Orlando Reserve unit back from Iraq gets big 'Welcome home'

Orlando Reserve unit back from Iraq gets big 'Welcome home'
By Helen Eckinger Sentinel Staff Writer
September 28, 2008
When Donovan Lewis was 11 months old, his father was deployed to Iraq.

"It was difficult for him," Donovan's mother, Victoria Lewis, of Sanford said Saturday as she manned the refreshments table at a welcome-home ceremony for the Army's 841st Engineer Battalion at the First Baptist Church of Orlando while Donovan, now 2, rifled through a nearby cooler. "He's an only child, and he couldn't understand why Daddy wasn't there."

On Saturday, Donovan's father, Reginald Livingston, and about 30 of his fellow members of the 841st were honored for their service in Iraq, where they were deployed for 11 months before returning home in May.

During its deployment in Iraq, the battalion's primary mission was to find and remove improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. Over the course of the tour, the unit disabled 104 IEDs and cleared more than 88,000 kilometers — almost 54,000 miles — of roadway. It did not, Maj. Ernie Hernandez said, lose a single member.
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