thedrifter
03-17-03, 06:29 AM
The Sept. 11 Marines
One Call Answered, One to Come
Spurred to Serve by Terrorism, Enlistees Confront a New Foe
By Donna St. George
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 29, 2002; Page A01
Another in a series
of occasional articles.OCEANSIDE, Calif.
He has trained in the desert. In helicopters. On blown-out urban landscapes. Now Shannon Plaut is in a classroom, intent as a combat medic drills him and 47 other Marines on the effects of weapons almost too horrible to comprehend.
"Hey doc, what's that gas that makes you throw your friggin' guts up?" one of Plaut's classmates asks.
"VX," the medic tells them. Deadly. Invisible. Odorless. He asks if they can recall the nerve agent used in a 1995 terrorist attack on a Japanese subway.
"Sarin," several answer.
"Saddam Hussein also has large piles of sarin," he tells them.
These could be life-or-death details if Plaut is called upon to administer combat first aid -- that is, if there is a war, against an enemy capable of such destruction, which once seemed theoretical but now feels almost imminent. After class, Plaut recites a grim fact of Marine life: "You have nine seconds to get your mask on."
Now there is Iraq.
Now, even for Plaut, who only nine months ago was graduating from the grinding misery of boot camp at Parris Island, S.C., Iraq looms as the mission that could thrust him into the real-world combat of enemy fire and urban warfare and chemical weapons.
It was not something he or others predicted when they enlisted in the weeks after Sept. 11, 2001. Back then, invading Iraq was not on the radar of daily public debate. And even as Afghanistan was pounded by bombings, ground troops were not deployed en masse.
But as Plaut's class of Sept. 11 Marines ends its first year, members stand to see their military lives defined, a second time, by the turn of world events. Especially for many based here at Camp Pendleton, any U.S. action in Iraq would mean a strong chance they would be in the Persian Gulf.
This has imbued life on this vast and rolling Marine base, set in the scrubby foothills of coastal mountains, with a kind of edgy uncertainty -- a reflection of the nation's sense of teetering on the verge of war, only sharper and more pointed.
Here are those who would help wage the fight, the same as a decade ago, when Marines from this base battled Iraq in Operation Desert Storm.
Already there are signs of the combat to come. In early November,the headquarters staff of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, based here, moved out to Kuwait, in position to help coordinate any invasion of Iraq. Just before Thanksgiving, several hundred more planners and commanders followed. Thousands of other Marines await orders.
No one knows with certainty whether an invasion will happen, and much depends on the progress of the U.N. inspections that make headlines every day -- and which leave Marines such as Plaut and his roommate, Daniel Wilson, 22, studying the television news in their small barracks room with a new intensity.
Will they head out -- or won't they?
They know the call could come at any time. Posted in an office for their unit -- the highly decorated 2nd Battalion, 5th Regiment -- are maps of Iraq and Kuwait, with details about transportation routes and marsh destruction. Their routine now includes donning gas masks once a week. Shots are being administered for anthrax.
When Plaut was selected from his platoon to take a week-long course in combat first aid, which included the classroom discussion of nerve agents, he clearly understood where the next battlefield might lie. A rangy college graduate with dark eyes and prominent eyebrows, Plaut was upbeat but plainspoken about the grimness of it all.
"That's the only thing that bothers me if we have to go into a conflict," he said. "You don't smell or see the biological agents, and it's a lot harder to run and hide from gas."
Rough From the Start
One year ago, Shannon Plaut and 424 other men and women were enjoying the Christmas holidays with a sense of great foreboding. Within days, they knew, their lives would change in ways they could not possibly imagine.
They were joining the Marine Corps in the wake of Sept. 11 and had orders to show up for boot camp on Parris Island in the first days of January. They were nervous and scared, having heard stories about how demanding it would be, how utterly harsh.
A year later, as another Christmas passes, their lives have been remade, and yet there is a tinge -- some will admit -- of the same worry. The future looms large and unknowable. But now the concern is not change. It is danger.
