Seabees Get Ready To Pave Trail to Iraq

Navy Unit Would Bridge Desert in a War

CAMP 93, Kuwait -- Sure, she wanted to see the world and serve her country, but Patricia Cabral said she joined the Navy mainly because her father did not want her to work construction. Turned down for a job at her family's contracting company, the indignant Cabral signed on with the Seabees, the Navy's construction corps that deployed to Kuwait in October to lay groundwork for the military build-up that has been taking place ever since.

"I always loved building things," Cabral, 25, said as she and her platoon practiced assembling a steel bridge at this desert camp 30 miles north of Kuwait City. "My dad wanted me to be an accountant, but it didn't work out that way."

Cabral's persistence and abiding interest are the hallmarks of the unit she joined. The Seabees claim they coined the phrase "can do."

In that spirit, they spend their days turning an inhospitable desert into a place fit for Marines. In three months in Kuwait, two battalions of Seabees have built the camp where the Marines live and train, an enormous parking lot for aircraft at a base in southern Kuwait and the largest air munitions storage facility the Marines have had since the Vietnam War.

While their motto is "We build, we fight," they focus heavily on the former.

"We're here to put in place whatever the Marines need to do their job," said Rear Adm. Charles R. Kubic, who commands the Seabee task force here. "What they've done so far has been Herculean, but what might be ahead will require even more work."

While the Marines and soldiers at neighboring camps prepare for a possible invasion of Iraq, the Seabees are training for their own mission in the event of war: paving the trail north blazed by combat forces and providing infrastructure for ground troops on undeveloped or destroyed terrain.

Two Seabee companies practiced Thursday setting up and removing bridges hundreds of feet long that could be used to span the rivers or ground depressions troops would cross in Iraq. In five hours they built a 30-yard bridge that could support a 70-ton tank. It might take a little longer, they said, if artillery shells were raining down.

Unlike combat engineers, who are heavily armed and lead soldiers across battlefield obstacles like minefields or wire fences, Seabees generally follow a day or two behind an invading force, making bridges, roads and cities for soldiers from the rubble of war. They also come bearing amenities much-appreciated at the front lines, like showers and flush toilets.

"It's not always pretty, but we go where civilian contractors can't, and build under combat conditions," said Capt. Bill Rudich, who leads the 30th Naval Construction Regiment. "Believe me, the Marines are always happy to see us arrive."

Most of the military camps scattered throughout the Kuwaiti desert are full of tanks and artillery pieces. But the Seabees home at Camp 93, named for the United Airlines flight whose passengers fought back against their Sept. 11 hijackers, is stocked with dozens of Caterpillar and John Deere construction vehicles painted in green camouflage, hundreds of yards of stacked pipes and a fleet of flatbed trucks.

"I think of myself as being in charge of a very large construction company," said Capt. David Fleisch, 43, who commands a battalion of some 650 Seabees with non-military-sounding titles like "builder," "steelworker" and "electrician."

"We're trained to defend ourselves if necessary, but our main job is to allow the Marines to do the fighting they're called on to do."

Formed during World War II, Seabees achieved legendary status for leveling ground in the South Pacific to make airfields. During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, they helped build the 20-lane road that the army used to move soldiers into northern Kuwait for the "left hook" attack on Iraq's Republican Guard.

Maj. Gen. James F. Amos, commander of the Third Marine Aircraft Wing, visited Camp 93 Thursday to thank the Seabees for getting the Al Jaber air base up to speed. They built the munitions armory from the ground up and more than doubled ramp space for aircraft, flattening the terrain and covering some 17 acres of desert with concrete.

"The only reason you all aren't Marines is that they must not have had a Marine recruiter in your home town," he said.

Many of the sailors who make up the unit certainly look combat-ready. Scott Farmer, a construction mechanic from Virginia Beach, still has the broad shoulders of a linebacker, which he was at the University of Florida before he injured his knee in the early 1990s. "I thought about joining a more combat-oriented unit," said Farmer. "But I wanted to use my mind and my body."

Cabral, a builder, said she appreciated Amos's words but added she was happy to be learning a trade that will be useful when she leaves the Navy. Eventually, the East Los Angeles native plans to return to college to study civil engineering.

"It took my father three years to say it, but he finally admitted he's proud of me for what I am doing," she said. "Maybe when I get out we can go into business together."