| Subject: US Marines prepare for new war, say patience is the key |
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Date Posted: 12:39:08 12/03/01 Mon
US Marines prepare for new war, say patience is the key
Reuters
(Aboard USS Peleliu, October 31)
The psychiatrist aboard the flagship of a US Marine Corps unit in the Arabian Sea says the marines are ready to fight a "new genre of war" and they understand it will need patience.
"We don't have a country that is the enemy," said Commander Kenneth Hirsch, who has worked with the military for 18 years. "We have individual groups of people who are the enemy and that's very different."
"It's a new genre of war. You can't target a national entity," he said.
"Everyone has talked about Afghanistan, but it's not the country of Afghanistan, it's certain specific people who are controlling Afghanistan, not the Afghani people, and our own warriors recognise that.
"That recognition is critical because that dictates how they function in a combat situation. It's a level of sophistication that hasn't historically been required of them, but they're meeting that challenge very well."
Commander Hirsch is one of 22 medical personnel who have been deployed to the boost the medical staff of the warship Peleliu, which along with two other ships in its amphibious ready group can carry a full complement of around 2,200 marines.
The military is cagey about the extent to which the marines may have already seen action, saying only that they are supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. The only confirmed action was the recovery of a downed US helicopter in Pakistan last week.
"I think that most of our people understand why we have to wait, that the actions we take have to be judicious," said Hirsch.
"The immediate impulse is to go do something impulsively... (but) we have to make the right response, not just any response."
BEHIND ENEMY LINES
Travis, a staff sergeant in a force reconnaissance platoon trained to penetrate behind enemy lines and send back information, said the uncertainty was the biggest challenge for him.
"The most difficult part about this operation for myself is just not knowing exactly what they want us to do yet," said Travis, who did not want to be identified further due to security concerns.
The marines in his platoon volunteer for special assignment and are trained in demolition, sniper shooting, amphibious reconnaissance, parachute drops and what he called "direct action" in an urban setting.
"Any time you're out on a reconnaissance mission it gives you a lot of responsibility," said Travis, who saw action in Somalia in 1992 and said it was "an honour" to be supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. "You have to keep in mind what you send back is what they're going to believe."
William Griesmeyer, 33, from Kettering, Ohio, works in the intelligence centre on the Peleliu, and is another veteran of Somalia.
"We got a test of a real operation then. And it's definitely more intense and you have to pay a lot more attention to the job knowing there's actual people out there on duty," he said.
Hirsch says the problems he has to deal with cover a spectrum from men worried about sick relatives back home to serious depression and people considering suicide.
"It might be `I'm nervous, I'm anxious and I don't know if I going to do okay when I get to the beach' or `I can't stand being in the ship in the middle of the ocean and I can't see land', or `I'm going crazy' and they really are."
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