‘Routine’ convoys in Iraq are a sign of progress
AL-ASAD AIR BASE, Iraq – It’s 4 a.m. and the convoy is staged and ready to roll. Today’s run has 70 vehicles – 50 trucks loaded with food, water and supplies and 20 military escorts, guns mounted and turrets manned.
When it hits the road, the convoy will sprawl six miles long.
The course ahead is a 70-mile stretch of desert highway through the oasis hamlet of Baghdadi and out to Haditha Dam, where the Euphrates River meets Lake Qadisiya.
The dam, on the outskirts of a dusty city by the same name of about 78,000, is Iraq’s second-largest source of hydroelectricity, and the U.S. Marines’ Combat Logistics Battalion 4 – CLB 4 – has been protecting its lifelines for the past seven months.
Supply routes vary, but today’s will be primarily along Bronze, which is a relief to everyone. Bronze is smoother, and in the back of the Marines’ new armored vehicle, the much-delayed MRAP, that means a lot less bouncing around.
More important, Bronze is calm.
Though they discover caches every few weeks, the battalion, which deployed to Iraq last summer from the Japanese island of Okinawa, has only been “hit” on three convoys.
In one, an improvised explosive device was run over by the first vehicle, a mineroller. The mineroller, which looks something like a thresher, was demolished. Though the driver was unhurt, the gunner in the next vehicle took a burst of shrapnel to his face and throat.
But he was back out on a convoy the next day.
To date, no one in the battalion has been killed by IEDs. The only death on a convoy since CLB 4 got here was a combat photographer who was shooting a fuel tanker that had careened off the road in an accident. It exploded, and the photographer was enveloped in the flames.
“Routine” is how people describe the convoys now.
And “quiet.”
Anbar province, which stretches to the Saudi Arabian, Jordanian and Syrian borders west of Baghdad, had been the heart of the Sunni insurgency and a bastion of al-Qaida in Iraq. But Sunni tribal leaders who were fighting the Americans began in late 2006 to turn on al-Qaida, fed up with its brutality and austere brand of Islam.
Now the province is one of the safest in Iraq. The troops’ mission is to keep it that way.
“We must be doing something right,” said Cpl. Colbert Rianda, of Chico, Calif. “You can see the change.”
Just getting out of al-Asad, a sprawling airfield built by Saddam Hussein’s regime and now known as “Camp Cupcake,” seems to take forever.
Lying at the bottom of a canyon and surrounded by a whole lot of nothing, al-Asad Air Base is big enough to support 20,000 troops. It currently holds about 15,000 – including thousands of private contractors, from ponytailed KBR truck drivers to Pakistani cooks to a contingent of Ugandans who handle the on-base security.
Al-Asad is big enough to have its own bus system. It has a Burger King, a Pizza Hut, and round-the-clock Internet access. The base store sells Tic Tacs, souvenir T-shirts and iPods.
To the Marines, who take a sort of masochistic pride in roughing it, the extras are almost embarrassing.
Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James T. Conway even singled out al-Asad last summer, warning his Marines not to get soft.
“Marines are getting used to living at fixed bases and with more comforts of life than we really need,” he said in a speech at the Naval War College in June. “Marines must guard against complacency and the expectation that tomorrow’s fight be marked by equally hospitable operating bases.”
Even so, life at Camp Cupcake is hardly cushy.
“Out here, we’re working 12 hours a day, seven days a week,” Sgt. Jason Smith, of Altoona, Pa., said after loading a helicopter for a run to a combat outpost that the truck convoys can’t reach. “We don’t get any time off except those 12 hours.”
He said off hours are spent sleeping. Or playing games online. Or keeping fit.
There isn’t much else to do.
Unless they have good reason to – like convoy duty – the troops don’t go outside the wire.
CLB 4 has set something of a precedent.
The battalion was one of the first to be deployed, in full, from Okinawa. It was established specifically to support the fight in Iraq, and its deployment here underscores the extent to which Iraq has become a long-term draw on the U.S. troops’ positioning worldwide.
Though the U.S. has about 50,000 troops in Japan with a mandate to secure Washington’s prime Pacific ally, those troops are now being called on to fight 5,000 miles away. Along with the Marines in Anbar, Air Force fighters have been deployed from northern Japan to Iraq’s Balad Air Base. U.S. troops from Japan serve in Afghanistan too.
But CLB 4’s mission is almost complete.
Unlike their Army counterparts, who frequently stay for a year or longer, the Marines come for relatively short stints. For CLB 4, it was seven months.
It has been a concentrated deployment.
Their vehicles have put in 13,173 mission miles – about twice around the moon – escorted 2,297 trucks, provided a million gallons of fuel and 2 million gallons of water throughout Anbar.
At the sandbagged battalion headquarters, officers are preparing for departure, writing up merit citations and doing the spadework to get all the 900 Marines back to their home stations.
Their building was a shambles when they arrived, with wires stripped from walls that are now covered in a fresh – albeit dust-covered – coat of paint.
“We are definitely leaving this place better than it was when we came,” said 1st Lt. Alex Derichemont, CLB 4’s adjutant officer.
“The change has been dramatic, even just during the time that we have been here.” he said. “It’s not bullets flying through the air every day. A lot of the time out here, it’s just another day at the office.”