New Riverine force will take fight upriver in Iraq

[USMCRET6391]

By LOUIS HANSEN, The Virginian-Pilot
© April 10, 2006

At this time next year, about 200 sailors will fill up small boats, man .50-caliber machine guns and watch for trouble along the waterways of Baghdad.

There’s a catch, though: A t the moment, these sailors have no boats, no manuals and no past missions to call their own. Riverine Group 1 of the Navy’s new river combat force based at Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base is starting from scratch.

They still are recruiting men and writing a fresh chapter on how to prepare for river fighting.

“We’ve got sailors lining up at the door,” Capt. Michael L. Jordan, commodore of the riverine force, said during an interview at his half-finished headquarters. “The problem is, we’ve got no experience to draw from.”

The Navy has not seen this type of action since the Vietnam War, so it is calling river veterans, the Marine Corps and the special warfare community for advice. The chosen sailors will undergo eight months of training, including combat first aid and grunt infantry at Camp Lejeune, N.C.

Sailors of the new riverine force conduct boat training Wednesday at Little Creek Naval Amphibious Base. Sailors in the force also will attend special sessions at Camp Lejeune, N.C. There, they will undergo basic infantry training, but, officials say, the force will not be a naval infantry.

It’s a brave new world – and in one year, they’ll be in Iraq.

The riverine force is part of the Navy’s effort to become a bigger player in global efforts against terrorists and insurgents. Policing and protecting the shallow brown and green waters in hot spots now is the responsibility of the Marine Corps and special forces.

That will change quickly.

For several months, the Navy riverine force has been little more than a progression of planning sessions, think-tank reports and endorsements from top brass. Now, ideas are becoming action.

Late last year, the sea service established the 40,000-sailor Navy Expeditionary Combat Command at Little Creek. The unit, led by Rear Adm. Donald Bullard, has wide-ranging responsibilities for sailors working primarily on the ground, including Seabees, ordnance teams, logistics and cargo handlers.

In January, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Michael G. Mullen cited the development of a riverine force as a key goal this year. The riverine force falls under the new command.

The riverine group will consist of three squadrons and roughly 900 sailors, including the 200 initially deployed, and support staff. Each unit will have 16 boats, most likely 30- to 40-foot crafts capable of cruising as fast as 40 knots. The craft will be similar to those used by Marines and special forces.

The Navy’s last widespread riverine force patrolled during the Vietnam War along the Mekong Delta and its rivers and canals. The hastily assembled riverine corps came together in 1965.

The Navy shelved its squadrons after the war, turning many boats over to allies and the mission over to the Marines.

Robert Work, a senior defense analyst with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said the return of the brown- and green-water Navy will benefit the service in the long term.

Since the Cold War, t he Navy has projected its force miles away from the coastlines.

“It was all about putting missiles on the shore,” said Work, a retired Marine colonel. A s the Soviet Union disintegrated, however, threats from small stateless insurgents and terrorists grew.

The Navy has felt the blow from terrorists several times. The Norfolk-based destroyer Cole was attacked and 17 sailors were killed in 2000 while at port in Yemen. In 2004, two sailors and a Coast Guardsman died when they confronted terrorists during a patrol around the Iraqi oil terminals in the Persian Gulf.

A few Navy leaders pushed to re-establish a riverine force, Work said.

Those arguments were bolstered by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the Iraq war.

“The global war on terror has a gravitational pull over time,” he said.

Although the Navy’s core strength will remain its aircraft carriers, more of its leaders are willing to move toward brown- and green-water operations, Work said.

“I really believe the Navy has made the cultural shift,” he said.

To meet the new mission, the Navy has to draw up a set of needs for training, equipment and expertise. It is a work in progress.

“Standing up in six months is a daunting task,” Jordan said. “We want to get it right.”

As Jordan worked through the details of creating a command, he found himself posing questions most sailors do not get to ask:

What should our boats look like? What kind of flak jacket should a sailor wear? What type of training and physical fitness regime should he run his sailors through?

Jordan has travel ed to Iraq and across the United States to learn about training and equipment for his new force. He has turned to the Marines and Navy special warfare units for advice.

The Navy also faces intra service rivalries with the Marines, who have felt uneasy about the possibility of a new naval infantry. The Marines, a part of the Department of Navy, have served as the sea services’ infantry throughout their history.

So Jordan also is building bridges to the Marines Corps.

