He’s home from Iraq after spending almost a year tiptoeing around land mines and rebuilding schools as a member of the 418th Civil Affairs Battalion.

Grant Montney, 28, returned to Lawrence last week. He was the last soldier son of the original group of mothers who organized last year to cope with having their children at war.

Montney was working on his second degree at the University of Missouri-Kansas City early last year when he was called up. He’d joined the Army Reserves before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to pay for school. But he said he never expected to see the area known as the “cradle of civilization,” which he’d studied while working toward a history degree at St. Mary College, now the University of St. Mary, in Leavenworth.

Nor did he expect to see the bathrooms of Saddam Hussein’s palaces or to help convert an old Baath party disciplinary building into a medical clinic.

“I was thinking, ‘Is this real? Is this really going to happen?'” Montney recalled.

Long, worrisome year

For Montney’s mother back in Lawrence, it was all too real and too scary.

“It’s been a very worrisome year,” Carolyn Montney said. “It’s just never out of your mind. You read and watch the news and it (war) is just always there.”

Grant Montney said his work in Iraq was gratifying. Through a local interpreter, he became acquainted with the people of Taji, the 200,000-resident region 20 miles north of Baghdad where his base was located. Montney and his five teammates hired local contractors to refurbish schools that had been ignored for more than 30 years under Saddam’s rule, he said. As fresh coats of paint and new sheets of drywall went up, the crew removed portraits of Saddam plastered on the walls of the school.

Grant Montney, 28, returned last week from nearly a year in Iraq.

The group also worked to restore a water-treatment facility, helped local doctors jump-start a decrepit medical clinic and rebuilt a bombed-out bridge over a canal at the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

For Montney, the culture shock came in spurts. Some days in the summer, temperatures reached well above 100 degrees, and were even hotter under body armor. The one room on base with a window air conditioner would be 100 degrees. For his 28th birthday on July 30, he road-tripped to Baghdad to wallow in a day of air conditioning and Iraqi ice cream.

‘Drown it in salsa’

But luxuries like ice cream were rare, he said. He survived six months on what are known in Army lingo as MREs: Meals Ready to Eat. Montney scrunched his face and flailed his arms while describing a particular tray of gray, almost inedible eggs.

“The only possible way to eat it was just to drown it in salsa,” he said.

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Though the U.S. government hasn’t found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Montney said he saw thousands of small missile shells lying in graveyards throughout the countryside. He and his crew once found a nursery containing 1,200 anti-tank mines. And each time he carried his M-16 while mingling among the people, he remembered that Iraqi homes were allowed to stock firearms as powerful as AK-47s, Montney said.

Though most everyone was armed, none of Montney’s fellow battalion members was killed. And Montney never had to use his weapon.

Carolyn Montney watched the news for a glimpse of her son and a glimmer of hope that he was still OK. Near the beginning of the war, she and the family saw him once, in a camera pan while CBS anchor Dan Rather performed a live shot from the base. Grant Montney was glued to the 2 a.m. airing of a Kansas University basketball NCAA Tournament game.

“There was Grant, sitting there watching the Final Four,” Carolyn Montney said. “You could even see (Jeff) Graves up on the screen.”