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NAPLES — Nidia Gonzalez is overflowing with pride.

She shows off delicate goblets in a display case alongside figurines, all shipped carefully, wrapped in Iraqi newspapers.

But the thing that is most precious to her, the thing that most needed to arrive in one piece from Iraq, was finally standing in her living room Wednesday night: Her son, Michael Gonzalez.

The Army sergeant returned home after a 15-month tour in Iraq, where he was stationed in Balad as an Apache helicopter technician for the Army’s 2-159 Aviation Battalion.

Gonzalez, 22, grew up in Naples. He graduated early from Lely High School in 2003, a great student who always took the honors classes, always worked hard, his mother said.

He has until Monday with his family before leaving on a cruise with three friends, embarking to Jamaica; Cozumel, Mexico; and the Grand Cayman Islands — a world away from a place torn and broken by sectarian violence.

After two short weeks, he will return to his station in Illesheim, Germany, to finish the final year-and-a-half of his six-year enlistment.

“I’m just happy to be home,” he said Wednesday as he waited for his bag at Southwest Florida International Airport. “I’m ready to relax a little bit.”

His last visit home was in November for his sister’s wedding. That was one of his surprise visits, when he spared his mother the worry she experiences each time she knows he is flying, knows he is so close, yet so far away, to reuniting with his close-knit family.

Michael Gonzalez turned 18 during basic training, and was deployed to Iraq the week of his 21st birthday.

“We’re the type of people who throw a party and celebrate any event we’ve got,” said his sister, Janet Robbins. “My mom gets really depressed in times like that.”

But they have found little ways to celebrate birthdays, holidays, births — the type of milestones that make it particularly hard to be without the brother and uncle everyone calls “Mikey.”

While Gonzalez was stationed in Iraq, the family helped him ring in the New Year, on Iraq time, via Webcam.

“We counted down with him while he was on camera,” Robbins said, laughing after a brief pause. “We took tequila shots for him online.”

On Wednesday, a throng of family members, high school friends and neighbors waited in the car port of Nidia Gonzalez’s home, shouting, “Where’s our soldier?” as he approached.

Trevor Lunan, known as D.J. Goldfingers, set up a sound system in the driveway, sweating through the damp heat as everyone around him sipped cold beer. The musician, a veteran himself, offered to play music for free to help the family celebrate.

“I know exactly what it’s like,” said Lunan, who was deployed three times in the 1990s to Bosnia, Kosovo and Turkey. “I don’t mind doing this because I know the feeling.”

Robbins said she knows little about her brother’s time in Iraq, a tough thing to come to terms with for two siblings who have always been close.

“He doesn’t say much,” Robbins said Tuesday, before her brother’s return. “There’s a lot he can’t talk about when he’s talking online.”

But Robbins said she hoped to make up for lost time in the few precious days her family has with her baby brother.

Their older brother, Denny Romero, served in Iraq and Afghanistan in the Army Reserve as part of the 82nd Airborne. Romero, 29, now lives in Asheville, N.C., with his wife. They are expecting their first child.

But readjusting to civilian life was difficult for their older brother, Robbins said. She sees some of the same differences in Michael Gonzalez that she saw in their older brother after his time in the service.

“(Denny) talked about how he was scared to have children because of the things he saw over there, things he saw happen to children,” Robbins said. “I know it traumatized him and turned him into a different person.”

She can see why.

Every announcement of a soldier killed in Iraq stings, she and her mother said.

“On television, you hear this one dies, that one dies, and you sit there and wonder...” she said, her voice trailing off.

It brings back memories of one loss that hit too close to home.

In February 2007, family friend Brandon Gordon was killed along with six fellow soldiers when his helicopter crashed in southeastern Afghanistan.

Gordon, one of Michael Gonzalez’s best friends, had recruited Gonzalez into the Army. He was like another son, Nidia Gonzalez said.

“I don’t think I could go through that again,” she said, welling with tears.

But the next moment she was gushing with pride again, shedding tears for love of her baby boy, the son for whom her newest grandchild was named. She never wished for him to join the Army, she said, but she couldn’t be prouder.

And her heart goes out to every parent who has not yet celebrated a child’s return home.

“I know what every parent, every family, every sibling feels when they say they want (the war) to just be over,” she said. “Just because Michael’s here doesn’t mean it’s over.”