A homecoming celebration for Gainesville-based Charlie Company is being planned for May 1 at Lakeshore Mall in Gainesville.
Operation Patriot’s Call, a group formed several years ago to support the military unit’s family at home during deployment, hashed out many of the details Thursday evening in a meeting at the National Guard Armory on Alta Vista Road.
The event could feature high school bands and speakers, among other highlights, in a tribute to the Georgia Army National Guard unit, which has been deployed in Afghanistan since March 2009.
Charlie Company was deployed with other units of the 1st Battalion, 121st Infantry Regiment of the National Guard’s 48th Brigade.
Plans so far call for a parade from the armory to nearby Lakeshore Mall and then a welcoming ceremony taking place from 10 a.m. to noon.
The unit will finish returning to Fort Stewart in Savannah later this month, with members dismissed to their families.
"They won’t be coming back en masse at all," said Dave Dellinger of Patriot’s Call.
The next time the 100-member unit will be in Gainesville as a group will be May 1.
"It’s their first drill weekend (after deployment)," Dellinger said. "They all have to be in town."
Sgt. Casey Taylor, a Charlie Company member who remained behind to help with families, didn’t have further details about their return.
"If this were an Iraq deployment, we’d probably already know pretty much which day they’ll be coming back," he said.
"But because it’s Afghanistan and it’s wintertime, they just don’t know. Everything is weather dependent over there."
The outfit has had two primary missions in the country — serving as mentors to Afghan military and police and working as the security force for Forward Operating Base Lightning in eastern Afghanistan, the group’s commander, Capt. Jeff Moran, said in December.
Moran, of Forsyth County, who was on two-week leave at the time, gave deployment updates to the unit’s Family Readiness Group.
He said that morale was high among soldiers and everybody was "doing a good job."