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Dustin A. Derga—December
2005 Shipment Honoree
Marine Cpl., 24, of Columbus, Ohio; assigned to the 3rd
Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment, 4th Marine Division, Marine
Forces Reserve, Columbus, Ohio; attached to 2nd Marine
Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force (Forward); killed May
8, 2005 by enemy small-arms fire while conducting combat
operations in Ubaydi, Iraq.
Pickerington Marine Dustin Derga killed Sunday in Iraq
Source:
Mackenzie Fry,
This Week, May 12, 2005
A Pickerington Marine who
wrote recently in a Web site posting that he was "so ready to
come home" was killed Sunday in Iraq. Cpl. Dustin A. Derga,
24, died in Ubaydi as the result of enemy fire, the Department
of Defense reported Monday.
Derga, a 1999 graduate of
Pickerington High School, was assigned to Marine Forces
Reserves 3rd Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment, 4th Marine
Division. He was a member of the Columbus-based Lima Company.
Brandon Harmon, who is dating
Derga's sister, Kristin, answered the phone at the family's
home Tuesday. Harmon described Derga as a "very outgoing,
positive person. Fun to be around." He said Derga would "do
anything for you." Harmon said Derga's family, including
parents Stephanie and Robert, was handling the news as "good
as it can be expected."
Derga
was due to return home next month, Harmon said. He said Derga
had aspirations of becoming a firefighter and had made other
plans, including possibly opening a bar with a friend and
moving in with his girlfriend. "You feel like your world
crumbles, you know?" Harmon said.
"He was
a good kid," said Ken Schneider, who was Derga's teacher in
the high school's construction and engineering technology
preparation program in 1998 and 1999. "He worked hard."
In a
posting May 3 on the "Reach a Marine" Web site, Derga said his
unit had just returned from a week-long mission and was
leaving for another, which he said would "be even longer,"
right away. He described an "unusual" hailstorm that had hit
the night before. "I am so ready to come home," he wrote.
According to a biography of Derga on the Web site, he worked
at ISG Columbus Processing before he was deployed. He also
attended Columbus State University, where he majored in EMS
and Fire Science, and had served as an EMT and firefighter in
Baltimore, Ohio, for three years.
In
Death, Lima Company Family Forges a Tragic Bond
Source: Pauline Arrillaga, the Associated Press
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 once
was 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.
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.
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 drove two hours to
Columbus to be at Williams' service. They planned to head
Monday to Ashland, Ohio, for Cpl. Lyons' funeral.
"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,'" said Marla Dergas,
Dustin's stepmother. | 
