Pat Dollard | Young Americans

March 28, 2008

KANDAHAR AIR FIELD, Afghanistan (AFP) - At the well-tended perimeter of Kandahar Air Field, just-arrived US Marines are exercising under a strong sun far from the other deployments.

They are some of a new force of 2,500 soldiers with the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, who started arriving this month to back up other soldiers in this hotbed of the Taliban insurgency.

They are still setting up and have not yet received mission orders.

“We are just ready to respond to whatever our commanders are going to ask us to do,” said Colonel Peter Petronzio, head of the unit.

“We should be involved in everything from door-kicking to well-digging,” he said, referring to military searches and reconstruction work.

Petronzio, 47, has served in the infantry and the Special Forces — including in Afghanistan during 2001 and 2002, when the Taliban were being driven from power, as well as in Kosovo and Iraq.

But most of his Marines are new to Afghanistan. “Very few have been here before, a very small number,” Petronzio said.

They have arrived with a lot of baggage: 20 CH-46 assault helicopters and various heavy transport choppers among a range of weapons and other equipment.

It is a time of preparation before what military officials refer to as the “fighting season.”

That prep work includes getting to know the 17 different military deployments at Kandahar Air Field, the biggest base in southern Afghanistan.

“I am focused on my people and making sure we are ready,” Petronzio said.

Last year was the deadliest of the Taliban-led insurgency, with roughly 160 suicide bombings and 8,000 people killed, most of them rebels but also nearly 220 international soldiers.

The Taliban this week announced their new offensive, Operation Ebrat (Lesson), to see “a new type of operation to expand operations countrywide.”

Nations with soldiers in the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force will meanwhile meet in early April, when some are expected to announce extra soldiers and resources for ISAF, which is now about 50,000 strong.

Petronzio and his soldiers will work with ISAF; about 1,000 more Marines are due in the coming weeks to work with the separate US-led coalition, which has about 20,000 soldiers.

As part of their preparations, some Marines are taking classes in Afghan history and language. Outside their new tents, others sweat as they lift weights or disassemble and clean mortars.

“The heat is going to be the most difficult to overcome,” said Lance Corporal John Feathers, 22, who is on his first mission.

It is already about 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) in the sun, and temperatures can reach the 50s in summer.

Feathers’ fellow soldier, 22-year-old Corporal Steven Gattis, is on his third mission — having already been through two in Iraq.

He said he has “quite a few friends dead — it makes you angry.”

“But you have to keep in mind that not everybody is bad, not everyone is directly involved in the fighting,” said the soldier, who comes from a military family.

He is a little nervous: he has a new position of authority and “am more worried about making mistakes and losing one of them rather than me.”

“Mom was worried,” he added. “She said, ‘You’re leaving for the third time’. I said, ‘I came back every time.’”

Feathers marked his departure on his first mission with a party, “one last good time before I left. One never knows.”

Of the nearly 220 international soldiers to lose their lives in Afghanistan last year, about 117 were Americans.

Since Operation Enduring Freedom was launched at the end of 2001 to remove the Taliban, 490 US soldiers have died here.