April 26, 2004

By Margaret Lillard
Associated Press

ABOARD THE USS SAIPAN — In the faint, greenish glow of a few small landing lights, a CH-46 helicopter settles on deck. The scream of its engine pierces through earplugs and a headset; the amber light on 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, who this late evening are debriefing after their own flights or relaxing in bed.

A year ago, some of these Marines were leading the United States’ charge into Iraq. Some wear tattoos that feature the numbers 18 and “032303” — the date their Task Force Tarawa lost 18 Marines in fighting around Nasiriyah.

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

For Sgt. Daniel Shaw, it’s a chance to size up — and toughen up — some of the new guys.

“There’s a bunch of crybabies — not all of them,” says Shaw, who at 24 already is a veteran of nearly seven years in the Marines. “Some guys complain a lot.”

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

This nine-day exercise 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.

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.

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.

“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?”

This year, the training exercises include specific language and cultural instruction about Iraq and Afghanistan.

But the goal is the same now as a year ago, and in every year before that: to teach each member of the MEU the ability to cope with the worst, whatever that may be.

“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.”