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thedrifter
04-07-04, 07:04 AM
Haitian Marine to take part in Haiti effort <br />
Submitted by: MCB Camp Lejeune <br />
Story Identification Number: 20044615836 <br />
Story by Lance Cpl. Ruben D. Maestre <br />
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MARINE CORPS BASE CAMP LEJEUNE,...

thedrifter
04-07-04, 07:06 AM
‘So far, so good,’ say new Marines in Haiti


By Sandra Jontz, Stars and Stripes
Pacific edition, Tuesday, April 6, 2004

PORT AU PRINCE, Haiti — Pfc. Erik Siler says he isn’t much of a praying man.

But the 21-year-old always wears the round Episcopal cross pendant that his father, a Navy chaplain, gave him when he graduated from boot camp eight months ago and became a U.S. Marine.

And while he didn’t say prayers during his flight on a C-130 Saturday on his way from North Carolina to Haiti for his first deployment ever, he had the pendant.

“I never take it off,” said Siler, one of 49 new Marines from 3rd Battalion, 8th Marines out of Camp Lejeune who landed in Haiti to bring the total of 3-8 to nearly 900.

For Gunnery Sgt. Marvin Arnold, one word best described the new 49.

“Help,” Arnold said. “We’re pretty shorthanded.”

And so they dumped their gear, got some hot chow of rice topped with teriyaki beef bits and then filled out registration forms. Then it was off to their new sleeping quarters: a steamy makeshift gym with no fans, no air movement and, for the first night at least, no cots or mosquito netting.

“So far, so good,” quipped Pfc. Michael Alford, 19. But accommodations were better than he anticipated. “I was thinking we’d be sleeping outside or in the hooch or something.”

“I’m surprised by this place. Things seem way settled down and I didn’t think it would be like this. After seeing what’s going on, I’m not nervous at all,” Alford said just a few hours after landing at a secured airport and traveling less than a mile to his secured base camp. “But if tomorrow things get a little more shaking, I probably will be.”

“They’re all nervous,” said Sgt. Christopher Horman, the assistant administration chief with about half a dozen deployments behind him. “They’re thinking, ‘Why the hell am I here and why did I join the Marine Corps?’ But it’s all good. We all went through it the first time.

“This is the easiest part of being in the Marine Corps,” he said of the “boots,” or newcomers to the Corps. “You just have to worry about yourself.”

Pfc. William Boone, 18, didn’t really care to which company he was assigned, but if given the choice “I’d pick whatever company is in the palace,” said the 8-month Marine.

“They get showers. That’d be nice.”

http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=21430


Ellie

thedrifter
04-07-04, 07:45 AM
Issue Date: April 12, 2004

On edge in Haiti
It’s a peacekeeping mission, but for Marines patrolling the capital’s slums, there’s squalor and potential combat on every corner

By C. Mark Brinkley
Times staff writer

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — There was a time not so long ago when this would have been a monster deployment. Magazines filled with live ammo, urban patrols for weapon caches, curfew enforcement and humanitarian assistance operations. Nearly 2,000 Marines, “gettin’ some” at a time when few were getting any. People in the rear would have been jealous, and the Marines on the ground would have been pumped.
But that was then.

With thousands of Marines in the fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, the peacekeeping mission to Haiti is more like the booby prize behind door No. 3 than hitting the deployment jackpot. There’s no combat pay here, no tax-free.

These Marines are getting the “Haitian vacation,” as many jokingly refer to it. “Caribbean Spring Break 2004.” Only, they’re not.

They’re giving it their all, working long days in tough conditions, missing home. Fighting heat and stench — and occasionally, outlaw gang members — in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation. Doing the Lord’s work, truly, in a place that needs whatever help it can get.

Blessed are the peacemakers? Perhaps. But rewarded are the warriors. That’s a fact not lost on this group.

Missing Iraq

“If you ask most people, they would rather be in Iraq,” said one lance corporal, an infantryman with 3rd Battalion, 8th Marines. “At least there, you get paid for it. Would you rather have $3,000 waiting on you when you get home, or $12,000?”

Bring up the security difference between the two locales, and the lance corporal just shrugs.

“We had a Marine get shot here,” he said. “I’d rather take the risk and get paid than take the risk and not get paid.”

