Daniel!
Here is an article that was written about Daniel's boat, so if you all want to know what he has been doing, and what it is like for him.
MISSION TO SUMATRA
by DAN BAUM
The marines of Expeditionary Strike Group Five take on the tsunami. Issue of
2005-02-07 Posted 2005-01-31
Rear Admiral Christopher Ames, the commander of Expeditionary Strike Group
Five, learned about the Asian tsunami on December 26th the way most of us
did: from television. He and his strike group-seven Navy and Coast Guard
ships plus a submarine, carrying among them more than two thousand
marines-had just left their home port of San Diego for a six-month
deployment. The group was a couple of days from Guam, where it was scheduled
to stop before heading for the Persian Gulf. The group's marines were the
closest to the disaster scene, so, in anticipation of an order, Ames told
his officers to begin planning to provide help to tsunami victims. "I had a
feeling," he told me, as we talked in his cramped stateroom aboard the
U.S.S. Bonhomme Richard.
Ames is no crusty old salt; at fifty, he has an eager, open manner that
seems more executive than warrior, and a master's degree in public
administration from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. The formal order
came by classified e-mail on December 28th to stop at Guam for supplies and
then "proceed at best speed" to Sri Lanka. "'Proceed at best speed' aren't
words you often hear," Ames said. "We're very fuel conscious. An order like
that is not given without considerable forethought." A few days later, the
group was redirected to Banda Aceh, in Sumatra, the city closest to the
earthquake's epicenter. As they pulled into Guam, trucks loaded with
humanitarian supplies were lined up on the docks "as far as you could see,"
Ames said. He sent a party to the Ace hardware store near the port to buy
just about everything in stock-shovels, lumber, hammers, nails-and within
ten hours the group was under way again.
Expeditionary Strike Group Five was in many ways the perfect response to the
tsunami. No other agency responding to the disaster had anywhere near its
capabilities. The Bonhomme Richard alone would have been a godsend to the
people of Sumatra. Commissioned in 1998 and named for John Paul Jones's
privateer, she was designed to be the Marine Corps's dream boat. Her entire
stern opens to release the high-speed air-cushion landing craft necessary
for the Marines' rare but signature beach assaults. From the outside, she
resembles a small aircraft carrier, though she lacks the catapult for
throwing planes into the air. Instead, her flight deck is given over to six
vertical-lift Harrier jump jets as well as a wide selection of helicopters,
big and small. In addition to being a seaborne platform from which to launch
land assaults, the ship could serve as a floating emergency room and thus
free the Marines of having to treat their wounded in rudimentary and
vulnerable field hospitals. Immediately off the flight deck are three large
triage rooms equipped with X-ray readers, oxygen tanks, a decontamination
chamber, and other medical equipment; a large elevator descends from here to
the hospital belowdecks. Off to the side hangs a discreet blue curtain,
behind which wait twelve stainless-steel morgue drawers. For such a large
ship, the Bonhomme Richard draws shallow-only twenty-six feet-so she can
move close to shore. The Bonhomme Richard and the other ships in
Expeditionary Strike Group Five were carrying twenty-two helicopters; five
landing craft, each with a sixty-ton capacity; desalinators capable of
making unlimited quantities of fresh water; and forty high-riding seven-ton
trucks to master the island's ruined coastal roads. The ships carried
backhoes, bulldozers, generators, portable floodlights, and twenty-two
hundred marines to rebuild bridges, treat the injured, restore electricity,
and provide plenty of healthy young muscle. As the ships approached
Indonesian waters, Ames told a reporter on board that he looked forward to
putting "boots on the ground."
It didn't work out that way. As the American ships approached the Sumatran
coast, they received word that the Indonesians wanted few, if any, Marine
boots on the ground.
I reached the Bonhomme Richard by helicopter on January 8th. The next day, a
huge boxy supply ship, the U.S.N.S. Concord, arrived from Singapore and drew
alongside. The Bonhomme Richard's helicopters roared off the deck and buzzed
around the Concord like flies; in several hours of feverish and noisy
activity, they moved tons of rice, water, and other goods into the Bonhomme
Richard's hold-the kind of oceangoing resupply, independent of a host
nation, envisioned by Sea Power 21. "The heroes are the logisticians," Ames
told me. "Within two weeks of the tsunami, they put out bids to venders, got
the bids, cut the checks, told them where to deliver, collected the goods,
flew them to Singapore, loaded them onto ships, figured out where we'd be,
and met us out here in the middle of the ocean." He paused while the ship's
chaplain came on the intercom with the evening prayer, I Samuel 30:24, which
the chaplain artfully interpreted: "For as his share is who goes down into
the battle, so shall his share be who stays by the supplies: they shall
share alike."
