Fathers, Sons And Brothers: The Call

Rarely has our country asked citizen soldiers to shoulder so much of the burden of war. One third of the troops fighting are National Guard and Reserve-more than 400,000 soldiers called away from their civilian lives.

In 2005, the call came for a battalion from the Iowa National Guard, a battalion of many fathers, sons and brothers serving together.

60 Minutes and correspondent Scott Pelley have been following the Iowa guardsmen and their families for nearly two years. And on this Memorial Day weekend, you will see and read about the sacrifices made by soldiers and their families over the long months at war.

The soldiers of the 1st Battalion of the 133rd Infantry left their loved ones with high hopes. Most had never seen combat before and some would never see Iowa again.

There were about 700 calls to be made: a call to Andy Wendling and his brother, a call to Denver Foote, as he waited in the delivery room for his first baby, and a call to an old soldier, Mike Ites, never sent to war until now.

The battalion is a band of bothers, literally: there's Ryan and Chris Gericke, a student and an electrician; Tom and Jerry Boge; the Moyers brothers; the Parmaters; the Veveras from Iowa City; the Gingrichs, a medical technician and a paramedic; and the Grieners, Mark, a plumber, and Kent, who wants to be a teacher. The list goes on.

Beyond the brothers, there are fathers, sons, uncles, even a husband and wife-one of 22 women in the battalion. Families have been joining the 1st of the 133rd since the Civil War.

After the call in 2005, there were eight weeks for parties and picnics. That's when 60 Minutes met twin guardsmen Denver and Justin Foote, known jokingly among friends as "the feet." Justin stayed behind for officer school, while Denver prepared to ship out. He's been in the guard seven years.

"Quite a few things I like about it," Denver Foote tells Pelley. "The people I work with. The feeling you get, you know, when you're at a football game, you know they play the national anthem. It's an awesome feeling."

When 60 Minutes first met Denver's wife Shannon, she was in labor with their first child, Landen, as the deployment call came on his cell phone.

"So he's shipping out tomorrow. What are you going to do with Landen?" Pelley asks.

"Well I'm just going to turn into 'Supermom.' I'm just doing everything I can to make Landen know who his father is," Shannon Foote replies.

"What are some of the things you're going to be missing?" Pelley asks Denver.

"Gosh, first walk, first tooth, first words," he replies.

"It's hard to think about," Pelley remarks.

Out on the Wendling farm, Andy Wendling was making a last pass on the fields and putting his dream on hold. He was in law school but withdrew just two days before Pelley interviewed him.

He didn't have to go to Iraq but he volunteered to be with his kid brother, Adam.

On the porch back in 2005, when 60 Minutes first started this story, their mission seemed clear.

"What does the Iraq war mean to you, what do you think it's all about?" Pelley asks.

"I think it's about stepping into a situation where, a lot of people didn't have you know, the freedoms that we are afforded everyday. And you know it seemed like basically what they were living under was completely inhumane," Adam Wendling says. "So I think a lot of changes have happened so far and I think the outcome will ultimately be good."

Down the road in Wellsburg, at the Ites home, it is a father and son, Mike and Josh, who are shipping out together.

"I feel that God led me to do this job," says Mike Ites, who has been on the job 20 years, and is a fulltime guardsman.

At the time of the interview, Ites was 49 years old and was going on his first combat deployment to Iraq.

"What are your thoughts about the war in Iraq? What does it mean to you?" Pelley asks.

"Well, I believe that I'd rather be in their country keeping them turned down or from coming to America. What they did on 9/11 is a travesty," Mike Ites says.

"You draw a line from 9/11 through Iraq to the present day?" Pelley asks.

"I do," he replies.

Mike Ites' wife Brenda is a registered nurse. Asked how she feels about her husband and her oldest son going together to war, she says, "I think it's great."

Why?

"Because they can be there and support each other, Scott," she explains. "And, because they're both Christians, they can pray together and encourage one another, be together during the holidays."

Another father in the battalion is Ben Corell, the battalion commander. All three of his sons serve under him. His wife asked him to take only one to Iraq, and it turned out to be Tyler.

"How do you decide which of your three sons you bring with you in Iraq?" Pelley asks.

"Well they made it easy, he came to me and said 'I'm goin','" Corell says.

"The first thing I head about it, I told him 'I wanna go.' It's always what I've since I heard about the Iraq war I wanted to go to Iraq," Tyler tells Pelley.

Oct. 7, 2005 was deployment day. Then-governor Tom Vilsack and the Iowa Guard commander, Major General Ron Dardis, flew from high school to high school to send off the troops.

"You need to know and must know, that as you leave here, the thoughts, prayers, hopes of the entire Iowa community are with you," Gov. Vilsack said at one send-off ceremony.

The gym in Iowa Falls was filled beyond capacity with hope and prayer and worry. What they feared but did not know was that not all the men in this formation would be coming home.

"We have not experienced taskings like this since the Civil War. And know this, we care about your families. Our families are our greatest treasure. Best of luck to all of you. Take care of yourself. Take care of each other. God bless all of you and God bless your families. Thank you very much," Dardis told the troops.

"I'd send an Iowa boy any day, they're standup kids. You don't find that everywhere," says Tonya Rosol, the mother of the Foote twins, Justin and Denver, the guardsman with the new baby.

"And that's not to say that, you know, the other units aren't just as good, but these are Iowa boys. They can depend on them. They're trustworthy. They work hard and they have so much pride. We've never had so much pride in our country," Rosol says.

In Jan. 2006, three months after they left Iowa, the guardsmen were getting their first look at a mosque. But they were not in Iraq; they were at Fort Polk in Louisiana, where the Army trains the Guard in mock villages with real Iraqis. In one exercise, a village leader complained that U.S. troops killed his children.

"There's nothing I can do right now. I feel his pain…I would turn my loss into something better," a guardsman said.

The guardsmen learned how to live with Iraqis and how to kill them. Adam Wendling had gone from the cornfield to sniper school.

The training in the states took almost six months, and a lot of the men complained that much of it was wasted time away from home. 60 Minutes gave Adam a camera to help us follow the story.

"I don't see the fear in people as much I do as the desire to get out of this place. Everybody is pretty much ready to get over to the sandbox and see what they can do," Adam said.

But before they left for Iraq, many of the guardsmen made a few dreams come true for their families.

Margo Bodensteiner wanted a baby, so she came down south to meet her husband Jim. "We went down to Mississippi on a mission to conceive a baby," she explains.

Sarah Nisley wanted her dad to give her away. So she moved up her wedding date. "I figured it's not a wedding if my dad can't walk me down the aisle," she says.

Scott Nisley, a postman, took her to the altar two weeks before they deployed.

And Esther Starr wanted a wedding of her own. So she met her college sweetheart, Sgt. Sean Rohret, on a four-day pass to start a new life. "I think I tricked him into it. He tricked me into dating him and I tricked him into marrying me," she says.

Then, in March 2006, the Iowa guardsmen lined up one last time on American soil, preparing to head overseas.

"For a mother to send her child into harm's way is unnatural. It's unnatural and there's a 100,000 plus mothers who are doing this, an unnatural act. Should I have, at 17, stomped my foot and said absolutely not? I couldn't do that. Do it wish now that I did? No," says the Footes' mother, Tonya Rosol. "It's the hardest thing I have ever done, and will ever do, I'm sure of it."