thedrifter
12-01-02, 09:16 AM
For Enlistees, Boot Camp Lessons Give Way to Battle Against Terror
By Donna St. George
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 1, 2002; Page A01
ZAMBOANGA CITY, Philippines – The road is crowded and tropical-hot. Bumping forward on a Humvee loaded with Marines, Chris Funk grips his M-16, muzzle pointed out toward the street. His blue eyes are locked on the world before him.
He sees shanty houses with rusted tin roofs and sidewalk stalls with metal pots of food. The city is Third World poor, it is steamy, it is jumbled -- a chaos of jitneys in motion, horns blaring, roosters crowing, people milling, foreign dialects.
Everywhere, eyes turn toward the Humvee, toward him.
Funk returns a steady gaze.
His sunburned face is sober, flat, all boyishness hardened by his four-pound Kevlar helmet with combat fringe. He scans the movements in the street, aware of the loaded weapon in his hand and the Marines beside him with assault rifles and machine guns.
They do not expect a firefight just now, on a hot Saturday afternoon, as they patrol near an airfield. But then, they are in a war against terrorism, and the rule is that there is no rule. Bad things happen. They happen with no warning, anywhere at all, the sinister mingled with the mundane and the ordinary.
They have happened here in the southern Philippines. Bombs have exploded near churches and restaurants. Hostages have been taken -- some beheaded. The brutality of late has come mostly from the Muslim extremist group Abu Sayyaf, which has been linked to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda.
Funk does not take his eyes off the street. He has been in the Philippines for two months -- a private first class, in his first experience of war -- and the longer he has been here, the more real the danger has seemed.
He is 20 years old, a lanky kid from the Baltimore suburbs who grew up on soccer games and Sunday Mass and family vacations, the son of a State Farm insurance agent and a preschool aide. He had a job installing siding on houses when Sept. 11, 2001, reordered his choices. "I want to be out doing something," he had thought.
Now he is halfway around the globe, among the first in his boot camp class to be deployed in the U.S.-led fight against terror. With him are Michael Garey, Brad Thomas and Jonah Harper, all part of the 3rd Marines, paths drawn together by a singular American horror that history would mark as a turning point.
The four are part of a generation that has come up through boot camp and training schools since Sept. 11 and who are now wondering whether they will join the war on terrorism or head to Iraq.
In Zamboanga City, Funk and the others find a first and early taste of life in a hostile zone. This is not the war of battlefields and tanks they have seen in movies. But at times the tension, they think, must be much the same.
Fresh Faces, New Fight
The war on terrorism is not the soldier's war of old. Beyond the bombing campaigns and cave-searching missions of Afghanistan, it has played out quietly, in obscure places, dramatic moments often unchronicled.
Unlike many large conflicts of the last century, this has been a war experienced by the few, not the many. It is combat in the shadows, much of it grinding and anonymous -- even as President Bush proclaimed two weeks ago that it was advancing and vowed to "keep America safe" by going after terrorists "where they plan and hide."
But over the past 13 months, few lasting public images have emerged from distant battlegrounds like the Philippines, where the U.S. role has been limited, and so when Chris Funk and several other Sept. 11 Marines found themselves deployed, they knew only that this war would be different.
They did not know exactly how.
This, they would see slowly unfold over time.
"People think 'Thin Red Line' or all-out war, the trenches or something," said Garey, two months into his deployment with Funk in Zamboanga. "This is a new age of war. This is a kind of war for the time it is."
The Long Calm
In August, when he stepped off a C-130 in Zamboanga, Funk was immediately alert for danger. Until recently, he had not heard of this tropical outpost 500 miles south of Manila and he knew little at all about the Philippines.
Now he knew about an enemy. He knew about Abu Sayyaf.
Since January, as many as 1,200 U.S. troops had been based in the Philippines for an evolving mission to combat terrorism -- part military assistance, part humanitarian aid -- and prevent the island nation from becoming a haven for al Qaeda members on the run.
Funk's job as a Marine was infantry, but U.S. troops were not allowed in direct combat in the Philippines. Special Forces acted as advisers for the Philippine military. Funk's unit was responsible for security.
