After 13 years of war, life outside the gates of the United States’ largest military base has settled into a familiar ebb and flow.

Army paratroopers and commandos stationed at Fort Bragg periodically board transport planes bound for Iraq and Afghanistan, leaving spouses to handle the carpooling and holiday planning. Kids celebrate birthdays with one parent in the room the other watching from a computer screen somewhere out there. Crowds thin out at Little League games and restaurants sell fewer orders of chicken wings. When troops return, business picks back up.

Video: Writer Andy Sullivan in Fayetteville

So when President Barack Obama announced a new military campaign to contain Islamic radicals in Syria and Iraq several weeks ago, little seemed to change in this city of some 200,000 folks, just west of Interstate 95. On the night the President announced a new wave of airstrikes, TVs in the local sports bars were tuned to a football game between the New York Jets and the Chicago Bears. Another war? “I’m all for it,” said a recent enlistee, dressed in running shoes and shorts as he left a Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant.

But behind the gung-ho, business-as-usual attitude, it’s not hard to detect a sense of weariness and frustration about the prospect of another open-ended conflict that could drag on for years. In that sense, this proudly pro-military town in the North Carolina flatlands isn’t so different from the American public as a whole, which the polls tell us, is leery of returning to a messy region of the world that already has claimed too much of the country’s blood and treasure.

It’s not uncommon in Fayetteville to hear of soldiers who have served multiple year-long tours of duty, returning again and again to guerilla-style wars with no clearly defined front lines. Some 5,000 troops from Fort Bragg are still fighting and dying in Afghanistan, even though that war long ago slipped off the front pages of U.S. newspapers. With one war over and another winding down, more soldiers are back in Fayetteville now than during the height of the deployments between 2008 and 2011. Still, President Obama has already sent 1,600 Special Operations commandos back to Iraq. Americans are flying helicopter missions (“boots in the air) and military leaders have hinted that the conflict could soon require more boots on the ground.

“Here we go again – here’s all these children without their daddies and mothers,” said Kathy Jensen, who represents several Fort Bragg neighborhoods on the Fayetteville city council. “It’s a new normal for us.”

‘FAYETTENAM’ THE SEQUEL?

Fort Bragg has dominated life between the Cape Fear River and the Sand Hills since 1941, when the Army scaled up a small post to train paratroopers, infantrymen and artillery units for World War Two. After the war, the camp became the permanent home of many of its airborne and special-operations units, which are responsible for everything from undercover work to training missions. Some 55,000 active-duty military and 21,000 civilian employees are now assigned there, and the base is home to more generals than any other region of the country outside Washington.

The surrounding region, once a sparsely settled forest of sandy soil and loblolly pine, now is a tangle of Waffle Houses, motorcycle dealerships and pawn shops. New suburban developments stretch far into the countryside.

There are certainly advantages to being a military mecca. The steady flow of federal dollars has shielded Fayetteville from the recession and other economic pressures. The region’s economy has grown by 80 percent since 2001, outpacing the rest of the state and the country as a whole. The military paid $1.4 billion to private-sector contractors in the region in 2012.

The military presence has its downside as well. Good jobs outside the defense sector are scarce. When a health insurance company announced it was setting up a call center downtown, more than 1,000 people applied for 107 jobs.

And while the city has long since dispersed the tattoo parlors, strip clubs and seedy juke joints that saddled downtown Hay Street with the unwelcome nickname of “Fayettenam” in the 1960s, the appetites of a young, transient population still create problems. Sex trafficking has increased and the region now struggles with one of the most acute prescription-drug abuse problems in the country as military hospitals treat an influx of wounded soldiers and veterans. According to the Fayetteville Observer, the local Veterans Administration hospital prescribed narcotic painkillers to 48,000 patients in 2012, the most recent figures available, an increase of 4,100 percent in 11 years. (The VA hospital in Fayetteville also has the third longest wait time in the country.)

WASTED TIME

But for many here, the most distinctive aspect of life during wartime isn’t drugs or crime – it’s the families pulled apart by war.

Jillian McCarthy’s husband has deployed overseas six times, leaving her periodically to care for the couple’s two daughters on her own. As she shuttled the girls to school and soccer practice, she assured them their father would come home safely.

“I never cried in front of them,” said McCarthy, 42. “That would be for me to do in private.”

Now she wonders whether those long absences were for naught as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) emerges as the latest adversary in a region of deep-rooted and ancient hostilities. “This is a thousand-year-old battle there,” she said.

Steve Parker has a different take: the U.S. and president Obama aren’t doing enough. Parker, age 49, spent the greater part of two decades in the Marines and the Army special operations. He walks gingerly these days, the legacy of two shattered hips from repeated parachute jumps. Sitting at the desk of his home office, surrounded by knives, combat gear and other mementos of his service, Parker explains that ruling out regular ground troops is a mistake. But even he worries that his friends still in the service are overworked at this point. “Our special operations forces,” he said, “are tapped out.”

There are other signals from Washington that worry the locals. Despite the recent uptick in military activity, the Obama administration still plans to reduce the size of the Army in coming years, and a budget-cutting Congress has agreed to hold the military to tight spending caps through the end of the decade. The spending cuts have many in Fayetteville wondering whether the military is compromising its ability to fight future conflicts.

In a field in the Sand Hills region west of Fort Bragg, Jim Lynch watched a black Labrador retriever sprint through a series of drills as it searched for homemade, or “improvised,” explosive devices. Though the Marines have deployed hundreds of his company’s bomb-sniffing dogs overseas, funding for the program is due to expire at the end of the year. If the military needs more dogs at that point, they won’t be ready for at least six months, he said. “If we go back into Iraq again to fight ISIS, we’re not going to have that capability – it’s gone,” said Lynch, a Special Forces Operations veteran who sports a handlebar mustache. “We understand budgeting, but with new threats on the horizon, IEDs are not going away.”

THE KIDS

But it may be the children of Fayetteville who are bearing most of the burden of years of war. After all, they didn’t volunteer for the assignment.

I met a number of them in the brightly colored library at E.E. Smith High School, where roughly one out of six students has parents on active duty. Some are hoping to follow in their parents’ footsteps, readying applications for military academies like the Citadel and the Air Force Academy. That said, the nature of this war is confusing and worrisome. “Obama can say we’re going to end the war, and then something can come up like the whole ISIS situation. You never know when something’s really going to end,” said Amirah Latiff, 17, whose father, a combat engineer, missed seeing her off to her first prom when he was stationed in Afghanistan. “There’s always that fear in the back of your mind.”

Victoria Wilson, 16, agrees. Like many in Fayetteville, young and old, the fear and uncertainty are just part of the job description.

“The last thing you want to think about is your dad in a combat zone and having the possibility of him being injured or even dying,” said the high school senior, who is planning a career as a military doctor. “But if it’s going to benefit everybody … if that’s what we have to do, then by all means, OK.”

“A big thing in our house is prayer,” she added. “We do a lot of that.”