Inactivity is hard on marines. Those on the Bonhomme Richard milled around
the ship's narrow steel halls, hung out in the enlisted mess watching Fox
News and war movies on a big-screen TV, cleaned and recleaned their weapons,
and got on one another's nerves. "It's frustrating-we're good to go,"
Sergeant Arthur Anthony said. Sea duty is uncomfortable. The enlisted mess
is vast, low-ceilinged, and as chaotic as a high-school cafeteria, with lots
of shouting and grab-ass. The din is maddening, and the air suffused with a
heavy, rank odor, like steam-table water left too long. Unlike officers, who
eat off crockery, enlisted sailors and marines are served on sectional
plastic trays. Their salad bar is more extensive than the officers', but
otherwise their food is worse-garlic bread made of hot-dog rolls, thick
squares of pizza beribboned with orange cheese, soggy spaghetti. A lance
corporal said it made him pine for a Jäger Bomb-the herbal liqueur
Jägermeister mixed with Red Bull.
An aircraft carrier is often compared to a floating city, but, with its
stale air, the incessant clang of heavy steel doors, and pasty-faced men in
coveralls threading poorly lit corridors, it feels more like a floating
prison. Nobody is allowed on the flight deck without good reason, so the
only glimpse of the outdoors that most sailors and marines get is from a
vast hangar bay one deck down, and only when the huge elevator
hatches-through which aircraft are pushed onto moving platforms-are left
open to the sea. Many crew members on the Bonhomme Richard see as little of
the sun as they would if they were serving on a submarine. Off-duty officers
wanting a moment's peace can sit in the wardroom, which, though not
luxurious, is at least quiet, but the enlisted people's only refuge from
noise and commotion is their bunk, or "rack"-a slot in a stack of beds ten
feet high, with the bunk above so close that it's impossible to read in bed.
It's a tribute to the allure of the services that so many marines reënlist.
Their discomfort helps explain why they're in such magnificent physical
condition: they burn off bottled-up energy by working out endlessly in the
ship's stuffy but well-equipped gym. As I was passing through one evening,
three marines with superhero physiques were watching American Forces Network
News while running on treadmills. The lawyer for Army Specialist Charles
Graner, who was on trial for abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib, was telling
the camera that forcing prisoners to make a pyramid with their bodies isn't
abuse, because American cheerleaders make pyramids all the time. "They're
not wasting too much time defending this guy if they got him a lawyer that
dumb," one of the treadmilling marines said. "You're going to Leavenworth,
dude."
The ship woke on January 10th to the news that the Marines were finally
going ashore in force. What's more, they were going in the miraculous
vehicle that has replaced the landing craft of yore: the Landing Craft Air
Cushion, or lcac (pronounced "el-kack").The lcac is essentially a gigantic
everglades boat, a platform eighty-eight feet long and forty-four feet wide
that rides on an inflatable rubber skirt, with two twelve-foot fans on the
back for propulsion. It can transport a tank, or a hundred marines, or
twelve Humvees across the waves at more than forty-five m.p.h. and zoom up
onto the sand. The Marines haven't made a landing under significant fire
since Inchon, in 1950, but hitting the beach lies at the core of their
mythology. They train for it endlessly, and organize their Expeditionary
Units around the Battalion Landing Team. As they tell it, only the Marines
can execute this dashing, dangerous maneuver today; it's what sets them
apart.
The Marines differentiate themselves from the Army in other ways, too. They
were the first to adopt strange, digital-camouflage uniforms dotted with
tiny, pixillated squares that make the men and women wearing them look like
icons in a video game. Unlike soldiers, marines don't wear unit patches or
awards on their uniforms. "It's nobody's business," one landing-team major
told me. "The first thing we do when we kill an enemy soldier, if we're
fighting a uniformed enemy, is to go up to the body and read his patches.
You can learn a lot-what units you're up against, what their qualifications
are-and then you know how well fed and equipped those units are. I even take
off my rank in combat. My marines know who I am." The Marine ethic also
dictates that every marine is a rifleman; even cooks and typists are trained
and ready to go into combat at a moment's notice, their rifles always
nearby.