“We’re training sailors to operate on a small craft. … Their job is on the boat,” he said. He added what has become a mantra from the Navy: “We’re not developing a naval infantry.”

Marine Lt. Col. Ray McFall, a liaison officer with the Marine Corps Forces Command in Norfolk, has been helping the Navy form its new command.

McFall has arranged special sessions for Group 1 sailors at Camp Lejeune. They will undergo basic infantry training, much like foot soldiers learning the building blocks of combat and weaponry.

“The Navy’s trying to step up,” he said. “The Marine Corps is very supportive of this.”

However , he sai d, it’s still a sensitive area within the two services.

“We’re not training them into Marines,” he said.

Work said riverine work is difficult for the Marine Corps to keep in the long term. Skilled positions, particularly boat drivers, are lost as Marines advance their careers back into the infantry, he said.

With the Navy ready to assume the new role, he said, sailors with small-boat experience will have skills and a career path more valuable to the Navy. “This is the way it should be,” Work said.

Jordan is encouraged by the response from sailors. The Navy has identified about 90 percent of the personnel needed to fill the three squadrons.

Brown-water veterans from Vietnam say they are not surprised by the steady stream of volunteers.

Larry Weatherall of Virginia Beach conducted about 220 missions in patrol boats from 1967 to 1968 . He said the assignment was the highlight of many sailors’ careers.

“For most of us, that was the time of our lives,” he said. “We never had more freedom. We never had more responsibility.” Weatherall, 58, is president of the regional chapter of the Gamewardens of Vietnam, an association of brown-water veterans .

The riverine fleet acted as a beat cop on the water: checking small boats, getting to know the local fishermen and traders, and, at night, setting up ambushes on enemy craft. Weatherall estimates that his four-man crew engaged in about 40 fire fights.

Jordan has invited the veterans to conferences, and other officers in the expeditionary command have sought guidance on equipment and tactics. The veterans and active duty officers conferred again at a Riverine Warfare conference last week at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.

A bout one out of five sailors have reached Little Creek to start their new duties. More arrive every week, along with equipment and support personnel. Eventually, the sailors will deploy to Iraq and replace a Marine force guarding Haditha Dam near Baghdad.

Lt. John John served as a liaison officer with Marine Corps forces in Okinawa, Japan. When he heard about the riverine force, he requested a spot and moved half way across the world to join and lead a new squadron.

He also passed on the shore duty he was owed next year.

“I wanted to be a part of history,” John said. “I’ve rationalized this by saying I’ll be on the shore in Iraq.”

[Grimmy]

I am glad to see this type of operational force get re-established in the Navy.

I can see a value in having a serious "joint command" type outfit that's USMC and US Navy formed up to specialize in coastal waters and freshwater strike force operations.

Especially if it came with a 2500 man end strength cap raise for the Marines.

[onep0int]

Posteddocument.write(''+ myTimeZone('Tue, 26 Sep 2006 17:20:01 GMT-0700', 'Tue 26 September 2006 17:20')+''); Tue 26 September 2006 17:20 Tue 26 September 2006 17:20From the Oct 2nd Navy Times:

Getting their feet wet
Marines instill speed, decisiveness and flexibility in brown-water sailors

By Andrew Scutro, staff writer; photos by M. Scott Mahaskey, staff


CAPE FEAR RIVER, N.C. — The sailors hide under a tree. It’s black as ink beneath the leaves, despite a bright moon.

They’ve nosed their riverine assault craft up on the bank with another boat, while two more creep back from a ferry crossing up ahead. Those two boats just put a squad of heavily armed sailors ashore to intercept gun-smuggling “insurgents.”

The Navy ground combat element went in shooting, but it’s quiet now both ashore and afloat, the loud diesel motors shut off.

Hospital Corpsman 2nd Class Neath Williams keeps a weather eye from under the tree.

“We’re just hanging out here,” he said. “We don’t want to be in the middle of the river.”

He stands aboard a dark green assault craft, gripping an M-240 machine gun. His medical kit and backboard are stashed under the gun.

Williams has been in the Navy for seven years, but he’s spent it all with Fleet Marine Force. He went into Iraq in 2003 with the Marine invasion forces as a member of a shock trauma platoon.

He’s in good enough shape to seriously consider Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, but now he’s in Riverine Squadron 1, headquartered at Naval Amphibious Base Little Creek, Va. It’s his first actual Navy assignment, and he couldn’t be happier.

