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thedrifter
02-14-09, 08:08 AM
Marine Unit From Gray Re-Activated
Published: 9:58 AM, 02/13/2009 Last updated: 1:53 AM, 02/14/2009

Source: The Greeneville Sun


Lima Company

To Deploy In Fall

For Either Iraq

Or Afghanistan



BY BILL JONES

STAFF WRITER

A Washington County-based U.S. Marine Corps Reserve unit, which includes a number of Greene County residents, is being activated in May for deployment this fall to Afghanistan or Iraq.

Major Greg Gordon, a spokesman for Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, of the 24th Marine Regiment, said this morning that the unit is expected to be mobilized in May for deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan in September or October.

The unit's exact destination will not be known until later this year, Major Gordon said.

The deployment, he said, will be for a period of seven months and will involve the entire company.

Gordon said the unit had anticipated for some time that it would be mobilized again but that the mobilization order was only recently issued.

Several Greene County residents are among the more than 150 Marine Reservists assigned to the company.

Major Gordon said Lima Company will spend time finishing "pre-deployment" training at a Marine base in the U.S. prior to deploying overseas.

In two previous deployments, the unit went to California for training before being deployed to Iraq.

The company deployment will be Lima Company's third deployment to a war zone since 2004.

The entire company, which is based at the Armed Forces Reserve Center in Gray, was deployed to Iraq in 2004 and part of the company was deployed to Iraq for a second time for seven months in 2006 and 2007.

During the second deployment, Lance Cpl. Jonathan Thornsberry, a Lima Company Marine from Kentucky was killed in Iraq.

Thornsberry was killed Oct. 25, 2006, while riding in a High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV).

While in Iraq, the Lima Company Marines served in Al Anbar Province, then a hotbed of insurgent activity between Baghdad and the borders of Jordan and Syria.

Lima company members left the Armed Forces Reserve Center in Gray in June 2006 for training in California before deploying to Iraq.

2004 DEPLOYMENT

During Lima Company's 2004 deployment to Iraq, Lance Cpl. Nathan Morrow, who lived in Elizabethton but has family ties to Greeneville, was wounded on March 13 by a roadside bomb explosion. That incident came only two weeks after Lima Company arrived in Iraq.

He returned home on convalescent leave in April 2004 and did not have to return to Iraq.

Morrow, whose mother is from Greeneville and whose grandparents and other family members still reside here, had been a junior at East Tennessee State University when Lima Company was called to active duty in 2004.

Ellie