But the order on January 10th was "No weapons." The Indonesians were finally
letting the marines come ashore, but they had to come unarmed. The marines w
ere appalled. "Man, I'll bet this island is crawling with folks who'd love
to kill a marine if they could get the chance," one lance corporal said. A
ripple of hope went through the ship when Fox News reported that shots had
been fired in Banda Aceh, perhaps by the rebels who have been trying for a
quarter of a century to gain independence from Indonesia. Then an American
helicopter rolled over in a rice paddy, leaving its injured crew momentarily
stranded, and the Marine pilots on the Bonhomme Richard began carrying
sidearms-though with the magazines removed. Major Robert Salasko, who is
thirty-six, and is known as Bubba, sat down on January 10th for a breakfast
of six hard-boiled eggs and a sweet roll, as the loudspeaker announced a
random drug screening ("Urinalysis now being held in ship's brig and will
secure at sixteen hundred"). "Going ashore," Salasko boomed happily to Major
Keith Parry. Gloomily stirring his Cream of Wheat, Major Parry, who commands
an élite combat team but had orders to stay aboard and check helicopter
manifests, mumbled, "Don't shoot anybody." Salasko responded, "Can't take my
weapon." He patted the sides of his close-cropped cranium. "Except this."
"That's a hindrance," Parry said.
"You're jealous."
"Got that right."
We passed through the cavernous hangar deck to get to the lcac. Sailors and
marines were scooting about in forklifts to an exquisitely mixed soundtrack
of helicopter engines, beep-beeps of backing vehicles, shouts, ah-ooo-gah
klaxons, and loudspeaker announcements. Everywhere stood pallets loaded with
Gitangkim rice from Thailand, Ice Cool bottled water from Malaysia, and
U.S.-bagged rice labelled "Whole Grain White Rice, Origin: Vietnam."
The torpid sky tore open, as it had been threatening to do all day,
drenching us in a sudden downpour. Howard didn't register the rain. "In the
Navy, we command by negation. I communicate up what I want to do, and my
superiors say, 'Yeah,''Yeah,''Yeah,''Stop!'" She spoke emphatically of
coöperation and respect. "I will tell you this," she said as rain poured off
the brim of her hat. "Everybody down to the lance corporal understood that
this is a Muslim country, and you should have seen them going through the
M.R.E.s"-meals ready to eat-"pulling out all the ones with pork in them."
Finally, we walked back to the lcac and got out of the rain. This time, I
sat in the pilot house. As we backed into the surf, I looked upon sixty-four
thousand pounds of rice and bottled water resting on the beach.
The next evening, I asked Colonel Greenwood, as we sat in his windowless
stateroom, if he'd specifically negotiated permission to use the lcac so
that the Marines could have a televised beach-hitting event. He chuckled and
waved away the question. Then he said, "There are four words we use every
day with Colonel Geerhan," the Indonesian commander at Meulaboh. "'How. Can.
We. Help.' I don't say, 'Why don't you use my trucks?' If I did that, I'd be
putting him on the defensive. The Indonesians definitely want to control the
size of the footprint. It's mutually understood, for example, that everybody
goes home at night. If my marines live in what's left of the town, it's a
burden to the infrastructure." Also, he said, the Indonesians "don't want to
feel like a charity case."
On his coffee table was a copy of Foreign Affairs and several issues of
Harvard's alumni magazine. Greenwood, at forty-nine, has a folksy air but a
sterling pedigree-including stints at the Kennedy School and the National
Security Council-and a chestful of medals that he wasn't wearing. He again
recounted the incident on shore with the Frenchmen, as though France and the
United States had recently been at war, and he emphasized his respect for
the sensibilities of the Indonesians. "The only time Colonel Geerhan
specifically said no was when we were going to bring ashore a ten-man
working party yesterday," he said. "The word we got back was, That might be
excessive. It wasn't that they dislike Americans or marines. The nuance was,
If you can do it with less people, we'd appreciate it." He said the notion
that the Marines always have to be in charge is a stereotype that he hopes
this operation will dispel. "I think the biggest challenge is figuring out
how to be useful in a way that doesn't, in the long term, alienate people,"
he said. "It's easy to come into a place and think you have all the
answers."
I asked if the same could be said of Iraq, which was, unofficially, this
ship's likely next stop. "We haven't always been good at expeditionary
intelligence, that's true," he said. He pulled out a Smart Card, a folding
laminated pocket card for marines to carry in Iraq, covered with
transliterated Arabic phrases ("Can you get us out of here safely?"),
communications tips ("Quick upward head snap with tongue click means no"),
and thumbnail cultural sketches of Arabs, both Shia and Sunni, Kurds,
Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Turkoman ("As a religious and ethnic minority, the
Chaldeans distrust both Kurdish and Arab intentions. They have peaceful
relations with Turkoman"). "Ten, fifteen years ago, we wouldn't have had
this," Greenwood said of the Iraq Culture Smart Card. "The Marines have
learned the hard way. We continue learning."
