‘Papa Battery’ safe and sound

As many as 1,200 people stood in the noon sunshine behind the Navy and Marine Corps Reserve Center on Wednesday, the day they had been awaiting for nearly seven months.

They had gathered in Spokane from four states. Wives, children, parents and grandparents – carrying posters, banners and flags – erupted in shouts of joy as the first of four buses entered the military grounds.

“Papa Battery” was home from Iraq.

As the buses pulled up in front of the crowd, young women held their hands to their faces and middle-aged couples held back tears for their sons. The doors opened, spilling out 118 Marine reservists and one Navy corpsman in desert camouflage, carrying packs and rifles. In a second, they were in someone’s arms.

Battery P, 5th Battalion of the 14th Marine Regiment has been providing security at Al Asad Airbase in the Al Anbar province for more than six months. Every one of its members returned home safely.

“They performed outstandingly,” said Maj. Patrick Coonrod, commander of the unit that has been at Camp Pendleton, Calif., since returning from Iraq on Feb. 25. “They accomplished their mission and maintained morale throughout the deployment.”

Morale was even better on Wednesday.

Cpl. Jeff Taylor’s hitch in the Reserves was supposed to be up in August when Battery P deployed. But he ended up in Al Asad instead of his home in Richland.

“The way they put it is, I got to go with them,” Taylor said. “It wasn’t as bad as I expected – hot in summer, surprisingly cold in winter.”

“Not many trees, kind of like Richland,” said his mother, Betsy Taylor. She, along with his dad, sister, two aunts and two uncles, were there to greet Taylor, 24, as he got off the bus.

Betsy Taylor said her son had just started a new job last spring when he got the news that he was being deployed. She said the Marines called her because her son was the only member of the unit that had not been contacted.

“He said, ‘You’re kidding,’ ” Betsy Taylor recalled, “as if a mother would kid about something like that.”

Now he plans to spend some time in Hawaii before going back to school to study computers at Columbia Basin Community College or Eastern Washington University. Re-enlisting is not on his list of things to do.

Sgt. Mike Griffeath, 24, was in the Reserves less than a year when he was deployed. He had been an active-duty Marine until 2003 and wanted to go to Iraq. The best part of his tour, he said, was Jan. 30, the day Iraqis voted for a new government.

“I felt blessed to be there that day,” said Griffeath, who recalled Iraqis dancing in the streets after voting. “On that day in history, there was no better place to be in the whole world than in Iraq.”

But there were moments of fear as well. He said the enemy would rocket the air base regularly while he was there, and he said he heard the attacks have gotten worse in the last couple of days.

Griffeath was greeted Friday by his girlfriend, Laurel Zimmer. Both are from Moscow, Idaho. She was impressed with community support for the troops, and just got her Marine boyfriend’s truck detailed at Dave Smith Motors for free.

“It made it a lot easier knowing the community was behind us,” Zimmer said.

Now Griffeath plans to return to the University of Idaho to study – rather than make – history.

Battery P, an artillery unit, had a nontraditional mission as a rifle company in Iraq after extensive training at the Marine Corps base in Twentynine Palms, Calif., Coonrod said. He believes his men matured at Al Asad, the second-largest air base in Iraq. They forged relationships with other military units and Iraqi civilians and returned more confident, he said.

The unit is made up of Marines from across Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Montana. About half are from the Spokane area.

According to the Department of Defense, more than 183,000 Guard and Reserve troops are currently on active duty, including nearly 13,000 Marine reservists. Because the Pentagon has relied so heavily on these “citizen soldiers,” the U.S. occupation of Iraq has had a profound impact on towns large and small across the United States.

On Wednesday, the Marines of Battery P began a 96-hour liberty before returning to the Spokane center for “demobilization.”