COLORADO SPRINGS — Just as the Army song rang out through the open doors of a Fort Carson hangar on a fine summer morning, one brunette shook her waist-length hair and flashed a huge grin across the expanse of concrete, targeting her man with a brilliant smile.

As Alia and Sgt. Albert Reyes connected, for that one special moment, the other 500 people in today's departure ceremony disappeared. The 1st Squadron of the 6th Cavalry Regiment was setting out for war, but for Alia and Albert, it was a moment to concentrate on just their family. One man, leaving his wife and two small boys behind.

Some 350 members of the squadron will be leaving Fort Carson over the next several weeks to run Blackhawk and Kiowa Warrior helicopters in air support of ground combat in northern Iraq.

Albert Reyes will be heading to Iraq for third time in their six years of marriage. He served four months in the war zone the first time, 12 months the second, and now it will 15 months, as the stretched-thin army has extended the routine tour of duty.

Add a deployment to Korea at the beginning of his army career, and Albert has been gone more than he's been home in their six years as a couple.

"This time, it will be harder, because he'll be gone a lot longer," said Alia.

Reyes, a crew chief for mechanics maintaining the unit's helicopters, held the hand of his 3-year-old, Alex, as the little boy juggled a paper plate full of cream puffs after the ceremony.

"He knows I'm going, but he doesn't know why," the sergeant said of his youngest. His 5-year-old, Arliano, does know that "Daddy's got to go to Iraq."

Arliano has been busy lately, deliberately cramming in extra time to play the video game Halo with his father before he's gone. He tells his family that he's got to watch his father's back.

But there's an unusual twist to this story of families pulled apart, in the form of a crowd standing behind Alia — in every sense of the phrase. Six members of the Reyes' families have moved to Colorado to be with Alia and her two children while her husband is overseas.

Albert's mother, Laura Erives, said she and her husband and three younger children came to Colorado on vacation in June from Marble Falls, Texas, escaping a flood and 20-inch rainstorm.

When the family confronted the sergeant in his living room and told him they'd be moving to Colorado, "he couldn't believe it," recalled his mother. "He was so ecstatic, knowing his wife would have company. It was a big load off him, knowing she has support."

Meanwhile, Alia's mother, Olga Schnelker, moved from Indiana. "We couldn't bear to be away from the kids," she said, smiling.

Picking up and moving the whole family wasn't easy, Laura Erives said. Her husband was a self-employed painter, so he could move that skill. But she's now job-hunting, and daughter Gloria is trying to reconstruct her high school life with a new set of volleyball pals.

"Seeing the family happier I guess is more rewarding," Gloria said.

When the families first arrived in Colorado Springs, they had 10 people stuffed into the Reyes apartment for a month until the others found homes nearby. "Talk about a close-knit family," laughed the sergeant's mother.

But the upheaval has been more than worth it, especially with the knowledge that her son is heading into danger in Iraq.

"As a mom, you do have a little worry in the back of your mind," she admitted, though she said she would never say that to her son. "The first time he left, I cried like a baby."

This deployment, it's different. With everyone together in Colorado, where her youngest children can play with her son's little ones while he is off to war, "I felt like we had won the lottery."