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Marines itching to leave once-volatile Anbar

CAMP UBAYDI, Iraq — The Marines here are too diplomatic to put it this way, but they are bored.

Iraq’s Anbar province used to be a volatile and deadly region, marked by daily firefights and roadside bomb attacks. Not anymore.

“We’re livin’ the life out here now,” said Sgt. Glyn Long, a squad leader with Echo Company, 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines, which is winding up its tour at this isolated forward post in northern Anbar. “It’s better than back in ’05 and ’06, when it was run and gun, street to street, battle to battle.”

He fought then to free this part of Anbar in operations that cost the lives of 16 men, Long said.

But “better,” for Marines, is a relative term. Although the security and diplomatic situations have improved markedly in this part of Iraq, the Marines are eager to get into the fight in Afghanistan. Echo Company will get there, in October of 2010, but in the meantime, its leathernecks are spending a lot of time on comparatively quiet duty.

“It’s tougher out here when you’ve been trained so well to go out and close with the enemy and get him by the neck, so to speak,” Long said. But instead of firefights and rolling-thunder columns of armored vehicles, Anbar these days is a place where Marine convoys pull off the road to let Iraqi police or army convoys pass.

“It’s to show them that it’s their area and we’re just more or less visitors in it at this point,” said Capt. Matt Bartels, company commander.

On the rare occasions when the camp takes a rocket or mortar attack from local insurgents, Bartels said his first phone call is to the Iraqi police. The last attempted indirect fire attack was July 11, and it failed. Camp Ubaydi has averaged an attack per month this year.

Bartels counsels new arrivals that this isn’t the place for aggressive squad tactics, but discretion, restraint and diplomacy.

Marines no longer go on random street or foot patrols in the area, just to show they’re there. Every time vehicles go outside the wire, they must have a specific purpose to show themselves to the surrounding residents, Bartels said. The Marines are pulling farther back as the Iraqis take charge of their own environment, and not only that, the Marines “aren’t fearing for our lives every time we get in a vehicle — we’ve got some good friends out there, and the economy’s doing good.”

As fall approaches, many of the combat elements of Multinational Force-West, which runs the military operations in Anbar, are scheduled to leave Iraq and be replaced by Army “advise and assist” brigades, drawn from elements of the 82nd Airborne Division, said Lt. Col. Jim Desy, deputy current operations officer for MNF-West.