The marines of Expeditionary Strike Group Five had no firm orders directing
them to Iraq; they were merely slated to pass from Pacific Command to
Central Command, or centcom, which oversees the Iraq war. Most of the
marines I spoke to, though, believed that with the war going as it is they
would be called in. On my way to Indonesia, in Thailand, I'd met Marine
Lance Corporal Joel Abshier, a young man who, as soon as we were introduced,
told me, "I'm eager to get to Iraq, sir! That's where the fight is." He went
on, "I mean it. Nobody joins the Marines for the college money. You join the
Army for college money. You join the Marines because you want to fight
wars." On the Bonhomme Richard, though, I found the marines more reflective,
perhaps because many of them were veterans of the war's initial, or
"kinetic" phase, which ended with the declaration "Mission accomplished."
(The Marines now refer to that phase as Operation Iraqi Freedom I, or O.I.F.
I. The messy insurgency that followed, which some of the Bonhomme Richard
marines also participated in, is called O.I.F. II. Some are even starting to
talk about O.I.F. III, the intensely violent period surrounding the
elections.)
Lance Corporal Jeremy Harris, who is twenty-three, was a breacher in Iraq;
he opened doors in the towns that his unit passed through, sometimes with a
sledgehammer, sometimes with a shotgun blast, sometimes with C-4 explosives.
He was scared every time, he said, and described his attitude about his
return trip the way many marines did. "No, I don't want to go back, fuck
no," he said. "But nobody made me sign up. It's what I have to do so that
other people don't have to. I'm ready."
On the morning of my last full day aboard the Bonhomme Richard, I stopped in
a helicopter-maintenance office to say goodbye to some sailors I'd met and
then hurried up to the organized chaos of the flight deck, where, for all
the geopolitics involved, it was undeniably touching to see kids from the
Midwest sweating and heaving big sacks of rice to help Asian fishing
communities that they'd very likely never heard of before. I was put aboard
a CH-46, a banana-shaped helicopter that was a mainstay during Vietnam; this
one, in fact, had a little brass plate saying that it entered service in
1969-well before either of its pilots was born. The crew chief, Marine
Corporal Eric Hutchinson, a strapping, ruddy twenty-two-year-old from
outside Portland, Oregon, was wearing an unloaded pistol with the clip in
his pocket. "You remember 'Apocalypse Now,' when the woman throws a grenade
into the helicopter?" he shouted over the engines as he strapped me in. "I'm
not down with that."
Hutchinson was eager to set me up with an audio helmet: I could hear the
pilots talking to each other and then, suddenly, an electric guitar-Linkin
Park's "Nobody's Listening." Grinning, Hutchinson gave me a thumbs-up and
waggled his iPod at me, dancing in place as the helicopter leaped upward. At
our feet was a box full of elfin parachutes from which dangled rolls of Life
Savers. The flight-equipment crew, which takes care of life jackets and
crash helmets, had made them during their off hours to drop over ruined
villages to cheer up children. We flew fifty feet above the water at about a
hundred and fifty m.p.h., watching the water color change from sapphire to
jade to egg cream to egg cream churned up with bits of wood, cloth, root
balls, overturned boats, and paper. It had been two weeks since the tsunami,
and the bodies appeared to have sunk, been fished out, or carried out to
sea. We skimmed over coastal mudflats, which extended inland about half a
mile. But they weren't mudflats. Faint squares showed through the slime-the
fleeting footprints of houses. As the angle changed, the ghosts of streets
faded in and out of view. This had been a town. Here and there were the
remains of a concrete building, shattered into pieces the size of dinner
plates and strewn inland. Regiments of oil palms lay identically on their
sides. All this destruction had happened in minutes on the morning of
December 26th.
We flew for about fifteen minutes and set down at a tiny airfield in the
middle of a jungle, well inland from the destruction, where a group of
Indonesian soldiers and civilians waited. The people who lived along
Sumatra's coast had never been long on cash and the things cash buys, but
with fish and rice abundant neither had they been desperately poor. The
soldiers seemed well enough cared for, but the civilians, grimacing against
our noise and rotor wash, were destitute-frighteningly thin, traumatized,
their clothes ragged and filthy. We made a bucket brigade to hand out the
rice, then each of us Americans shook hands with each of the Indonesians,
soldier and civilian alike. They touched their hearts and pressed their
hands together. We had camcorders; they had camcorders. We filmed them and
they filmed us. As we lifted off and swung back toward the ship for another
load, Guns N' Roses came on the headset, singing "Knockin' on Heaven's
Door." One advantage to listening to rock and roll on a Marine helicopter is
that you can sing along as loud as you like.