In the early weeks, Funk found this meant long days at Edwin Andrews Air Base, a place with coconut trees and farm animals and barefoot children, along with the usual runways and low-rise barracks.
For 12 hours at a time, Funk watched and waited for danger from a Humvee parked on a flight line where U.S. aircraft landed and took off. Alternating with another Marine in the turret, Funk manned an 84-pound machine gun pointed toward the airport perimeter.
On occasion, a C-130 would land with supplies. Then nothing. Hours passed. Breezes came and went. The sun went down; the sun rose. The heat persisted. Maybe another plane landed or left, maybe not.
On a remote Pacific island, with mosquitoes and malaria and soaking downpours, they conjured images of Baltimore and Texas and New York. They remembered their jobs before enlistment. The sports they played. The girls they dated. The wonder of cheese steaks and McDonald's hamburgers.
There were times when they stared at the horizon with admiration, watching the Army's Black Hawk helicopters swoop by and touch down, mighty rotors swirling overhead.
The choppers seemed to suggest action, places where more was happening.
They wondered whether the choppers were bound for Basilan, an island just south that had been an Abu Sayyaf stronghold, with a history of combat and hostages.
In Zamboanga, for a time, this seemed remarkably far away.
On Oct. 2, part of the Marine unit prepared to head home. The men packed their weapons into a shipping crate. They imagined homecomings with wives and girlfriends and children.
The Sudden Storm
The night of Oct. 2, while Chris Funk was on the flight line, one of his sometime duty partners, Brad Thomas, had orders to be an armed escort for military contractors making a run to an army base a few miles away.
Just before 7:30 p.m., Thomas was on his way back from the run. He looked out the window as his van passed a block of sidewalk stalls and shops. There was a tailor who made military uniforms and a cafe that specialized in beefsteak and a butcher who displayed meat on large, silver hooks.
He had been here before, and it seemed an ordinary day.
At 27, Thomas was older than Funk and had enlisted for one reason only: Sept. 11. On that day, he had a fiancee and a job as a manager of a steakhouse in Houston. He had been home, with a day off, in his apartment.
Horrified, he had sat for hours, transfixed by the television. That night, he and his buddies stood in a parking lot after their regular softball game, listening to a radio broadcast of Bush's speech.
For three weeks, Thomas rethought his life choices. He prayed to God.
By October, he was in a recruiting office, asking for infantry.
Now in Zamboanga, Thomas tried to keep his mind on the bigger picture. It was true that the work could get tedious, not just guard duty but the endless training that was the life of a Marine -- and it was truer still that he missed his fiancee, whose photo he hung near his bed.
Still, Thomas considered himself old enough to see that this was necessary, important.
That night, Thomas finished his duty with the military contractors before 8, then returned to the barracks and joined a group of Marines in a small room with a television and a giant American flag, near the dormitory of bunk beds where they all slept. The movie of the night -- one of the "Rambos" -- was all muscle and action.
At 8:30, a call came in for the commander, Maj. Joseph T. McCloud.
In a matter of seconds, someone ran into the television room.
There had been a bombing.
Thomas ran for his gear, thinking it must be another drill.
Within minutes, it was clear this was the real thing. The casualties, Thomas learned, included two U.S. soldiers who were sitting at the cafe he had passed in the van an hour earlier. "I was just there," he thought.
Now the cafe was blown apart. So were adjoining shops. Four people were killed in the chaos. More than 20 were injured, including another U.S. soldier.
Thomas and other Marines went out to stand watch on a military base where the soldiers had been taken.
Then Thomas was in a van again.
Now the body of the slain U.S. soldier lay beside him.
Just hours before, the soldier had been all gusto and future, a Green Beret commando, part of the U.S. military elite: Sgt. 1st Class Mark W. Jackson. He had stopped for dinner with a fellow soldier at a cafe where members of his unit had grown close to the mom-and-pop owners.
That particular night, a homemade nail bomb had been planted nearby on a parked motorcycle. "This man eating dinner lost his life," Thomas thought.
The soldier's body would be returned to the United States in a flag-draped coffin, flown on a military plane like those that he and other Marines guarded every day.
In the dark of the van, the loss felt personal, though Thomas had never known his slain comrade. This was, he would come to decide, the closest he had ever felt to Sept. 11. "I wasn't in New York when it happened," he reflected, "but now I've seen it."
continued........
