Breaching The Berm

Trip Start Jan 27, 2003
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Trip End Sep 29, 2003


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Flag of Kuwait  ,
Friday, March 21, 2003

We arrived late at night and took a bus into the middle of the desert to Camp Matilda, our new home for the next few months. Here we prepped for the possibility of war. There was still no confirmation whether there would be one. During the day we would train, runs through the desert, pullups, etc. We held classes on techniques for desert warfare. I was put in charge of the motor pool. From dawn till dusk I worked on preparing the vehicles. We only had two armored humvees and they were the only ones with turrets for the machine guns so I used cargo straps and plywood to fix the guns on the roof of softback vehicles. I took my doors off and fixed chains to the front. My commanding officer just shook his head and said it would never work so we took it to the firing range. The machine gun was able to fire without shaking the vehicle apart so we modified the rest of the vehicles the same way.

Now here are a few examples of what bored marines do. Stupid things. Just in our camp we had numbers of pre-war casualties. There were a couple of guys who decided to hit a .50 caliber round with a hammer. He lost his hand. One of our own guys stabbed himself in the head while trying to open his food. Just a cut though. Standing in line for chow, we'd hear a bang when someone's weapon went off accidently. A tank ran someone over in the middle of the night. Stupid stuff.

The sandstorms were horrendous. At times it became almost dangerous to out at night. Even with a flashlight you couldn't see more than a few feet. The wind would carry plywood into the air.

We had gas attack drills every few hours. A sentry would run from tent to tent and yell "gas!" We'd have to throw on our gas masks and wait in our tents until the all clear came. Lying in a pool of sweat with a gas mask on for a half hour was not much fun at all. Two of our friends from 3/23 were at a different camp when Saddam launched those two chinese rockets. One hit close enough that it blew them against the side of a bus and shattered all the windows.

As the probability of war neared, we staged further and further north along the Iraq border. Our commanding officer wasn't the brightest. He got lost and nearly drove into Iraq, starting the invasion early. Fortunately U.N. personnel stopped him. My team met up with some British engineers for prepping the berm, the giant dirt wall, for breaching. That night, Safwan hill was turned into a parking lot. We watched with through our nightvision goggles, standing on our vehicles. It was quite the light show. The British commander came over and asked if he could hang out with us. Apparently his troops were hiding under their vehicles.
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