CRAIG T. KOJIMA / CKOJIMA@STARBULLETIN.COM Cpl. Nick Misiano was one of 33 Kaneohe Marines returning home yesterday after four months in Iraq.

33 isle Marines
rejoin families after
mission in Iraq

Lance Cpl. Eric Reed got to hug his daughter for the first time yesterday.

Reed, a member of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, was among 33 Kaneohe Marines who flew home from Okinawa after being deployed in Iraq for four months.

The rest of the nearly 900 Kaneohe Marines assigned to the 1st Battalion are on the Navy amphibious landing ship USS Essex after leaving Kuwait for Okinawa last month. Although a few of the Kaneohe Marines have returned, the main body isn't expected back until late April.

Capt. Jer Garcia, commander of Bravo Company, said the Marines who returned yesterday are either leaving the Marine Corps or have transfer orders.

Reed, whose daughter Madison was born a month ago, plans to take his family home to Circleville, Ohio, after his enlistment ends.

Reed has been a Marine for four years. He said he was able to see pictures of Madison through a Web camera.

Reed called her "my bundle of joy" as he cuddled his daughter with his wife, Rene, standing nearby on the sidewalk fronting the Honolulu Airport's international arrival area.

Sgt. Jack Foster, another member of Charlie Company, plans to return to his home in Maryland with his wife, Megan.

"It's wonderful," Megan said about having her husband home. "Words cannot describe it."

"It was a very long eight months," she said.

Nearly 900 members of the 1st Battalion left Kaneohe Bay in July for what was supposed to be a routine seven-month deployment in Okinawa, Garcia said. Instead, in August, they were reassigned to fight in Iraq as part of the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, "which changed the whole outcome of our deployment," Garcia said.

The Kaneohe Marines participated in the month-long battle for the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah in November and December.

Garcia, who leaves for Okinawa in two weeks to accompany his men back to the islands, said the house-to-house fighting in Fallujah was "the hardest part of the combat operations."

"The next difficult time was the elections at the end of January," Garcia said.

He said the Iraqi deployment "built character and made men out of young men. Up to then it was just training in tactical skills. Now these men are combat veterans."

Garcia said "every unit was touched in some way" by combat injuries and deaths. The battalion, as the major combat element of the 31st MEU, lost 43 Marines and two Navy hospital corpsmen from Hawaii. The biggest single-day loss for the Marine Corps came on Jan. 26, when 26 Kaneohe Marines and one Pearl Harbor corpsman were killed in a helicopter crash while on their way to act as a security force for the Jan. 30 national elections.

Sgt. Raul Munoz, who has orders to report to the Twentynine Palms Marine base in Southern California, was greeted by his fiancee, Nicole Fisher, and her 2-year-old daughter, Mikayla.

"It's good to have him back," said Fisher, who got engaged eight weeks before Munoz left Hawaii last summer. "It's unbelievable. I didn't think it was happening."