Boston.com / News / Rebuilding Iraq

As goal accomplished, other missions await

By Scott Bernard Nelson, Globe Staff, 4/13/2003

AGHDAD -- The war in Iraq may in one sense be over, but the guerrilla campaign is not, nor is the uncertainty of how to differentiate between friends and foes for the tens of thousands of US military personnel still operating here. The Second Battalion of the 11th Marine Regiment typified the uncertainty yesterday.

The artillery unit reached its "terminal objective" for the war earlier this week, and many of the Marines thought they had accomplished their goal. Around the campsite in an open field in the Saddam City neighborhood of Baghdad, they smoked cigars, played cards, and told jokes, more relaxed than they had been in three weeks.

Yesterday, the reality of an ongoing low-level campaign hit home.

"Basically we have to be ready to do anything," said Mark Dumas, 35, of San Diego. "Just because Saddam's out, doesn't mean we get to go home yet."

What the battalion does get to do next, however, remains an open question.

One company in the battalion, the Echo Gun Battery, left early yesterday morning to join infantry companies of the Fifth Marine regiment in a reconnaisance mission in northern Iraq. The rest of the battalion was told that it might join a similar mission as early as today.

The other possibility, the marines were told, was that they would give up their howitzers and become a rifle company for the rest of their time here. Essentially, they would handle security for an air field in southeastern Baghdad and walk the streets in that part of the city to help bring calm back to Iraq's capital.

"It wouldn't be any more dangerous than being on the streets in some parts of Los Angeles," Captain Paul Noyes, logistics chief of the battalion, told his Marines. "In fact, Los Angeles would be more dangerous."

Whatever their mission, the Marines' prime objective yesterday was speculating about when they would receive weeks' worth of packages that have been held up in Kuwait and when they might get their first showers in a month.

"The longer we're sitting here without a war to fight, the more the guys will focus on quality of life things like that," Noyes said. "At this point, they just want to go home."