KINGSTREE - After a year in Iraq, members of the Kingstree-based S.C. National Guard 1052nd Transportation Co. - minus one member - returned home Friday night.

Amid a patriotic-themed backdrop featuring the Stars and Stripes and all things yellow, the occasion was marked by jubilant yet solemn fanfare at the unit’s spacious National Guard Armory.

The local high school marching band, relatives, friends and fellow soldiers composed the long-awaited welcome wagon.

Among those on hand was Sonia Burgess, who 12 months ago saw older sister and 1052nd supply specialist Karen Burgess off.

“It means a lot to have her back,” Sonia said. “It seems like when they leave, you really don’t appreciate them until you’ve been separated for so long and they get back.”

Tribute was later paid Friday night to Jerome Lemon, the only one of Karen Burgess’ comrades who didn’t make it back to U.S. soil safe and sound. Killed in late October by a car bomb, Lemon also is the lone Pee Dee native thus far to have died during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Lemon’s wife, Sheila Lemon, anchored a contingent of the late soldier’s family in attendance Friday.

Flanked by a memorial shrine dedicated to her husband, she voiced thanks to everyone from the soldiers of the 1052nd, for their support and prayers, to his mother “Ms. Betty, for sharing a son with me ... who gave me his time, love and was the father of my children.”

Sheila Lemon still resides in Charleston, where Jerome last served as a state trooper. While the widow gracefully attempted to keep her composure, holding back tears, Kingstree’s Monica Elliott cried for another reason: the return of her husband, Staff Sgt. Clifton “Rusty” Elliott.

Monica could hardly contain her elation at having her whole family together home for the first time in two years. Her son, Russell “Trapper” Elliott, finished a second U.S. Naval tour of duty in the Middle East earlier this month.

Peace of mind at long last will no longer elude Monica, a bookstore manager and purchasing officer at Williamsburg Technical College, now that 12 months of worries generated by the absence of Clifton, who is the dean of instruction at the school, are over.

“It was like a roller coaster ride - you’re up, you’re down - but, when he called and said, ‘Baby, I’ve landed,’ I was elated,” she said. “(I) really don’t even know how to describe it.”

The 1052nd is the third group of Pee Dee-based soldiers to return from tour in the Middle East this week.

Bennettsville, Cheraw and Hartsville-based U.S. Army reservists returned from overseas assignments Tuesday. The arrival of the fourth, with headquarters in Florence, is slated for next week.

That many units hailing from the same region returning at about the same time is coincidental, said Brig. Gen. Buford Mabry, commander of the 59th Troop Command.

Mabry said the members of the 1052nd, as well as their respective support systems, are American heroes, explaining that without the latter “soldiers can’t do what’s demanded of them.”

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