It's been more than a year since local soldiers from the U.S. Army's Bravo Company, 463rd Engineer Battalion left for Iraq and this week they're coming home. The company is based in Weirton and for the local families they left behind, the anticipation is growing. Early Thursday morning an estimated 150 soldiers are coming home. The buses will arrive in Weirton between 9:00 and 10:00 in the morning. The buses will come down Main Street with the final destination the local reserve base. The main mission in Iraq was to build roads, buildings, even a runway for planes, north of Baghdad. Their mission now complete, their families wait for them to come home. This homecoming will be bittersweet, in August a road side bomb killed Sergeant Joseph Nurre. Nurre was from California but was a part of this local unit. Nancy Polland is a mother of one of the local soldiers and says the troops are taking Nurre's loss very hard, "They were broken hearted they were. You can't live with someone for a year and then have them snatched up, that's hard."

Kelly Bryan NEWS9