10:12 AM CDT on Monday, May 15, 2006

By Joel Rawson / The Providence Journal

Dispatches are exclusive reports from our field correspondents in Iraq. Joel Rawson, senior vice president and executive editor of The Providence Journal, and John Freidah, staff photographer, were in Iraq in May 2005 to cover the 173rd Long Range Surveillance Detachment of the Rhode Island National Guard.

SAMARRA, Iraq — The soldiers of the 173rd Long Range Surveillance Detachment of the Rhode Island Army National Guard live in a strange kind of tent encampment set up inside a block-long concrete and steel building.

Journal photo / John Freidah

Specialists Gregory Stott, left, 36, of Norwich, Conn., and Tony Sousa, 22, of New Jersey, of the Rhode Island Army National Guard's 173rd Long Range Surveillance Detachment, shower at their base in water trucked in from the Tigris River and purified by reverse osmosis.

The encampment is inside two long structures that recall the old Quonset huts. The frames are made of galvanized pipe, which is covered with plastic tarps and lined with silver insulation.

Inside, the men improvise.

Soldiers use ponchos, blankets and shelving to make little rooms for privacy, so they can sleep during the day after night missions.

Specialist Christopher Azevedo, a New Bedford firefighter, has arranged a solitary space.

Spec. Brian Santos and his friend Spec. Tony Sousa, both of Kearny, N.J., share another partitioned-off space.

Spec. Richard Busa, of Newton, Mass., just bunks in the open.

All around them are the soldiers' tools: rucksacks, rifles, machine guns, ammunition, body armor. A 9mm automatic pistol hangs on the end of Sousa's bunk.

The men sleep on steel-frame beds with real mattresses.

Everywhere, there are shelves of food, from Cheez-Its to canned Chef Boyardee Ravioli to powdered Gatorade.

Photographs of family and girlfriends are on display, and so are pictures of ladies whom these men probably will never meet.

Fluorescent lights are strung from the ceiling.

A separate tent houses the officers, Capt. Michael Manning, of North Kingstown; 1st Lt. John Fay, of Exeter; and the first sergeant, Sgt. 1st Class John Nolan, of Pawtucket.

Inside a dark green tent is the Tactical Operations Center. There, the communication section mans the radios, 24/7, keeping the 173rd in touch with the teams in the field and Humvees on the road, and with the 3rd Infantry Division battalion to which they are attached.

You will find Staff Sgt. Michael Davis, of South Portland, Maine, and the operations sergeant, Sgt. 1st Class Robert Saquet, of Brockton, Mass., working there.

Supply operations are run from a tent with an office, supply storage, and the bunk space for Staff Sgt. Paul Mailloux, of Portsmouth, the supply sergeant. Another tent is set aside for operations briefings.

The tents are air-conditioned and pleasant even on a hot day; they can be cool enough at night to require a blanket or sleeping bag.

Water for drinking, cooking and brushing teeth comes in 1.5-liter plastic bottles, shipped in by the pallet-load. The unit consumes about a pallet of water a day. The water is bottled in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia from desalinated sea water and from springs, according to Staff Sgt. Thomas Preston, of Fitchburg, Mass. It is shipped to Iraq by truck.

The men are told to drink lots of water, to stay hydrated. They cool the water in a chest freezer set in the middle of the building. When they go out, they take the frozen bottles, which provide cold water as the ice melts.

The men of the 173rd built their own showers. The water comes from the Tigris River, according to Preston, and is filtered by a process called reverse osmosis. It is brought in by tank truck. No one drinks the river water.

The men shave using the mirrors on the Humvees.

Sanitation is handled by five green plastic portable toilets, three at one end of the building, two at the other.

Laundry is sent out on Fridays and Mondays to another base, where it is washed — for free — and returned on the next cycle.

THE 173RD encampment is outside Samarra, at Forward Operating Base Brassfield-Mora. From the outside, it looks like an old-time fort surrounded by an outer ring of razor wire.

The base is roughly a large square with concrete-block walls and steel guard towers. Tanks have been driven up onto piles of earth, so their cannons and machine guns can fire over the walls.

Before the United States Army arrived, the Iraqis stored and processed grain here. There are two rows of steel buildings — like the one occupied by the 173rd — and a row of long concrete bins, where grain is still stored. The Iraqis call it the "silo." There are a lot of mice around.

The base has trailers for showers, and one of the buildings has a gym, a small library, an Internet cafe and a mess hall.

The mess hall serves breakfast and dinner. At lunch, the Army's prepackaged MREs — meals ready to eat — are put out, wrapped in tough brown plastic. Bring a sharp knife or hard teeth.

Last Thursday, the breakfast menu was:

Scrambled eggs

Steak

Pancakes

Little tubs of cold cereal, such as Frosted Flakes and Cheerios

Fresh oranges, grapes and pears

Cold soda

Cold banana juice

Milk

Hot water

Coffee

(Editor's Dining Out Review — Mess Hall, Samarra, Iraq: The eggs were OK. The steak was overcooked but tasty. The pancakes were round. The day before, the chef had no pancakes, but put out syrup. The day we had pancakes, there was no syrup. The coffee is good. My companion had the same. Price — free.)

