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thedrifter
04-02-03, 06:15 AM
April 01, 2003

Echo Company can’t wait to depart cesspool bivouac

By Doug Mellgren
Associated Press



NASIRIYAH, Iraq — This place stinks.
The latest stopping point for the men of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit’s Echo Company amounted to a cesspool strewn with garbage and swarming with flies in the desert heat.

“The bog of eternal stench,” said Lance Cpl. Robert Duncan, 22, of Mishawaka, Ind., whose fighting position on the outskirts of Nasiriyah was closest to a stinking sewer pit that a bulldozer had covered over with dirt to try to reduce the smell and the health hazard.

These Marines are used to hard living. It has been two weeks since they have seen the inside of a tent; they have been sleeping in the sand without their sleeping bags most of the time. Showers and fresh food are a distant memory, and they have been wearing hot and now dirty chemical and biological protection suits for almost two weeks straight. They do not even have latrines.

But the stretch of desert they were ordered to stop in on Monday was below even their low exceptions.

“This is hell. Saddam is the devil, and the flies are his little minions,” said Cpl. Jerod Elder, 21 of Temecula, Calif.

He went after the flies with a fly swatter made from a piece of cardboard and a stick.

Even though the Marines of the 1st Platoon have barely fired a shot in the past week, their “Doc” — Navy Hospitalman Rashon Kyle, 31, of Long Beach, Calif. — said this may be “the most dangerous place in Iraq” because of the risk of disease from the sewage and trash.

“They want people to eat in this?” he asked, walking up and down the lines to remind troops again and again that they must clean their hands all the time. He worried about dysentery and other diseases.

Echo Company is arrayed along sand berms facing the yet-to-be-controlled city of Nasiriyah in southern Iraq. Their lines are strewn with refuse left from the derelict buildings nearby, as well as from an open sewer trench. There are broken bottles, old cans, shoes, paper, metal scraps, and packs of stray dogs that start baying with every huge explosion — usually caused by U.S. demolition crews destroying Iraqi weapons caches.

Sgt. Jeff Seabaugh, 23, of Colorado Springs, Colo., said the buildings look like something that might have stood empty in the United States for 20 years, “but here they were probably lived in a few weeks ago. The sanitary conditions are appalling.”

The men of Echo Company arrived in Nasiriyah after a long haul in their tracked vehicles from a secret Marine base in southern Iraq. Walking in long lines, they cleared acres of desert, checking bunkers and buildings, without meeting any resistance.

They cleared a vast Iraqi military base, one of many in the area, that appeared to have been so recently abandoned that looters had just begun to empty it.

There was a huge portrait of Saddam Hussein in military uniform at the entry gate, as well as inside. A wall mural depicts a nearly naked man draped in an Iraqi flag, defeating another man using a U.S. flag as a cap. Another shows the American flag in the dirt, with footprints on it.

In reality, it was a large Iraqi flag that was left in the dirt until a Marine picked it up as a souvenir. There were abandoned gas masks, boots, clothing and cots in the base streets, and Seabaugh said the Marines found a cache of gas masks, old rifles, ammunition, military manuals, anti-aircraft guns and rocket-propelled grenades.

The men of Echo Company joked that to cope with the stink, they might just don their gas masks.

A small crowd of Marines watched in amusement about 40 flies gathered on a stain on the pants leg of Cpl. Clint Bagley, 21, of Shreveport, La. “Heat. Mosquitoes. Sandstorms. Rain, and now we have garbage,” he said.

Echo Company has been used to moving almost every day. On Monday, the men seemed more than eager to get going.

“I’d rather be anywhere else. I’d rather be alone in the city (of still-dangerous Nasiriyah) with my M-16,” said Lance Cpl. Garrett Amerine, 22, of Laguna Niguel, Calif.

The place they most want to be, Seabaugh said, is home.

“But to get there,” he said, “we have to go through Iraq.”


Sempers,

Roger