Baghdad, Iraq ? One night in mid-March, three days before the Iraq war began, 30 Florida National Guardsmen swung picks and shovels in the Iraqi desert.

Until they were called up on the day after Christmas, they’d been bartenders, salesmen, police officers and firefighters. Now they were assigned to support a Special Forces unit, which needed them to knock a Humvee-size hole through a huge sand berm.

When they finished, Spc. Jeffrey Wershow, 22 a tall and exuberant college student from Gainesville, Fla., ran to the top of the berm to wave the Special Forces on. A video from that night showed him, like an earlier generation of soldiers on Iwo Jima, raising a standard toward the sky.

Four months later, Wershow and another guardsman from Charlie Company are dead, among the first National Guard combat fatalities in more than a decade. The remaining soldiers from the unit, part of the largest force of National Guard troops in combat since the Korean War, are still bunked down in Baghdad.

“We thought Hurricane Andrew was the worst it would ever get in the National Guard,” said Sgt. Walton Lowrey, 37, of Ocala, Fla. “When this call came, even though we were stupefied and astonished that we were actually going to war, we were honored and we were ready to come.”

All over Iraq, exhausted and increasingly on-edge troops are beginning to wonder aloud when they’ll be sent back to the United States.