, who live in Yadkinville, were waiting with his wife and sons at the Charlotte airport to take him back home to Deep Gap. Selena Adams said knowing that people appreciated what her son has done made her feel joyful.

Adams, who returned home Sept. 13, had been serving in Afghanistan since October 2006.

On Oct. 15, Adams, 47, will go back to work as a trooper with the N.C. Highway Patrol.

In the meantime, he has been eating the foods that he missed while he was gone, catching up on a few of the projects around the house that his wife wasn't able to take care of and going to Garrett's soccer games. (Baseball is Dalton's sport.)

Being away has made him really appreciate home.

"If I never have to leave the great state of North Carolina again, I will be just fine," he said.

It has been almost three years since the Adams family has been able to have a normal life.

Adams, who joined the Army in 1979, was in the Army Reserves when he was called back to duty in 2004. After serving at Fort Benning in Georgia for about two years, he was sent to Afghanistan in October as part of the Regional Police Advisory Team–South to train members of the Afghan National Auxiliary Police.

When he was at Fort Benning, Tammy Adams was able to take the children down or he was able to come up about every six weeks, and he has had periods of leave. But, all in all, Tammy Adams estimates, he has been with the family for a total of only eight weeks in the past three years.

Phone calls and e-mail helped them stay in touch. Even when he was in Afghanistan, they were able to exchange e-mail almost every day, except when he left the base for such missions as resupplying checkpoints, which were frequent targets of Taliban attacks.

Regular contact helped her keep her worries fairly well in check as long as he was at the base. It was when he was gone on a mission that her worrying spiked and she found herself unable to eat.

Without being dismissive of the dangers, she did her best to allay their sons' fears. Sometimes, some scrap of information that they heard at school would send them home freshly worried and they would ask, "Is Daddy going to die?"

She certainly wasn't going to tell them that nothing was going to happen, she said, because what would she then say to them if he were killed or seriously injured?

So she talked to them about the necessity of praying for him and remembering that, no matter what happened to their father, God would take care of him and of them.

Tammy Adams' mother, Helen Griffin, said that it was hard to hear the children express those fears.

"It breaks your heart," she said.

Griffin, who lives 2½ hours away in Montgomery County, did what she could to support her daughter. They would talk by phone first thing in the morning and again sometime later in the day.

"I know that it was very stressful for her and the children, as it is for every wife who has her husband go and be in war," Griffin said. "She was very brave. She stood behind him. That's what makes a family. Tammy was very strong. I'm not saying every day was a good day. They had their faith in God, and that's what held them together."

The Adamses met in the early 1990s when she was a dispatcher for a sheriff's department.

"It took me a while to warm up to him," she said. "He was intimidating. He was a drill sergeant in the Army for a while."

But, as she got to know him, she came to appreciate his honesty and straightforwardness.

"He's a real straight-up person, and he speaks him mind," she said. "And I like that."

He doesn't talk up his accomplishments, she said, and figured it was a safe bet that he hadn't mentioned the Bronze Star he was awarded for his service in Afghanistan.

No, he didn't.

She sent the Journal a copy of the citation and of the recommendation narrative. In part, it reads, "Conducting over 150 combat patrols through the Regional Command–South and executing missions for Anti-Coalition Forces with and for the Afghan National Auxiliary Police, he distinguished himself as a mature and highly motivated combat leader. Throughout his tenure in Kandahar and during routine rocket attacks over the Regional Training Center and direct fire by Taliban forces, his swift and decisive actions ensured the security and defense of the camp and the safety of DynCorp employees and U.S. military personnel."

Tammy Adams is sleeping better and eating better since her husband came home. She has also been filling him in on the things - car breakdowns, broken ceiling fan - that she left out of her messages because they would cause him to fret without being able to do anything.

In the time since he's been back, one of the things she has really appreciated is having him there to talk to when she comes home from her accounting job with Watauga County. She has enjoyed their activities together, including going out to eat, something that she didn't do much when she was on her own. But what she enjoys most is just sitting in the living room talking.

His mother said that, on visits, she has particularly enjoyed watching her son sleep in his recliner and being able to reach out and touch him.

Having him gone was hard, his parents said. They felt as if he was doing the right thing.

"He was raised to do his duty," Roy Adams said.

And, as Christians, they felt that he was right with God no matter what happened.

"Still," Roy Adams said. "He's my only son."

Both his parents made a point of saying how proud they are.

Adams says he feels as if he is pretty much the same man who went over to Afghanistan and feels good about the work that he did there.

"As far as my job went, we were very successful - I met a lot of good Afghan folks that are really interested in making things better," he said. "What I was doing was a good job, which was training police. I could see results, tangible results."

Should Adams ever want to receive counseling from the military to help him in his transition back to civilian life, he has that option. But he doesn't expect to need it. He has been sleeping just fine, and, if he finds that he needs to talk about things, he said, he already has the perfect person to listen.

"I married my best friend," he said.

Because men he cares about are still there, Afghanistan is still with him. He has people there he keeps in touch with by e-mail.

He has zero interest in going back, but, if he were sent, so be it.

"I just hope they don't," he said.

He has been in the Army for 27 years and nine months. That feels like enough, he said, and he has filed the initial paperwork that will lead to retiring from the Army Reserves.

Being in Afghanistan has made him realize just how blessed we are in America, he said. "We don't have anything to worry about here."

■ Kim Underwood can be reached at 727-7389 or at kunderwood@wsjournal.com.