Some 1,700 members of the Hawai'i National Guard's 29th Infantry Brigade Combat Team will begin returning from about nine months in Kuwait and Iraq around Aug. 14, officials said.

There will be a whole lot of parties going on to celebrate.

A lot of Schofield Barracks families are looking forward to the end of an Iraq deployment as well.

The 3rd "Bronco" Brigade of about 3,500 soldiers is about two months away from its return to Hawai'i, while the 25th Infantry Division headquarters of another 1,000 soldiers is about three months from the end of its deployment.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said conditions in Iraq have improved to the point that the drawdown of combat brigades may be accelerated.

U.S. troops still will be headed to Iraq for years to come. That includes Schofield's 25th Combat Aviation brigade of about 2,400 soldiers and 90 helicopters heading off soon for a year in northern Iraq.

A deployment ceremony is scheduled for 9 a.m. on Aug. 10 at Wheeler Army Airfield.

Lt. Col. Chuck Anthony, a Hawai'i National Guard spokesman, said the first full planeload of Hawai'i's citizen soldiers will arrive at Fort Hood in Texas around Aug. 10.

An "advance party" of about a dozen of the soldiers will arrive sometime before that.

The soldiers will spend nearly a week at Fort Hood being out-processed — something nobody is happy about. Around Aug. 14, 15, 16, and 17 "is when we'll start to get planeloads of folks coming in (to Hawai'i)," Anthony said.

The aviation brigade last returned from Iraq in September of 2007, and about two years later, they are going again.

The Hawai'i National Guard was in Iraq and Kuwait from 2005 to 2006, so the soldiers had about 2 1/2 years between combat mobilizations. The 3rd Brigade had a year at home between Iraq deployments.

Iraq is quieting while Afghanistan is growing more volatile. Time will tell how the pace of Hawai'i deployments is affected.