Free Republic

A touch of home At Bangor's airport, the gateway back for many troops, greeters make sure they get the warmest of welcomes By David Filipov Globe Staff / May 24, 2009 BANGOR - As a chaplain in the US Army's First Cavalry Division, Captain Edward Tolliver just spent nearly a year in Iraq as the guy to whom soldiers came for advice, comfort, or just a welcome face. But on a recent May evening in Bangor International Airport, Tolliver was the one receiving the comforting embrace.

Sgt. 1st Class Minnie Hiller set down her M-16 and lowered herself gently into a foxhole. Forty targets would soon emerge from the scrub oaks and pine trees of a Fort Dix firing range. Hiller, a 50-year-old widow and grandmother who works in civilian life as a high school counselor, would have to hit at least 23 of them to convince the Army she was qualified to go to Iraq. "I don't care for guns," she said as she adjusted a stack of sandbags at the front edge of the hole and waited for the range master to clear her...