MISSION TO SUMATRA
by DAN BAUM
The marines of Expeditionary Strike Group Five take on the tsunami. Issue of
2005-02-07 Posted 2005-01-31
Rear Admiral Christopher Ames, the commander of Expeditionary Strike Group
Five, learned about the Asian tsunami on December 26th the way most of us
did: from television. He and his strike group-seven Navy and Coast Guard
ships plus a submarine, carrying among them more than two thousand
marines-had just left their home port of San Diego for a six-month
deployment. The group was a couple of days from Guam, where it was scheduled
to stop before heading for the Persian Gulf. The group's marines were the
closest to the disaster scene, so, in anticipation of an order, Ames told
his officers to begin planning to provide help to tsunami victims. "I had a
feeling," he told me, as we talked in his cramped stateroom aboard the
U.S.S. Bonhomme Richard.
Ames is no crusty old salt; at fifty, he has an eager, open manner that
seems more executive than warrior, and a master's degree in public
administration from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. The formal order
came by classified e-mail on December 28th to stop at Guam for supplies and
then "proceed at best speed" to Sri Lanka. "'Proceed at best speed' aren't
words you often hear," Ames said. "We're very fuel conscious. An order like
that is not given without considerable forethought." A few days later, the
group was redirected to Banda Aceh, in Sumatra, the city closest to the
earthquake's epicenter. As they pulled into Guam, trucks loaded with
humanitarian supplies were lined up on the docks "as far as you could see,"
Ames said. He sent a party to the Ace hardware store near the port to buy
just about everything in stock-shovels, lumber, hammers, nails-and within
ten hours the group was under way again.
Expeditionary Strike Group Five was in many ways the perfect response to the
tsunami. No other agency responding to the disaster had anywhere near its
capabilities. The Bonhomme Richard alone would have been a godsend to the
people of Sumatra. Commissioned in 1998 and named for John Paul Jones's
privateer, she was designed to be the Marine Corps's dream boat. Her entire
stern opens to release the high-speed air-cushion landing craft necessary
for the Marines' rare but signature beach assaults. From the outside, she
resembles a small aircraft carrier, though she lacks the catapult for
throwing planes into the air. Instead, her flight deck is given over to six
vertical-lift Harrier jump jets as well as a wide selection of helicopters,
big and small. In addition to being a seaborne platform from which to launch
land assaults, the ship could serve as a floating emergency room and thus
free the Marines of having to treat their wounded in rudimentary and
vulnerable field hospitals. Immediately off the flight deck are three large
triage rooms equipped with X-ray readers, oxygen tanks, a decontamination
chamber, and other medical equipment; a large elevator descends from here to
the hospital belowdecks. Off to the side hangs a discreet blue curtain,
behind which wait twelve stainless-steel morgue drawers. For such a large
ship, the Bonhomme Richard draws shallow-only twenty-six feet-so she can
move close to shore. The Bonhomme Richard and the other ships in
Expeditionary Strike Group Five were carrying twenty-two helicopters; five
landing craft, each with a sixty-ton capacity; desalinators capable of
making unlimited quantities of fresh water; and forty high-riding seven-ton
trucks to master the island's ruined coastal roads. The ships carried
backhoes, bulldozers, generators, portable floodlights, and twenty-two
hundred marines to rebuild bridges, treat the injured, restore electricity,
and provide plenty of healthy young muscle. As the ships approached
Indonesian waters, Ames told a reporter on board that he looked forward to
putting "boots on the ground."
It didn't work out that way. As the American ships approached the Sumatran
coast, they received word that the Indonesians wanted few, if any, Marine
boots on the ground.
I reached the Bonhomme Richard by helicopter on January 8th. The next day, a
huge boxy supply ship, the U.S.N.S. Concord, arrived from Singapore and drew
alongside. The Bonhomme Richard's helicopters roared off the deck and buzzed
around the Concord like flies; in several hours of feverish and noisy
activity, they moved tons of rice, water, and other goods into the Bonhomme
Richard's hold-the kind of oceangoing resupply, independent of a host
nation, envisioned by Sea Power 21. "The heroes are the logisticians," Ames
told me. "Within two weeks of the tsunami, they put out bids to venders, got
the bids, cut the checks, told them where to deliver, collected the goods,
flew them to Singapore, loaded them onto ships, figured out where we'd be,
and met us out here in the middle of the ocean." He paused while the ship's
chaplain came on the intercom with the evening prayer, I Samuel 30:24, which
the chaplain artfully interpreted: "For as his share is who goes down into
the battle, so shall his share be who stays by the supplies: they shall
share alike."
