The chaplain was winding things down when Maj. Rick Smith grabbed his niece by the waist and pulled her close. She buried her face into his shoulder and cried a little.

Until then, things had been lighthearted. People were laughing and taking pictures. There were cookies. You can't cry with a mouthful of cookie.

But then the chaplain started praying, and everyone became acutely aware of the wall they were about to hit. The sudden end of the road. After months of waiting, the day was here, the time was nigh.

"We love soldiers, we love freedom, we love life," Chaplain Maury Millican said Friday to a gymnasium full of people who were about to say goodbye to someone they love for a year. The tears came.

Forty-five soldiers from the North Dakota National Guard will leave Bismarck tonight and won't come home until next spring. The 34th Engineer Brigade will go to Iraq to help rebuild the country. Its job is not to repair damages caused during the war, but rather to help reconstruct a crumbling, long-neglected infrastructure. That means roads, schools, utilities, hospitals.

"It is a mission where you stand up for this country, but it is much more than that,"Gov. John Hoeven said at Friday's send-off ceremony. "You are going to help rebuild a way of life for the people of Iraq. That is part of what America represents to the rest of the world."

That mission is an easy one to accept for the soldiers - many of them engineers or public works officials in the civilian world - and their families.

"They're going to be leaving something behind over there," said Leslie Moszer, wife of Lt. Col. J.P. Moszer. "This mission makes it easier. We're very proud of them."

J.P. Moszer, who was deployed to Bosnia on a de-mining mission in 2004, will go to Iraq with his sister, Lt. Col. Jan Carter. Being deployed with family helps, he said.

In a sense, now, all the families that showed up at Raymond J. Bohn Armory on Friday have now been whittled to just two: The unit and those they will leave behind.

Maj. Gen. David Sprynczynatyk said the Guard will do whatever it can to help the soldiers' families during the engineer brigade's deployment.

Sprynczynatyk was at Fort Lewis, Wash., on Thursday to welcome the Guard's 188th Air Defense Artillery back to the country. The 150 soldiers from that unit are returning from Afghanistan, and will arrive in North Dakota on the heels of the latest unit's departure.

"This is all about making a difference. That's what the engineer brigade will do,"Sprynczynatyk said. "It's important for the soldiers to know the community and their families are behind them."

The engineers will first travel to Camp Atterbury, Ind., where they will undergo training before flying to Iraq. Once in Iraq, they will be spread across the country, from Kirkuk in the north to Basra in the southeast.

The engineer brigade is old, by Guard standards. The average age of the 45 soldiers is 41 years, and the average years of military service is 211/2. Eleven of them have previously been deployed to Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia or Kosovo in the last few years.

(Reach Tony Spilde at 250-8260 or tony.spilde@;bismarcktribune.com.)