For Marine unit, downtime means training for next mission

[thedrifter]

For Marine unit, downtime means training for next mission


By MARGARET LILLARD
Associated Press Writer

ABOARD THE USS SAIPAN - In the faint, greenish glow of a few small landing lights, a CH-46 helicopter settles on deck. Its engine's scream pierces through earplugs and a headset; the amber light on the end of its front rotor whips through the night like a lariat.

Inside, Marine 1st Lt. Marcia Sandrew peers through night vision goggles for about a minute until she gets the go-ahead to lift off into the inky sky. She has been making "bounces" _ touch-and-go landings _ through the day and evening to earn her rating as a pilot qualified to land on aircraft carriers.

Below decks here and on six other ships are 4,200 members of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit. Some 3,000 are sailors; the rest are Marines _ pilots, ground troops and officers who on this late evening are debriefing after their own flights, relaxing or in bed.

A year ago, some of these Marines were part of Task Force Tarawa, leading the United States' charge into Iraq. Some wear tattoos that feature the numbers 18 and "032303" _ the date the task force lost 18 Marines, half of them from Lejeune, in fighting around Nasiriyah.

Now those veterans are passing along the hard lessons learned then to a new crop of troops, as the unit prepares to deploy for another six-month tour in August.

They will relieve the 22nd MEU, which is now in Afghanistan. Where the 24th will be sent this summer is anyone's guess.

In the meantime, the Marines train. This nine-day exercise, to familiarize troops with shipboard life and shore duties, was the second of four planned training exercises and ended shortly before Easter. In May, members of the MEU will practice urban warfare around Morgantown, W.Va.

Over the nine days, pilots practiced carrier takeoffs and landings. Marine and Navy officers on the Saipan ran "rapid response" drills, talking through plans for handling hypothetical wartime situations. Marines who had never been aboard ship had time to get used to the tight spaces and maze-like corridors of the three vessels _ the Saipan, the Oak Hill and the Trenton _ where they could conceivably spend the entire six-month deployment.

On the morning after Sandrew rehearsed touch-and-gos, about 50 members of the MEU's battalion landing team rode a breadpan-shaped landing craft over about seven miles of choppy water from the ship to Camp Lejeune's Onslow Beach, where they practiced moving vehicles and heavy machinery.

For Sgt. Daniel Shaw, who handled security for the landing team, it was a chance to size up _ and toughen up _ some of the new guys. At 24, the Greensboro native is already a veteran of nearly seven years in the Marines, including duty in Albania in 1998 during a prior MEU deployment and last year's action in Iraq.

"There's a bunch of crybabies _ not all of them," Shaw said as Marines lounged near trucks and Humvees, playing cards and napping at the end of a day of training ashore. "I'm not a badass or anything, but I know when I deserve something and I don't deserve something. Some guys complain a lot."

"They think they're coming into something easy, everyone can be a Marine," Lance Cpl. Brandon Autin, another Task Force Tarawa veteran from New Iberia, La., chimed in. "When they actually get into it and see how hard it is, the things we go through, they get scared out of it."

As a small squad darted past, making a show of capturing menacing "civilians", Shaw said he worries the new troops may not appreciate the importance of training's most trivial aspects.

Take digging a fighting hole _ a tedious chore that seems kind of pointless on a sunny spring day in North Carolina.

"But when mortar rounds and artillery start coming in on you, you're going to start digging a hole with your fingers or whatever you've got," Shaw said. "It's a helpless feeling."

And lives depend on doing it right.

"If you're digging a hole, you can't have both guys digging. You've got to have security the whole time, whatever you're doing," Shaw said. "It's something you can kind of overlook back here, but when you get out there, somebody's got to be looking out for you."

It's that sense of reality _ of urgency _ that the MEU's commander, Col. Ron Johnson of Duxbury, Mass., feels is the critical change in this year's training.

Johnson, who was operations officer for Task Force Tarawa, explained that pre-deployment training is always based on the assumption that the troops will see combat, so there's been little substantial change in the instruction.

What's different now is the attitudes, the awareness of just how good the chances are that the training will be put to its full use.

"There's a purpose to it now. Everyone feels it now," he said. "If you go to biology class, how much do you pay attention if it's just a normal biology class? But if you know you're going to be a doctor and going to operate in a couple of days or months or years, would you pay more attention?"

Shaw had an eager audience in Cpl. Andrew Olson, who delayed his planned departure from the Corps to transfer into the MEU for a shot at a deployment.

Olson has spent six years in the Corps, most in a clerical job arranging the moves of personnel and their families.

"I have no experience. I hear stories (about being deployed) and I'd like to know. It'll help me understand better what's going on," the Chewela, Wash., native said. "It worries me, but if I have to do it I'll do it. I told my family, this is why I moved out here, this is why I stayed in for another year."

"Sea stories" is the name for these types of real-life lessons, according to Sandrew, a native of Vermillion, Ohio.

"We're very fortunate _ I just checked into the squadron when it was getting back from Iraq, so I've known nothing but instructors who were combat qualified," she said.

The night landings that Sandrew and other helicopter pilots practiced involved trying to set down using instruments and night vision equipment _ a tough task on the small, pitching deck of the Saipan.

But on other training flights between now and deployment, they will be faced with "tactical scenarios" _ a hypothetical broken radio or enemy attack, said Capt. Chris Kotlinski, a CH-46 pilot from Bartlett, Ill.

"It's true for all pilots that every time you go out, you learn something new," said Kotlinski, who earned his carrier rating a few nights after Sandrew.

Scenarios are now modeled on a typical global hot spot, such as Iraq, but the basic concept has changed little since Capt. Ryan Shadle, Kotlinski's instructor, prepared for his duty in Iraq last year.

The Harrisburg, Pa., native flew his CH-46 to evacuate casualties and resupply ground troops.

"If anything, (the scenarios) show you how fluid the whole situation was in a lot of things we did," he said.

It's coping with that fluidity that is the goal of the training, Johnson said.

The scenarios of each exercise reflect the likelihood that the MEU will be deployed to the Middle East; this year's training includes specific language and cultural instruction about Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the goal is the same now as a year ago, and before every deployment in every year before that: to teach each member of the MEU how to cope with the worst that can happen _ whatever that may be by the time they sail into the unknown.

"It's not a robotic way where you go from one and one equals two. It's kind of like being a cook," Johnson said. "You have a whole bunch of ingredients they give to you. You've got to assemble those ingredients in different amounts, apply them to make the meal you want."

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Ellie