Navy Seabees set to
return to Makalapa
after Iraq duty
About 30 Navy Seabees will return to Hawaii this month after helping to build and repair bridges and other infrastructure during the Iraq war.
Rear Adm. Charles Kubic, who commands the more than 3,000 Seabees in Iraq, met with Pacific Fleet commander Adm. Walter Doran yesterday at the Pacific Fleet headquarters in Makalapa.
Kubic, commander of the First Naval Construction Division, told reporters that the job of the Seabees now is to help with the U.S. Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, which is the interim government in Iraq serving as the coalition civilian authority.
He estimated that there will be close to 5,000 engineers, many of them Seabees, who will help rebuild eight or nine cities in Iraq.
Eventually, the military engineers will be replaced with civilian contractors, Kubic said.
"Having won the war, we must now win the peace," Kubic said. "In many respects that will be harder. There are still many Baath Party regulars and Fedayeen thugs in Iraq, as well as ever-growing numbers of foreign Rhadists, including Iranian Badr Corps, flowing into Iraq to spread anti-coalition sentiments. Democracy and economic recovery need to take hold before these subversive elements gain strength."
Kubic said that before the war began on March 19, the military believed that all the bridges leading into Baghdad would be blown.
"We believed that the dams would be blown and that the fields flooded, and we believed there would be large numbers of displaced people on the battlefield and we really believed that Saddam Hussein would have used at some point chemical weapons on us."
Although the military expected Saddam to blow all the bridges leading into Baghdad, in reality only three over the Diyala River were demolished and had to be replaced by Seabees, Kubic said.
"In many cases the (U.S.) attack happened so swiftly," Kubic said, "that we took the bridges intact."
Kubic singled out for praise civilian engineers working for the Pacific Division of the Naval Facilities Engineering Command at Pearl Harbor for their help, noting their design and expertise resulted in a 70-ton steel bridge that was built in 190 hours over the Diyala River on the main route to Baghdad.
He said that civilian engineers Mel Tsutahara, Richard Mashiba, Ross Shimabuku, Sherwin Chang, Aaron Kam, Kirby Hong and Keith Hayashi at Pearl Harbor's combat operations center worked 24 hours a day to come up with the proper design to repair the bridges.
Pearl Harbor Seabees, all members of the 30th Naval Construction Regiment, began deploying to Kuwait last summer. Kubic said the Seabees worked with the 1st Marine Division.
Once the Pearl Harbor Seabees return to Makalapa, it will mean that naval reservists belonging to the 1st Naval Construction Regiment who replaced them here will be taken off active duty.
Kubic described that one of the "defining moments" for him was when he was sitting in his tent in Kuwait reviewing his "morning battle brief" on March 20 when an Iraqi missile struck Camp Commando.
"About 200 meters from our tent," Kubic said, "a Chinese cruise missile hit. It was the first shot of the war. It landed 100 meters outside of the main Marine camp in Kuwait. ... It knocked us all down to the floor, and at that moment we knew that the war had begun."
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