Everyone pulls guard duty

[thedrifter]

03/01/2003
Everyone pulls guard duty
By PETER WILLIAMS
FREEDOM ENC
CAMP FOX, Kuwait ? The saying is ?Every Marine is a rifleman.?



At Camp Fox it could be ?Every Marine does security.?



A lot of Marines who have been trained as cooks or clerks find themselves manning a guard post. They include Mike Hassler from Camp Lejeune.



Hassler joined the Marine Corps hoping to become an air traffic controller, but when that didn?t work out he was trained in legal.



On Friday evening he was manning the guard post at Headquarters and Support Battalion at this base in the desert near the border with Iraq.



He was cleaning sand out of the hand-cranked siren used to warn of gas attacks.



A guard post here is something you stand in. There?s no sitting. A sandbag and wood frame about the size of a phone booth is about all the protection from the elements that can be found.



There are many levels of security across Camp Fox. The first is a manned guard tower at the entrance to the base.



On Friday Hassler was manning his post with Lance Cpl. Louis Guthrie from Tampa, Fla.



The cloth cover over Hassler?s helmet has ?Camel Stalker? written on the front with a black marker. The words ?Mess with the best, die like the rest? are written on the back.



?I made it up on the plane ride over,? the Lexington, S.C., native said.



Guard posts are manned 24 hours a day, with teams rotating six hours on and six hours off.



But even when they are off duty they are on, because they can be called out of the rack to supplement guards on the outer perimeter.



Some of it can be boring, like making sure vehicles that enter the compound have a ground guide ? someone to walk in front of them for safety. But all of the guard duty is critical in this country where once in a while Marines still get shot at.



?The best thing about the Marines is making new friends, going around the world,? Hassler said. ?This is my first time overseas, but I have been to Rhode Island and Florida so I got to travel up and down the East Coast.



?It kind of worked out because now I am back at Lejeune and closer to home.?



Sempers,

Roger