REV. TERRY Oatman

dropped his oldest daughter off at nursery school on his way to Iraq.

She didn't see him again for a year.

He relived that moment last week, as he dropped her off at school for the first time since that day.

So did she.

"She said, 'Daddy,' " Oatman recalled, " 'When you leave are you going to be gone for a long time?' "

Kaitlyn Marie, oldest of his three pre-school children, was only 4 when he left.

His son, youngest of the three, was still in diapers.

"The girls were really happy to see me," he said recalling his homecoming two weeks ago. "But my son wouldn't come to me right away. It was like he didn't know me at first."

He looks and sounds like the man who dropped his daughter off at school that day. But a year away has worked subtle changes in him and his family.

He left here as 1st Lt. Terry Oatman, executive officer of Bravo 328, a National Guard unit that was a support company for a Stryker brigrade.

He is still the pastor of National Temple Baptist Church at 17th and Master streets. He is still head of a household that includes his wife, El-Veta, and daughters Kaitlyn Marie, 5; El-Veta, 4, and Terry Jr., 2.

But he and his family, like the families of thousands of returning soldiers, are going through more of an adjustment than some of them had imagined.

"It's a transition," he said. "I had mentally turned myself off. I tried not to think too much about home so I wouldn't miss it too much.

"I was dealing with my soldiers. I had people coming to me with their problems just in my role as a leader. Some of them didn't even know I was a pastor.

"I told them you can only handle what you are in control of. You have to trust your familes and the people that you left behind."

It's a lesson that resonates with him now as he gradually returns to his roles as head of his family and pastor of his church.

"Your family has done so much without you," he told me. "You have to ask yourself, 'what is my place?' "

"You can't be aggressive about it. I feel like I'm playing catch up. I want to spend every minute with them.

"I picked up all three of them last Wednesday. Then, I went to church that night. It was very tiring.

"But, I did that for one day. I looked at my wife and I thought, how did you do this every day?"

He had his own challenges, of course. With his promotion to captain came increased responsibility. He got sick in the last month of his deployment and had to be flown to Germany and finally back to Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington where he met his family.

"I had become a staff officer in charge of transportation," he said. "I left two weeks before everybody else. I couldn't take charge of returning our equipment. I felt my mission wasn't completed.

"But I had to rely on the same advice I was giving others and trust my NCOs [noncommissioned officers] to do what they were trained to do."

Just as he has had to rely on his wife to handle his duties and hers while he was away.

He'll be fine. I've known him since he was 15 and I was his mentor in the Philadelphia Futures program. He has been living at warp speed ever since.

He went to college at 16. He has been a pastor since he was 19. He became a husband and father a year later.

His family and the members of his church are getting back more than they sent to Iraq a year ago.

"I've been through some challenges," he said. "Now my message to our young people is that you can do anything.

"I experienced my war zone. But your war zone doesn't have to be in Iraq. We're all combating something."

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