Lackland Air Force Base, Texas • It's been six minutes since Rick Souza and 692 classmates, standing in formation, received their Airman's Coins and recited the Airman's Creed, a loud, proud chant that has left him in tears.

His family has driven 26 hours to see him receive his coin and Monday, graduate with honors from Basic Military Training. Souza holds a beaming 3-year-old MacKenzie in his arms as his sons, Riley and Maverick, crane their necks to see if they're hugging the right dress blue pant legs. Rick tries to talk to his wife, Stacy, but the jostle of hundreds of reuniting families makes it tough to talk.

Basic training, Rick says, was much harder than he expected, both physically and mentally. He's not sure he would do it again.

And yet Rick and Stacy — a 2004 graduate of basic training at Lackland who spent five months in Iraq this year — agree there's something harder than this: Staying home alone to juggle work and three children under 5.

"This," says the newly minted 30-year-old airman, "is way easier."

The year 2011 will go down as a crazy one for the Souzas, who live in Roy.

In January, Stacy, a member of the Air Force Reserve's 67th Aerial Port Squadron at Hill Air Force Base, deployed to Iraq. She helped control cargo in and out of Joint Base Balad while Rick managed the children at home and dealt with an unexpected surge in his contracting business.

Three days after Stacy returned home in May, she took over as the single parent and Rick shipped out to Texas, beginning a military career that he had long wanted, but figured was out of reach.

Now, eight weeks later, he is graduating in the top 10 percent of his class from basic — one of 35,000 airmen churned out each year or about 700 a week — here at Lackland Air Force Base.

After a few days in San Antonio with Stacy, their children and Stacy's twin sister, Tracy Harris, Rick is headed to Fort Lee in Virginia, where he will be trained as an air transportation specialist until Sept. 12.

After that, Rick and Stacy will both be in the 67th Squadron, part of the 419th Fighter Wing at Hill, a part-time job that requires one weekend a month, two weeks a year, with the possibility of deployment.

She will keep her day job as a corrections officer at the Weber County Jail; he'll resume building garages and remodeling homes for clients in northern Utah.

But for now, Rick tries to explain the surge of relief and patriotism that brought him to tears as the basic-training deputy commander promoted his class.

"Now I am part of this military. I did take an oath to defend it, to die for it," says Rick. "At the point where he said, 'You go from trainee to airman, U.S. Air Force,' that was huge. Especially for me, because I wasn't born here. I'm not from here. But it's my country. It's home."

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Joining up • Impulsive decisions have been part of Rick and Stacy's relationship from the start.

A native of Brazil whose family converted to the LDS Church when he was a boy, Rick persuaded his mother to move to Utah when he was 17. He served a mission for the church after high school, and had a short-lived marriage to a high school sweetheart after his return.

When a co-worker of Stacy's who rode motorcycles with Rick suggested she date him, Stacy at first balked. "I felt it was a pity date," says the 32-year-old, raised mostly in Utah.

But Rick wouldn't take no for an answer, she remembers. They were engaged within a month and married four months later. Soon, they had Riley, now 4, and then the twins, MacKenzie — Kiki for short — and Maverick, nicknamed Mavvy. The twins turned 3 while their mother was in Iraq.

About a year ago, Stacy's twin persuaded Rick to join the Reserves. Harris, a corrections officer at Salt Lake County Jail, has been in the 67th Squadron since 1999 and loves the military life.

"I get to travel places I would never get to go," says Harris, who just returned from a deployment to Kyrgyzstan. Her splurge on a new motorcycle with a $15,000 military bonus not long ago turned Rick's head.

He had always yearned to be a military man, but his mother had discouraged it. Ten years out of high school, with $100,000 in student-loan debt from a failed helicopter school, Rick saw the Reserves as a way to make extra money while living out a dream.

Even if he doesn't earn bonuses in the thousands of dollars, his monthly Reserve paycheck will help Rick make payments on his Dodge Ram truck.

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'It all requires sacrifice' • After a long working day in May, near the end of Rick's five-month stint as a single parent, he chides his irritable children for snacking on bananas as they await dinner. And he wonders if joining the Reserves — and making his a dual-military family — was such a good idea.

His father-in-law, Ron Harris, arrives with a jar of warm sauce and a bag of cooked spaghetti, and Rick cuts the noodles into brightly colored plastic bowls for his little ones.

"I want to serve. I want to be part of it. But it all requires sacrifice," says Rick.

Ten days before his departure to basic training, Rick is particularly stressed.

