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Base like gun range

Jan- 9-2005 » Filed Under: TF Olympia

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By Steve Walsh, Post-Tribune staff writer

MOSUL, IRAQ — The Army base at Mosul looks like it fell from an episode of M*A*S*H. The roads swim in puddles of mud. Grime covers the trucks and Humvees. The crumbling buildings of the former Iraqi base and the quickly assembled offices, nailed together by the Americans, play into the disheveled look.

The only thing that looks really new are the rows of concrete barriers being hauled into place to improve security.

Most of the newly arriving unit of local Indiana Guard troops will be using this as their home, likely for a full year.

Carried by crane from a common yard, just past the place where the 113th Engineering Battalion Guardsmen sleep, the concrete barriers sprout unexpectedly. After breakfast, a crew placed a 6-foot-long, 7-foot-high barrier to the left of the doorway in the office of Col. Richard Shatto and the senior staff.

“The battle for Mosul is the battle for Iraq and it will happen on your watch this January,” Shatto told his senior staff in the morning meeting.

The details of their mission are still not defined, but for the next month it is to help secure the elections. Americans are not expected to monitor the polling places, but troops are expected to harden them against attack on election day.

Shatto has been into the city three times since arriving six days earlier with an advanced party. No one has shot at him, but he has seen shooting around him, he said.

“It’s a mess out there, no doubt. It’s not the Iraqi people but outside insurgents,” Shatto said.


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