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Soldiers cheer Sox from afar

Oct-23-2004 » Filed Under: Iraq News

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By MEREDITH GOAD, Portland Press Herald Writer

So you think you've suffered as a Red Sox fan? Try watching your favorite team finally make it to the World Series from a desert country half a world away.

That's the situation for Spc. Chad Haskell of Augusta and his buddies in Iraq. A Sox fan since 1969, Haskell has been getting up at 3 a.m. to watch every playoff game, and plans to do the same during the coming week, no matter how worn out he is for duty the next day.

"I would gladly spend another year in Iraq if the Sox could win," Haskell wrote in an e-mail from Mosul. "Well, not gladly, but I would do it. I feel bad that I am not in the states to enjoy this, but will take it any time I can get it. It is very nice to have something to look forward to over here."

Haskell and other soldiers in the Maine Army National Guard's 133rd Engineer Battalion are as pumped up as anyone about the Red Sox playing the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series. The battalion was mobilized last December as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom and is not expected to return home for another four months.

"It's nice to be stressed out about the game instead of other things, for once," Spc. Joe Schreiber, 20, of Lisbon said Friday in a telephone interview from Iraq.

Some of the soldiers are finding creative ways to express their support for the Sox.

PV2 Chris Mallett of Winslow and three other soldiers stationed at Camp Marez in Mosul have been watching every game together over the Armed Forces Network.

They rise at 3 a.m. and watch in a lounge they have been transforming into "a Fenway experience," Mallett wrote in an e-mail. The Iraqi version of Fenway features all the retired numbers that are hanging at the real ballpark, and soon will have a scoreboard and surround sound so it will feel more like they are at the game. The soldiers even went on a "night mission" to snatch a black leather couch and used it to build stadium seating.

By the time the Sox won Game 7, it was 7:30 a.m. and Mallett and his friends were exhausted but full of adrenaline, so "there wasn't one soldier in Mosul that didn't know the Red Sox won."

"Here in Iraq they shoot off guns when their soccer team wins," Mallett said, "but our command frowns upon that, so we just yelled a lot."


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