It's 8 a.m., and a cluster of families has gathered at the airport behind a rope draped with red, white and blue bunting. They're waiting for a plane full of soldiers coming home from Iraq on leave. When the first one appears at the top of the long escalator in his desert fatigues, relatives and bystanders alike break into applause.

"Do you see her yet?" Susan Hancock asks her husband, Jerry, as they look for their 19-year-old daughter, Brean. When Susan spots her, she slips under the rope and launches a full frontal assault, embracing her and lifting her off the floor, backpack and all, as if she were a sack of seed.

Rich Addicks/AJC (ENLARGE)
Attending a football homecoming game while on leave from Iraq, Pfc. Brean Hancock, 19, looks more like the Dublin High cheerleader she once was than the Guard soldier she has become. Clad in her new 'Some Girls Are Born Lucky' shirt, Brean acknowledges the crowd at halftime. She sometimes shrinks from such attention, but she had no choice this time. More photos
Rich Addicks/AJC (ENLARGE)
Brean Hancock talks a blue streak with parents Susan and Jerry and (at left) Jean Crispin, mother of a fellow brigade member, upon her arrival in Atlanta. During her 15-day leave, Brean spent part of the time at her parents' new home in Gwinnett County and part of it in Dublin, where she grew up. Brean's parents, who were in the midst of moving, left their youngest daughter's bedroom at the Dublin home intact for her homecoming.
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AUDIO • Brean talks about discussing the war with her friends at home • What Brean's friends ask her about • Brean talks about how her attitude has changed • Brean's comments before her deployment in June PHOTOS • Brean Hancock home on leave • Ricky Stanley in Iraq • Stanley family gallery PREVIOUS STORIES • Heartache at home PHOTOS • Going to war, coming of age PHOTOS • Hancock an unlikely soldier PHOTOS • Hometown of Dublin sends troops off AUDIO MORE COVERAGE • Follow the 48th Brigade in Iraq

"How did you know when I was coming in?" asks Brean, who didn't have time to phone during her brief layover in Germany.

"Mothers," Susan says, "have their ways."

It has been four months since the Hancocks said goodbye to their youngest daughter at Fort Stewart. The Georgia Army National Guard's 48th Brigade Combat Team was shipping out for Iraq, and Pfc. Brean Hancock — all 95 pounds of her — was one of the smallest and unlikeliest soldiers on the parade field. Barely a year out of high school, she looked less like a warrior than the varsity cheerleader she recently had been.

Susan releases her daughter and steps back to inspect. The girl looks thin. Hmmm, there's that sore she's been talking about where a grain of sand embedded in her cheek.

Despite her grueling two-day journey, Brean (rhymes with Lee Ann) makes landfall with the gale-force gusto of a student on spring break. "I want a big coffee and a shower," she announces, "and then I want to go shopping. I need makeup. I need clothes. I want to go, go, go."

First she has to go to baggage claim with the soldier who accompanied her from Iraq. Spc. Ryan Crispin, a 23-year-old Guard mechanic with an easy drawl and an aw-shucks smile, comes from the Middle Georgia town of Dublin, like Brean, but they didn't really know each other until training earlier this year. Now he's her constant companion — her good friend, Brean specifies. "We don't use the B-word."

Ryan must be a very good friend indeed, because he packed his duffel bag with most of Brean's clothes and personal effects, including the teddy bear she has slept with since she was a kid. "When the customs man saw that teddy bear in there," Ryan says, "he just looked at me."

Once teddy has been retrieved, Brean dashes off to a coffee stand for a large mocha. Time's a-wasting. She has 15 days before she has to return to the war zone, 15 days to party and hang out.

As if her leave isn't reason enough to celebrate, there's something else. Before she left "Baghdaddy," as she sometimes calls it, Brean asked her parents to have some champagne on ice because she has some good news.

As it turns out, it isn't the news anyone is expecting.

The Hancocks pile into their red Mountaineer — the one with the magnetic ribbon on the back that says "Keep My Daughter Safe" — and head, not south to Dublin, but north to Gwinnett County. It's a good thing she doesn't have to drive, Brean jokes; Atlanta traffic is almost as intimidating as Baghdad's.

Brean's leave comes at an awkward time for Susan and Jerry. After 12 years of working at the YKK aluminum products plant in Dublin, he recently took a job with a hardware distributor in Suwanee, Special Projects Group. They're selling the home where Brean grew up and are in the middle of moving to a two-story brick house in a far Gwinnett subdivision still under construction. Half their stuff is here, and half is in Dublin, including Brean's bedroom, which Susan and Jerry wanted to leave intact for her homecoming.

