A mere month after coming home, Frank Moran III said he would return to Iraq for a second tour if asked.
“Absolutely,” Moran said. “I miss it actually. I miss the people I served with. We?ve all now gone our separate ways.”
No one else really knows what they?ve been through, he said.
When opposition to the Iraq war was mounting, Moran, a correctional officer at the Carroll County Detention Center in Westminster, joined the Marines in 2005 with the understanding that he would probably be shipped off to war.
It?s not that Moran, now 24, harbored visions of glorious battles. He just wanted to help, he said.
A month later, he was deployed.
A week after landing in Iraq, where he served as an infantryman on a gun boat in the Euphrates River in Al Anbar province, he experienced his first firefight and watched his buddy get shot in the face, neck and arm ? and live.
“That?s when the reality of war set in,” Moran said Tuesday while sitting in his office at the jail.
A commitment to law enforcement runs deep in Moran?s family: His father, Frank Moran Jr., served 20 years as a state trooper and his mother, Cecilia Moran, worked 10 years as a Howard County policewoman.
And, enough Carroll County residents, or people with family in the county, are being called up for duty overseas that two McDaniel College employees have launched the county?s first support group for Iraq veterans and their loved ones.
Army Master Sgt. Jose Flores, an ROTC instructor at McDaniel College who served two tours in Iraq, and Bobbi Hollingsworth, a secretary in the school?s human resources department whose son-in-law is in Iraq, started the group.
“We can exchange numbers so when someone wakes up at 3 a.m. with the shakes, they have someone to call,” Flores said.
If you go
» What: Military support group
» When: June 1 at 7 p.m.
» Where: McDaniel College