Inactivity is hard on marines. Those on the Bonhomme Richard milled around
the ship's narrow steel halls, hung out in the enlisted mess watching Fox
News and war movies on a big-screen TV, cleaned and recleaned their weapons,
and got on one another's nerves. "It's frustrating-we're good to go,"
Sergeant Arthur Anthony said. Sea duty is uncomfortable. The enlisted mess
is vast, low-ceilinged, and as chaotic as a high-school cafeteria, with lots
of shouting and grab-ass. The din is maddening, and the air suffused with a
heavy, rank odor, like steam-table water left too long. Unlike officers, who
eat off crockery, enlisted sailors and marines are served on sectional
plastic trays. Their salad bar is more extensive than the officers', but
otherwise their food is worse-garlic bread made of hot-dog rolls, thick
squares of pizza beribboned with orange cheese, soggy spaghetti. A lance
corporal said it made him pine for a Jäger Bomb-the herbal liqueur
Jägermeister mixed with Red Bull.
An aircraft carrier is often compared to a floating city, but, with its
stale air, the incessant clang of heavy steel doors, and pasty-faced men in
coveralls threading poorly lit corridors, it feels more like a floating
prison. Nobody is allowed on the flight deck without good reason, so the
only glimpse of the outdoors that most sailors and marines get is from a
vast hangar bay one deck down, and only when the huge elevator
hatches-through which aircraft are pushed onto moving platforms-are left
open to the sea. Many crew members on the Bonhomme Richard see as little of
the sun as they would if they were serving on a submarine. Off-duty officers
wanting a moment's peace can sit in the wardroom, which, though not
luxurious, is at least quiet, but the enlisted people's only refuge from
noise and commotion is their bunk, or "rack"-a slot in a stack of beds ten
feet high, with the bunk above so close that it's impossible to read in bed.
It's a tribute to the allure of the services that so many marines reënlist.
Their discomfort helps explain why they're in such magnificent physical
condition: they burn off bottled-up energy by working out endlessly in the
ship's stuffy but well-equipped gym. As I was passing through one evening,
three marines with superhero physiques were watching American Forces Network
News while running on treadmills. The lawyer for Army Specialist Charles
Graner, who was on trial for abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib, was telling
the camera that forcing prisoners to make a pyramid with their bodies isn't
abuse, because American cheerleaders make pyramids all the time. "They're
not wasting too much time defending this guy if they got him a lawyer that
dumb," one of the treadmilling marines said. "You're going to Leavenworth,
dude."
The ship woke on January 10th to the news that the Marines were finally
going ashore in force. What's more, they were going in the miraculous
vehicle that has replaced the landing craft of yore: the Landing Craft Air
Cushion, or lcac (pronounced "el-kack").The lcac is essentially a gigantic
everglades boat, a platform eighty-eight feet long and forty-four feet wide
that rides on an inflatable rubber skirt, with two twelve-foot fans on the
back for propulsion. It can transport a tank, or a hundred marines, or
twelve Humvees across the waves at more than forty-five m.p.h. and zoom up
onto the sand. The Marines haven't made a landing under significant fire
since Inchon, in 1950, but hitting the beach lies at the core of their
mythology. They train for it endlessly, and organize their Expeditionary
Units around the Battalion Landing Team. As they tell it, only the Marines
can execute this dashing, dangerous maneuver today; it's what sets them
apart.
The Marines differentiate themselves from the Army in other ways, too. They
were the first to adopt strange, digital-camouflage uniforms dotted with
tiny, pixillated squares that make the men and women wearing them look like
icons in a video game. Unlike soldiers, marines don't wear unit patches or
awards on their uniforms. "It's nobody's business," one landing-team major
told me. "The first thing we do when we kill an enemy soldier, if we're
fighting a uniformed enemy, is to go up to the body and read his patches.
You can learn a lot-what units you're up against, what their qualifications
are-and then you know how well fed and equipped those units are. I even take
off my rank in combat. My marines know who I am." The Marine ethic also
dictates that every marine is a rifleman; even cooks and typists are trained
and ready to go into combat at a moment's notice, their rifles always
nearby.