Brean has mixed emotions about the move and pointedly told her parents that she wanted to spend her break in Dublin, among friends, not in metro Atlanta. Whether she likes it or not, she'll have to split her time between both.

At first, Brean likes Atlanta just fine; the shopping is much better. She changes into jeans and hits the Mall of Georgia, looking at clothes for three hours as her parents wait patiently outside the stores. Thanks to the 120-degree summer heat in Iraq, she's down to size 0.

When Brean finally runs out of gas that night, she collapses on their bed — hers is in Dublin — and Susan and Jerry share the sofa. Brean's rest is disturbed only once, when one of the family cats jumps on her and a creepy thought flashes in her mind: camel spider! The scorpionlike creature with frightful pincers and 6-inch legs has spooked many a soldier in Iraq.

On Day 2, Brean has a mission: Operation Enduring Brunette. She became a bottle blonde last winter during training and has been trying to return to her natural brown coloring ever since. Susan books hair appointments near Gwinnett Place mall, and Jerry goes along for the ride.

At Salon Greco, hairdresser Carrie Pressley hears about Brean's military service and appraises her light-streaked locks.

"Your hair's pretty dry. How have they been cutting it over there?"

"Scissors," Brean says. "Paper scissors. And one time my brother-in-law cut off some of it with a knife."

The freelance barber is Andrew Campbell, a Guard mechanic who married Brean's older sister, Heather, shortly before he was activated. He and Brean are stationed at the same camp, and he likes to whine to her about having to spend his first year of marriage with his sister-in-law.

"Is it scary over there?" the hairdresser asks.

"Sometimes," Brean says. "A mortar round hit about 30 yards from me one day. That was pretty scary. We had 11 soldiers killed in 11 days this summer. I think the Georgia Guard has one of the highest death rates."

The hairdresser stops working in the dye and leans closer to her customer. "Your mother's over there," she says, looking toward the next wash basin, where Susan sits with her hair sopping. "You don't want to upset her, do you?"

Susan, who doesn't miss much, cocks an eyebrow.

"Oh, she knows," Brean says. "I'm pretty safe where I am. I just fuel trucks. She knows that."

Three days into her leave, Brean and her parents drive to Dublin. She's happy that her father landed a better job and that her mother can enjoy her empty-nest years in an area with more amenities. But Brean regards Dublin as home — she spent almost all her school years there — and when she sees the "for sale" sign in front of their house, part of her wants to yank it out of the ground.

Tonight, Brean and Ryan are going to the Shamrock Bowl, home of the Dublin Fighting Irish, to see Ryan's nephew play for one of the best high school football teams in the state. Brean wades into the stands wearing an ensemble from her shopping spree: tight jeans, suede boots with pompoms at the ankles and a black shirt that reads "Some Girls Are Born Lucky." She's promptly surrounded by former cheerleading friends and softball teammates. Everyone wants to know about Iraq.

"Do y'all have showers?"

"Yes," Brean says. "But when you take a shower during a sandstorm, you might as well not bother. Your hair's just icky."

"Can you see during a sandstorm?"

"I wear my goggles. I call them my Liz Claibornes."

"Can you go shopping?"

"Yeah, there's a big PX. I'd like to buy some mascara, but with all that sand, I don't think so."

It's the kind of conversation Brean likes to have about Iraq. She doesn't want to talk about casualties among friends. And she certainly doesn't want to debate the war; she knows that many of her classmates opposed the invasion and might disagree with her over U.S. policy. When they send her e-mails overseas, telling her about college or boyfriends, she responds in kind with amusing anecdotes about military life and Ryan. She wants them to remember her as the clever girl from senior year.

Shortly before halftime, the public address announcer pages Brean. "Uh-oh," she says, "did I do something wrong?"

Hardly. TV 35, the local station, wants to interview her on the field after the homecoming ceremony.

"This is Brean Hancock home from Iraq," says TV 35's Johnny Payne, turning her toward the camera on the 50-yard line. "We are so proud. What would you say to the people at home?"

Miss Poise doesn't miss a beat. "I appreciate all the prayers and all the support. We're doing a job over there, fighting for the Iraqis and our nation. I'd rather be over there doing it than over here."

Toward the end of the exchange, the press box announces Brean to the crowd and asks for a round of applause.