Last Friday's dinner menu was:

Meatballs

Spaghetti in red sauce

Canned green beans

Pizza pockets

Fresh green salad with tomatoes, cucumbers, celery and green pepper and a choice of dressing

Chocolate-mint brownies

Fresh fruit

Beverages, the same as breakfast

Generally, the men of the 173rd skip the mess-hall breakfast. If they do eat there, it is dinner. The soldiers here wake up when they need to. If they have just come in off an operation, or if they work nights, they sleep in. There is no reveille.

Tons of food is sent from home, and the soldiers eat when they are hungry. They cook in a little kitchen they've set up with a microwave oven and a hot plate.

On a recent night, Sgt. Wayne Lynch, of Tewksbury, Mass., fried steaks. There is usually a package of frozen steaks in the chest freezer.

Yesterday morning, Azevedo made pancakes.

IN THE SMALL LIBRARY on a recent day, 54 books were on the shelves, ones such as Nobody's Fool and Mohawk by Richard Russo, Debt of Honor by Tom Clancy, The Outlaws of Mesquite by Louis L'Armour, and A Daily Guide to Miracles by Ann Packer.

The library magazines run to Bow Hunter, Deer and Deer Hunter, American Hunter, The American Rifleman, Sports Illustrated, the 2005 Baseball Review and the L.L. Bean Catalog.

A television carries the Armed Forces Network, which in turn carries CNN and Fox News. At 8:35 last Wednesday morning, Larry King was interviewing the stars of Everybody Loves Raymond, and the military network was hyping stories on an Air Force weight-loss program in Turkey and joint exercises with the RAF in England.

Staff Sgt. John Shimkus, of Boxboro, Mass., was watching.

"Somebody said this is what TV in North Korea must look like," he said, "all propaganda."

They also use their computers and projection equipment to show movies. Last week, it was Naked Gun.

The work of the Long Range Surveillance Detachment is intensely physical, requiring both strength and endurance. The soldiers have set up a space with weight benches and gym equipment, where they work out after sunset, when the air has cooled, sometimes late into the night.

Azevedo, wearing his rucksack, recently marched back and forth from one end of the building to the other, over and over, to condition his back and legs.

DUST COATS EVERYTHING with a fine brown haze and lies thick on the concrete floor of the building. The soil in this part of Iraq tends to bake hard, but the traffic of tanks, Humvees, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and trucks grinds the soil into a fine powder, which blows into the building and drifts into the tents. The area is swept, but carefully. Any vigorous sweeping would send the fine dust up in clouds.

Specialist Santos remarked that a piece of laundry dropped on the floor is instantly dirty.

Laptop computers are everywhere. They are used for business and to pass the time. Sgt. Douglas Ray, of North Kingstown, tapped into a NASA Web site. Spec. Nathaniel Deitch, of North Kingstown, made a logo for his team, which he intended to send home and have made into stickers and printed on T-shirts.

The soldiers use digital cameras constantly, to record what they see on the job and to record their experiences and their friends. The personal computers are loaded with pictures taken here and pictures sent from home.

E-mail and satellite-telephone technology connects the people here with their families and friends in the almost-instant 21st century, but there is still a ritual as old as the Army: mail call.

AT 5:25 FRIDAY evening, Deitch and Sgt. Juan Rivera, of Jersey City, N.J., drove a Humvee into the building, loaded with packages and letters. Davis, who is a musician back in Maine, brought his bugle out and played the music for mail call.

Watching, his friend Staff Sgt. James Leonard, of Waldwick, N.J., said: "It was great when we crossed the berm into Iraq, with him blowing charge."

Sergeant Preston passed out the letters, calling names:

"Saquet.

"Sousa.

"Rivera.

"Brown.

"Dean.

"Busa."

Preston turned to the packages.

Spec. Aaron Buehler, of Newport, opened his package and found a container of powder to make Del's lemonade. He said he planned to crush the ice in one of the frozen water bottles and mix it in a blender.

Capt. Michael Manning, the 173rd's commanding officer, received three packages. One was from his family in North Kingstown, containing food such as trail mix and refried beans. A second was from the Parents Club of West Point, a connection made through a good friend.

The third package came from Susan Schwab's class, at the Wickford Middle School. The names of the children in the class are Andrew, Joe, Derec , Matt and Kara.

"Did you get something from Wickford Middle?" Deitch asked. "I love them."

"Did you go there?" Manning asked.

"I did when I was a kid," said Deitch. He is 19.

Manning said they often get letters and packages from schools. He brought out an American flag signed by students at the St. Matthew School, in Cranston. The flag was crafted of white paper and blue and red finger paint. Rows of children's red handprints made the stripes.

Manning showed the children's flag to a Vietnam veteran.

"It's a different war," Manning said.