In 2004, Joyce Borum had been in Baghdad just a short time when she realized she’d found her niche, serving as a civilian member of a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers team in a war zone.

Borum, an internal review officer, volunteered for a four-month tour and ended up staying in Iraq three years on that mission, she said. She cried when she had to come home.

“It was such an opportunity,” said Borum, 46, a Natchez native who lives in Vicksburg. “The work I do is behind the scenes, but it somehow seemed more important there. And it was in a place that everybody just can’t pick up and go. My circumstances allowed me to go, and I felt like I was doing my piece, and the people who stayed behind and did the work in the office, they were doing their piece by keeping things going back home.”

A year ago, Borum deployed overseas again as a member of the Corps’ 579th Engineer Detachment that went to Afghanistan for a year.

This time she was dry-eyed and smiling as she and the Corps’ 579th were welcomed home Friday by family, Corps officials and guests at a ceremony at the Vicksburg Convention Center.

The 579th, known officially as the Forward Engineer Support Team-Main, or FEST-M, was charged with engineering design and construction support for both Afghan facilities and U.S. and NATO troop support, said its commander, Col. Richard W. Dean II.

“It’s been a total team effort and a job well done,” Dean told his team.

The 579th is a 36-member team comprised of 27 civilians and nine active-duty soldiers, Dean said. Civilian positions include surveyors, engineers, architect and document and accounting specialists.

“The civilians provide the technical support, and the military provides the leadership,” he said.

While in Afghanistan, the unit designed force protection buildings and police substations, roads, meeting and market places and other facilities for local and provincial Afghan governments, Dean said.

“Now (the Corps) is in the process of getting these things constructed,” he said. “I’d like to see in five years what has become of them.”

For U.S. and coalition troop support, they designed rifle ranges, airfield drainage projects, sewage lagoons and wastewater treatment and other facilities.

Sam Stacy, a civil engineer, returned from his second deployment to Afghanistan. “The work was fascinating,” said Stacy, a Vicksburg resident originally from Booneville, who previously went in 2003. “A lot more construction has been done — schools, houses have been built, roads and much more. You also see a lot more Afghan children outside playing now.”

Brig. Gen. Michael Walsh, commander of the Corps’ Mississippi Valley Division, commended the 579th for completing the two missions he gave them at sendoff a year ago — providing vital construction and technical engineering support, and coming back as a team. “That’s exactly what you’ve done,” Walsh said. “I want to thank you for your selfless service and sacrifice.”

Walsh also noted that 10,000 civilian Corps’ employees had voluntary deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan since the 2003 start of the war in Iraq.