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thedrifter
08-15-06, 03:06 PM
August 21, 2006

Training for the worst
CAG readies for Iraq deployment

By John Hoellwarth
Staff writer


There is no way to tell what will happen to the Reserve Marines of the 4th Civil Affairs Group when they leave for Ramadi, Iraq, next month. But one thing is certain: They’ll spend a lot of time with the locals.

If there is a problem in town — electricity outage, police corruption or an insurgent terrorist campaign against the populace — it falls to the 98 civil affairs Marines of this group — activated June 1 — to win the town over, block by block, through face-to-face negotiations with the local power brokers. And with success hinging on such variables as cultural differences and sensitivities, practice makes perfect.

On Aug. 9, on the western side of the Marine base at Quantico, Va., about a kilometer from the mock town that serves as the urban-warfare training facility there, the CAG Marines sat in a school circle just inside the tree line of landing zone Peregrine around a terrain map as their detachment commander, Maj. John Harding, briefed the mission.


“On order, our detachment will depart LZ Peregrine and travel to the al Samut village to locate the emir and conduct two assessments,” said Harding, whose unit is based in Washington, D.C.

“Our assessments are to determine the validity of reports that the village we will be going to has a water problem. The second assessment is to determine the validity of reports that no salary or pension payments have been made by the Rashid Bank over the last two months.”

He explained that, for the purposes of the exercise they were about to kick off, it was unknown whether the “Iraqis” in al Samut — a team of about 30 costumed Marine and civilian role players — would be friendly.

“Intel tells us that within the last 48 hours, there have been no [roadside bomb] attacks in this area,” Harding said. “That tells me to be very cautious because it’s likely we’ll get hit.”

Harding picked up a stick and traced the path of the detachment’s five-vehicle convoy into the town, stopping at the blank white sheets of paper weighted with rocks to show where the buildings are.

The Marines paid close attention, scribbling information into their hardback green notebooks as Harding briefed the exit strategy and communications plan — call signs, grid coordinates, radio frequencies and brevity codes such as “fireball” for a bomb attack and “sky” for get the heck out of Dodge. It seemed like they were ready.

The Marines packed into their Humvees, got accountability and rolled out.

It took only a couple minutes to reach the village, and each Humvee pulled up behind the appropriate building, just as Harding had briefed on the terrain map. It was the last thing that went according to plan.

As soon as the Marines spilled out of their vehicles, the two-week infantry and security training they were given at Fort A.P. Hill, Va., in July was clearly visible. With their weapons at the ready, they began entering and clearing buildings, ignoring the Arabic objections of an obviously disturbed populace.

“Lah!” one role player shouted while waving his arms in an unsuccessful attempt to shoo a Marine from his doorstep. “Shukran!”

The Marines fanned out through the town aggressively as Harding walked nonchalantly down the center of the street asking Iraqis in vain if they speak English, if they know where the mayor is. No joy.

Capt. Charece Martin was kneeling in the grass with her back to one of the buildings, pointing her weapon down an alleyway to provide security for the Marines in the street when she heard her name called from a block away.

“Captain Martin, there’s a translator in town. We’ve got to find him,” a Marine called out.

She acknowledged the call and moved farther into town with her battle buddy in tow as Harding, back on the main drag, spoke to one irate villager after another in an ill-fated attempt to communicate that the Marines had come to do no harm.

“We’ve come to try to assist with the money situation,” he said. “Engleezi, Engleeziah. Do you speak English? Where is the mayor?” Nothing was working.

The villagers grew louder, bolder, more animated and more provocative, intentionally approaching the Marines and standing well within their comfort zone.

The Marines providing security tried to put distance between themselves and the role players who were quickly turning into a mob. According to the rules of engagement spelled out in the pre-mission briefing, a decisive butt-stroke was a nonoption for crowd control.

Then, a break. Martin had found the role player who had been pre-designated as the only one in town with limited English speaking skills.

Harding soon learned why the town was in an uproar. The Marines had entered and cleared the home of the local Imam upon their arrival without permission. But when a loud explosion rocked an adjacent building and thick black smoke poured out onto the street, it became clear there was little the Marines could now do to reverse the anti-American sentiment in the village.

“Fireball!” the Marines shouted from all corners of the village. The mood in town had gone from stressful to chaotic.

From his perch in the third-floor window of a building at the end of town, group operations officer Lt. Col. David Bunn watched with a radio in his hand as the worst-case scenario he had engineered to train his Marines deteriorated into a mass-casualty drill.

Women in burkas stumbled out of the building where the explosion had occurred, wearing rubber wounds, squirting “blood” from their arms and legs and wailing from their simulated injuries.

Someone yelled “sky,” and the call spread through the village like wildfire from Marine to Marine. Back to the vehicles. So much for the water and bank assessments.

As the Marines hurried from the town, the villagers followed, yelling in broken English for doctors and trying to push their wounded onto the Humvees. The Marines struggled to maintain a secure perimeter around their vehicles as the role players banged on the windows, rocked the trucks from side to side and tried to pull the Marines back into the street where civilian casualties lay bloodied.

“Don’t touch me,” shouted a frustrated Lance Cpl. Andrew Colon. “I will shoot you.”

Harding came alongside each vehicle on foot, squeezing what little order could be derived from the chaos by ensuring his Marines were accounted for before the convoy sped out of town and into the roadside bomb that awaited them. By a stroke of luck, the simulated “bomb” had exploded with a “pop” between vehicles and nobody was injured.

The Marines had made it out, albeit without accomplishing their objectives.

Back at LZ Peregrine, Bunn was waiting. He gathered the Marines around him and put the day in perspective.

“I was intentionally going to screw with you so that you were put in a stressful situation so that as you ran into one stress, another stress went on,” he said. “If you know now more than you knew this morning, the training has been a benefit. If you can impart that knowledge on other Marines and as you get out in Iraq you can impart that, you’ve benefited from it. And that’s the key.”

Colon described the training as “pandemonium,” but said it has major value for a unit that may likely be confronted with uncivil affairs during its seven-month deployment to Iraq’s Anbar province.

“The training that we do here provides us with realistic situations of what we’re going to have in Iraq. The more effort we put into this training, the better prepared we are when we deploy in Iraq.”

Ellie