Engineers follow troops' wake

By James Janega
Chicago Tribune

JACKIE SPINNER / THE WASHINGTON POST Engineer Reconnaissance Team member Navy Lt. Jeffrey McCoy, 31, watches for insurgents near railroad tracks in Fallujah, Iraq.

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FALLUJAH, Iraq — The first steps toward reconstruction in Fallujah were taken yesterday, and they were taken at a run, while crouching.

Two dozen members of the 1st Marine Engineering Group crunched over gravel, charred shell casings and broken glass, rifles outward and bounding down a war-torn street that was once a commercial strip.

They duck-walked past the sounds of a nearby gunfight as it floated through eerily empty streets.

One gravelly voice broke the silence in a lull: "Does the word 'apocalyptic' apply?"

The men were reservists, with accents from places like Boston and Chicago and central Pennsylvania, and hair tinged with gray. Their regular jobs were in electrical, plumbing and building trades; their house-to-house military skills raw compared with the soldiers half their age who took the town.

But the Navy Seabees, Marine and Army civil engineers running through Fallujah weren't there to take the town. They were there to repair it.

Seizing their first objective, teams of rifle-toting engineers crouched behind cover and pointed M-16s in all directions. One man produced a pry bar, another a sturdy shovel. Together they heaved up a sewer cover.

The dank passage of sewage was proceeding nicely. The heavy steel lid clanked shut. Onward at a crouch.

"There's cobwebs all over it," assessment team leader Navy Lt. Cmdr. Larry Merola said, "but much of the infrastructure that we went to — municipal electrical, water — it's in very good shape."
 
As sporadic firefights continue convulsing Fallujah, military civil-affairs officials already have tentatively moved into town, unable to wait longer for a mixture of humanitarian and public-relations reasons.

They bring with them civil-engineering expertise and suitcases full of contracts worth more than $23 million, for solid-waste and sewer equipment, landfills, new schools, sewer pumps and well-water drilling. No one knows how much of the work will go toward repairing damage inflicted in the seizure of the city and how much will address accumulated problems stemming from years of local neglect.

Though the hardest, most time-sensitive work will be done by American military specialists, most of the rest — road and building repairs, stringing wire, rebuilding homes — will be contracted out to locals.

Yesterday, scouts sent to determine the extent of battle damage and other necessary repairs skirted a burbling lake of sewage that stretched two blocks and seemed to feed off a mysterious clean-water source. They found an almost perfectly intact well-water pumping station. They despaired over a rat's nest of electrical connections that could easily produce power but seemed unlikely to transmit it reliably to homes and businesses.

And not inconsequentially, the military engineers and civil-affairs specialists moved their offices into Fallujah, even though the many residents who left have yet to return and the city still crackles with gunfire.

"When the people begin returning, they'll be able to come right here," said Marine Lt. Col David Dysart of the 4th Civil Affairs Group, who was setting up shop.

Unlike a civil-affairs outpost run on the outskirts of town, the new digs in a former Fallujah youth center (complete with weight rooms and outdoor boxing ring) will be big enough to handle the expected flow of complaining residents, as well as a bank safe from which the military will dispense money.

"They won't have to wait weeks for payment," Dysart said, citing a frequent problem now. "They'll be able to get it in days."

In what was an entranceway in the youth center, a forward-thinking person had scrawled "CMOC," for Civil Military Operations Center, using black marker on a cream-colored wall.

In what was a paint-spattered art room, new tables were lined up. An electric coffee urn was unboxed, as well as a fax machine and a computer.

Giving his stamp of importance to the mission, the leader of ground forces in Fallujah, 1st Marine Expeditionary Force commander Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, arrived at the still-transforming building for an update yesterday.

He gave the troops the traditional Marine Corps war cry on his way out, as the assessment team poured over an aerial photo map spread on a Humvee hood and marked with the words "sewage buildings."

He clapped Merola on the shoulder. Then he was gone, and the engineers loped back into the bullet-pocked streets to find empty pumping stations.

Explosions still thundered from the next block, where holdout insurgents were pursued with high explosives. Ignoring the tankers, the civil-affairs assessment team moved out with a spring in their steps.

As a particularly loud explosion died away, Navy Chief Petty Officer and point man A.J. Ball summed up why:

"Job security," he said.