June 15, 2004

By Marine Times staff

About 500 Marines and sailors with an infantry battalion based at Camp Pendleton, Calif., will deploy to Iraq later this week to relieve a battalion that has spent several months in the war zone, base officials announced Tuesday evening.
The troops with 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, are slated to depart Friday for a seven-month tour in Iraq, where they will join about 25,000 Marines and sailors now serving there on the first of two planned seven-month Marine rotations.

It was not immediately clear which battalion the 3/1 Marines are to relieve, but the longest-serving infantry units now in Iraq are those who were on Unit Deployment Program rotations to Okinawa, Japan, when they were tapped for war duty.

Those units include 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, from Camp Pendleton, and 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, from the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, Calif. Both deployed to Okinawa in late December.