“I like this group. Everyone wants to be here. That makes it worthwhile,” he said in the darkness. “We’re all on the same sheet of music. I’m with a whole bunch of guys who want to be riverines.”

That’s what they call themselves — “riverines,” not “dirt sailors” or “devil squids.”

They came from all over the fleet — off destroyers, from the Seabees, out of the gators and small boat units. Two of the 225 sailors in the squadron came right from boot camp, and the brown-water Navy is the first Navy they’ll know.

They don’t look like Marines and they don’t look like soldiers. They look like sailors in camouflage utilities armed with carbines and machine guns. And they think they’ve found the coolest job in the Navy.

As former fleet sailor Senior Chief Boatswain’s Mate Bruce Diette put it, “I volunteered for this duty. I think this is the best thing the Navy has going on right now.”

Taking care of business

Riverine Squadron 1 is the newest combat unit in the Navy. It’s part of Navy Expeditionary Combat Command, a new type of command formed specifically as a naval force for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other operations. It puts the new riverine unit, Seabees, explosive ordnance disposal, divers, coastal warfare squadrons and expeditionary logistics under a command that can put forces up inland waterways, through the river deltas and on the green littoral sea, whether it’s for expeditionary combat or humanitarian relief.

And the fact that a dozen sailors armed like an infantry squad are now shooting up a ferry crossing in North Carolina just upriver shows the Navy has jumped in with both feet.

The disembarked sailors have found their “insurgents” and it’s time for them to come out. The diesels roar, the boats maneuver and blank machine gun fire flashes and thuds.

As the boats carrying the ground force speed by, gunners behind the .50-caliber machine guns fore and aft on Williams’ boat start thumping out covering fire. Soon, the corpsman joins in with his M-240. He clearly enjoys the work.

“We’re pretty much ready for whatever they throw at us,” Williams said later. “By the time we’re done with training, I know we’ll be able to take care of business.”

Changing the sailor ‘mind-set’

Williams is gung-ho, but whether the squadron’s sailors are ready to go to Iraq in the spring will be up to the Marines who have trained them.

This past summer, the squadron went through Marine infantry training at Camp Lejeune, N.C., and now the unit is under a cadre of combat veterans who are teaching the sailors how to operate on rivers.

Although the Navy had a strong riverine force in Vietnam, its brown-water force atrophied in the years following the war. The remaining expertise resided with special warfare units who support SEALs. In recent years, conventional river operations were left to a Marine small craft company. But after operating up and down the Euphrates River in Iraq for two years, that unit was disestablished in 2005 under Marine force restructuring. The riverborne Marines in Iraq now are reserve provisional units that will be relieved by the Navy squadron this spring.

For the Marine training cadre getting the Navy riverines spooled up, the biggest lesson they’ve tried to impart is “a sense of urgency.”

In the most diplomatic ways possible, the combat veterans talk about changing the sailor “mind-set.”

Gunnery Sgt. Thomas Scudder is the senior staff noncommissioned officer for the Marine detachment of the joint Special Missions Training Center at Camp Lejeune.

A former reconnaissance Marine and infantry platoon leader with two Iraq tours, Scudder puts the sailors into situations where they need to make decisions quickly. Every sailor has to be able to man every spot on the boat, and no task can be put off for later.

“Things need to be done right away. It’s not, ‘Hey, we’ll get around to the boat later.’ It’s not lackadaisical. You don’t go back and play Xbox or anything like that,” he said.

Scudder has seen the sailors evolve since they’ve been under Marine training.

“Marines are brought up one way. The Navy is brought up another,” he said. “There’s a lot of good ones, a good mentality and a good sense of what they’re getting themselves into. They’ll find out exactly when they get there.”

He means it.

After one training evolution that involved two boat crew casualties and a broken boat, Scudder scolds the sailors for being hesitant while under fire.

“Violence,” he tells them. “You need to understand. Shoot. Shoot. You have the weapons. Use the damn things.”

One of Scudder’s trainers put it succinctly while waiting to ambush the sailors from the riverbank.

Cpl. Jackson Wilson was a coxswain on a Marine riverine boat during the second push into Fallujah in November 2004. It was a bloody battle, and the enemy fought hard. His crew went through thousands and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

Because a boat is a fat target on a river, “make sure you do what you’re told to do, and do it quick — real quick,” he said. “You need to gain fire superiority immediately.”

When it comes to operating in a small boat crew in combat, he said to remember one thing: “immediate obedience to direct orders.”