Joined by augmentees from 2nd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, 2nd Combat Engineer Battalion, 2nd Intelligence Battalion and many others, the grunts of 3/8 form the core of an international peacekeeping force that includes about 1,800 Marines. Responding to Operation Secure Tomorrow — as the Haiti mission is known — yanked the grunt battalion from Camp Lejeune, N.C., off its planned rotation to Iraq later this year.

It’ll be the second time this battalion has missed the big dance. The group was on a six-month Unit Deployment Program rotation to Okinawa, Japan, when the war began in March 2003. With a stop-loss and stop-move policy in place for the early part of the war to prevent Marines from leaving the Corps or making any orders-related moves, that UDP rotation grew to 10 months.

The battalion was off the map for so long, some began referring to it as “The Lost Battalion.”

And now it’s Haiti, a mission that folks back home are hearing less and less about on the nightly TV news and reading less and less about in the papers. With wars still raging overseas, humanitarian missions like this and the recent mission in Liberia drop off the radar for most people.

But there was a time when the United States’ involvement here was everything that Iraq is now.

From 1915 until 1934, political infighting and instability in Haiti led Marines and other U.S. forces to a similar job in the Caribbean nation — building infrastructure, training local militaries and police forces, providing order.

Rebel groups sprouted during the occupation, and fighting between the Marines and the guerrillas was a constant. The Corps’ two-time Medal of Honor recipients, Sgt. Maj. Daniel Daly and Maj. Gen. Smedley D. Butler, both earned their second medals here. Half a dozen others received their first. Marine legends like Brig. Gen. Herman “Hard Head” Hanneken made their marks on Corps history here.

During that time, the United States also managed Haiti’s finances, set up public works programs and created public health plans. A period of relative calm eventually fell over the former French colony.

Then the Marines pulled out and returned all aspects of the government to the people. Unsuccessful regimes followed, along with more than three decades of harsh dictatorship and military rule. The 1990s brought free elections and the rise of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, but his term in power was cut short by a military coup.

In 1994, President Clinton dispatched thousands of troops to the island to help restore Aristide to power. When U.N. peacekeepers pulled out and Aristide left office in 1996, the Defense Department created U.S. Support Group Haiti to provide ongoing humanitarian assistance, a mission that ended in 2000.

That same year, Aristide was elected to return to office. But questions about how the election was conducted prompted the United States and other nations to suspend most financial aid to the country, as much as $500 million worth at the beginning of 2003.

A matter of luck

Now, Aristide is out of power again, resigning his post Feb. 29. About 200 Marines from 3/8 hit the ground as soon as the ink was dry and hundreds more followed over the next several days. The unit was part of the Air Contingency Marine Air Ground Task Force at Lejeune, the “flyaway battalion,” on call for rapid deployments worldwide.

continued.....

thedrifter
04-07-04, 07:46 AM
Some would say the Marines from 3/8 just have bad luck. First, the air-contingency force hadn’t been used in years. Second, the Marines from 3/8 were supposed to turn that rotating duty over to another battalion March 1 — the call to Haiti came just a day before the turnover.

“We’d been on ACM for so long, they just sent us,” said Lance Cpl. Ryan Pruett, 21, of Gadsden, Ala., a member of 3/8’s Kilo Company. “I guess higher-ups just thought we were ready for it.”

They were, but that’s little consolation for Marines who had to stay within a few hours of Camp Lejeune for the three months they were on duty, only to get the call on the last day of the detail. With their air-contingency tour extended to cover this humanitarian op, many are having flashbacks to the longest UDP rotation in recent memory.

“We were supposed to go on leave that Monday,” said Lance Cpl. Reshad Reed, 25, an infantryman with Kilo Company. “We were that close.”

Instead, most were on the ground here March 1, trying to bring order to a nation out of control. People were looting and shooting. The U.S. Embassy had been buttoned up for about a week, with a Fleet Anti-Terrorism Security Team augmenting the embassy’s small group of Marine Security Guards. Civilian flights to the island nation had stopped.

“These mobs would just appear,” said Maj. Justin Rodriguez, executive officer for 3/8. “It was like someone beamed them there. The street would be empty, then there’d be a screaming mob.”

The unsanitary conditions prevalent throughout the Haitian capital city were worse than usual, after the limited public works system failed. Cars were set on fire. General chaos was the rule.

And the Marines had to put it back in order.

Making it right

That meant dealing with a “three-block war,” a once-catchy term for such low-intensity military operations. Humanitarian assistance on one block, peacekeeping on another, firefights somewhere else.

Haiti officially qualifies.