"Deep down, I think everybody is always a little apprehensive," said Plaut, trained as a rifleman and a radio operator. Most Marines, he said, try not to dwell on the risks. As he put it: "This is what I came to do."
It is a long way to have progressed in a year. It was Jan. 2 when Plaut and many of his classmates took a midnight bus from a nearby airport to their fabled boot camp, on a swampy, flea-infested island off the South Carolina coast.
As they lined up in the darkness on yellow footprints painted on the street -- for their ritual introduction to life as a Marine -- a drill instructor thundered at them: "You WILL do what you're told to do, when you're told to do it, without question."
This became the theme of their lives. They gave up their clothes, hairstyles, phone calls, free time -- almost everything -- for 12 weeks of screaming-tough Marine training. They endured physical rigors like nothing they ever knew. They were taught to fire M-16s with killing proficiency. They made it through a 54-hour forced march called "the crucible."
When they graduated March 29, Good Friday, the intensity of training did not stop. For Plaut, it was six weeks at the School of Infantry. For others it was a shorter course of Marine combat training and then weeks or months of special schooling.
Not everyone's path was the same. Some men and women dropped out, even after they made it through boot camp. Others were disciplined. A number were married or became parents. Some were disappointed by less-than-glamorous assignments.
By summer, many of the Sept. 11 Marines were standing in airports, carrying duffel bags and bound to their first duty stations -- in North Carolina, Hawaii, Okinawa, California -- with the guess that it might be many months or years before they would head off toward war.
But in August, Chris Funk and Michael Garey, both members of that post-Christmas boot camp class, got an early look at life in a hostile zone. As part of the war on terrorism, they were sent to Zamboanga, in the southern islands of the Philippines, where a Muslim terror group was planting bombs and taking hostages.
By autumn, many in the larger class of Sept. 11 Marines were wondering whether they might ultimately head toward combat and peril -- as part of an invasion of Iraq. In an age of talk about "scorched earth" retaliation and weapons of mass destruction, this had an ominous undertone.
Itching for the Fight
In the small ordnance unit in which John Adams works -- called "the junk shop" -- they are packed for Iraq. They have stowed away all sorts of parts for their trailers, which haul explosives that are loaded onto helicopters. If the trailers need fixing, they are ready.
Thinking ahead, they have also bundled in tents and gear and that old, most basic staple of combat -- rations. Tucked away and loaded, they have MREs, Meals Ready to Eat, shelf-stable dinner pouches with entrees such as bean burritos and chicken teriyaki.
Adams himself is a little wistful about all of this. He is not on the list for immediate deployment.
Steady in his manner, Adams, 19, from the Dundalk area of Baltimore County, has had his eye on combat for a long time. While he joined a class of Marines who enlisted because of Sept. 11, he had planned to sign up anyway -- and he never wavered when terrorism changed U.S. war plans entirely.
"It just puts anger into you," said Adams, a graduate of Patapsco High School, where he sang in a range of school choirs and was captain of the wrestling team. "Although anger's not good, it kind of helps you get through."
Now, Staff Sgt. Vincent DiVincenzo, one of his superiors, mentions that Adams may not deploy for Iraq in the first wave of troops. Adams tries not to reveal his disappointment. His thinking has been: "I want to see as much action as I can."
DiVincenzo tells him: It could still happen. "The names are changing all the time."
Adams nods his head, heartened. They are standing in a fenced field that everyone calls "the bomb dump," where warheads are created for helicopters such as the Cobra, which congregate noisily on a nearby flight line.
This is where Adams hopes to land what he believes is a better ordnance job -- closer to the action. In the best of all cases, he thinks, he might do this in Iraq. "It's definitely dangerous," he said, "but it's something I want to do."
Running Into Trouble
In the rolling fields and cactus-studded hills of Camp Pendleton, not far from its 18 miles of Pacific coastline, Plaut's battalion spent three December days training in a city under fire, or at least the $10 million simulation of one -- 31 buildings set up like a town, built for this purpose, where Marines learn the art of clearing rooms and counter-sniping and urban patrol.
This is practice for what is called urban warfare, among the most difficult forms of action -- with too many hiding places for the enemy and too many civilians in the mix.
continued..