Keeping the mission straight

Lt. Cmdr. Mike Egan, executive officer of Riverine Squadron 1, comes from the EOD community. He began his Navy career 25 years ago as an electronics technician on the submarine Tinosa.

The command has three boat detachments of 50 sailors each and a headquarters element with 75 sailors. Within the boat crews are sailors with extra maritime interdiction training; they make up the ground combat element.

Egan said there’s still some debate over how much the riverines will go ashore, but the riverine mission is clearly for the Navy.

“The Navy’s focus is always on the water. The Marine focus is always on the ground. As long as we always keep that straight, there won’t be any mission creep that we really need to be concerned about.”

As the first squadron gets ready for a six- to nine-month deployment in Iraq, a second squadron is being manned and a third will follow. After going through the same training, Riverine Squadron 2 will take over for the first squadron in Iraq.

But Egan said his guys will have more work when they get back.

“There are already missions and requirements for us in different parts of the world, like South America and Indonesia, anywhere you can imagine that has extensive waterways.”

High speed, low drag

Egan’s sailors feel fortunate to be riverines.

It’s a Saturday morning and Diette, the senior chief boatswain’s mate, just got off a mission where he was the patrol navigator. When the Marine opposing forces ambushed the sailors, Diette and the patrol leader were “killed.” The cadre also “disabled” a boat that had lashed up for towing.

Before this, Diette was the leading chief petty officer of the deck division on the destroyer Howard. Under Marine training, he’s seen more flexibility for “free thinking” and more responsibility for young sailors.

He’s learning how to call in artillery and air support. He’s watching his young sailors learn and grow and work toward an expeditionary warfare qualification.

He loves it.

“It’s real high-speed, low-drag. All I know is, I was lucky,” he said. “I’m working with motivated sailors who will not give up in any situation.”

According to Diette, one aspect of riverines that differs from his fleet experience is that his E-3s manning belt-fed machine guns have weapons release authority, and they’re expected to use it.

“A lot of people are not really going to understand that when they read it or hear it, but I would invite them to come and get on the boat and run a mission and see how much goes on with 20 guys to really understand it.”

One of those young sailors is Boatswain’s Mate Seaman Michael Huggins. He’s 19, right out of boot camp, and now, he’s a riverine bow gunner.

When he was the only one of 80 in his recruit division to get orders for the riverine squadron, no one could tell him what it was.

Now he’s living and working with four other sailors — his boat crew — and it’s the Navy he knows.

“Everybody tells me how lucky I am,” he said. “I am looking forward to staying in the Navy as long as I am doing this.”

Posteddocument.write(''+ myTimeZone('Tue, 26 Sep 2006 17:20:01 GMT-0700', 'Tue 26 September 2006 17:20')+''); Tue 26 September 2006 17:20 Tue 26 September 2006 17:20From the Oct 2nd Navy Times:

Getting their feet wet
Marines instill speed, decisiveness and flexibility in brown-water sailors

By Andrew Scutro, staff writer; photos by M. Scott Mahaskey, staff


CAPE FEAR RIVER, N.C. — The sailors hide under a tree. It’s black as ink beneath the leaves, despite a bright moon.

They’ve nosed their riverine assault craft up on the bank with another boat, while two more creep back from a ferry crossing up ahead. Those two boats just put a squad of heavily armed sailors ashore to intercept gun-smuggling “insurgents.”

The Navy ground combat element went in shooting, but it’s quiet now both ashore and afloat, the loud diesel motors shut off.

Hospital Corpsman 2nd Class Neath Williams keeps a weather eye from under the tree.

“We’re just hanging out here,” he said. “We don’t want to be in the middle of the river.”

He stands aboard a dark green assault craft, gripping an M-240 machine gun. His medical kit and backboard are stashed under the gun.

Williams has been in the Navy for seven years, but he’s spent it all with Fleet Marine Force. He went into Iraq in 2003 with the Marine invasion forces as a member of a shock trauma platoon.

He’s in good enough shape to seriously consider Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, but now he’s in Riverine Squadron 1, headquartered at Naval Amphibious Base Little Creek, Va. It’s his first actual Navy assignment, and he couldn’t be happier.

“I like this group. Everyone wants to be here. That makes it worthwhile,” he said in the darkness. “We’re all on the same sheet of music. I’m with a whole bunch of guys who want to be riverines.”

