Even as US forces are packing up and preparing to end a war that has cost the lives of 4,485 of their comrades and more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians, some troops report feeling an unexpected emotion as the mission here draws to a close: dread.

It’s the fear, US military officials say, of what occasionally awaits soldiers on the home front when they return, from fiscal uncertainty to relationship woes.

Troops who deployed to escape their troubles, officials add, are increasingly grappling with the notion that as the wars wind down, they have nowhere left to go but home.

“A lot of people here dread the thought of going back – that has surprised me,” says Lt. Col. Mark Rowan, an Air Force chaplain who counsels troops returning from Iraq and Kuwait. “You’d think it would be high-fives and a happy time, but you’ll find that some don’t want to go home. Some of them left to get away from problems – financial problems, marriage problems – and now they have to face them.”

US forces must leave Iraq by Dec. 31 in accord with an agreement reached between the two countries in 2008. Commanders are aware that even for troops counting the days to the war’s end, the transition can be trickier than they expect. “It’s harder coming home than leaving –anyone will tell you that,” says Col. Michael Gaal, vice commander for the 321st Air Expeditionary Wing in Baghdad. “You think it’s going to be all cotton-candy clouds and unicorns, but it’s different.”

Relationships may be strained after years of deployments, and spouses and children – after the initial flurry of hugs and relief – often need time to readjust to the presence of their returning loved one, Colonel Gaal says.

These difficulties are increasingly compounded for troops coming home amid an economic downturn. Many service members – once guaranteed work fighting – are now suddenly worried about being out of a job.

Others volunteered to deploy specifically because they were having trouble finding work back home. "I had met people who are unemployed due to the economy – that's why they came here," says Staff Sgt. Teresa Pavljuk, a National Guardsman who supervises the military flight terminal in Baghdad.

Even those who are active-duty military are worried about job security. “A lot of them are scared, because with the bad economy, the military’s going to downsize.That means a lot of them are going to be out,” Lieutenant Colonel Rowan says.

“That’s going to be a concern for us,” adds Command Chief Master Sgt. Jerry Delebreau for the 321st Air Expeditionary Wing in Baghdad. “It might be hard for some people.”

When the Air Force announced in late October that it was cutting 157 officers from its ranks due to the increasingly strong budget pressures facing the Pentagon, some airmen took it personally.

“They are in shock. They are angry,” Rowan says. “They feel betrayed.”

The news that, not only were they out of a job, but they would also have to leave the service – along with the life and community they have known – by March 1 hit particularly hard, he adds.

The counseling of troops who were cut from the ranks becomes “basically a talk on self-worth,” Rowan says.

After fighting two wars, “some of them just want to know – what did I do wrong?” he adds. “I had one guy, he said, ‘I can’t understand what I did wrong. I can’t understand. I feel like such a loser.’

“I tell them, ‘You did nothing wrong. You’re not a loser. It’s a function of the budget – you’re being downsized,’ ” Rowan says. “You can’t give them an answer or a job, which you’d love to do.”

BAGHDAD — After nearly nine years of war in Iraq, was it worth it?

As the U.S. military ends its mission in Iraq, Stars and Stripes spoke with 20 soldiers and airmen currently serving in Iraq and asked them that question.

The servicemembers came from varying jobs and backgrounds. Most have served multiple tours in Iraq. Many knew people in their units who lost their lives.

Their responses varied markedly. Some expressed optimism for Iraq’s long-term future, while others said that the war amounted to a waste of effort and life.

But the dominant conclusion that servicemembers came to on the war’s worth was this: We think so, but we don’t really know yet.

“If [the Iraqis] continue on the path they’re on, it was worth it,” said Air Force Staff Sgt. Charlie Ford, of Omak, Wash., a joint tactical air controller attached to the 1st Cavalry Division out of Fort Hood, Texas. Most of the American public does not appear to agree.

In a November Washington Post-ABC News poll, 62 percent of Americans said “no” when asked, “Considering the costs to the United States versus the benefits to the United States, do you think the war in Iraq was worth fighting?”

After 25 successive polls, opinion has barely changed since December 2006, when 61 percent said the same thing.

Servicemembers who strongly believed that the war was worth fighting attributed the poll results to either ignorance or lack of interest in what they’ve been doing.

“The American people are just like brand new soldiers,” said 1st Lt. Justin Hackett, of Beloit, Kan. “A limited point of view breeds negativity.”

Hackett, who spent 2011 in Basra with the 215th Brigade Support Battalion, 1st Cavalry Division, served as an enlisted sniper section leader in 2004 at Camp War Eagle, located in the violent Baghdad slum of Sadr City.

Sophisticated attacks from cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army and other anti-American forces came daily. Hackett still grapples with the tough calls he made during that chaotic time — the innocent man he shot at, the bomber he didn’t — yet he remains an ardent exponent of the war’s accomplishments.

