Artist Anita Miller, formerly of Columbus, happened to call U.S. Army veteran Brian Zimmerman on the day he told her he was gonna end it all.
Brian had visited the ‘The Eyes of Freedom: Lima Company Moving Memorial’ exhibit that Anita had created to honor the lost veterans of Lima Company (Ohio) during the Iraq War. The exhibit stop in Minnesota was near Brian’s home and he relayed to her a vision. She followed up.
Timing is everything.
Brian’s vision was a re-occurring dream of a soldier in army fatigues bent over holding the dog tags of his lost buddy. Anita, who now lives in Boulder, Colorado, created a bronze colored statue she called ‘Silent Battle’ and added it to her exhibit.
She told Brian that clearly his service wasn’t done yet.
Lima Company was based at Rickenbacker ANGB in Columbus, Ohio. 184 brave Americans from Lima, 3rd battalion, 25th Marine reserve unit were deployed to Iraq in the spring of 2005 for Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003-2010), part of the Global War on Terrorism. Twenty three did not make it home, fourteen from Ohio.
Lima’s operating base there was the strategic Hadithah Dam in Iraq, seventy five miles from the Syrian border. The Marines began going town to town and house to house knocking and kicking in doors to make sure the bad guys were all gone. An incredibly dangerous undertaking. Lima Company was deployed for seven months in the Iraqi desert.
The summer of 2025 marks the twenty year anniversary of their bravery and their sacrifice.
The company performed controlled explosions of IEDs leading to every town they entered. In just four days, however, in May 2005, eight Marines from Lima Company were killed. Eighteen were wounded.
Then August 3rd. Their staff sergeant was told the road ahead had been cleared of IEDs. A convoy of 30 ton tracks military vehicles loaded with soldiers began its slow march to Barwana. There was a massive explosion. One of the tracks vehicles had been blown up and flipped. The carnage was horrific. One soldier on his way up to the scene found 25-year-old Lance Corporal Michael Cifuentes’ tag. Other Marines grabbed blankets to cover up body parts.
In all, eleven Lima Company Marines were killed by a roadside bomb that day.
In the weeks after the August 3rd track explosion, Lima Company was engaged in four more major combat operations in Anbar Province.
Surviving members arrived home on October 7th to a hero’s welcome in Columbus, Ohio. Thousands of people lined the streets at Rickenbacker ANGB on Columbus’ south end with banners, flags and a lot of red, white and blue.
It was a gray, wet day filled with raw emotion. There were hugs and babies and emotion and tears. It took an hour and a half for the buses carrying the returning vets to get a short distance to their drill site.
After they marched, they were mobbed.
Lima Company accomplished a lot: they executed at least ten significant operations; removed terrorists, insurgents and weapons from the streets of Iraq; levelled a complete town full of nothing but bad guys; increased safety at crucial borders; trained Iraqi security forces; gained valuable intelligence and put in place an environment in an Iraqi town that increased voter turnout from 10% to 70%.
20-year-old LC Wesley G Davids from Dublin wrote a letter to his family in case of his death: “I want you to know I don’t fear death, and while I wish I could live out the rest of my life happily, I am proud to give my life in the name of Freedom. I have never been more proud of myself than I am right now. I think I have finally found the key to happiness. Live your life the way that you can be proud of in everything you do. No regrets.”
As was written in the memorial guestbook “courage we only dream of.”
Lima Company was awarded 59 Purple Hearts (23 posthumously). No combat platoon was hit harder in Iraq.
Military honors were given to the families of the 23 fallen heroes of Lima Company in a ceremony in Columbus on Nov 12, 2005.
The combat boots of Corporal Dustin Derga are on display at the National Veteran’s Memorial & Museum in Columbus. He was killed on Mother’s Day.
Lance Corporal Eric Bernholtz (Grove City) was 22 years old when he was killed. A road sign in his name was unveiled covering a section of I-270.
‘The Eyes of Freedom: Lima Company Moving Memorial’ was unveiled in the Ohio Statehouse rotunda in 2008. The exhibit features life size paintings of each of the 23 fallen heroes. In 2015, the ‘Silent Battle’ sculpture was added. The artist’s hope was to create dialogue and healing. “Art fills in places,” Anita Miller says, “where words just don’t live.”
Columbus was the first stop on the exhibit’s tour and the 68th stop in March 2025.
The ‘Eyes of Freedom’ exhibit has made it to 37 states and is still going strong twenty years in. From Sept 21 – 28, 2025 the exhibit will be at the Barnesville Pumpkin Festival in Barnesville, Ohio, commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the Lima Company’s ultimate sacrifice. And on Saturday, October 11, 2025 the exhibit will be at the Miami County Veterans Services VetFest in Troy, Ohio.
A heart wrenching 90-minute documentary ‘Combat Diary: The Marines of Lima Company’ can be found on YouTube detailing the incredible story of bravery and brotherhood of Lima Company. It is filled with footage from the cell phones of the soldiers themselves.
One month before he was killed, Corporal Andre Williams made a video for his daughter’s sixth birthday. You will cry. You will also be in awe of the courage and determination of these young men.
And extremely proud.
Sources: ‘The Eyes of Freedom: Lima Company Memorial’, Feb 15, 2013, www.ohiostatehouse.org; www.limacompanymemorial.org; ‘The Promise’, a 9News documentary, produced by KUSA-TV (Denver) and KARE-TV (Minneapolis), 2016; ‘Marines of Lima Company remember the fallen and reunite in Nashville to halt veteran suicides’ by Jennifer Griffin, May 31, 2021, FOX News, www.foxnews.com; ‘Lima Company Marine honored eleven years after being killed in Iraq’ by Rick Reitzel, NBC4-TV, YouTube, 2017; ‘Combat Diary: The Marines of Lima Company, produced by Michael Epstein & Jonathan Yellen, Vimeo.com, September 14, 2014; ‘Staff Voices: ‘Combat Diary: The Marines of Lima Company’ by Regina Shillinglaw, www.deploymentpsych.org, Dec 12, 2012; ‘Ten years later, Lima Company’s sacrifice remembered’ by Cameron Knight, The Cincinnati Enquirer, Cincinnati.com, August 15, 2015; Marine Reserve unit hit hard in Iraq holds 10-year reunion, by Jenny Leonard, August 19, 2015, www.marinecorpstimes.com; silentbattle.org; ‘Tribute to Lima Company ending its run’, Columbus Dispatch, November 10, 2008, www.dispatch.com; Defense & Security, March 5, 2024, www.usafacts.org; Annual Report on Suicide in the Military, U.S Department of Defense, 2023, dspo.mil; Marines of Lima Company Mark ten years since return by Tom Borgerding, August 14, 2015, www.ideastream.org; Featured photos courtesy of the National Veterans Memorial & Museum.