GOOD LOCAL COVERAGE.

Giving us a glimpse of reunion.

His mother recognized the difference immediately. Physically, Army Pvt. Michael Chavez was a little thinner, a little older looking. He walked with more confidence, and his maturity found its way into every conversation.

War had changed Chavez. The sleepless nights. The close call when a mortar shell exploded 15 feet from his truck. The two weeks without a shower. The children begging for food. The new appreciation for having a roof over his head.

"He's actually a man now," Rebeca Corona said of her 21-year-old son.

Corona and Chavez are among the families in the Northern San Joaquin Valley reuniting after months of worrying and waiting during war.

Sunday at his house in Newman, Chavez dressed in blue jeans and a blue plaid button-down shirt -- a nice change from the brown Army uniform he had lived in for months.

"I thought about home everyday," he said. "You appreciate everything a lot more after coming through something like that."

Chavez's unit -- the 123rd Signal Battalion -- was one of the first groups to arrive in Kuwait in early January. In the months before the war, the troops spent the days training in the desert.

"Every now and then we'd build a sand castle just to keep the morale up," he said.