Lima Company family forges tragic bond

[SR-25]

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Their son was the first to die. On Mother's Day, he led a team of Marines to a house near the Iraqi-Syrian border. Cpl. Dustin Derga, the practical joker who wanted to be a fireman, tried kicking in the door. He was met with a spray of armor-piercing bullets from insurgents tucked in a crawl space beneath the floor.

That night, in Uniontown, Ohio, the men in uniform came to Bob and Marla Derga's door. Even in their own grief, they worried for Dustin's comrades back in Iraq - the 160 or so men of Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th Regiment - and all the other parents, wives and children at home. They had become, simply, "The Lima Family."

"We are in this together, good and bad, to the very end," Bob wrote days later in an e-mail sent to other Lima Company families. "We are a team and none of us is going to falter."

Three days after 24-year-old Dustin was killed, three more Lima Company Marines perished when an explosive detonated near their armored transport vehicle. Two weeks after that, another Lima Marine was gunned down. Two months later, two others were gone.

Then last week, utter devastation.

Lima mom Anne Ritchie heard it on the radio driving to work: Fourteen Marines killed in a roadside bombing. She started screaming: "It cannot be Lima! We just had two. It cannot be Lima Company."

But nine of the 14 were.

War brings misery home, but this war has brought this place, this company, these families far more than their fair share.

The Columbus-based unit was once known as "Lucky Lima," having suffered no fatalities and few injuries after arriving in Iraq in March. But the infantry company quickly became a workhorse of the war, cropping up in news stories about critical missions designed to rid a remote desert region of followers of Iraq's most-wanted terrorist.

"We are arguably the `salty dogs,' traveling from hotspot to hotspot ..." Lance Cpl. Christopher Lyons wrote in a May column for his hometown paper, the Mansfield News Journal.

Really, they are just everyday guys - not career servicemen but reservists who live and work in the cities and suburbs of Ohio. Students, police officers, firefighters. Newlyweds, new fathers and fathers-to-be. Lyons, 24, sold ads for the newspaper. His baby daughter, Ella, was born a few months after he deployed, though he will never hold her. He was killed July 28.

These men, once strangers, became buddies, brothers - their common bond a desire to serve with the best of the best.

Tragedy has since forged another bond here at home: A brotherhood of those left behind.

When their Marines shipped out, the families of Lima Company barely knew each other's names. They were the parents of this lance corporal, or the wife of that one. They snapped pictures for one another at the deployment ceremony, knowing little about the person who stood on the other side of the camera.

They stand together now, swapping stories at their once-monthly "family days," exchanging e-mails with good news or bad from the front, wrapping their arms around each other at each funeral.

"I only met them the other day," Ritchie said outside Schoedinger Hilltop Chapel last week after paying respects to the parents of Cpl. Andre Williams, 23, who died alongside Lyons last month. Ritchie's son, Jason, serves in Williams' platoon and remains in Iraq.

"I told them `My son's in Lima Company.' That's all it takes."

Moments later, the Dergas arrived and eased their way past Williams' flag-covered coffin. When they came to his mother, Mary, they embraced. Then Mary looked into Bob's eyes.

"They're together," she murmured. "I know," he said.

The Dergas have attended four Lima Company funerals since Dustin's, enduring the same sad scenes over and over, like a nightmare stuck on replay. The eulogies of men who lived life to the fullest and died too young. The 21-gun salute. The strain of taps. The neatly folded flag placed in a mother's arms.

They drove two hours to Columbus to be at Williams' service. They planned to head Monday to Ashland, Ohio, for Cpl. Lyons' funeral. Marla, Dustin's stepmother, understands that others might think this too agonizing, reliving your own loss with each burial. But she and Bob said they instead find solace in knowing they can be there for the others.

"I couldn't sit at home and not go there and not hug that mom and that dad and be able to look into their eyes and say `I don't know everything you're feeling, but you're not alone in this,'" Marla said. "It's this thing that we feel compelled to do - to reach out."

"It's like trying to climb up the side of a cliff with loosely packed dirt," Bob said, "and all of a sudden the soil lets loose and you go sliding down. When you hit that bottom, you look around and the other families are there with you. And you hold hands together, you climb up together, you lock arms together. Some of us may slip and fall, but we'll hold each other up."

When Lima Company's latest fell, the Dergas did just that.

Thursday morning, Bob Derga sat down at his computer to write yet another note of encouragement. The identities of the latest casualties had filtered out, and he thought he recognized one name - Dyer - from the Lima Company family e-mail list.

"I am hoping I am contacting the correct family ...," he wrote. "I just learned about Christopher's ultimate sacrifice. I too know your pain as we lost our son ... We are here to help. We are here to talk to. We are here to cry with. We are here .... always will be."

The evening before, the men in uniform had found John Dyer's door in Evendale, near Cincinnati. His son, Chris, was 19 - the youngest of the 14 Marines killed in what has become the deadliest roadside bombing of U.S. troops in Iraq. Like his father, a research chemist, Chris had a knack for science and planned to major in physics at Ohio State University, though he had talked about a career in the FBI or Secret Service.

Sitting by the living room coffee table where he and Chris used to play chess, Dyer spoke for hours about the young man who excelled at everything - schoolwork, football, viola - and could have done anything. Chris chose the Marines, Dyer said, because "being a member of a team, a brotherhood - that meant he had achieved something."

He's been sharing these memories with Bob Derga. Since receiving Bob's e-mail, the two men have written back and forth. Dyer recalled reading the note Bob sent immediately after Dustin's death. He had admired his strength but wondered "How can this man do this?" Now, he understands.

"The `Lima Family,'" said Dyer, "it really starts with the Marines. They're the brothers who make the rest of us family. ... We're trying to live up to the standards that our sons set."

As he said in one note to Bob: "There must be a special spot in Heaven just for Lima."

The two fathers have yet to meet, but they will - at Christopher's memorial service. Bob has promised to be there.

"Marines don't leave Marines behind," he wrote to Dyer, "and Marine Families don't either."


http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/12326540.htm

[AmericanGirl]

Prayers go up for all the families.