Commandant visits Marines, fire evacuees
By Gidget Fuentes - Staff writer
Posted : Tuesday Oct 30, 2007 21:28:25 EDT

CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. - Before weekend liberty was sounded, the top Marine stopped by San Mateo, an isolated infantry camp that last week became a temporary evacuee site for families and fellow leathernecks after two wildfires blazed across parts of Camp Pendleton for most of the week.

A faint hint of smoke hung in the ocean-cooled air at San Mateo as several hundred Marines watched Gen. James Conway on Friday afternoon step from a Huey helicopter across the 5th Marines Regiment's parade deck.

Conway, joined by the top enlisted Marine, Sgt. Maj. Carlton Kent, motioned for the desert camouflage-clad men to gather around him. The commandant had traveled from the East Coast, and Kent from Texas where he had visited wounded Marines at the military's burn center.

"Thank you," Conway told the crowd, which included about 100 family members and California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection officials. "You made us proud."

"This was the center of national, arguably international, attention throughout the past week," he said, noting that throughout his recent travels people asked him, "How are we doing at Camp Pendleton?"

As a dozen sizeable wildfires burned across San Diego County last week, forcing the evacuations of more than a half-million homes, several fires flared up on the 198-square-mile training base in the county's northwestern section. The Rice fire, which sparked near the town of Fallbrook, just southeast of the base, prompted the base to issue precautionary warnings for residents of four southeastern housing areas to evacuate.

The largest fire on base, called the Horno fire, began last Tuesday, threatening Camp Horno - home to 1st Marines - and the nearby School of Infantry and Staff NCO Academy. It prompted base officials to evacuate those areas to the safer confines of Camp San Mateo. But the Horno fire continued to expand, crossing Interstate 5 twice south of the San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant.

Later, into the early-morning hours, the Horno fire crept toward the northern housing areas, reaching the hillsides around San Onofre Peak, across from the San Mateo creek bed. Home to officers, noncommissioned officers and staff NCOs, the hillside San Onofre neighborhoods overlook the freeway and the Pacific Ocean from an area that includes an exchange complex, child development center and elementary school.

About 3 a.m. on Oct. 24, military police warned San Onofre residents to evacuate, and some joined evacuated Marines at San Mateo.

"People were uncertain. They left their homes with a fire coming," said Lt. Col. Bob "Ogre" McCarthy, regimental executive officer who became the de facto camp commander. "We welcomed them. We let them know that our house was their house."

San Mateo quickly swelled by 800 temporary residents.

"The chow hall extended its hours. The PX extended its hours. It was a collaborative effort," said 1st Lt. Lawton King, a 5th Marines spokesman.

And when the evacuated families and their fellow Marines arrived, leathernecks with 5th Marines - many of them small-unit leaders - got working around the camp, coordinating places to accommodate the evacuees, get them fed and keeping them busy. Marines played with the kids, and asphalt lots became small skateboarding parks. "It was an adventure for the children," McCarthy said.

Ironically, that week, 5th Marines was in the throes of a predeployment command field exercise. When word of the wildfires came, McCarthy said, the staff at the regimental operations center shifted their attention to the fires and to what became a local humanitarian mission.

"It was Marines and sailors taking care of Americans, and they did a great job," McCarthy said. "You're not used to going into your own community."

The unexpected mission gave junior Marines and NCOs the chance to step up to the plate in true fashion with the Corps' "strategic corporal" philosophy, said King, noting, "Decision-making had to be pushed down, it had to be decentralized."

Ellie