One Call Answered, One to Come
Spurred to Serve by Terrorism, Enlistees Confront a New Foe
By Donna St. George
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 29, 2002; Page A01
Another in a series
of occasional articles.OCEANSIDE, Calif.
He has trained in the desert. In helicopters. On blown-out urban landscapes. Now Shannon Plaut is in a classroom, intent as a combat medic drills him and 47 other Marines on the effects of weapons almost too horrible to comprehend.
"Hey doc, what's that gas that makes you throw your friggin' guts up?" one of Plaut's classmates asks.
"VX," the medic tells them. Deadly. Invisible. Odorless. He asks if they can recall the nerve agent used in a 1995 terrorist attack on a Japanese subway.
"Sarin," several answer.
"Saddam Hussein also has large piles of sarin," he tells them.
These could be life-or-death details if Plaut is called upon to administer combat first aid -- that is, if there is a war, against an enemy capable of such destruction, which once seemed theoretical but now feels almost imminent. After class, Plaut recites a grim fact of Marine life: "You have nine seconds to get your mask on."
Now there is Iraq.
Now, even for Plaut, who only nine months ago was graduating from the grinding misery of boot camp at Parris Island, S.C., Iraq looms as the mission that could thrust him into the real-world combat of enemy fire and urban warfare and chemical weapons.
It was not something he or others predicted when they enlisted in the weeks after Sept. 11, 2001. Back then, invading Iraq was not on the radar of daily public debate. And even as Afghanistan was pounded by bombings, ground troops were not deployed en masse.
But as Plaut's class of Sept. 11 Marines ends its first year, members stand to see their military lives defined, a second time, by the turn of world events. Especially for many based here at Camp Pendleton, any U.S. action in Iraq would mean a strong chance they would be in the Persian Gulf.
This has imbued life on this vast and rolling Marine base, set in the scrubby foothills of coastal mountains, with a kind of edgy uncertainty -- a reflection of the nation's sense of teetering on the verge of war, only sharper and more pointed.
Here are those who would help wage the fight, the same as a decade ago, when Marines from this base battled Iraq in Operation Desert Storm.
Already there are signs of the combat to come. In early November,the headquarters staff of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, based here, moved out to Kuwait, in position to help coordinate any invasion of Iraq. Just before Thanksgiving, several hundred more planners and commanders followed. Thousands of other Marines await orders.
No one knows with certainty whether an invasion will happen, and much depends on the progress of the U.N. inspections that make headlines every day -- and which leave Marines such as Plaut and his roommate, Daniel Wilson, 22, studying the television news in their small barracks room with a new intensity.
Will they head out -- or won't they?
They know the call could come at any time. Posted in an office for their unit -- the highly decorated 2nd Battalion, 5th Regiment -- are maps of Iraq and Kuwait, with details about transportation routes and marsh destruction. Their routine now includes donning gas masks once a week. Shots are being administered for anthrax.
When Plaut was selected from his platoon to take a week-long course in combat first aid, which included the classroom discussion of nerve agents, he clearly understood where the next battlefield might lie. A rangy college graduate with dark eyes and prominent eyebrows, Plaut was upbeat but plainspoken about the grimness of it all.
"That's the only thing that bothers me if we have to go into a conflict," he said. "You don't smell or see the biological agents, and it's a lot harder to run and hide from gas."
Rough From the Start
One year ago, Shannon Plaut and 424 other men and women were enjoying the Christmas holidays with a sense of great foreboding. Within days, they knew, their lives would change in ways they could not possibly imagine.
They were joining the Marine Corps in the wake of Sept. 11 and had orders to show up for boot camp on Parris Island in the first days of January. They were nervous and scared, having heard stories about how demanding it would be, how utterly harsh.
A year later, as another Christmas passes, their lives have been remade, and yet there is a tinge -- some will admit -- of the same worry. The future looms large and unknowable. But now the concern is not change. It is danger.
"Deep down, I think everybody is always a little apprehensive," said Plaut, trained as a rifleman and a radio operator. Most Marines, he said, try not to dwell on the risks. As he put it: "This is what I came to do."
