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thedrifter
04-21-03, 10:35 AM
Apr 21, 11:10 AM EDT

Britain's Royal Marines Leaving Iraq

By PATRICK McDOWELL
Associated Presss Writer

KUWAIT CITY (AP) -- After winning some of the Iraq war's hardest fighting, Britain's Royal Marine Commandos began packing up hovercraft and landing vessels Monday to begin a long journey home.

The departure over the next few weeks of the 2,000 troops of the 3rd Commando Brigade - among the British army's best-trained forces - is quiet proof that the war is over.

Relative stability has come to the British sector in the southern city of Basra, the Faw peninsula and the vital port of Umm Qasr. Reconstruction and peace-building will be left to engineers and civil affairs troops.

Still grimy with sand that just won't wash off, troops of the brigade's 530 Assault Squadron spoke on the docks of a Kuwaiti naval base about what they're looking forward to.

"Carpet under my feet," mused Sgt. Eddie Cochrane, 34, of Plymouth. "No sand. Walking the dogs. Seeing my 1-year-old son, Thomas - he wasn't walking when I left."

Cpl. Phil Smith, 38, of Market Drayton in Shropshire, envisions a beer and plans to "basically chill as much as possible."

"I want to get home to my family, that's the main thing," said Smith, 38, missing his wife and two teenagers. "Then some Italian food, cold weather - and a hot shower. We haven't had a hot shower in three months."

The 3rd Commando Brigade was in the thick of the war at the outset, and eight members died in an American helicopter crash in the first hours.

Other units roared over mud flats in the Faw peninsula with squat, black hovercraft and employed grappling hooks to tear down obstacles of barbed wire and steel girders.

The noisy, low-slung craft moved so fast over the marshland that when they triggered mines, they had usually passed over them before the devices exploded.

The commandos destroyed an Iraqi brigade and caused others - demoralized at the prospect of defeat - to surrender or just disappear, said Lt. Col. Nick Antony, commander of the assault squadron.

"They fought pretty hard for four days, then slacked off when they realized they weren't going to win," said Antony, 38, of Abbott's Ann, Hampshire.

"I think that everybody can be justifiably proud of what they achieved," Antony said.

The brigade's last fatality came 10 days into the war, when President Saddam Hussein's paramilitaries launched a rocket-propelled grenade at a hovercraft in a marsh ambush. The troops are pretty certain that nobody survived the riposte.

"We determined they were positioned behind a mud hut," Cochrane said. Indicating the 7.62 mm machine gun mounted on the front of a hovercraft, he added: "We cut it in half."

The squadron's four hovercraft have been scarred by bullets and shrapnel and generally beaten up by weeks of hard use - and by a 16-hour slog in choppy seas Sunday from Iraq to a naval base south of Kuwait City.

Marines were preparing to load them Monday - along with four drop-ramp landing vessels capable of carrying a Land Rover and four bigger ones that can haul a tank - onto a ship making a six-week trip to Britain.

The soldiers will fly home and the entire brigade should be back home by mid-May to overhaul their gear and get ready to redeploy, wherever, by Aug. 1.

They are as proud of the fighting they didn't do as the engagements they won. Long experience of patrolling the rough streets of Belfast, Northern Ireland, taught British troops that winning hearts and minds means easing up on firepower.

When the commandos entered Umm Qasr, Basra and other southern Iraqi towns, they immediately settled into police-style street patrols and doled out what water they had.

Within hours, local people were warning them of ambushes planned by Saddam loyalists. In one case, a man used hand signals to point out the positions of guerrillas equipped with a grenade launcher and machine guns. The would-be assailants were killed or captured.

The Baath party leadership in Basra was destroyed by a 2,000-pound guided bomb dropped on a house fingered by a local person who said a meeting was being held there, Antony said.

"We couldn't have done what we did without the support of the locals," Antony said. "We're quite used to doing this in Northern Ireland, but this is their back yard. We wouldn't have known who these people were."


Sempers,

Roger