He's proud of helping to bring several soldiers home safely, and he's grateful to have such a supportive family backing his call to duty. His daughters were ages 5 and 7 when he went overseas.

"That's the toughest thing in the world. They change so much and so much happens while you're gone," he said. "My wife's amazing. She knew what we signed up for and was 100 percent behind it. Without her I couldn't do it."

Back at home base again, Colledge is working one weekend a month, coming in a day or two per week for flight training, and getting close to attaining the rank of sergeant.

His recent visit to Green Bay was his third time back at Lambeau Field since he retired from the NFL – once per year except for his commitments to basic training and deployment. The weekend leading up to the Lions game he was the keynote speaker at a Heroes of Wisconsin USO fundraising gala in Milwaukee.

One message he gets across without explicitly saying so is that while football initially might have made him a famous soldier, it also potentially made him a much better one in the long run. What is clear is the latter is of far greater importance to him.

It's impossible for Colledge not to draw the parallels between his current and previous occupations. He spent five seasons with the Packers counting on left tackle Chad Clifton and center Scott Wells on either side of him to do their jobs well so he could excel at his, and he looks at the pilots, medics and other crew chiefs he works with much the same.

"In football, you've trained to work up to something, and all of a sudden when there's 60,000 people out there, you shut that out and you do your job, and you react to things that go wrong and handle the atmosphere," he said. "In the Army, it's the same way – how hard you train to work as a unit when the bullets start to fly or the missions get tough.