(CBS) Nearly a year after they left home, the battalion suffered its first losses in Anbar province. As correspondent Scott Pelley reports, two soldiers—one of the youngest and one of the oldest—were killed in a firefight while trying to stop insurgents.

Back home in Iowa, Major Kevin Loney was driving to the home of one of the families to break the news.

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"For me, it's not easy but we do it out of respect for both the family and the soldier and their service to their country. Quite frankly, for me it’s an honor to do it," Loney says. "This is the closest to hell of anything that I've had to do in my life in terms of the emotional and the fact that these families are being told they lost a soldier in combat."

He then headed to Sarah Nisely's porch. Just a year before, Sarah walked down the aisle with her dad Scott, the Marshalltown postman and former Marine.

Scott Nisely's wife Geri was at her sister's when the officers came to her door. "And I said, 'Oh no, this is for me,'" she remembers. "You know the rushing in your ears starts and you go to the door. In my mind I’m just saying just over, and over and over, 'Just tell me he’s injured, I don’t care if he doesn’t come home with any legs. I don’t care. Just let him come home.' But then they said no, he'd been killed in action."

Sarah worried her dad wouldn’t come back and that’s why she had moved up her wedding. As father of the bride, Scott and his daughter danced the first dance. And it was the last.

"This was going to be our 25th wedding anniversary when he came home. And he was finally going to get out," Geri Nisely tells Scott. "I have not experienced any anger over this situation. I'm disappointed in what I've lost for my future. Just my personal loss."

Geri met her husband's body when it returned to Des Moines.

Asked why she went to the airport to meet the body, she tells Pelley, "Because we always went to his welcome home. And we felt this one wasn't any different than any others. And that we needed to be there. It was very moving. The Patriot Guard were there to support us. And all branches of the military service were there. And it was just nice to have him home. Not the way we wanted him home, but nice to have him home nonetheless."

Geri remembers the moment when the officer handed her the flag.

"What were you thinking in that moment?" Pelley asks.

"Well, I think that it's finally over. I knew that I would miss him terribly. And then I had a challenge of what my next life is going to be. I mean, going on from here," Geri recalls. "It hasn’t always been easy. Some days are better than others. And that’s okay."

Nisely's buddies from the Marshalltown Post Office volunteered for the tribute through town.

Kampha Sourivong was killed alongside Nisely.

When his mother Patti comes into his room, she thinks of Kampha. She turned the room into a shrine. "Everything reminds me of him in here," she says.

Sourivong was 20 years old. His father had been a refugee from war in Laos in the 1970's.

"At 20 years of age we might say he was just a kid, but he was not a kid, he was a man who made the decision fight for his country," a speaker said at Kampha's funeral.

In that high school gym, a year before, Sourivong marched in to hear Dardis send him off. Now Dardis was back to send him home.

"For you and your family, what do you think about fighting this war, has the sacrifice been worth it?" Pelley asks Patti Sourivong.

"Sometimes I'd have to say sometimes I think no. But then other times I think yeah. I mean it’s what Kampha wanted to do," she says.

When Pelley asked Geri Nisely the same question, she said, "I'm not real sure at this point. It was what Scott wanted to do. I don’t feel…."

Produced by Shawn Efran
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