That’s what they call themselves — “riverines,” not “dirt sailors” or “devil squids.”

They came from all over the fleet — off destroyers, from the Seabees, out of the gators and small boat units. Two of the 225 sailors in the squadron came right from boot camp, and the brown-water Navy is the first Navy they’ll know.

They don’t look like Marines and they don’t look like soldiers. They look like sailors in camouflage utilities armed with carbines and machine guns. And they think they’ve found the coolest job in the Navy.

As former fleet sailor Senior Chief Boatswain’s Mate Bruce Diette put it, “I volunteered for this duty. I think this is the best thing the Navy has going on right now.”

Taking care of business

Riverine Squadron 1 is the newest combat unit in the Navy. It’s part of Navy Expeditionary Combat Command, a new type of command formed specifically as a naval force for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other operations. It puts the new riverine unit, Seabees, explosive ordnance disposal, divers, coastal warfare squadrons and expeditionary logistics under a command that can put forces up inland waterways, through the river deltas and on the green littoral sea, whether it’s for expeditionary combat or humanitarian relief.

And the fact that a dozen sailors armed like an infantry squad are now shooting up a ferry crossing in North Carolina just upriver shows the Navy has jumped in with both feet.

The disembarked sailors have found their “insurgents” and it’s time for them to come out. The diesels roar, the boats maneuver and blank machine gun fire flashes and thuds.

As the boats carrying the ground force speed by, gunners behind the .50-caliber machine guns fore and aft on Williams’ boat start thumping out covering fire. Soon, the corpsman joins in with his M-240. He clearly enjoys the work.

“We’re pretty much ready for whatever they throw at us,” Williams said later. “By the time we’re done with training, I know we’ll be able to take care of business.”

Changing the sailor ‘mind-set’

Williams is gung-ho, but whether the squadron’s sailors are ready to go to Iraq in the spring will be up to the Marines who have trained them.

This past summer, the squadron went through Marine infantry training at Camp Lejeune, N.C., and now the unit is under a cadre of combat veterans who are teaching the sailors how to operate on rivers.

Although the Navy had a strong riverine force in Vietnam, its brown-water force atrophied in the years following the war. The remaining expertise resided with special warfare units who support SEALs. In recent years, conventional river operations were left to a Marine small craft company. But after operating up and down the Euphrates River in Iraq for two years, that unit was disestablished in 2005 under Marine force restructuring. The riverborne Marines in Iraq now are reserve provisional units that will be relieved by the Navy squadron this spring.

For the Marine training cadre getting the Navy riverines spooled up, the biggest lesson they’ve tried to impart is “a sense of urgency.”

In the most diplomatic ways possible, the combat veterans talk about changing the sailor “mind-set.”

Gunnery Sgt. Thomas Scudder is the senior staff noncommissioned officer for the Marine detachment of the joint Special Missions Training Center at Camp Lejeune.

A former reconnaissance Marine and infantry platoon leader with two Iraq tours, Scudder puts the sailors into situations where they need to make decisions quickly. Every sailor has to be able to man every spot on the boat, and no task can be put off for later.

“Things need to be done right away. It’s not, ‘Hey, we’ll get around to the boat later.’ It’s not lackadaisical. You don’t go back and play Xbox or anything like that,” he said.

Scudder has seen the sailors evolve since they’ve been under Marine training.

“Marines are brought up one way. The Navy is brought up another,” he said. “There’s a lot of good ones, a good mentality and a good sense of what they’re getting themselves into. They’ll find out exactly when they get there.”

He means it.

After one training evolution that involved two boat crew casualties and a broken boat, Scudder scolds the sailors for being hesitant while under fire.

“Violence,” he tells them. “You need to understand. Shoot. Shoot. You have the weapons. Use the damn things.”

One of Scudder’s trainers put it succinctly while waiting to ambush the sailors from the riverbank.

Cpl. Jackson Wilson was a coxswain on a Marine riverine boat during the second push into Fallujah in November 2004. It was a bloody battle, and the enemy fought hard. His crew went through thousands and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

Because a boat is a fat target on a river, “make sure you do what you’re told to do, and do it quick — real quick,” he said. “You need to gain fire superiority immediately.”

When it comes to operating in a small boat crew in combat, he said to remember one thing: “immediate obedience to direct orders.”

Keeping the mission straight

Lt. Cmdr. Mike Egan, executive officer of Riverine Squadron 1, comes from the EOD community. He began his Navy career 25 years ago as an electronics technician on the submarine Tinosa.