“From a strategic side, yes, it was a success, having seen what it was like in 2003 and what it’s gone to,” Hackett said. “Where it will go is anyone’s guess.”

The Iraq war toll is far more staggering than most servicemembers ever imagined when the war began in March 2003: About 4,500 U.S. servicemembers have died and another 32,000 have been wounded, according to U.S. estimates.

Roughly 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died from violence since 2003, according to U.S. and Iraqi figures, and the United Nations estimates that 1.5 million Iraqis are either refugees or internally displaced.

Among Iraqis, many who opposed the U.S. war effort, hold it responsible for the bloody sectarian fighting between Kurdish, Sunni and Shi’a Arab groups that still festers.

“Everyone really was grateful that the U.S. got rid of Saddam,” said an Iraqi who served in the Saddam-era Iraqi army, and now works for an official in the reconstituted Iraqi army. “But before that, nobody cared if you were Sunni or Shia. That only came with the Americans. I think [Western nations] fear what would happen if Arabs united.”

Most servicemembers do not see themselves as responsible for Iraq’s troubles; instead, they view themselves as the element opposing corruption and sectarian troubles through fighting, building infrastructure and training Iraq’s security forces.

Sgt. Christopher Mendez, of Yuma, Ariz., served his final Iraq tour during 2011 in Basra with Hackett, and his first tour in 2004.

The first time Mendez rode through the gate during that initial tour at Camp Cuervo, in Baghdad’s northeast, a rocket-propelled grenade whizzed by his window.

“That’s when it became real, that these guys really want to kill me,” Mendez said. “Every day before we rolled out the gate, I’d think, ‘Is this the day?’ For the whole year, it was like that every single day.”

Later in his tour, Mendez stepped out of his vehicle when a mortar landed, sending six pieces of shrapnel into his leg. He was hospitalized for four months, and then returned to his unit.

Mendez said the tour was so intense that he has blocked parts of it out of his mind.

He then talked about the decreases in violence since the darkest days of the insurgency, and concluded that the war was worth fighting.

“One view is that it really is better,” Mendez said. “The other side is that you’re internally justifying it. You force yourself to look at the good, so it’s justified. I’d like to say I avoided doing that.”

Reckoning the costs of war in Iraq will take years, especially the impact on US prestige and power in the world. Historians, political scientists, and economists will write doctoral dissertations on the subject, and some will devote careers to calculating and analyzing the data and each others’ conclusions – as continues to be the case with the Vietnam War.

The center is a progressive, nonprofit think tank and advocacy organization in Washington, founded in 2003 by former Clinton administration chief of staff John Podesta.

The organization's inclinations are clearly left-of-center, but the figures in its “Iraq War Ledger” are taken from nonpartisan sources, including the Congressional Research Service, icasualties.org, the Defense Department, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, the Centers for Disease Control, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Here are some of the main points:

Human Costs

Coalition deaths totaled 4,803, of which 4,484 (93 percent) were American. The number of Americans wounded was 32,200. At least 463 non-Iraqi contractors were killed.

Iraqi civilian deaths are estimated to total between 103,674 and 113,265.

The UNHCR says the war resulted in 1.24 million internally displaced persons and more than 1.6 million refugees.

Financial costs

The Congressional Research Service puts the dollar cost of Operation Iraqi Freedom at $806 billion.

In their book “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes estimate the projected total cost of veterans’ health care and disability payments to be between $422 billion and $717 billion.

Veterans

More than 2 million US service members have served in Iraq or Afghanistan (many in both wars).

The total number of Iraq/Afghanistan veterans eligible for Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health care is 1,250,663, half of whom (625,384) have used VA health care since 2002.

The number of Iraq/Afghanistan veterans diagnosed with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is at least 168,854 – more than a quarter of those who have used VA health care.

The suicide rate for Iraq/Afghanistan veterans using VA health care in FY 2008 was 38 suicides per 100,000 veterans – more than three times the national suicide rate for the previous year.

Iraq reconstruction

Total funding: $182.27 billion.

Iraqi government funds (including Coalition Provisional Authority funding): $107.41 billion.

International funds: $13.03 billion.

US funds (2003-2011): $61.83 billion. As a basis for comparison, the US after World War II spent $34.3 billion in Germany and $17.6 billion in Japan on post-war reconstruction. (All figures in 2011 dollars.)

The cost of war is more than numbers, of course. Losing a family member or a lifetime of disability are incalculable.

“The end of former Iraq President Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime represents a considerable global good, and a nascent democratic Iraqi republic partnered with the United States could potentially yield benefits in the future,” Duss and Juul of the Center for American Progress write. “But when weighing those possible benefits against the costs of the Iraq intervention, there is simply no conceivable calculus by which Operation Iraqi Freedom can be judged to have been a successful or worthwhile policy.”

That’s a political and historical judgment that no doubt will be debated for years.