The Long Road Home

Victoria Olmo, a 35-year-old army specialist known to her friends as Vikki or just plain Vic, is sweating in a lounge chair on a cement slab under a carport, sheltered from the burning Texas sun but not the breezeless Texas heat. A sprinkler spritzes a patch of the backyard lawn; her two small dogs, tongues lolling, are collapsed at her feet. She's got one hand wrapped around a perspiring Corona, the other resting on her bad leg, which is slightly bent at the knee. “That's a different kind of heat over there,” she says. “Nothing like this. This is vacation heat. Qatar-that was a humid, heavy heat. Imagine putting a blanket in the oven and throwing it over you. Now, Iraq, it was more a dry heat.