March 25, 2008

Outside the wire, convoys find ‘quiet’ duty

By ERIC TALMADGE
Associated Press writer

     AL-ASAD AIR BASE, Iraq — It’s four in the morning and the convoy is staged and ready to roll. Today’s run has 70 vehicles — 50 trucks loaded with food, water and supplies and 20 military escorts, guns mounted and turrets manned.
     When it hits the road, the convoy will sprawl six miles long.
     The course ahead is a 70-mile stretch of desert highway through the oasis hamlet of Baghdadi and out to Haditha Dam, where the Euphrates River meets Lake Qadisiya.
     The dam, on the outskirts of a dusty city by the same name of about 78,000, is Iraq’s second-largest source of hydroelectricity, and the U.S. Marines’ Combat Logistics Battalion 4 — CLB 4 — has been protecting its lifelines for the past seven months.
     Supply routes vary, but today’s will be primarily along Bronze, which is a relief to everyone. Bronze is smoother, and in the back of the Marines’ new armored vehicle, the much-delayed MRAP, that means a lot less bouncing around.
     More important, Bronze is calm.
     Though they discover caches every few weeks, the battalion, which deployed to Iraq last summer from the Japanese island of Okinawa, has only been “hit” on three convoys.
     In one, an improvised explosive device was run over by the first vehicle, a mineroller. The mineroller, which looks something like a thresher, was demolished. Though the driver was unhurt, the gunner in the next vehicle took a burst of shrapnel to his face and throat.
     But he was back out on a convoy the next day.
     To date, no one in the battalion has been killed by IEDs. The only death on a convoy since CLB 4 got here was a combat photographer who was shooting a fuel tanker that had careered off the road in an accident. It exploded, and the photographer was enveloped in the flames.
     “Routine” is how people describe the convoys now.
     And “quiet.”
     Anbar province, which stretches to the Saudi Arabian, Jordanian and Syrian borders west of Baghdad, had been the heart of the Sunni insurgency and a bastion of al-Qaida in Iraq. But Sunni tribal leaders who were fighting the Americans began in late 2006 to turn on al-Qaida, fed up with its brutality and austere brand of Islam.
     Now the province is one of the safest in Iraq. The troops’ mission is to keep it that way.
     “We must be doing something right,” said Cpl. Colbert Rianda, of Chico, Calif.      “You can see the change.”