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Guardsmen return from Iraq
About 100 Ephrata-based National Guardsmen have returned home after a one-year deployment to Iraq.
Members of the Washington Army National Guard 1161st Transportation Company were sent home last Tuesday after a one-week demobilization process at Camp Atterbury, Ind., where they also did their pre-deployment training last year. The long-haul trucking task force was made up of about 100 guardsmen from the 1161st based in Ephrata and about 70 others from the 1041st Transportation Company based in Spokane.
“We had hoped to fly them into Moses Lake and have some sort of ceremony, but they were bought individual tickets and most have flown into Sea-Tac or Spokane,” said Capt. Keith Kosik, National Guard spokesman at Camp Murray, near Tacoma.
Family members were waiting for the soldiers when they began to arrive at the airports Tuesday evening, Kosik said.
The task force was based at Camp Taji, about 20 miles northwest of Baghdad, Iraq. From there, they completed 361 convoys and logged hundreds of thousands of miles on the road while transporting goods to every major operating base in Iraq, according to a National Guard news release. They delivered 31,402,430 pounds of cargo and supplies and 71,000 pallets of water. They arrived in Iraq last May following two months of preparation.
There were no casualties nor life-threatening injuries to any of the guardsmen during the deployment, Kosik said.
This was the company’s second deployment to Iraq. The 1161st was also deployed from February 2003 to August 2004.
