Join Veterans Bridge Home and Veterans across Uptown Charlotte for lunch and to hear from Col Mortenson;
Col. Royal P. Mortenson served around the world during a 30-year career as an infantry officer in the Marine Corps.
As commander of an infantry battalion of more than 900 Marines, he led the battalion in combat operations in Iraq in 2003.
His battalion took significant casualties during the battle of Al Naziriyah in March of 2003. He personally engaged in direct combat with Iraqi forces.
It’s a lifetime of service he treasures.
“I would have done it for free,” he said.
Mortenson, 61, retired from the Marine Corps in 2012, after 30 years, and he now serves as director of the Illinois Fire Service Institute.
The tradition of the Marine Corps runs deeply through the family. Mortenson’s father was a Marine in World War II. His two sons are serving now, one as a captain and the other as a first lieutenant, in the Marines.
The Chicago-area native was commissioned as a second lieutenant at 26, after graduate school in criminal justice at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
He served as a platoon commander and company executive officer at Marine Barracks-Guam in the mid-1980s.
As a colonel, he led the Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy and plan development for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2007 to 2009.
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