My Journey In The Marine Corps

Gearing Up For Combat

It was mid January in 2003 when the Company I was with, Charlie Compny 6th Engineer Support Battalion, got activated and sent on an unknown mission

So far, all we did know for sure, was that we were going to be headed to Kuwait for an unknown period of time to prepare for a possible attack against Saddam Hussein and the alleged "weapons of mass distruction"..

By this time, early February has rolled around, and I found myself stepping off of an airplane at an airport in Kuwait City, Kuwait. My biggest memory of this moment was how intensly hot it was. The wind was blowing and the temperature, somewhere above 110, reminded me of what it would feel like if someone took a blow drier and blew it on your face.

Information is kept pretty secretive while on deployment, given only on a need to know basis. I'd imagine that would keep people from writing home or making calls on the SAT phone and risking any enemy intercepting critical information to use against us. None the less, our deployment seemed to be off to a slow start.

Our first "mission" was to fill sand bags.. all day.. for many days. Later the reason came clear when we were tasked to start building inground bunkers around our entire base camp. The camp was fairly large, probably about half a square mile, so there were many bunkers that needed to be put in.

The bunkers were to protect us from missile attacks coming from across the border in Iraq. We had heard that the Iraqis had some fairly large scud missiles that they could potentially use to deture us from carrying out an attack. Wait.. attack? Yes, i'm getting there, bare with me.

By now it's around mid March, and things are starting to pick up a bit. Our sand bags aren't quite as important to fill these days, and it's not looking like our bunkers will be put to much use, better safe than sorry! We get word that we will be picking up and moving on in a day or two, but no real news as to whats to happen.

We move to a staging area that is surrounded by things like these, and waited for the sunset.

On this night, March 19th, 2003, we crossed over the Kuwaiti/Iraqi border, and the War on Terror, was officially started.

Our complay, being an engineer company, was tasked with clearing a path from the border 3/4 of the way to Bagdad for a buld fuel company to make its way through behind us. The bulk fuel company was tasked with running a fuel line from the Kuwaiti border, all 60 miles to our end point near Bagdad in order to refuel any and all of the ground vehicles that were involved in the initial attack when the war officially started.

Our mine sweep of this 60 miles moved quick, and was pretty intense. We found an extreme amount of UXO on the ground from the previous war 10 years ago, which we had to blow up, in place, each time we found. Along the way large areas had to be cleared in order to set up pumping stations for the fuel line to operate. All of this was accomplished within less than a day and accomplished without any casualties.

I had been attached to an Explosive Ordinance Disposal(EOD) squad and stayed back to help the bulk fuel company finish sweeping for mines around their pump stations. At this point the fuel company was done the rest of the convoy, so it moved on to its next mission. The convoy made its way to a water purification system set up on a long river called the Saddam Canal. I met back up with my platoon at the water point about 12 hours later. Here we would provide security around the entire water point for the Marines that were involved in the water purificatoin station, which provided the initial clean water to many ground troups during the kick off.

Most of our time was spent building up bunkers to set up our large weapon in that looked out in every direction around the water point. After they were useable, we set up our weapons and maned the stations, along with further building up the bunkers while threats weren't aparent.

It was here at the water point that we heard that Saddam Hussein had lost power of his country and was on the run. Many things happened in between and many after.

This deployment was fairly short, but very meaningful in many ways, especially concerning the ones we lost. Their stories can be viewed on the right.