100 West Frankifort Guardsmen Headed Home

</element><element id="paragraph-1" type="body"><![CDATA[ More than 100 combat soldiers from Company A of the 33rd Battalion of the 130th Infantry Illinois National Guard Unit based in West Frankfort are heading home.

Guardsman Christopher Higgerson's (Du Quoin) mother said this morning a military aircraft carrying the unit was to leave the United States air base at Bishkek, Krygyzstan --a country to the immediate north of Afghanistan--today or in the morning.

A spokesman at the National Guard Armory in West Frankfort confirmed the information, adding the troops will land at Fort McCoy in Wisconsin before completing their tour of duty. They are expected back in Southern Illinois on or before August 1st. West Frankfort officials and certainly families are already planning for the celebration.

The combat soldiers are ending a nine-month combat tour.

The U.S. air base from where the West Frankfort guard will depart has been a political hot spot in recent months.

Krygyzstan President Bakiyev announced in February that the U.S. would be evicted from the Manas base used to ship supplies to troops in Afghanistan, but his government later agreed to a new lease that will see Kyrgyzstan earn $60 million in annual rent, more than triple the previous amount, plus a further $120 million in investment and aid.

Families have been anticipating the safe return of guardsmen for weeks as Afghanistan becomes as troubled, if not moreso, than Iraq.

As of Tuesday, July 21, 2009, at least 670 members of the U.S. military had died in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan as a result of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, according to the Defense Department. The department last updated its figures Tuesday.

Of those, the military reports 500 were killed by hostile action.

Outside the Afghan region, the Defense Department reports 68 more members of the U.S. military died in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. Of those, three were the result of hostile action. The military lists these other locations as Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba; Djibouti; Eritrea; Ethiopia; Jordan; Kenya; Kyrgyzstan; Philippines; Seychelles; Sudan; Tajikistan; Turkey; and Yemen.

There were also four CIA officer deaths and one military civilian death.

A soldier died Tuesday in a vehicle accident in Afghanistan.