Sometimes she shrinks from this kind of attention, not wanting to come off as a would-be Jessica Lynch. "I'm no hero," she'll say. "I just sit in an office at a fueling station and support the heroes." But tonight Brean has no choice.

She smiles and waves to the stands and then raises her arms in a V-for-victory display she performed countless times on this sideline. It's as if Dublin High has more than one homecoming queen.

After a week in Dublin, the Hancocks load their remaining furniture into a rental truck for the move to Suwanee. Brean's bedroom, a teen shrine of trophies, bouquets and other keepsakes, is one of the last things to go. She spends her final night there on a mattress, her bed frame packed away. When her parents go to the closing the next day, she stays behind and bids farewell to her childhood home by rolling around on the carpeting and thinking to herself, Oh, my room.

Brean spends the rest of her leave in Suwanee. Susan's parents have driven down from Pennsylvania and want to have some time with their granddaughter. On the last night before she has to return to Iraq, the family gathers for a cookout. The guest of honor seems uncharacteristically downcast as she waits for her father to finish grilling the beer-can chicken. It seems her champagne news has gone flat.

Before her leave, Brean explains quietly, the scuttlebutt in her camp was that the 48th Brigade would be coming home before its year in Iraq is up in May. One of her sergeants said the rumors might be true. That was the main reason she asked her parents to ice some champagne.

But before she left Dublin, Brean continues, she and Ryan ran into another sergeant home on leave who said the rumors were wrong. The 48th was getting a different assignment and staying the full year — news since confirmed by the brigade commander.

Brean took it hard. When the sergeant asked how her leave was going, she admits, she snapped back at him, "Fine until you opened your mouth."

At least there's a silver lining. Most of Brean's company is being sent to a camp in southern Iraq, where there has been less insurgent activity. Now she worries that she and Ryan might be separated.

Brean is sitting at the breakfast table almost sulking when Ryan and his parents arrive from Dublin for the cookout. Her mood immediately brightens.

After dinner, Susan ushers everyone into the den for a double feature of home movies on the big-screen TV. First up: a tape of Brean's cheerleading routines.

"This isn't the one where I hurt my ankle, is it?" Brean asks her mother. The video shows a 10th-grader bursting with nervous energy as she scampers across a gym, scales human pyramids and, once, falls to the floor. It's impossible to watch without smiling.

The second feature is different. Ryan has put together a slide show of scenes from Iraq set to the Toby Keith song "American Soldier." Choppers over Baghdad. Sweaty Guardsmen squinting into the sun. Columns of heavy vehicles stretching out over the sand.

As one image dissolves into another, Brean and Ryan squeeze hands at the end of the sofa. No one is smiling over this show.

At the airport the next day, Brean wears her desert fatigues — and something else: a ring.

"I've got a secret," she says, as she waits at the departure gate with her parents and Ryan and his family. "We're engaged."

She presents her left hand and shows off a glittering diamond solitaire.

The proposal came during Brean's last night in Dublin — the night the couple ran into the sergeant with the unhappy intelligence from Iraq. She and Ryan went back to his sister's house and sat up late talking. "Brean," he began, "I've been doing some thinking ... "

She thought he was kidding at first. "Shut up!" she said. "You aren't serious."

Brean didn't break the news to her parents until everyone left the cookout the night before. "I have something to tell you," she recalls saying, "but I'm afraid you're going to yell at me."

Susan, sitting next to her daughter at the gate, hastens to say that no one yelled. She simply asked Brean whether she still intended to go to college. Brean assured her that she would; it was going to be a long engagement.

"I was surprised," Susan admits, as her daughter takes her hand and compares their rings. Brean is beaming. Susan, her face blank, seems to be processing it all.

In a few minutes, the military charter is announced: World Airways 08126 departing for Frankfurt at 21:30. More than 200 soldiers reluctantly make their way to the ramp and say their goodbyes. One father has to tear himself away from his young girls, who cry and bawl after him, "Daddy, don't leave."

"Let's go!" a sergeant bellows at the door of the jetway. "The train's leaving the station."

Brean and Ryan are among the last to board. Susan embraces them both, telling Ryan, "Mama approves."

It's half an hour before the plane is pushed back from the gate. As the rest of the families melt away, a janitor begins cleaning the area. On the TV overhead, CNN reports that five U.S. soldiers and scores of Iraqis have been killed in the worst outbreak of bombings in weeks.

Susan and Jerry seem oblivious to it all. Their girl is headed back to war, but they're the ones who look shellshocked as they sit at the window and watch her plane disappear into the darkness.