875th keeping Iraq roads passable
Posted on Sunday, May 13, 2007
NORTH OF BAGHDAD, Iraq — The main supply route that winds along the Tigris River from Kuwait through Baghdad on to the northern tip of Iraq is pocked with a growing number of massive bomb craters.
These are not old battle scars like those still marking Saddam Hussein’s former palaces from the initial Iraq invasion in 2003. The blast holes aren’t the work of coalition forces.
This four-lane road is a battle ground that slices through green farmland, with flocks of sheep, mud houses and date palm trees flanking its rocky shoulders during the day and insurgents burying bombs in pavement at night.
Roadside bombs, called improvised explosive devices by the military, are continually becoming more complicated. Some include projectiles, others are loaded with ball bearings to increase the amount of deadly shrapnel.
Such bombs account for the majority of deaths in Iraq. Countering the bombs is one of the Pentagon’s top priorities. The Defense Department will spend more than $ 3 billion in training and equipment for counterbomb measures in Iraq this fiscal year.
One of those measures is combat road repair, with Support Platoon of Arkansas’ 875 th Engineer Battalion’s Headquarters Company patching the roadways using crude, handmade tools and cement.
The Arka nsas National Guard’s 875 th Engineer Battalion based in Jonesboro arrived in Iraq in September for a year-long deployment. The battalion’s 500 members include soldiers from the Vermont and Indiana National Guards.
The platoon headed out at dawn Friday, racing the growing heat of the day, with a list of 10 blast holes to fill. The locations were reported by various units that have either been hit by bombs in those spots or have seen the aftermath of one. The Support Platoon members would find many more than that along the handful of miles they worked on that day.
“All of these happened within the last month,” said Sgt. James Lee of Cherry Valley, Ark.
It took eight hours to fix this patch of roadway, and the platoon worked on only one side of the highway. The rest would have to wait for another day or another engineer unit.
“There’s one we filled,” Lee said as the line of humvees and armored bomb detection equipment left Camp Stryker. “There’s another one we filled. And another.”
Most of the force of bombs that explode along a roadway is directed upward — into vehicles as they roll over them. Some of the blast always pushes downward, carving deep holes into the pavement. Those holes are often used to hide more bombs targeting U. S. convoys and patrols.
Every day — along with chunks of blacktop, vehicle parts, soot and oil — a new crater scars the roadway.
“That’s the crater that took 36 buckets to fill,” Lee said, pointing to a fresh gray patch on the road. Each bucket contains ready-mix cement that the soldiers mix with water.
This is combat road construction. It is hard, manual labor by men and women carrying guns and wearing 35 pounds of chesthugging body armor.
As the patrol approached a blast site, a soldier drove past the crater to see if it was safe or rigged with a bomb.
“All clear,” Sgt. 1 st Class Neil Hall of Vermont said over the radio, setting the humvees into action, circling the hole.
Across the roadway, a family selling jugs of black-market gasoline picked up grimy blue and white 5-gallon containers and hauled them into a mud house set along a dirt path several hundred yards off the main roadway.
A cluster of young boys ran back out of the house to squat on the side of the road and watch the engineers work.
Re-enforcement bar, a sledgehammer, cement and water were unloaded from a trailer and organized next to the hole. Efficiency is key out here, the faster the work, the less the danger.
Sgt. Mark Labonte of Vermont poked the end of a rusted piece of re-bar into the hole as Sgt. 1 st Class Oliver Savage grabbed the sledgehammer.
A homemade piece of metal sat on the end of the re-bar providing a flat spot for the hammer to land, as the re-bar is pounded into the hole. Before the battalion’s welder crafted the device, the soldiers hit the re-bar directly with the sledgehammer, resulting in some painful missed swings.
Labonte grimaced every time the hammer struck, which sent shock waves through the re-bar in his hands.
Piece after piece was pounded into the dirt at the bottom of the hole, created a few days earlier by a bomb powerful enough to blast through more than two feet of pavement.
The re-bar helps keep the cement in place, making it almost impossible for insurgents to pry the chunk of concrete out of the hole to hide another bomb.
There is evidence that some patches have been torn out in the dark of night, chipped away to make room for a bomb and then covered with dirt or crumbled asphalt.
Savage opened a large bucket of cement and Staff Sgt. Aaron Norman of Indiana fired up a small generator. Labonte poured water out of 5-gallon jugs into the bucket as Norman shoved in the hand-held, 3-foot tall electric cement mixer.
Cement dust filled the air, coating faces and clothes as the soldiers worked.
In a fluid movement, Labonte poured the thick mix into the hole as the next bucket was mixed. He then smoothed the thick material using a board. Seven buckets of quick-dry cement later, the hole was filled.
Labonte grabbed a can of red spray paint and marked the hole using a stencil that contains the number 875 and an image of a castle — the Army’s symbol for combat engineers.
Then he sprayed the edges and marked the site with an additional number.
“I had a cool design to use on these, but they wanted something simple,” Labonte said, clearly an expert with spray paint.
Asked how many bridges he’d painted back home, he said with a grin, “Quite a few.”
At the next hole, the soldiers agreed that this was a second patch. The old patch had been blown away by a new bomb.
“This one was tampered with,” Savage said. “We’re seeing that even more up here.”
Up the road, as they approached another crater, the soldiers saw the effects of a blast from the night before.
A black streak of grease and oil mixed with pieces of plastic, metal and pavement trailed north several hundred feet from the hole. At the trail’s end was a massive piece of charred roadway, where the large Army tractor-trailer rig called a “Het” had finally stopped rolling after the blast and burned to the ground.
The vehicle’s burned frame was hauled away when the fire stopped, but balls of steel belts remained on the road, marking where the tires had once been.
The routine of pounding, mixing and pouring started again. As the men worked, a shepherd in the field next to them tended to his flock of sheep and goats, seemingly without concern.
The hole was marked on the list as 6 inches deep. It was little more than a divot in the road when the bomb was placed. Now, Hall stepped into the crater.
The road’s surface was at his knees.
Filling bomb holes is a relatively new mission for the platoon. The mission started within the past two months. It’s added to the small unit’s responsibility of providing security escorts for commanders around the region and sending mechanics to vehicles that break down while on patrol.
“Of course, I like these missions better when I’m on the ground working [on the craters ],” said Spc. Ryan Mounce of Jonesboro as he manned the 240 B machine gun in his humvee turret, surveying the traffic and farmers in the fields.
He is not alone in that thought.
“I’m not sure I’d call this my favorite,” Savage said. “If I have to be out here, I’d rather be out on the ground like this working than stuck in a truck pulling security.”
Labonte grabbed another piece of re-bar from the truck.
“This here ?” he said. “It’s fun, but it’s tiring.”
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