They survived blinding sandstorms, suffocating heat, deadly ambushes and roadside bombs. But five days before they were scheduled to leave Iraq and put the year's heartache and hardship behind them, a company of Bay Area soldiers was defeated by an unlikely source: a phone call. It came on a Thursday in late April. Unit members had turned in their weapons. Bags were packed. Jobs, families and vacations awaited them. Homecomings were planned, posters made, food ordered. The Army reservists of the 341st Military Police Company out of San Jose were told to unpack. The Pentagon had extended their stay in Iraq by 120 days, the company's second extension. Now the resentment -- and sense of betrayal -- is building. Sgt. Catrina Hernandez, 22, of South San Francisco, a member of the 341st, said in an e-mail from a military base in the heart of Iraq's hot spot, the Sunni triangle, that the homecoming reversal was like "having your heart torn out, stomped on and then given back to you." "I am proud of my service in Iraq," Hernandez wrote. "I'm proud to be ...

The information that I received was that the 341st Military Police Company was being mobilized for a potential conflict in the Middle East. Which from what I was seeing put all over CNN was the looming war in Iraq due to the country having Chemical and Biological weapons that posed a serious threat to the national security of the United States. That was all fine and dandy but I was just looking forward to having some real combat experience. Initially no one could tell us what our mission would be when we got deployed overseas but since the unit had already spent six months in the Balkans doing convoy security missions just two years earlier we had a good idea what missions would be handed down to us. On March 1st the 341st Military Police Company started creating orders to have soldiers brought in before we actually mobilized to start getting the equipment ready and get a lot of the field training out of the way like qualifications with our M16 rifles, 9mm handguns and M249 squad automatic weapons which we completed at Ft. Hunter Ligget California. I was given training on how to use the Army version of a GPS ...