AFTER long years of messy combat, America’s mission in Afghanistan is going to have a swift and tidy ending, Barack Obama recently told Congress. This spring American forces will move to a support role behind Afghan allies. By the end of next year the war will be over, the mission completed. After a grinding decade, Mr Obama declared ringingly in his state-of-the-union address that “our brave men and women in uniform” are coming home.

That pledge earned a standing ovation. Beyond Washington, in the sort of American communities that provide the backbone of the armed forces, it prompts a more complicated response. The small city of South Portland in Maine is one of many obscure places to be heavily touched by war since the September 11th 2001 attacks. No state has lost more soldiers in Afghanistan, per person, than Maine—a fertile recruiting ground in every conflict since the civil war and still today home to an unusual number of veterans. And the Afghan and Iraqi campaigns cost South Portland dearer than most places in Maine. A windswept coastal city of 25,000, it lost four local men, three of them young graduates from the same high school.

One town cannot represent American opinion. Yet talking to a cross-section of locals, as well as to state military and government officials, the same observations come up repeatedly. It may be useful to record some of them.

The cheering in Washington feels painfully premature to those whose neighbours and relatives are still in Afghanistan, or waiting for fresh deployments there with regular or part-time units. A Maine national guard unit left the day after Mr Obama’s speech on February 12th, and more will follow this year. South Portland’s police department is still missing an officer, on duty in Afghanistan. At Broadway Variety, a convenience store which has sent hundreds of care packages to South Portlanders serving overseas, collections continue for fresh parcels of cookies, candy and other home comforts.

In South Portland the pre-announced ending of the war feels perilous, not stirring. Worries loom about the safety of the last troops, and angst about signs of hostility from Afghans supposed to be allies. Even the most vocally patriotic doubt that the war will end in a way that brings “closure”. Jake Myrick, an Iraq war veteran and campaigner for ex-soldiers, loyally complains that the media do not show the good works being done by Americans in Afghanistan. But after news reports of Afghan forces killing their American trainers, he still wrote in protest to Maine’s governor demanding the withdrawal of the state’s national guardsmen, fearing the Pentagon had lost sight of its war goals.

The commander of Maine’s national guard, Brigadier-General James Campbell, says that explaining the war’s final stages is “hard”. As troops are drawn down, he questions the war constantly, fearing a moment when a grieving parent or spouse asks why their loved one died, “and I don’t have an answer”.

No more global crusades, please

Support for the troops has healed old griefs, which is some comfort to Vietnam veterans who recall coming home to be blamed for an unpopular war. The sight of mostly blue-collar boys pulling on their country’s uniform has narrowed social divisions in a community split by wealth, says Laurie Wood, a local school principal and the aunt of one of the dead. Ideological differences have also been trumped, if not healed, by respect for the troops: although that change only took place after local boys died. The city votes Democratic at election time, but—this being northern New England—it has plenty of prickly independents and libertarian-tinged Republicans too. Starting during the Iraq war, some military families and supporters strung yellow ribbons from lamp posts and electricity poles, prompting other residents to say the city was being made to look pro-war. The argument lasted years and “really divided” South Portland, recalls the city’s chief administrator, James Gailey. A handsome stone memorial in the city’s main park, dedicated in 2011, is an “overdue” statement of thanks for military service, says the mayor, Tom Blake. It is also the product of a truce between the pro- and anti-ribbon camps, who were persuaded to back a monument as a compromise.

Yet some fear that reverence for the troops has dangerously dulled public curiosity. Ms Wood’s beloved nephew, Justin Buxbaum, found himself at war after signing up, aged 16, because without military grants “he didn’t know how to pay for college,” she says. Once in Afghanistan he died in an accident when a roommate’s gun fell and went off. That isn’t the story that people want to hear, she says, but the details matter less and less as time passes, being subsumed into an “amorphous” narrative about heroism. Many stopped paying close attention after Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were killed, she says.

Brigadier-General Campbell admits to being dismayed when he walks through American airports in uniform and strangers try to buy him sandwiches. Volunteer soldiers need no sympathy, he says. On the whole, he says, the people of Maine are more sensible than that, especially those who seek to join the armed forces, whose numbers have not fallen. Maine’s military recruits are asking to serve their country, but “not really signing up to some great moral cause,” the general says.

All America may need a dose of such pragmatism, if South Portlanders are right. They call their city more overtly patriotic than a decade ago, yet more cynical, too. For all Mr Obama’s assurances, many fear an untidy ending in Afghanistan, and further messy crises to follow. Whether fresh interventions might be justified divides them. In short, they will believe in the homecoming of the brave when they see it.

Economist.com/blogs/lexington