And now, after a yearlong deployment in Afghanistan, the 350 soldiers of the 211th Aviation Battalion will come home.

A 32-member advance team from the Utah-based National Guard unit arrived in Fort Carson, Colo., on Thursday, where some will stay through the next month to help facilitate the return of the rest of the unit. Others, including Chief Warrant Officer Mike Pluim, will trickle back into Utah over the next several days.

"It's wonderful," Pluim said in a telephone interview. "It's great to be home on American soil."

Those members of the 211th remaining in Afghanistan are expected to begin leaving at the end of this week. Members hope to have the entire battalion home by the end of April.

But the return also is bittersweet. Staff Sgt. Alan Lee Rogers, a 20-year National Guard veteran, died Sept. 29 in Bagram. The details of Rogers' death remain under investigation by the Army's Criminal Investigation Division.

To date, the Utah National Guard has said only that Rogers died of noncombat injuries. His stepson said he has yet to be provided the details of his stepfather's death.

"We've been trying to piece it together," said Josh Ellis. "But really, it's irrelevant at this point. Finding out what happened isn't going to change anything for me. We have to deal with it no matter how it happened."

Ellis' daughter - named Alexis in honor of Rogers, who went by the nickname "Big Al" - is due to be born April 4. Ellis was expecting to have his stepfather home for the arrival.

"He was just really looking forward to coming home and having a new grandbaby," Ellis said.

Pluim called the loss of the veteran guardsman "very sad."

But Rogers' death will not define the 211th's tour of duty, in which the unit flew helicopter escort missions starting in April 2004. It was for other heroics that the unit became known throughout the Southeast Asian theater of operations - and back home.

"The first shipment alone was 60,000 pounds of humanitarian aid," Pluim said of one of the many deliveries of hygiene kits, school supplies and toys shipped to the Middle East by Angels for Afghanistan, an organization of Utah Military Families, many from the 211th.

The 211th also was instrumental in sending a frail Afghan boy to California for a life-saving heart operation. Eleven-year-old Asadullah returned to the rural village of Jegdalek last week following a successful surgery at Loma Linda University Hospital in Southern California.

At first, members of the 211th simply believed they were helping one little boy, Chief Warrant Officer Layne Pace wrote in an e-mail to The Salt Lake Tribune.

"We didn't recognize the ultimate benefit over and above Asadullah's life, and that was the bond and love that developed between a remote Afghan village named Jegdalek and the U.S. military," Pace wrote.

As Pace's helicopter took off following the unit's final trip to the village March 11, he was touched by the sight below.

"I didn't think was possible in a foreign Muslim country," Pace wrote. "They were holding up the American flag and trying to keep it straight in the wind of our Chinook trying to take off."

mlaplante@sltrib.com