Bridging The Road To Baghdad
They are as close to the front lines as the soldiers on the front page, but this unit of Marines has never made the headlines.
If they weren’t here though, the story of this war could well be different. They build bridges for the invasion forces and keep them moving forward.
From the start of the war, when these combat engineers from the 1st Marine Division headed out of Kuwait towards Baghdad, 48 Hours Investigates producer Chuck Stevenson and photographer Larry Warner rode and lived with these Marines. This is their story.
A few were here before, in the first Gulf War, like Gunnery Sgt. Mark Wendling. But most of them are young – as young as 19. In these weeks on the battlefield they’ve had to grow up fast.
Once fearless, they’ve learned to deal with fear -- and along the way conquered an unforgiving and hostile desert.
The first day of the war they started heading north, near the front of a convoy of thousands of trucks and tanks. Trained to shoot as well as build, these Marines are on the lookout for Iraqis -- while they’re looking at Iraq.
“There’s so much empty space,” says Lt. Adrian Thom, 25, a Naval Academy graduate who leads a platoon of about 35 men. “That’s the thing that’s so surprising to me. There’s just nothing around.”
While riding along the highway, you wonder what it’s connected to. There’s just a whole lot of nothing here. People come out of nowhere, and all of a sudden you’re looking and wondering, “Where did they come from?”
Now, we’re 30 miles from the biblical city of Babylon. This was, at one time, referred to as the birthplace, the cradle of civilization.
From that standpoint, it is amazing to be over here now and walking around the land that history has written about for so many years.
Lt. Tom Tragesser, 32, leads another platoon that is here to help change the course of history. Only they have no idea what the immediate future holds.
“We really just don’t know the big picture,” says Tragesser. “It’s frustrating not to know what’s out there.”
“We could be leaving in 48 hours, or 24 hours, or 12 hours,” Thom adds. “We never really know.”
But after three days on the road to Baghdad, they finally get their first big mission. The heavy tanks on their way to Baghdad have been slowed by a gap in the road. As soon as the unit gets there, they will need to build a bridge in the dark with building materials that look like blocks of Legos.
But these Legos weigh hundreds of pounds. It’s back-breaking labor to fit each one together. The job stretches past midnight, and then, before dawn, they had to tear down the bridge and start over again.
In mid-morning, after working all night, the Marines open a new bridge on the road to Baghdad.
I don’t think I’ve ever been more proud of “my” platoon of Marines than I was after that bridge was complete.
Every bridge they build goes up in the shadow of battle, and in the shadow of fear. It is wartime.
They’re called combat engineers for a reason. “Five people with automatic weapons is dangerous to a lot of people,” says Wendling. “You know, if they just hit-and-run, if they do it right, they could pop off 15-20 rounds a piece -- well aimed rounds -- and then be gone.”
“The nerves are high, especially when it’s the first time,” adds Thom. “It’s the first incoming rounds, it’s the first gas alert, it’s the first time you hear a 50-cal being shot at you, or an AK-47 being shot at you. I think you can adapt, but that first time is really where the nerves sometimes get the best of you.”
There’s shooting all around them, but none directed at them. There is more building. In the middle of a sandstorm which slowed the advance of the invasion force, they built another bridge.
It went up without a problem, which is good, because after four days in the desert, they’ve got enough problems.
“Well, I got my first shower, not full shower, but I got to wash my hair for the first time in two weeks yesterday,” says Thom.
On top of that, you have the food situation. What do I miss about home? Food. There isn’t much of it here. Sometimes, you just have one meal a day.
“The only thing I’m craving now is eggs benedict,” says Tragesser.
“Right now, I’d love to have a pork chop sandwich with some mashed potatoes,” says Lt. Corporal Marvin Barnes, 23.
But food is just a small part of what Barnes misses about home.
“I miss the little things like being woken up every morning,” he says. “I miss the grass, just simple things. I miss people, seeing family, listening to my father talk.”
Barne’s parents are waiting and praying back home in Leary, Georgia.
“I would give him some encouragement and give him some words of wisdom to help him as a young man,” his father says. “To grow up to be a responsible young man.”
“He’s special to us,” his mother adds. “We always tell him that, and he’s our little hero.”
Tragesser, from Jacksonville, North Carolina, has left behind a wife and five children.
“What I really miss is when the children are in bed, and I’ve read them a story, and I come back into the kitchen and my wife’s got the light’s turned down,” says Tragesser. “She’s got a couple of little lamps on around the counter, she’s got all of the chairs picked up on the table, she’s swept the floor and the house has that warm, evening feeling.”
“My dad, he’s also in the military,” says Thom. “He understands what I’m going through.”
“I miss her. I miss her a lot,” says her dad, an engineer. “I miss her tremendously. I’ve got her pictures up all over the place.”
But Lt. Thom may have to wait a long time for a letter from her home in Lafayette, Louisiana. The engineers in this battalion have out-raced the supply lines, and the mail. Some of them are waiting on the most important news of their lives.
Randy Beckett is about to be a father, if he isn’t already. “Wish I could be home for it,” says Beckett. “I don’t even know if it’s going be a boy or a girl.”
That one glimpse of home is everything to the younger Marines. But not to veterans like Wendling.
“The bridge is the essential thing,” says Wendling. “Without the bridge, we don’t move. Without the mail, we move.”
Seventeen days after they set out, they built their biggest bridge -- this one across the Tigris River, the biggest obstacle on the road to Baghdad. There were a few problems, but the Marines have learned how to do this.
And along the way, they’ve learned about themselves.
“I am going to die someday. I realized the first night when we laid in the trench watching the scuds fly over us,” says Tragesser. It never really hit me until I got out of here how short life can be, and how I take certain things for granted. That’s definitely something I’ve learned.”
“We came from such different backgrounds and experiences,” adds Thom. “I definitely have seen a lot of molding coming that way as far as us changing and working together.”
“If I ever make it, I want to write music about something like this,” says Barnes. “You know what I mean, about something that’s going on in the world.”
Barnes has learned about the world the hard way -- on the road to Baghdad.