About half the soldiers I've talked to feel that we shouldn't be there. There's only about 1 percent of Iraqis that support our ongoing occupation.

So much of our work in Iraq has dealt with talking to families of people taken prisoner. Our work is ongoing. This is the work Tom and the others were doing before they were taken and it will continue.

We are so happy to see that they're well.

We're happy that they've all returned with no serious injuries. These soldiers are going to have up to 90 days to be left alone with their families. Then it's back to one weekend a month, two weekends in the summer.

[Burns says he has been particularly inspired by accounts of Japanese-American soldiers who left internment camps to serve in combat in Europe.] These men were only given one opportunity as volunteers and that was to go straight to combat, ... They went straight to the battlefield. It was very tragic. But they were some of the most amazing heroes of the war. And that's the kind of thing I didn't know when I started working on this project and the kind of thing I love to talk about. It gets me excited. And it's more fun when you can talk about it with people in a forum.

Had we not had these soldiers and airmen deployed and they participated in the relief efforts of a storm of this magnitude, we would have had to have outside help anyway. I don't believe there is a state in this county that could have conducted hurricane relief efforts on this scale to adequately respond without help from other states.