319th sets up camp amid carnage from '91

Go to the Conflict with Iraq section for previous stories about the 319th Transportation Company.

CAMP VIPER, Iraq - Sgt. 1st Class Jonathan Fields parked his Humvee on a strip of asphalt and sat waiting for two Marine Chinook helicopters to move out ahead of him.

Behind him a line of the Augusta-based 319th Transportation Company's tanker trucks, which had just finished unloading fuel in bladders in the sand, waited to pass.

In the distance he saw a crowd of Marines dash toward one of the helicopters, a few of them carrying a stretcher. They pulled out what appeared to be a wounded man, laid him down and rushed him away.

"That there, boy, that's reality," said Sgt. 1st Class Fields, 39, of Hephzibah.

The 319th has moved into the thick of things in the war against Iraq. After an exhausting night moving its entire fleet from Camp Coyote in Kuwait, the Army Reserve Unit spent its first day on Iraqi soil Sunday at Camp Viper, a base in American-controlled territory deep in southern Iraq.

A small group of trucks arrived at the camp in the morning while most of the fleet delivered nearly 300,000 gallons of fuel to a depot farther north, then rendezvoused at the camp in the evening.

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Here at Camp Viper there is the constant roar of helicopters coming and going from battle.

Some Cobra helicopters landed at a nearby landing strip Sunday with what appeared to be bullet holes on their frames.

The landscape surrounding the camp is full of carnage, but it's carnage from the last Persian Gulf War.

Shelled brick buildings and craters in roadways are remnants of American bombings that helped Allied forces drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait in 1991.

Because this camp is farther forward, solders and Marines weren't huddling in bunkers, as they were regularly back at Camp Coyote in Kuwait.

Here they watch their step, trying to walk in the path of tire tracks, fearing mines.

A mine set off by Marines exploded in the distance Sunday. Some 319th members mistook it for a Scud missile and strapped on their gas masks.

"I'm nervous. I'm not going to tell you I'm not," said Spc. Jeffery Key, 32, of Augusta. "We're walking on unknown land. You might step on something, and there goes your leg."

But Sgt. 1st Class Fields, who was deployed with the 319th a decade ago in Desert Storm, said the move into Iraq had barely fazed him.

"It still looks like Kuwait," he said. "There's nothing here but American military."

--From the Monday, March 24, 2003 printed edition of the Augusta Chronicle