Marines return from Iraq to warm, happy welcome
Chesterfield-based Hotel Battery is home with no loss of life
They got shot at, blown up and rocket-propelled grenaded. They were hot, dirty and tired. Their duty week didn't have a weekend.
BY PETER BACQUE
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER
Saturday, October 28, 2006
Dozens of them were wounded and six were wounded twice.
But all the Marines of Hotel Battery came back alive.
"It was a miracle," said Kathryn Kirk, whose son, Lance Cpl. Campbell Kirk, survived two roadside bomb attacks. "God protected them."
And yesterday, more than 300 happy -- and relieved -- family members, comrades and friends formally welcomed home the Marines of Chesterfield-based Hotel Battery of the 3rd Battalion, 14th Marine Regiment.
Campbell Kirk, a 22-year-old Virginia Commonwealth University student, was grateful, he said, "just to reunite with friends and family [and] be out of the combat zone."
Moms and dads hugged young sons, burly Marines bounced tiny babies on their shoulders, and best buds banded together for final snapshots in the battery's "drill deck."
"You were in some tough country," said Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense H.C. "Barney" Barnum. "I'm proud of what you've done."
"I say thank you from the commandant of the Marine Corps and the secretary of the Navy."
Barnum's words had special meaning for them: A retired Marine colonel, Barnum received the Medal of Honor -- the nation's highest award for valor -- during the Vietnam War.
The 115 Marines in the reserve unit had reasons to be proud.
"You were the go-to battery" in Iraq," Marine Lt. Col. Jon E. Sachrison told the gathering at the Navy-Marine Reserve Center on Strathmore Road.
Normally a heavy-artillery unit, Hotel Battery spent seven months in Iraq as military police escorting convoys. The Marines conducted 214 missions, traveling almost 450,000 miles around Iraq.
They were hit by roadside bombs 23 times -- "One is more than enough," Campbell Kirk said -- but they also uncovered 22 of the improvised explosive devices.
"That was 22 [fewer] chances the enemy had to attack," said the battery's commander, Maj. Chris Warnke of Arlington.
Hotel Battery came under small-arms fire 18 times, he said, and the leathernecks were twice attacked with high-explosive rocket-propelled grenades.
Forty-two of the battery's Marines were wounded in action, four seriously enough to require extended hospitalization.
"It was definitely dangerous over there," Warnke said.
Hotel's still in the fight.
Ten Marines from the unit "new-joins" who missed the January deployment -- are augmenting another battery in Iraq now.
Junior sergeants and young corporals were Hotel Battery's front-line leaders, Warnke said, in a war with no front line.
Leaving their well-defended camps was a gut check, said the battery's Maj. Ty Steidle: "You wave to the little guy on gate guard and [then] you're on your own outside the wire."
"If I could give every Marine a medal for just going over there and doing your job," Warnke told them, "I would."