The Mississippi National Guard’s 223rd Engineering Battalion completed its final leg of its trip home from Iraq Thursday.

Well-wishers, many sitting atop pickups and cars and holding flags and hand-lettered signs, lined the rural roadsides of their buses’ passages through Mississippi to armories in places like Clarksdale, Charleston, Bruce and Calhoun City. At each armory, well-wishers were joined by anxious family members, elected officials and military officers.

The yellow ribbons tied to trees and mailboxes so many months ago had long since faded to pale and gray, but in their place brilliant yellow jonquils bloomed in abundance along roadsides of the homebound routes, as though having taken over the vigil in the anticipation of return.

Also vigilant that afternoon at each of those armories were family members and friends who were patient, yet impatient for their soldiers’ buses to appear. In Charleston, they waited for the 223rd’s Company C, which had originally been scheduled to arrive at 2 p.m. and which finally arrived around five.

And in the small Tallahatchie County city, the homecoming mood was tempered somewhat by the acknowledgement of a "homegoing." Trooper Rafael Davis of the Charleston unit had died Friday, December 2, 2003, when an improvised explosive device detonated under his vehicle, the 223rd’s only fatality.

His comrades of Company C formed ranks behind the armory, then marched smartly to its front, each soldiers’ eyes straight ahead as though he or she owed an extra debt of respect since Davis was one of their own. Wives, girlfriends, family and friends strained and then restrained themselves at the edge of the paved drive that had been temporarily designated as the boundary between civilian and military.

The ceremony was mercifully brief, with "Welcome Homes" by the appropriate dignitaries – the Charleston mayor and the Tallahatchie Board of Supervisors President and "Job Well Done" by Mississippi National Guard Troop 66 Commander Brigadier General Roger Shields and Company C Commander Officer Captain Stacy Johnson.

Then, the troops were dismissed and the hugs began. Poignantly, many of the soldiers first hugged their comrades – great bear hugs in desert-camoflauge-clad knots of two and four and six – before turning to spouses and children who were running into the rapidly disintegrating formation. And there they were, finally, to be touched and hugged and squeezed and kissed and held ever so closely again. And again.

Mobilized in January last year, they went first to Ft. Campbell, Kentucky and by April 1 were deployed in Kuwait. From Kuwait they went north into Iraq where they were put to work in the volatile Sunni triangle of northern Iraq, around Saddam Hussein’s hometown of Tikrit.

"During all their engineering operations, they had to be soldiers first in this hostile environment," General Shields said. As an engineering unit, their skills and equipment were in demand in every area of operations, and the soldiers of the 223rd found themselves rebuilding plumbing, water systems, wells, schools, hospitals, roads in a land where infrastructure had been devastated by years of neglect, war and then looting and vandalism.

"You are looking at some of the best soldiers in the U. S. Army, Captain Johnson told the crowd.

Because he escaped, his living conditions there are the toughest possible – maximum security at Parchman.

That’s according to Suzanne Singletary, spokesman for the Mississippi Department of Corrections, who said Hentz was returned Friday from California.

Meanwhile, the prisoner’s Panola County wife, Elizabeth Lacy Hentz, remains in California pending extradition to Sunflower County, Mississippi.

Lacy Hentz faces charges for her role in the escape of Hentz, who fled prison on Nov. 17, after cutting through cell bars and a barrier fence with tools she allegedly provided him during prison visits.

The couple then set out on a cross-country trip that Lacy Hentz described in a letter to a friend as "wonderful."

The daughter of Lacy Hentz, Donna Yawn, told The Panolian about the letter Monday.

"She said it was so wonderful," Yawn, who is estranged from her mother, said. "She said it was so exciting to show [Larry] things he hadn’t seen in 20 years."

Yawn said her mother’s comments show " … she still doesn’t have any remorse."

Yawn said the experience has been difficult for her and her family but said Panola Countians "have been so nice" to all of them.

She said she’s especially grateful for the kindness that "other children" have shown her youngsters.

"Children can be so cruel, you know," Yawn said. "But no one has been. It just shows you how people are raised here."

Hentz, who is serving life without parole, has convictions for several crimes including conspiracy to murder a Batesville businessman.
It was in the early 1980s that Hentz was involved in the slaying of James Williamson, Panola County Sheriff David Bryan said previously.

After the escape, the couple was featured on the Fox television show, "America’s Most Wanted."

As a result of tips received, the couple was caught in San Diego after Lacy Hentz checked into a motel using her Mississippi driver’s license for identification.

Before his escape, Hentz was in medium security where he had "some privileges" and was allowed to mingle outside his cell with other inmates, Singletary said.

Now that he’s in maximum security, she said, Hentz will have "no privileges," will remain locked inside his cell 23 hours a day and will have one-hour of solitary exercise allowed daily.

Hentz will be allowed to "correspond" and will be granted one visitor every 90 days, the MDOC spokesman said.

After the escape, MDOC Commissioner Christopher Epps ordered an investigation by the department’s Internal Audit Division.

The investigation, Singletary said, found numerous infractions of staff neglecting to carry out proper standard operating procedures and policies. Eleven employees faced disciplinary action following the investigation.