But the order on January 10th was "No weapons." The Indonesians were finally
letting the marines come ashore, but they had to come unarmed. The marines w
ere appalled. "Man, I'll bet this island is crawling with folks who'd love
to kill a marine if they could get the chance," one lance corporal said. A
ripple of hope went through the ship when Fox News reported that shots had
been fired in Banda Aceh, perhaps by the rebels who have been trying for a
quarter of a century to gain independence from Indonesia. Then an American
helicopter rolled over in a rice paddy, leaving its injured crew momentarily
stranded, and the Marine pilots on the Bonhomme Richard began carrying
sidearms-though with the magazines removed. Major Robert Salasko, who is
thirty-six, and is known as Bubba, sat down on January 10th for a breakfast
of six hard-boiled eggs and a sweet roll, as the loudspeaker announced a
random drug screening ("Urinalysis now being held in ship's brig and will
secure at sixteen hundred"). "Going ashore," Salasko boomed happily to Major
Keith Parry. Gloomily stirring his Cream of Wheat, Major Parry, who commands
an élite combat team but had orders to stay aboard and check helicopter
manifests, mumbled, "Don't shoot anybody." Salasko responded, "Can't take my
weapon." He patted the sides of his close-cropped cranium. "Except this."
"That's a hindrance," Parry said.
"You're jealous."
"Got that right."
We passed through the cavernous hangar deck to get to the lcac. Sailors and
marines were scooting about in forklifts to an exquisitely mixed soundtrack
of helicopter engines, beep-beeps of backing vehicles, shouts, ah-ooo-gah
klaxons, and loudspeaker announcements. Everywhere stood pallets loaded with
Gitangkim rice from Thailand, Ice Cool bottled water from Malaysia, and
U.S.-bagged rice labelled "Whole Grain White Rice, Origin: Vietnam."
The torpid sky tore open, as it had been threatening to do all day,
drenching us in a sudden downpour. Howard didn't register the rain. "In the
Navy, we command by negation. I communicate up what I want to do, and my
superiors say, 'Yeah,''Yeah,''Yeah,''Stop!'" She spoke emphatically of
coöperation and respect. "I will tell you this," she said as rain poured off
the brim of her hat. "Everybody down to the lance corporal understood that
this is a Muslim country, and you should have seen them going through the
M.R.E.s"-meals ready to eat-"pulling out all the ones with pork in them."
Finally, we walked back to the lcac and got out of the rain. This time, I
sat in the pilot house. As we backed into the surf, I looked upon sixty-four
thousand pounds of rice and bottled water resting on the beach.
The next evening, I asked Colonel Greenwood, as we sat in his windowless
stateroom, if he'd specifically negotiated permission to use the lcac so
that the Marines could have a televised beach-hitting event. He chuckled and
waved away the question. Then he said, "There are four words we use every
day with Colonel Geerhan," the Indonesian commander at Meulaboh. "'How. Can.
We. Help.' I don't say, 'Why don't you use my trucks?' If I did that, I'd be
putting him on the defensive. The Indonesians definitely want to control the
size of the footprint. It's mutually understood, for example, that everybody
goes home at night. If my marines live in what's left of the town, it's a
burden to the infrastructure." Also, he said, the Indonesians "don't want to
feel like a charity case."
On his coffee table was a copy of Foreign Affairs and several issues of
Harvard's alumni magazine. Greenwood, at forty-nine, has a folksy air but a
sterling pedigree-including stints at the Kennedy School and the National
Security Council-and a chestful of medals that he wasn't wearing. He again
recounted the incident on shore with the Frenchmen, as though France and the
United States had recently been at war, and he emphasized his respect for
the sensibilities of the Indonesians. "The only time Colonel Geerhan
specifically said no was when we were going to bring ashore a ten-man
working party yesterday," he said. "The word we got back was, That might be
excessive. It wasn't that they dislike Americans or marines. The nuance was,
If you can do it with less people, we'd appreciate it." He said the notion
that the Marines always have to be in charge is a stereotype that he hopes
this operation will dispel. "I think the biggest challenge is figuring out
how to be useful in a way that doesn't, in the long term, alienate people,"
he said. "It's easy to come into a place and think you have all the
answers."
I asked if the same could be said of Iraq, which was, unofficially, this
ship's likely next stop. "We haven't always been good at expeditionary
intelligence, that's true," he said. He pulled out a Smart Card, a folding
laminated pocket card for marines to carry in Iraq, covered with
transliterated Arabic phrases ("Can you get us out of here safely?"),
communications tips ("Quick upward head snap with tongue click means no"),
and thumbnail cultural sketches of Arabs, both Shia and Sunni, Kurds,
Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Turkoman ("As a religious and ethnic minority, the
Chaldeans distrust both Kurdish and Arab intentions. They have peaceful
relations with Turkoman"). "Ten, fifteen years ago, we wouldn't have had
this," Greenwood said of the Iraq Culture Smart Card. "The Marines have
learned the hard way. We continue learning."
