Guess they turned it over to the Marines. Kerry would have pissed his pants and murdered at least the 1st guy mentioned;
Marines roll on river patrol By Rick Jervis
Chicago Tribune staff reporter
Sep. 27, 2004
The Riverine Assault Craft had knifed less than a mile down the Euphrates River when it came upon its first potential target of the day: a man in grimy clothes standing on the riverbank.
Nine gun barrels, including those of a .50-caliber machine gun and a 40-mm grenade launcher, swung around and trained on him.
The man waved.
"Hey, our first wave," said Marine Staff Sgt. James Cascio, the boat's captain. "I guess I would, too, if I had nine guns pointing at me."
The crew, culled from the Small Craft Company of the Marine Corps' Headquarters Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, and other infantry units, was understandably cautious. It was the third day of patrol down this stretch of river in a hostile country, and the crew was making its combat debut.
A little-known unit not used in combat since the Vietnam War, the crews of the Riverine Assault Crafts, or RACs, have been dispatched to cruise along the Euphrates in heavily armed, three-boat patrols looking for weapons caches, dropping Force Recon teams--reconnaissance Marines who take on special operations--and conducting board-and-search operations.
As coalition forces multiply their checkpoints and step up patrols of Iraq (news - web sites)'s highways and towns, military officials speculated that insurgents were increasingly turning to the country's riverbanks for refuge.
The RAC patrols are paying off. In April, a crew discovered 107 rockets on an islet near Al Asad, from where rockets are believed to have been fired at U.S. troops.
In June, another patrol found 13 82-mm mortar shells and five rocket-propelled grenade rounds on another island near Fallujah.
The crews also are seeing early signs of water-borne bombs. An unmanned boat carrying explosives drifted under a pontoon bridge and blew it up recently, killing a U.S. soldier, a Marine official said.
Using specialized training, radar systems and heavy firepower, RAC officials said their crews could combat river insurgency.
"We're an odd little animal off to the side of most people's thinking," said Capt. Paul Stubbs, a company commander. "But we're effective."
The company is made up of two platoons with about 40 Marines and sailors in each one. The 35-foot boats are armor-plated and stacked with weaponry: a Browning M2 .50-caliber machine gun on the bow, an MK19 grenade launcher on the stern and medium machine guns firing 762-mm rounds on either side.
Twin 300-horsepower jet diesel engines move the boats up to 45 m.p.h. Crews hope that the combination of speed and power will help them catch insurgents.
On a recent run, Sgt. Anthony "Ski" Czerwinski, the pilot, gunned a craft south down the Euphrates toward Musayyib. The six-man crew, along with three Marines holding M-16 assault rifles, continuously scanned the riverbanks as the boat passed fields of tall grass, mud-brick homes and a black panther sunning itself on a grassy swell by the river.
Occasionally, a shepherd would stop and gawk as the boat zipped by.
"They don't know what to think of us yet," said Gunnery Sgt. Brian Vianciguerra, manning one of the machine guns. "Once they figure out what we are, it's game on."
The Army and Navy deployed similar boats on similar missions on the rivers of Vietnam during the war there, often working the waterways in tandem.
That strategy became familiar to many with the 1979 release of Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now."
More recently, the Navy's swift boats, similar to but slower than the Marines' RACs, regained attention as the vessels captained by presidential candidate John Kerry in Vietnam.
But after Vietnam, the Army discontinued its Riverine unit, said Stubbs, the company commander. The river assault boats have not been used in combat since, mainly because the U.S. has not fought in locations with rivers, he said.
In 1991, the Marine Corps instituted its RAC unit, Stubbs said. RAC crews train at the Marine base in Camp Lejeune, N.C., where they learn to fire machine guns from moving boats, read radar and global-positioning systems and take 100-mile navigational journeys up North Carolina's Pamlico Sound, said Czerwinski, who helps train candidates.
"We teach them everything, from how to drive the boat at night to how to fix the engines," he said.
Marine RAC crews have been used to train government soldiers in Colombia, Argentina and Paraguay, a military official said. But the unit remained largely unused, and word among commanders was that the Pentagon (news - web sites) planned to phase it out, until the rivers of Iraq created a need, the official said.
"We don't have any control over what the Joint Chiefs of Staff decide," said Capt. Dan Wittnam, a company commander. "What happens in Iraq will largely decide what happens to this unit."
The platoons arrived in Iraq in April and began patrolling the inlets and cuts around a hydroelectric dam on the Euphrates near Al Asad, which supplies Baghdad and surrounding cities with much of their power, said Capt. Art Decotiis, 27, a platoon commander.
They patrolled the waters around Ramadi and near Fallujah, sometimes using bomb-sniffing dogs and occasionally drawing small-arms fire from land, Decotiis said. Soon after, they started finding the ammunition stashes, he said.
"Seemed like every area we looked, we found something," Decotiis said. "We're unknown. No one's really gotten a chance to get used to us."
But the unit, which moved down to Iskandariyah last week to be attached to the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, is not problem-free. The boats are 10 years old, and parts sometimes fail. Leaves and river gunk often clog the jets, and crew members have to rake them out as the boat floats dangerously exposed in the river.
On another recent outing, the crew's fourth near Iskandariyah, the launch was delayed an hour while a pump on one of the boat's engines was replaced. Darkness was creeping in as the three boats pushed off, giving the crew its first night run.
"The night is our friend," Vianciguerra said, strapping night-vision goggles to his helmet. "In 30 minutes, no one will see us."
Soon the trio of boats was gliding north up the river, one of four that in the Bible ran through the Garden of Eden. The boats cruised past silhouettes of date palm groves and stands of tall grass, landscapes similar to those found in the Florida Everglades. Or Vietnam.
As dusk bled to night and blackened the banks of the river, the crews snapped down their night-vision goggles or peered through night-vision scopes mounted on assault rifles, scanning shrubs they now saw in bright lime green.
Czerwinski, the pilot, kept his night-vision goggles up on his helmet, steering the boat along a ribbon of moonlight on the river.
He said he realizes the RACs' days may be numbered, but there's always a chance to reverse that.
"No one thought you'd use boats in the desert," he said, smiling. "But here we are." |
