Nothing seems so certain at an airport’s arrival gate as the back-of-the-plane seating of a person expected. The anticipation, extended by moments, grew for Buddy and Lori Calloway.

They stood behind the security glass and focused on the door under the Gate 12 sign, United Express passengers strolling into the Kansas City International terminal. The jetliner from Washington Dulles carried their oldest son, Cody, and he had yet to emerge.

Most of the past three and a half years, Cody lived abroad, the soldier stationed in Germany except for the 15 months deployed to Iraq. His brief leaves proved bliss ... until they ended. The parents knew both ends of this airport ritual, the send-offs and homecomings.

“Our goodbyes are horrible,” Mrs. Calloway says, waiting. “This is like heaven.”

Cody joined the Army just out of Mid-Buchanan High School. He kept his enlistment plans from his parents until the last minute in 2006, figuring they would disapprove. His ambition to be a combat forward observer would especially freak them out.

What’s a parent to do except support their son and suffer when putting him on a plane?

That was then. Now, somewhere beyond the glass and down the Jetway, the returning warrior waited to deplane, his duty at an end.

“We raise our kids and protect our kids, and all of a sudden our kids are protecting us,” says Mr. Calloway of his son.

Few people gathered to watch the Gate 12 procession, but the Calloway parents, son Camron and daughter Buddi crowded against one another. Buddy put his hand in the small of his wife’s back, rubbing it lightly.

A young face appeared and four hands shot up in unison, as if uncoiled. The family members, smiles unhinged, moved to the exit and, Cody within reach, wrapped him in a group hug. When they pulled apart, the eldest son moved in again to embrace his mother.

Passers-by could rejoice in this scene, a family reunited. But they would not know of the recent diagnosis, the middle-of-the-night conversation, the overseas assurances that things would be all right.

They would not know that a young man who fought for his country now returned to help his mother fight breast cancer.

In the airport corridor, neither Lori nor Cody appeared eager for the hug to end.

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Cpl. Cody Calloway, a member of the 1st Armored Division, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, thought better of volunteering but did so anyway. His unit needed someone to explore a tunnel system beneath an Iraqi settlement where weapons caches had been discovered.

The temperature topped 120 degrees. At least the assignment would let him strip his heavy pack for a time.

“They lowered me down. It was like some ‘Indiana Jones’ stuff,” he recalls. He found no enemies, nor did he expect to. “I was more afraid of the huge spiders that were going to be there.”

Sitting at the kitchen table of the Calloway home in Agency, Mo., Cody told of getting his military wish, to be tasked to scout reconnaissance teams where he could provide target information for fighter planes overhead.

These were “ghost troops,” and the Buchanan County soldier moved easily in their midst. Operation Iron Pursuit took him to the Diyala province, an area near the Iranian border where insurgents would bring across armor-penetrating explosives.

Plenty of bad guys resided in these parts. Like the seemingly harmless octogenarian whose welcoming demeanor turned sour once troops found military gear, enemy propaganda and $100,000 in cash during a search of his Iraqi home. The corporal felt strange restraining such an elderly man, but the war left little margin for risk.

Even small children who flocked to have pictures taken with U.S. troops began to have an ominous look the longer Cody spent in Iraq. “You had that thing in the back of your head saying, no, don’t let the kids get close,” the soldier remembers.

Three times in a three-week period, he traveled in the back of an armored personnel vehicle and felt IEDs go off beneath him. A flash, a roar, then a vehicle full of smoke. He suffered some hearing loss and a bloody nose. By the grace of God and armor, no other injury.

On the home front, Buddy Calloway said Cody’s 15 months in Iraq aged the father and mother 10 years. They stopped watching the news. No hours passed without their thoughts heading to the Persian Gulf.

When Cody left Iraq for Germany late this summer, the nation the Calloways once thought distant now seemed to them the next best thing to home.

On Oct. 8, Lori learned what a doctor thought of a lump in her breast.

“At three o’clock,” she says, the time etched in memory.

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Cody arrived in the world a preemie.

“He weighed a little over 3 pounds at birth,” Mrs. Calloway says. “Been fighting ever since.”

The parents considered not telling their oldest son about the cancer until his scheduled return to the United States next week. In a Facebook world, though, they feared the information might get to him in some unwitting way.

The Red Cross told the soldier to call home. He called five straight nights then. Helpless, he had little to say.

No farther now than his bedroom, the son at least feels some control.

“It’s horrible this is what it is, but I’m glad I’m at this point where I’m done and can help out,” he says.

For Lori, who works for Mid-Buchanan Schools, test results await next week and an MRI. Then surgery and treatment, still a mystery.

But her boy is home. At the airport Monday, a week early thanks to the Red Cross, Cody learned there was green chili simmering at the Agency home. The returning warrior gave a fist pump, notice that the best dinner in the best restaurant would not have pleased him more.

When soldiers go to war, people hang yellow ribbons. Cody now wears a pink wristband.

Cancer, mother and son say, doesn’t stand a chance.

Ken Newton can be reached at kenn@npgco.com.