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View Full Version : 'Make no mistake, there is a war going on over there,Â’ says Marine major



thedrifter
10-08-05, 07:54 AM
'Make no mistake, there is a war going on over there,Â’ says Marine major
By Xxxxx xxxx

MIDDLETOWN — For Marine Corps Maj. Steve Lawson, Friday was homecoming day. In more ways than one.

Lawson’s Lima-based Marine Reserves unit, part of the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marines, returned from Iraq Friday to a 20-mile Columbus parade, hundreds of relieved loved ones and friends and a grateful state.

And Lawson, a 1987 Middletown High School graduate, returned to his Poinciana Road home, his wife, Liz, and their four children — twin 19-month-old girls, a three-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter.

“It’s huge,” he said. “To get back, to see my wife and kids — to be honest with you, there were a lot of times in the last seven months when I wasn’t sure I’d be able to.”

The Marine’s day included taking in the Middies’ homecoming parade and game against Lakota East.

An international spotlight turned to Lawson’s unit — once known in its battalion as “Lucky Lima”— as it pushed through some of the fiercest fighting and heaviest casualties in the war this summer.

But the company then lost 22 reservists, including 11 in August alone, to roadside or hidden bombing — the insurgents’ use of what the military calls “improvised explosive devices.”

Altogether, the battalion suffered 48 dead.

Lima company, which calls itself “Light ’Em Up Lima,” had been sent to Iraq to root out foreign insurgents. Lawson, 36, sought to put his unit’s casualties in perspective, explaining that Lima was the largest to go out and actively hunt the enemy, often fielding some 300 soldiers and venturing beyond safe areas or bases on 143 of 180 days.

“Make no mistake, there is a war going on over there,” he said.

In total, Lawson and his fellow Marines were deployed in 11 major operations, each usually lasting more than two weeks.

They killed more than 200 insurgents, he said.

Said Lawson, “Urban warfare is the toughest warfare you’re going to see.”

A consultant for Booz, Allen, Hamilton at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Lawson is getting reacquainted with his family, including twins he last saw when they were nine months old.

“It was the only thing that kept me going at times,” he said of his family.

He does not expect his unit to be up for a return to Iraq any time soon, but he added that could be “a possibility.” He served nine years on active duty in the Marines before his five years in the Reserves.

“Life has been crazy,” Liz Lawson wrote in an e-mail to The Middletown Journal this week. “But I know my husband is a Marine at heart, and he believes in what he does and our country.”

Ellie