Shaffer
03-12-04, 07:22 AM
FALLUJAH, Iraq - With the rest of his battalion waiting back in Kuwait, Lt. Col. Gregg Olson flew ahead to get an advance peek at the troubled city they will police for the next seven months.
Olson, 40, is commander of the 1,000 Marines of the 2nd Battalion, First Marine Regiment out of Camp Pendleton, Calif. He toured their new base, met local leaders and received briefings from officers of the outgoing 82nd Airborne.
The heart of his new base is a 100-acre, man-made lake stocked with striped bass and lined with stucco bungalows. When Saddam Hussein's son Uday used it as a desert playground, it was known as Dreamland. It had a disco that a U.S. bomb destroyed. The soldiers are rebuilding it as a chapel.
Today Dreamland is called Camp Volturno, and it gets mortared regularly.
http://www.pjstar.com/news/topnews/b2de071u011.html
Olson, 40, is commander of the 1,000 Marines of the 2nd Battalion, First Marine Regiment out of Camp Pendleton, Calif. He toured their new base, met local leaders and received briefings from officers of the outgoing 82nd Airborne.
The heart of his new base is a 100-acre, man-made lake stocked with striped bass and lined with stucco bungalows. When Saddam Hussein's son Uday used it as a desert playground, it was known as Dreamland. It had a disco that a U.S. bomb destroyed. The soldiers are rebuilding it as a chapel.
Today Dreamland is called Camp Volturno, and it gets mortared regularly.
http://www.pjstar.com/news/topnews/b2de071u011.html