LAST 48TH TROOPS ARE HOME!!!!!!

Last Georgia Guard Troops

Home From Iraq

POSTED: 3:16 pm EDT May 11, 2006

FORT STEWART -- The 48th Infantry Brigade's mission to Iraq ended officially today as the last 280 Georgia National Guardsmen returned from a yearlong deployment. The citizen-soldiers were greeted by loud cheers and applause from hundreds of family members during a brief homecoming ceremony at Fort Stewart, where the troops began arriving three weeks ago. The 48th Brigade sent 4,300 citizen-soldiers to Iraq. It was the largest deployment of the Georgia National Guard since World War Two. More than 2,500 of the soldiers are from Georgia. They are augmented by nearly 2,000 troops from Alabama, Illinois, Maryland, Missouri, Rhode Island and Puerto Rico. The 48th Brigade had 26 soldiers killed in Iraq, eleven of them in a period of less than two weeks last summer.