He has more than a dozen construction jobs pending, most of which he will have to leave to a business partner. He had hoped to finish remodeling his own basement, but can't work much with the power tools until the kids — who set their own bedtimes — drop off at midnight or 1 a.m. each night.

The family's food storage is mostly gone, even though they eat most evening meals with his parents, Marlene and Joao Souza, who live nearby.

And Rick is not happy that another of his goals will remain unfulfilled when he leaves for basic training: he is still on his knees, changing diapers.

"You go potty in your pants again, you're going to get spanked. Crap, Kiki!" Rick tells his little girl, lying in her bedroom doorway, legs in the air for a diaper change.

"I don't want to change butt. Seriously. Your mom's going to get home and you're still not using a potty," he tells her. "You're a little butt, Kiki."

The 3-year-old, though, is not worried about a spanking; she knows her dad.

"I know," Kiki answers agreeably.

Rick is eager to leave family responsibilities behind and answer the commands of a drill sergeant.

"What am I going to miss? Changing the butts? Feeding? Giving baths?" he asks. "I'm glad I'm leaving."

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'We deserve to be together' • Stacy's plane arrives early at Salt Lake City International Airport in May after her five-month tour in Iraq. Dressed in battle fatigues, she paces and lines up her bags, waiting. "I want to see my kids!" she exclaims, shortly before her sister, Holly Harris, arrives with the three in tow.

Stacy is running her hands through Riley's short, curly hair, admiring his new cut when Rick, freshly showered from work, arrives 20 minutes later. They hug and kiss and he exclaims about the weight of her large bag.

Their intentions for the weekend ahead betray how each has spent the previous five months.

Stacy, knowing how much of her children's lives she has missed, wants her family close. Rick wants to drop the kids off at his parents and spend the weekend, alone, with his wife. "I think we deserve to be together," he says.

Their three short days, a handoff from one parent to the other, go by in a blur.

The first night Stacy is a single parent, Riley, Kiki and Mavvy are in bed by 7 p.m.

"I thought their bedtime was going to be a much bigger problem," she says, a few days later.

Even so, nights are the toughest part of Rick being gone, she says. Mavvy has night terrors, and Rick usually awakens to care for him.

"I'm not the night parent. Rick is the night parent."

Stacy has nearly a month before she returns to work at the Weber County Jail, and she wants to re-establish her children's schedules. She plans to practice hustling the kids out the door before 7 a.m. so they can become accustomed, again, to her earlier work schedule, which means early mornings at day care.

In the meantime, she enjoys taking them with her to the gym and going to Riley's tee-ball games.

She looks back at her five months in Iraq fondly. "It showed the unit they can throw anything at me and I can do it."

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'He loves the military' •The 67th Squadron generally deploys in groups of a dozen or two airmen who volunteer to go. But as a reservist who had never deployed, Stacy was urged to opt for her stint this year in Iraq. "They said, 'You need to be deployed or we're going to get you out of the squadron,'" Stacy recalls.

But Stacy says she would have to weigh the impact on her family before voluntarily deploying again.

Early during Rick's basic training, Stacy had mixed feelings about becoming a dual-military family. "It's the fact that I probably will never deploy again because of it," she says.

But a stream of handwritten letters from Rick conveyed how much the experience meant to him, and by his graduation on July 22 on the parade grounds at Lackland, Stacy is convinced Rick belongs in uniform.

"He loves the military," she says. "He's already got his future planned out. He wants to be the best of the best."

And she's even letting his ambition serve as motivation to kick her own physical training into high gear so she can advance a rank and stay a step ahead of her husband.

Rick has an E4 (senior airman) rank. Stacy is currently an E5 (staff sergeant) and hopes to advance to the rank of E6 (tech sergeant).

"He wants to match me or beat me in rank," says Stacy. "If he can help push me to get my next rank, I'm great."

The separation and strain on the Souzas' marriage this year, for the sake of dual military careers, has only been good, she says.

"We both realize how much we need each other and rely on each other," says Stacy. "We are each other's better half."

And, she says, there's only a slight chance they'll ever have to go to war together.

"It's not likely unless a global war breaks out and everybody gets deployed."

kmoulton@sltrib.com —

Utah troops in service

There were 1,518 Guard and Reserve troops from Utah activated as of July 19, according to the Department of Defense. Most of those were in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Most of Utah's Guard and Reserves are in Army units, which account for 1,329.

Throughout the country, 93,296 Guard and Reserve troops were activated on July 19, the last date for which numbers are available.

O Read the DOD report, littleurl.info/nnh