Kansas on Thursday will welcome about 450 National Guardsmen, including some from a Lawrence unit, returning home after a yearlong tour of duty in Iraq.

Gov. Kathleen Sebelius and Maj. Tod Bunting, Kansas adjutant general, will greet members of the 2nd Battalion, 137th Infantry (Mechanized). The unit includes about 100 members from Company A, which is based in Lawrence.

A 2 p.m. ceremony is tentatively scheduled to be in the Kansas Expocentre in Topeka. The battalion is headquartered in Kansas City, Kan., and, in addition to Lawrence, there is a unit based in Wichita. The public is invited. The soldiers will rejoin their families at the end of the ceremony.

The unit lost one soldier, Spec. Jessie Davila, who was killed in February when a vehicle-borne, improvised explosive device detonated near his vehicle. Davila was from Greensburg.