The marines of Expeditionary Strike Group Five had no firm orders directing
them to Iraq; they were merely slated to pass from Pacific Command to
Central Command, or centcom, which oversees the Iraq war. Most of the
marines I spoke to, though, believed that with the war going as it is they
would be called in. On my way to Indonesia, in Thailand, I'd met Marine
Lance Corporal Joel Abshier, a young man who, as soon as we were introduced,
told me, "I'm eager to get to Iraq, sir! That's where the fight is." He went
on, "I mean it. Nobody joins the Marines for the college money. You join the
Army for college money. You join the Marines because you want to fight
wars." On the Bonhomme Richard, though, I found the marines more reflective,
perhaps because many of them were veterans of the war's initial, or
"kinetic" phase, which ended with the declaration "Mission accomplished."
(The Marines now refer to that phase as Operation Iraqi Freedom I, or O.I.F.
I. The messy insurgency that followed, which some of the Bonhomme Richard
marines also participated in, is called O.I.F. II. Some are even starting to
talk about O.I.F. III, the intensely violent period surrounding the
elections.)
Lance Corporal Jeremy Harris, who is twenty-three, was a breacher in Iraq;
he opened doors in the towns that his unit passed through, sometimes with a
sledgehammer, sometimes with a shotgun blast, sometimes with C-4 explosives.
He was scared every time, he said, and described his attitude about his
return trip the way many marines did. "No, I don't want to go back, fuck
no," he said. "But nobody made me sign up. It's what I have to do so that
other people don't have to. I'm ready."
On the morning of my last full day aboard the Bonhomme Richard, I stopped in
a helicopter-maintenance office to say goodbye to some sailors I'd met and
then hurried up to the organized chaos of the flight deck, where, for all
the geopolitics involved, it was undeniably touching to see kids from the
Midwest sweating and heaving big sacks of rice to help Asian fishing
communities that they'd very likely never heard of before. I was put aboard
a CH-46, a banana-shaped helicopter that was a mainstay during Vietnam; this
one, in fact, had a little brass plate saying that it entered service in
1969-well before either of its pilots was born. The crew chief, Marine
Corporal Eric Hutchinson, a strapping, ruddy twenty-two-year-old from
outside Portland, Oregon, was wearing an unloaded pistol with the clip in
his pocket. "You remember 'Apocalypse Now,' when the woman throws a grenade
into the helicopter?" he shouted over the engines as he strapped me in. "I'm
not down with that."
Hutchinson was eager to set me up with an audio helmet: I could hear the
pilots talking to each other and then, suddenly, an electric guitar-Linkin
Park's "Nobody's Listening." Grinning, Hutchinson gave me a thumbs-up and
waggled his iPod at me, dancing in place as the helicopter leaped upward. At
our feet was a box full of elfin parachutes from which dangled rolls of Life
Savers. The flight-equipment crew, which takes care of life jackets and
crash helmets, had made them during their off hours to drop over ruined
villages to cheer up children. We flew fifty feet above the water at about a
hundred and fifty m.p.h., watching the water color change from sapphire to
jade to egg cream to egg cream churned up with bits of wood, cloth, root
balls, overturned boats, and paper. It had been two weeks since the tsunami,
and the bodies appeared to have sunk, been fished out, or carried out to
sea. We skimmed over coastal mudflats, which extended inland about half a
mile. But they weren't mudflats. Faint squares showed through the slime-the
fleeting footprints of houses. As the angle changed, the ghosts of streets
faded in and out of view. This had been a town. Here and there were the
remains of a concrete building, shattered into pieces the size of dinner
plates and strewn inland. Regiments of oil palms lay identically on their
sides. All this destruction had happened in minutes on the morning of
December 26th.
We flew for about fifteen minutes and set down at a tiny airfield in the
middle of a jungle, well inland from the destruction, where a group of
Indonesian soldiers and civilians waited. The people who lived along
Sumatra's coast had never been long on cash and the things cash buys, but
with fish and rice abundant neither had they been desperately poor. The
soldiers seemed well enough cared for, but the civilians, grimacing against
our noise and rotor wash, were destitute-frighteningly thin, traumatized,
their clothes ragged and filthy. We made a bucket brigade to hand out the
rice, then each of us Americans shook hands with each of the Indonesians,
soldier and civilian alike. They touched their hearts and pressed their
hands together. We had camcorders; they had camcorders. We filmed them and
they filmed us. As we lifted off and swung back toward the ship for another
load, Guns N' Roses came on the headset, singing "Knockin' on Heaven's
Door." One advantage to listening to rock and roll on a Marine helicopter is
that you can sing along as loud as you like.