It is a long way to have progressed in a year. It was Jan. 2 when Plaut and many of his classmates took a midnight bus from a nearby airport to their fabled boot camp, on a swampy, flea-infested island off the South Carolina coast.
As they lined up in the darkness on yellow footprints painted on the street -- for their ritual introduction to life as a Marine -- a drill instructor thundered at them: "You WILL do what you're told to do, when you're told to do it, without question."
This became the theme of their lives. They gave up their clothes, hairstyles, phone calls, free time -- almost everything -- for 12 weeks of screaming-tough Marine training. They endured physical rigors like nothing they ever knew. They were taught to fire M-16s with killing proficiency. They made it through a 54-hour forced march called "the crucible."
When they graduated March 29, Good Friday, the intensity of training did not stop. For Plaut, it was six weeks at the School of Infantry. For others it was a shorter course of Marine combat training and then weeks or months of special schooling.
Not everyone's path was the same. Some men and women dropped out, even after they made it through boot camp. Others were disciplined. A number were married or became parents. Some were disappointed by less-than-glamorous assignments.
By summer, many of the Sept. 11 Marines were standing in airports, carrying duffel bags and bound to their first duty stations -- in North Carolina, Hawaii, Okinawa, California -- with the guess that it might be many months or years before they would head off toward war.
But in August, Chris Funk and Michael Garey, both members of that post-Christmas boot camp class, got an early look at life in a hostile zone. As part of the war on terrorism, they were sent to Zamboanga, in the southern islands of the Philippines, where a Muslim terror group was planting bombs and taking hostages.
By autumn, many in the larger class of Sept. 11 Marines were wondering whether they might ultimately head toward combat and peril -- as part of an invasion of Iraq. In an age of talk about "scorched earth" retaliation and weapons of mass destruction, this had an ominous undertone.
Itching for the Fight
In the small ordnance unit in which John Adams works -- called "the junk shop" -- they are packed for Iraq. They have stowed away all sorts of parts for their trailers, which haul explosives that are loaded onto helicopters. If the trailers need fixing, they are ready.
Thinking ahead, they have also bundled in tents and gear and that old, most basic staple of combat -- rations. Tucked away and loaded, they have MREs, Meals Ready to Eat, shelf-stable dinner pouches with entrees such as bean burritos and chicken teriyaki.
Adams himself is a little wistful about all of this. He is not on the list for immediate deployment.
Steady in his manner, Adams, 19, from the Dundalk area of Baltimore County, has had his eye on combat for a long time. While he joined a class of Marines who enlisted because of Sept. 11, he had planned to sign up anyway -- and he never wavered when terrorism changed U.S. war plans entirely.
"It just puts anger into you," said Adams, a graduate of Patapsco High School, where he sang in a range of school choirs and was captain of the wrestling team. "Although anger's not good, it kind of helps you get through."
Now, Staff Sgt. Vincent DiVincenzo, one of his superiors, mentions that Adams may not deploy for Iraq in the first wave of troops. Adams tries not to reveal his disappointment. His thinking has been: "I want to see as much action as I can."
DiVincenzo tells him: It could still happen. "The names are changing all the time."
Adams nods his head, heartened. They are standing in a fenced field that everyone calls "the bomb dump," where warheads are created for helicopters such as the Cobra, which congregate noisily on a nearby flight line.
This is where Adams hopes to land what he believes is a better ordnance job -- closer to the action. In the best of all cases, he thinks, he might do this in Iraq. "It's definitely dangerous," he said, "but it's something I want to do."
Running Into Trouble
In the rolling fields and cactus-studded hills of Camp Pendleton, not far from its 18 miles of Pacific coastline, Plaut's battalion spent three December days training in a city under fire, or at least the $10 million simulation of one -- 31 buildings set up like a town, built for this purpose, where Marines learn the art of clearing rooms and counter-sniping and urban patrol.
This is practice for what is called urban warfare, among the most difficult forms of action -- with too many hiding places for the enemy and too many civilians in the mix.
continued..