MANAMA, Bahrain — Although she is a relatively new Army wife, 23-year-old Andrea Thane understands things can turn on a dime when it comes to military life.

But a recent Army pivot has left Thane and other spouses and soldiers of the 1st Cavalry Division’s 1st Brigade miffed at their command and the White House.

When announcing the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq by year’s end, President Barack Obama on Oct. 21 said the remaining 40,000 troops in Iraq would “definitely be home for the holidays.”

“Ironhorse” brigade leadership also announced on the unit’s official Facebook page that soldiers would be coming home early.

“I hope you all left the light on for us,” the Oct. 1 Facebook announcement read, “as the Ironhorse Brigade will be coming home sooner than expected.”

But 1st Brigade didn’t make it home for Christmas.

A new posting emerged on the brigade’s Facebook page Nov. 9, notifying troops and families that the brigade would instead go to Kuwait, filling out the second half of its tour doing security cooperation, joint training and exercises.

This abrupt change led some soldiers and families to cry foul against the White House and brigade command for misleading the unit’s community and causing family members to think their soldiers would be home early. Some also expressed anger over the brigade leadership’s choice to use an informal system like Facebook to disseminate such an important message.

“I was very hurt and let down that they would say it was for sure happening and I got my son’s hopes up by telling him daddy would be home early,” Thane said in an email. “And I had to be the one to tell him he wasn’t coming home early — that someone told mommy and daddy wrong. I myself was prepared for the 12-month deployment but I was not prepared to be put on an emotional roller coaster ride.”

Thane said she understands that “nothing in the Army is set in stone,” but wishes the brigade would have held back on posting anything on Facebook until the facts were clear.

“I don’t feel it should have been posted until they had orders in hand,” Thane said.

“This news is a disappointment and this situation could have easily been avoided by not jumping the gun and telling people something that was not certain,” one commenter wrote on the brigade’s Facebook page.

It has also been painful to see news articles in the past week touting the fact that all U.S. troops are home from Iraq, Thane said.

Brigade soldiers are not upset about their new mission in Kuwait per se, according to one disgruntled brigade officer who asked to remain anonymous because he was not authorized to speak on the matter.

“This is not Afghanistan,” the officer said. “Most of us have friends there right now who are all having some seriously dark times.”

It’s about the effect on families back home, the officer said, and when families are suffering during a deployment, the soldier suffers.

“We tune into AFN and every other commercial is Michelle Obama and Jill Biden talking about supporting military families and how difficult it is to be a military family,” the officer said.

The decision to keep the brigade in Kuwait was made as the Iraq drawdown was planned, Pentagon spokesman George Little said in an email this week to Stars and Stripes.

“We appreciate the outstanding service of the servicemembers in this unit, and for the sacrifice they and their families make to help protect U.S. interests around the world,” Little said.

DEERFIELD BEACH, Fla. — A Marine Corps officer said Friday he reacted as he was trained to do by chasing two men who stole a gold necklace he thought they were buying, and then using his fingers to plug bullet holes in his body when one of them opened fire.

Lt. Col. Karl Trenker, a 29-year Marine Corps veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, demonstrated at a hospital news conference how he stuck his fingers on his left hand into two holes in his left chest and another finger from his right hand where a .22-caliber bullet entered his abdomen. His doctor said the move helped staunch the flow of blood.

“I’m a Marine and I’m not going to run from a fight,” Trenker said. “You wouldn’t want a Marine to run from a fight. Call me crazy, call me stupid. I got shot once and it just angered me more. I wanted to get this guy. I got shot twice, and I re-evaluated that decision. I decided I need to stay alive.”

As for the use of his fingers, Trenker said, “I improvised.”

Trenker, 48, was shot multiple times Dec. 21. He had driven with four of his children to meet a man who responded to a Craigslist ad for the necklace. Two suspects are jailed on attempted murder and robbery charges.

Trenker, who was released Friday from North Broward Medical Center, will be left with one slug lodged in his pelvis but otherwise should make a full recovery, said Dr. Igor Nichiporenko. The doctor credited Trenker’s military training and fitness for his rapid recovery — as well as his use of fingers to plug the bullet holes.

“I think he did the right thing,” Nichiporenko said. “It’s amazing. He’s going to be fine.”

WEST POINT, N.Y. — Americans will argue for years over what was won in Iraq. To understand what was lost, come to the U.S. Military Academy cemetery and walk through Section 36, a garden of unrealized potential and thwarted dreams that sits on a windy bluff over the Hudson River.

Separated only by a hedge from a parking lot, Section 36 is the newest and least picturesque part of a cramped old graveyard that lacks the sweeping, aching grandeur of Arlington or the American cemetery at Normandy.

But there is loss and ache here enough.

See the big polished granite stone of Emily Perez, the highest-ranking minority female cadet in West Point history. On Sept. 12, 2006, she became the first female academy graduate and the first member of the Class of 2005 to die in Iraq.

At West Point she was command sergeant major, track star, singer and tutor. She started an AIDS ministry at her church. She donated bone marrow to a stranger. They called her “Taz” because, like the cartoon Tasmanian devil, “she spun with energy,” says her sociology professor, Morten Ender. At her funeral, when a classmate called her “a little superwoman,” no one thought it hyperbole.

Walk a few feet and stop at the simple white military-issue marker of Col. Theodore Westhusing. It says he died June 5, 2005.

It doesn’t say that he was a philosophy doctorate-holder who at age 44 left a wife, three kids and a teaching job at West Point to volunteer for Iraq; that he said the experience would make him a better teacher; that he shot himself a month before he was due home, becoming at the time the highest-ranking soldier to die in Iraq.

Move on to the graves of Capts. Stephen Frank and Jay Harting, Michigan boys who graduated from West Point together, went to Iraq together and died together while inspecting a suicide bomber’s car trunk. That was April 29, 2005, two weeks before Harting was due home for the birth of his son.

A few steps away, in Row E, lies 1st Lt. Michael Adams. On March 16, 2004, he was in a convoy headed out of Iraq and toward home when he was killed in a collision with a U.S. contractor’s vehicle. The barrel of his tank swung around on impact, hitting him in the head. He was 24.

“Next time you hear from me,” he had told his parents in an email a few days earlier, “it’ll be from Kuwait.”

A cemetery at war’s end is as much about what never will be as what was. Bill Hecker, ‘91, will never come back to West Point to teach Poe and Twain. Eric Paliwoda, ‘97, will never throw another tailgate party at Michie Stadium. Tom Martin, ‘05, will never make general.

Matthew August, ‘97, will never catch another trout or bag another deer. His classmate, Mike MacKinnon, will never have another burger at the York Bar in his native Helena, Mont.

The cemetery harbors the remains of 19 of the 59 West Point graduates who died in Iraq. They’re among the 4,474 U.S. military personnel killed in that conflict. Although the Iraq war is over, the one in Afghanistan may provide Section 36 with more headstones.

The sense of loss is palpable. It’s like 1st Lt. Phillip Neel’s sister Kelly said when he was killed in 2007: “There’s this huge, gaping hole that can’t be filled.” Yet next June, Neel’s brother Joe graduates from West Point.