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Family and showers top wishlist
21/04/2003 18:57 - (SA)
Kuwait City - Britain's elite Royal Marine Commandos on Monday began packing up to go home after some of the fiercest fighting of the Iraqi war, with dreams of family - and a hot shower - at the top of their minds.
"Carpet under my feet, no sand. Walking the dogs," said a happy Sergeant Eddie Cochrane. "Seeing my one-year-old son, Thomas - he wasn't walking when I left."
Around 2 000 troops from the 3rd Commando Brigade, among the best-trained forces in the British army, will be heading home from Kuwait in the coming weeks after some of the most difficult fighting in the war.
"I want to get home to my family, that's the main thing," said Corporal Phil Smith, 38. He also said he wants to have a cold beer - and a good hot scrub.
"We haven't had a hot shower in three months," Smith said.
British troops have brought relative stability to Basra, the Fao peninsula and the Iraq's only deep-water port, Umm Qasr. But with reconstruction left to engineers and civil affairs soldiers, the work of these commandos is over.
The 3rd Commando Brigade were in the thick of the war at the outset, as US-led forces drove into Iraq from Kuwait to the south. Eight of its members died in a US helicopter crash in the war's first hours.
'Spooky' fighting
Speaking on the docks of a Kuwait naval base as they prepared their hovercraft and other vessels for the long journey home, troops described the spooky fighting in southern Iraq.
Some units raced over the mud flats in the Fao peninsula in their hovercraft, tearing down girders and barbed wire and setting off mines as they passed.
Their vessels sped so swiftly over the marshland that when they triggered mines, they had usually passed over them before the devices exploded.
The commandos destroyed an Iraqi brigade and caused others - demoralised at the prospect of defeat - to surrender or just disappear, said 38-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Nick Antony, commander of the 530 Assault Squadron.
"They fought pretty hard for four days, then slacked off when they realised they weren't going to win," said Antony.
"I think that everybody can be justifiably proud of what they achieved," he said.
The brigade's last fatality came some 10 days into the war, when Saddam Hussein's paramilitaries launched a rocket-propelled grenade at a hovercraft in a marsh ambush.
The troops are pretty sure that nobody survived their riposte.
"We determined they were positioned behind a mud hut," Cochrane said. Indicating the 7.62 millimetre machine gun mounted on the front of a hovercraft, he added: "We cut it in half."
The squadron's four hovercraft have been scarred by bullets and shrapnel and generally beat up by weeks of hard use and a 16-hour slog in choppy seas Sunday from Iraq to a naval base south of Kuwait City.
Marines were preparing to load them on Monday onto a ship making a six-week trip to Britain.
The soldiers will fly home and the entire brigade should be back home by mid-May to overhaul their gear and get ready to re-deploy - wherever might be the next destination - by August.
Locals key to victory
The troops said local Iraqis were one of the main keys to victory.
The Ba'ath party leadership in Basra was destroyed by a 2 000-pound bomb dropped on a house fingered by a resident who said a meeting was being held there, Antony said.
"We couldn't have done what we did without the support of the locals," he said. "We're quite used to doing this in Northern Ireland, but this is their backyard. We wouldn't have known who these people were."
- AFX
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