By Donna St. George
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 1, 2002; Page A01
ZAMBOANGA CITY, Philippines – The road is crowded and tropical-hot. Bumping forward on a Humvee loaded with Marines, Chris Funk grips his M-16, muzzle pointed out toward the street. His blue eyes are locked on the world before him.
He sees shanty houses with rusted tin roofs and sidewalk stalls with metal pots of food. The city is Third World poor, it is steamy, it is jumbled -- a chaos of jitneys in motion, horns blaring, roosters crowing, people milling, foreign dialects.
Everywhere, eyes turn toward the Humvee, toward him.
Funk returns a steady gaze.
His sunburned face is sober, flat, all boyishness hardened by his four-pound Kevlar helmet with combat fringe. He scans the movements in the street, aware of the loaded weapon in his hand and the Marines beside him with assault rifles and machine guns.
They do not expect a firefight just now, on a hot Saturday afternoon, as they patrol near an airfield. But then, they are in a war against terrorism, and the rule is that there is no rule. Bad things happen. They happen with no warning, anywhere at all, the sinister mingled with the mundane and the ordinary.
They have happened here in the southern Philippines. Bombs have exploded near churches and restaurants. Hostages have been taken -- some beheaded. The brutality of late has come mostly from the Muslim extremist group Abu Sayyaf, which has been linked to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda.
Funk does not take his eyes off the street. He has been in the Philippines for two months -- a private first class, in his first experience of war -- and the longer he has been here, the more real the danger has seemed.
He is 20 years old, a lanky kid from the Baltimore suburbs who grew up on soccer games and Sunday Mass and family vacations, the son of a State Farm insurance agent and a preschool aide. He had a job installing siding on houses when Sept. 11, 2001, reordered his choices. "I want to be out doing something," he had thought.
Now he is halfway around the globe, among the first in his boot camp class to be deployed in the U.S.-led fight against terror. With him are Michael Garey, Brad Thomas and Jonah Harper, all part of the 3rd Marines, paths drawn together by a singular American horror that history would mark as a turning point.
The four are part of a generation that has come up through boot camp and training schools since Sept. 11 and who are now wondering whether they will join the war on terrorism or head to Iraq.
In Zamboanga City, Funk and the others find a first and early taste of life in a hostile zone. This is not the war of battlefields and tanks they have seen in movies. But at times the tension, they think, must be much the same.
Fresh Faces, New Fight
The war on terrorism is not the soldier's war of old. Beyond the bombing campaigns and cave-searching missions of Afghanistan, it has played out quietly, in obscure places, dramatic moments often unchronicled.
Unlike many large conflicts of the last century, this has been a war experienced by the few, not the many. It is combat in the shadows, much of it grinding and anonymous -- even as President Bush proclaimed two weeks ago that it was advancing and vowed to "keep America safe" by going after terrorists "where they plan and hide."
But over the past 13 months, few lasting public images have emerged from distant battlegrounds like the Philippines, where the U.S. role has been limited, and so when Chris Funk and several other Sept. 11 Marines found themselves deployed, they knew only that this war would be different.
They did not know exactly how.
This, they would see slowly unfold over time.
"People think 'Thin Red Line' or all-out war, the trenches or something," said Garey, two months into his deployment with Funk in Zamboanga. "This is a new age of war. This is a kind of war for the time it is."
The Long Calm
In August, when he stepped off a C-130 in Zamboanga, Funk was immediately alert for danger. Until recently, he had not heard of this tropical outpost 500 miles south of Manila and he knew little at all about the Philippines.
Now he knew about an enemy. He knew about Abu Sayyaf.
Since January, as many as 1,200 U.S. troops had been based in the Philippines for an evolving mission to combat terrorism -- part military assistance, part humanitarian aid -- and prevent the island nation from becoming a haven for al Qaeda members on the run.
Funk's job as a Marine was infantry, but U.S. troops were not allowed in direct combat in the Philippines. Special Forces acted as advisers for the Philippine military. Funk's unit was responsible for security.
In the early weeks, Funk found this meant long days at Edwin Andrews Air Base, a place with coconut trees and farm animals and barefoot children, along with the usual runways and low-rise barracks.
