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Reservists return from Africa

• Marine Reservists from south Georgia return from a humanitarian mission to West Africa.

Susan McCord

ALBANY — In the first mission of its kind, a group of Albany-based Marine Forces Reservists returned Monday from a 26-day humanitarian assistance exercise in Liberia.

“It’s a different world over there, oh yeah,” Lance Cpl. Derek Fuller of Valdosta exclaimed moments after arriving Monday at Detachment 2 Headquarters, located at Marine Corps Logistics Base-Albany.

Fuller and fellow Marine Reservists Sgt. Brandon Smith of Warner Robins and Lance Cpl. Travis Carlisle of Sylvester spent the last 26 days on a mission by ship to a continent none had visited before — Africa.

With a group of about 30 Marines and more than 100 Navy seamen, the reservists were part of West African Training Cruise 2008, a maritime sea-basing and humanitarian assistance exercise off the coast of Monrovia, Liberia, in West Africa.

The Marines used a ferry to transport convoy vehicles from a floating discharge facility to Monrovia, where they delivered $57,000 worth of humanitarian supplies to four different sites in the city.

Carlisle, who was promoted from private first class to lance corporal upon his return Monday, said the experience reinforced his decision to join the Marines.

“I loved everything about it,” the 19-year-old employee at Teleperformance in Albany said of his first deployment.

He returns home to Sylvester, where he and six siblings were home-schooled, more confident in possibly enlisting full-time in the Marine Corps.

“I don’t think I could go to any other branch,” Carlisle said. “They’re a lot tighter, closer-knit than the other branches.”

After the exercise, the group had four days’ leave during which they traveled around Liberia and to Dakar, said Sgt. Brandon Smith, 27, a police officer in Warner Robins.

Smith, who commanded the reserve unit, described the “mass poverty” in Liberia, where clean water was very, very scarce, in a nation still recovering from a civil war that ended in 2003.

“Just being able to help the people over there, and seeing how the people live,” was the biggest impression Fuller took from the deployment, where he was primary operator of an equipment tracking system similar to that used by United Parcel Service.

“It opens your eyes to a lot of things,” said Fuller, a high school wrestling coach who turned 24 today.

“The way we live over here and they way they live; it’s a million degrees different,” he said. “I wish we could have done more.”

Fuller said he likely will do more — in an upcoming mission he’s been asked to join.

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