There has been peacekeeping, as Marines enforce curfew, work with relatively unskilled police to disarm locals, and deter gang activity by simply providing a presence on the streets. The cops aren’t much help, though, as many local officers are either corrupt or afraid, Marines here said.

“The police need to step it up, do their job more,” Pruett said. “So we don’t have to be here.”

There’s been combat, as Marines have taken and returned fire. More than a few medals and ribbons will again come out of Haiti. There will be a Purple Heart for a Marine from Lima Company who is recovering after he was shot in the arm. And possible Combat Action Ribbons for many, including a patrol from India Company that was fired on while safeguarding the prime minister’s residence.

There’s been humanitarian assistance, as the Marines, Navy corpsmen and Army psychological operations and civil affairs units work to treat the sick, feed the hungry, clean the dirty. There are plenty of all three here in the capital, where millions live in squalor.

Mostly, though, it’s been patrol after patrol after patrol, walking the slums where the gangs thrive, baking in the Caribbean sun under the weight of full combat gear. The Marines here understand why someone needed to come in and make things right.

They see the nice homes on the hills, the people who have jobs and are doing fine. Then they see naked toddlers splashing and playing in ditches of raw sewage, laughing as if it were a day at the pool. Preteens working like adults at any job they can find. A dozen people living in a two-room shack.

They meander through the poorer neighborhoods, looking for troublemakers, searching for weapons, and they do what they can. The streets in the shantytowns are so narrow that you have to walk single-file. The buildings are made of cinderblocks or concrete, or sometimes, simply sheets of corrugated tin tied together at the corners. People eat from dumpsters or rummage through piles of trash on the ground. Pigs and goats roam free, half-starved dogs curl up in lethargy.

“There are the filthy rich, and the filthy,” said one Marine, a translator assigned to the battalion. “And that’s it.”

Words fail to describe the repugnant smell that saturates the city. The Marines working and operating in the poorest neighborhoods, especially those living down by the port, barely smell it anymore.

The nighttime potshots are less and less frequent. Few dare break out a weapon in the daylight, for fear that the Marines will take it away, by any means necessary. Everyone is here to help, but no one is playing around.

“It’s got to be challenging for the Marines to turn it on and turn it off,” said Capt. Kevin Clark, company commander for Lima Company, 3/8. “One minute you’re helping them, the next minute you’re running a combat patrol.”

The silver lining

There have been bright spots, though. Mail to the family back home is free, just like in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most troops have access to the occasional cold soda. One company has a big-screen television in its berthing area, with HBO, ESPN and CNN. Another has good access to showers. Another has good access to phones and the Internet.

And all of the units here are in a rotation that takes them to the prime minister’s residence for a three-day rest. Up on a hill overlooking Port-au-Prince, it’s easy to forget the slums exist.

There’s a pool that gets cleaned every day. There’s a nice grassy yard out back, and computers, air conditioning and phones inside the house. Some Marines protect the empty residence from looters while others “veg out,” and then the groups switch.

“Down there, it’s bugs and mosquitoes,” said Cpl. David Gonzalez, 21, a member of Kilo Company from Fort Lee, N.J. “This place is totally different. I mean, I could get used to this.”

Still, Haiti isn’t what they were expecting, even if the mission in Iraq and the mission here are quite similar. Most wanted to be part of the big fight, wanted to reap the rewards.

“A lot of guys are disappointed,” said Col. David Berger, battalion commander for 3/8. “When they get back, though, I think they’ll realize what they did here is pretty significant.”

When they’re getting back is the subject of much debate. The United Nations is supposed to take over the peacekeeping mission after 90 days, which could relieve the Marines here by June — unless the United States decides to keep them here as part of the follow-on force.

After the extended UDP, and now the extended air-contingency MAGTF rotation, the Marines know how fluid dates can be.

Their commander, however, is optimistic.

“I think we’ll only stay 90 days,” Berger said. “If we get it to the point that it’s stable here, I think that’s what the president wants.”

And if they are extended, the Marines will carry on, get the job done, complain to one another to help pass the time and suck it up.

“I don’t care where they send me as long as we have something to do,” said an infantry staff sergeant.

“I keep telling the Marines, ‘Quit your complaining. Be thankful for the things you do have.’ This is what you sign up for.”

C. Mark Brinkley, the Jacksonville, N.C., bureau chief for Marine Corps Times, is covering Marine Corps operations in Haiti.

http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/story.php?f=0-MARINEPAPER-2782532.php


Ellie