Downstate town stung by deaths

The worst attack yet on Illinois Army National Guardsmen serving in Iraq left two soldiers dead and 15 wounded, and it left the Downstate town where their unit is based stung by the news and fearful for the safety of survivors.

Mortar rounds pounded the 1544th Transportation Company southwest of Baghdad late Sunday afternoon, killing Sgt. Shawna Morrison, 26, of Paris and Spec. Charles Lamb, 23, of Martinsville, said Lt. Col. Alicia Tate-Nadeau, a Guard spokeswoman. Three of the 15 wounded were seriously injured, she said.

In Paris a radio station has put patriotic songs on heavy rotation while locals drive cars tied with yellow ribbons saying “Pray for our troops.” Morrison was the unit’s first female fatality, and the first soldier from Paris to die in Iraq.

“This is the first one to hit our community,” said Jim Cooper, the father of a 20-year-old guardsman who is stationed at the base that came under attack. “It has really brought this home. It opens up a lot of people’s eyes. They say: `Hey, I know so-and-so. He may be next.'”

The deaths brought the unit’s total fatalities to four as the nation’s total military deaths in Iraq since last year’s invasion edged past 1,000.

The 1544th, headquartered in a brick armory in this town of 9,000, contains about 260 soldiers from four states, Tate-Nadeau said.

Shirley Furry had posted a message under the price board outside her Citgo station in Paris reading “In memory of Shawna.” The young woman worked there several years ago, Furry said. Morrison’s mother called Furry Sunday night.

“I said, `Oh, no,'” Furry recalled. “She said, `Yeah, she’s gone.'”

Morrison attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and worked two jobs, one as a waitress and the other as a bartender, to put herself through school.

“She’s always been very independent,” said her father, Rick Morrison. “She never asked us for a dime from day one when she moved out.”

Morrison was called up in November, sent to Kuwait in December and arrived in Iraq by February where she worked in communications, her father said. And while she was nervous before the deployment, she was most worried about rumors of spiders the size of paper plates that could jump 6 feet.

“We spent many hours looking for spider spray,” her father said. “And she never saw one.”

Sgt. Scott Johnson, a member of the 1544th who was wounded in Iraq in May, said Morrison and Lamb had contrasting notions of comfort on base. “Shawna, she was really looking to settle in. She rounded up a couple of the nicer mattresses to make sure she slept well at night,” he said. “Charles, he would rough it. He was kind of an outdoorsman. He didn’t mind getting dirty.”

Lamb, who grew up in a rural area near Martinsville, about 25 miles southwest of Paris, was a “farm boy,” said Mark Harris, his agriculture education teacher at Casey-Westfield High School, where he graduated in 1999.

A live wire as a student, Lamb was active in the FFA, formerly known as Future Farmers of America, and trained for forestry, livestock and dairy competitions. A trip to Kansas City for an FFA convention was a big deal to him.

“I think one of the reasons he signed up for the service was to help other people out, make a better life and to see the country,” Harris said.

Before he was called up for active duty, he had worked as a mechanic in Martinsville and had recently married, said a former employer.

“He was planning on coming back,” said a shop co-owner, Shirley Goodwin. In Iraq he also worked as a mechanic.

Cooper leads a support group for families of soldiers from the 1544th. He said that when attacks take place, he’s the one who calls families whose sons and daughters weren’t hurt.

“I can tell them they’re OK, but I can’t give them any guarantees,” he said. “The unit is still running out there. It makes it scary.”

His son is also based at Logistical Base Seitz, the camp outside Baghdad where Morrison and Lamb were killed, but he was uninjured in Sunday’s mortar shelling.

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“Everybody’s upset,” he added. “It is hard to walk into a store without somebody recognizing me and saying, `How’s your son?'”