For 12 hours at a time, Funk watched and waited for danger from a Humvee parked on a flight line where U.S. aircraft landed and took off. Alternating with another Marine in the turret, Funk manned an 84-pound machine gun pointed toward the airport perimeter.
On occasion, a C-130 would land with supplies. Then nothing. Hours passed. Breezes came and went. The sun went down; the sun rose. The heat persisted. Maybe another plane landed or left, maybe not.
On a remote Pacific island, with mosquitoes and malaria and soaking downpours, they conjured images of Baltimore and Texas and New York. They remembered their jobs before enlistment. The sports they played. The girls they dated. The wonder of cheese steaks and McDonald's hamburgers.
There were times when they stared at the horizon with admiration, watching the Army's Black Hawk helicopters swoop by and touch down, mighty rotors swirling overhead.
The choppers seemed to suggest action, places where more was happening.
They wondered whether the choppers were bound for Basilan, an island just south that had been an Abu Sayyaf stronghold, with a history of combat and hostages.
In Zamboanga, for a time, this seemed remarkably far away.
On Oct. 2, part of the Marine unit prepared to head home. The men packed their weapons into a shipping crate. They imagined homecomings with wives and girlfriends and children.
The Sudden Storm
The night of Oct. 2, while Chris Funk was on the flight line, one of his sometime duty partners, Brad Thomas, had orders to be an armed escort for military contractors making a run to an army base a few miles away.
Just before 7:30 p.m., Thomas was on his way back from the run. He looked out the window as his van passed a block of sidewalk stalls and shops. There was a tailor who made military uniforms and a cafe that specialized in beefsteak and a butcher who displayed meat on large, silver hooks.
He had been here before, and it seemed an ordinary day.
At 27, Thomas was older than Funk and had enlisted for one reason only: Sept. 11. On that day, he had a fiancee and a job as a manager of a steakhouse in Houston. He had been home, with a day off, in his apartment.
Horrified, he had sat for hours, transfixed by the television. That night, he and his buddies stood in a parking lot after their regular softball game, listening to a radio broadcast of Bush's speech.
For three weeks, Thomas rethought his life choices. He prayed to God.
By October, he was in a recruiting office, asking for infantry.
Now in Zamboanga, Thomas tried to keep his mind on the bigger picture. It was true that the work could get tedious, not just guard duty but the endless training that was the life of a Marine -- and it was truer still that he missed his fiancee, whose photo he hung near his bed.
Still, Thomas considered himself old enough to see that this was necessary, important.
That night, Thomas finished his duty with the military contractors before 8, then returned to the barracks and joined a group of Marines in a small room with a television and a giant American flag, near the dormitory of bunk beds where they all slept. The movie of the night -- one of the "Rambos" -- was all muscle and action.
At 8:30, a call came in for the commander, Maj. Joseph T. McCloud.
In a matter of seconds, someone ran into the television room.
There had been a bombing.
Thomas ran for his gear, thinking it must be another drill.
Within minutes, it was clear this was the real thing. The casualties, Thomas learned, included two U.S. soldiers who were sitting at the cafe he had passed in the van an hour earlier. "I was just there," he thought.
Now the cafe was blown apart. So were adjoining shops. Four people were killed in the chaos. More than 20 were injured, including another U.S. soldier.
Thomas and other Marines went out to stand watch on a military base where the soldiers had been taken.
Then Thomas was in a van again.
Now the body of the slain U.S. soldier lay beside him.
Just hours before, the soldier had been all gusto and future, a Green Beret commando, part of the U.S. military elite: Sgt. 1st Class Mark W. Jackson. He had stopped for dinner with a fellow soldier at a cafe where members of his unit had grown close to the mom-and-pop owners.
That particular night, a homemade nail bomb had been planted nearby on a parked motorcycle. "This man eating dinner lost his life," Thomas thought.
The soldier's body would be returned to the United States in a flag-draped coffin, flown on a military plane like those that he and other Marines guarded every day.
In the dark of the van, the loss felt personal, though Thomas had never known his slain comrade. This was, he would come to decide, the closest he had ever felt to Sept. 11. "I wasn't in New York when it happened," he reflected, "but now I've seen it."
continued........