In front of a full Opelika High School Gymnasium, the heroes of the 111th Ordnance were honored by friends and family on Sunday afternoon.
The group will be deploying for Iraq around Feb. 21 after training in Mississippi at Camp Shelby.
After Aubie led the soldiers into the gym, many former soldiers and the mayor of Opelika presented the group with words of encouragement as friends
and family members looked on.
"It's very emotional (watching my son in the ceremony)," said Rufus McCall, father of a member of the ordnance. "It was good just seeing the crowd and the support. We are all family now, I believe and I feel confident in the family that I see here now."
Almost half of the soldiers in the ordnance have deployed to Iraq before.
It is an experienced group, but as retired Navy veteran Wayne Mitchell said, going to war is something that one really cannot understand unless one has done it. "It's kind of hard to put into words," Mitchell said, who was there to support the troops. "You just kind of don't know what to expect. You're kind of nervous about it, but you know you have a job to do. You know you have been trained, but you still don't know what to expect."
The 111th Ordnance is an explosive ordnance disposal or EOD group.
Its job is to protect other soldiers from explosive devices.
Col. Jose Atencio will be leading the 111th to Iraq.
During his speech he
told the friends and family in the audience he would do everything in his power to bring their soldiers home safely.
He looked at his soldiers and said, "The talking is over now. We have a job to do."
Atencio has been deployed three times before in his career.
He went over in Desert Storm and to Afghanistan in 2003.
These soldiers have to deal with the elements and the difficulty of being a soldier in another country.
They also have to deal with being away from their family for long periods of time.
"That was the worst thing about it," Mitchell said. "When I joined the
Navy that was the first time I had been away from my family."
Atencio said he hopes to return in early January 2011.
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