The command has three boat detachments of 50 sailors each and a headquarters element with 75 sailors. Within the boat crews are sailors with extra maritime interdiction training; they make up the ground combat element.

Egan said there’s still some debate over how much the riverines will go ashore, but the riverine mission is clearly for the Navy.

“The Navy’s focus is always on the water. The Marine focus is always on the ground. As long as we always keep that straight, there won’t be any mission creep that we really need to be concerned about.”

As the first squadron gets ready for a six- to nine-month deployment in Iraq, a second squadron is being manned and a third will follow. After going through the same training, Riverine Squadron 2 will take over for the first squadron in Iraq.

But Egan said his guys will have more work when they get back.

“There are already missions and requirements for us in different parts of the world, like South America and Indonesia, anywhere you can imagine that has extensive waterways.”

High speed, low drag

Egan’s sailors feel fortunate to be riverines.

It’s a Saturday morning and Diette, the senior chief boatswain’s mate, just got off a mission where he was the patrol navigator. When the Marine opposing forces ambushed the sailors, Diette and the patrol leader were “killed.” The cadre also “disabled” a boat that had lashed up for towing.

Before this, Diette was the leading chief petty officer of the deck division on the destroyer Howard. Under Marine training, he’s seen more flexibility for “free thinking” and more responsibility for young sailors.

He’s learning how to call in artillery and air support. He’s watching his young sailors learn and grow and work toward an expeditionary warfare qualification.

He loves it.

“It’s real high-speed, low-drag. All I know is, I was lucky,” he said. “I’m working with motivated sailors who will not give up in any situation.”

According to Diette, one aspect of riverines that differs from his fleet experience is that his E-3s manning belt-fed machine guns have weapons release authority, and they’re expected to use it.

“A lot of people are not really going to understand that when they read it or hear it, but I would invite them to come and get on the boat and run a mission and see how much goes on with 20 guys to really understand it.”

One of those young sailors is Boatswain’s Mate Seaman Michael Huggins. He’s 19, right out of boot camp, and now, he’s a riverine bow gunner.

When he was the only one of 80 in his recruit division to get orders for the riverine squadron, no one could tell him what it was.

Now he’s living and working with four other sailors — his boat crew — and it’s the Navy he knows.

“Everybody tells me how lucky I am,” he said. “I am looking forward to staying in the Navy as long as I am doing this.”

Meet the in-your-face Navy

Petty Officer 2nd Class Fealofani Peau, right, and Marine Cpl. Jeff Raider, left, react to incoming ordnance from mock-opposing forces along the Cape Fear River during riverine training in Elizabethtown, N.C. STEPHEN M. KATZ/THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT



By LOUIS HANSEN, The Virginian-Pilot
© September 18, 2006
ELIZABETHTOWN, N.C. - Marine Staff Sgt. Erick Hodge shot one final question at the 30 sailors slumped on the bank of Cape Fear River after an eight-hour training exercise.
How many had left blank ammunition in the chamber of their guns?
Groans. About one-third of the sailors raised their arms.
When you're in Iraq, using live bullets, that's a good way to accidentally shoot your buddy, Hodge barked. "That's a bad day."
More groans from the Navy men.
It's one thing for sailors to climb the learning curve toward becoming a combat-ready unit. They're finding it's quite another to hump it with the tough and aggressive Marine Corps.
Since early June, about 100 Virginia Beach-based sailors have trained at Camp Lejeune to transform from a collection of fleet sailors and specialists into a tight river patrol force. It moves regular sailors closer to combat than anytime in a generation.
Lt. Cmdr. Mike Egan, executive officer of Riverine Squadron 1, based at Little Creek, nodded along with the Marine's blunt debriefing on a recent weekend morning.
"It's not personal; it’s business," Egan said. "Their sole purpose and dedicated interest is to get us to come back alive."
The U.S. Navy has a long history in Riverine combat, but little since waging war in the Vietnamese delta in the 1960s and early ' 70s.
The Marine Corps has handled the bulk of river patrol missions in unstable nations, particularly in Latin America. In Iraq, the infantrymen established river patrols along the Euphrates near Baghdad shortly after the 2003 invasion.
Hodge, a 12-year Marine, was with the first deployment to river duty in Iraq in 2004. Two years later, he was in Fallujah. "We broke the brush for the rest of the platoon," he said.
They returned home with valuable battle experience. Now, Hodge is training sailors on tactics and experiences learned along the Euphrates. The Navy unit worked through ways to move its 36-foot boats across land, repair jet engines in the shallow waters and spot ambushes.
After months of initial training at Little Creek, the new generation of river rats now face Marine instructors and their habit of telling the unvarnished truth.
Marines "take for granted being infantry," Hodge said. "They're learning that."
And for sailors, it's been an adjustment.
Petty Officer 3rd Class Matthew Freeman, a lanky redhead from Modesto, Calif., said he joined the Navy two years ago "so I wouldn't have to go to combat."
Yet after spending his short career in the fleet, working as a firefighter aboard the destroyer Bainbridge, the Navy tapped the 20-year-old for its new force.
Among the perils of being on a Marine base, Freeman has discovered, sailors were scolded for acting up in the chow line - while the Marines waited quietly at parade rest for their food.
"You get a lot of weird looks," Freeman said.
At the start of infantry training, he and several buddies shaved their heads. He's since let it grow back out to sailor length. Still, he's adopted the infantry ethos for his gunner job: "Make sure my gun fires and take care of my boat crew."
Petty Officer 3rd Class Josh Holder spent four years in the Army before switching to the sea service. He wanted to join the special warfare community but did not make the cut on his first attempt.
Holder, 25, worked his way into the riverine force, where he serves as a boat driver. Some sailors haven't shed their less formal, blue-water attitude - but the Marines are trying to break them, he said.
"They all have that gung-ho mentality," he said. "I've absolutely got to see what the other side is."
During the recent training, two squadrons of sailors and their Marine handlers converged on the swollen banks of the Cape Fear River.
They bivouacked on a state park with a boat ramp and a lock, about a mile from small downtown Elizabethtown.
The sailors left behind air-conditioned berthing and hot chow lines. They deployed for the weekend in nylon tents and ate MREs, or meals ready to eat. They split into groups and ran night and day missions.
The first group piled into four patrol boats at dusk and plied the muddy waters.
Gunnery Sgt. Tom Scudder, who led his infantry unit into the bloody second battle for Fallujah, waited and watched for action from the opposite bank, under a full moon.
The riverine sailors sensed an ambush and stopped short around a bend. They slipped off the boat, crept through the woods and took the enemy by surprise.
The woods glowed underneath a drifting flare and cracked with practice M-16 rounds.
Scudder nodded in approval. "Exactly how I would have done it," he said. "Exactly."
The morning proved more difficult for the four-boat patrols.
The three-hour mission began smoothly enough, until a loud improvised explosive device blew up along the river bank less than a mile from camp. Mock insurgents opened up on the surprised and confused unit.
Down went the boat captain and starboard gunner on the six-man crew aboard one of the lead boats. Chaos and profanity reigned.
Cpl. Jeff Raider, a riverine vet training the sailors, said later that the crew handled the mission well - until the shooting started.
"When they got into contact, they lost their minds," Raider said.
Marine training means working hard under stress and respecting a strict chain of command, he said. "These guys," he added, "joke around too much."
At the debriefing, Scudder offered some advice to the weary squids. Move toward the fire.
"You sat there and did nothing," Scudder said. "You have weapons. Use them. Violence. You need to shoot."
Egan said the Navy understands the squadron is still learning. They are scheduled to relieve a Marine reserve unit in Iraq in March.
"You can't question orders," Egan said. "Sometimes you can, on an aircraft carrier 500 miles off the coast of Pakistan."
Some are beginning to grasp what combat means.
"I have great respect for what they do," said Petty Officer 2nd Class Tyrone Cole, a gunner. "When you get here, it has to be that way."

Posteddocument.write(''+ myTimeZone('Tue, 26 Sep 2006 17:20:01 GMT-0700', 'Tue 26 September 2006 17:20')+''); Tue 26 September 2006 17:20 Tue 26 September 2006 17:20From the Oct 2nd Navy Times:

Getting their feet wet
Marines instill speed, decisiveness and flexibility in brown-water sailors

By Andrew Scutro, staff writer; photos by M. Scott Mahaskey, staff


CAPE FEAR RIVER, N.C. — The sailors hide under a tree. It’s black as ink beneath the leaves, despite a bright moon.

They’ve nosed their riverine assault craft up on the bank with another boat, while two more creep back from a ferry crossing up ahead. Those two boats just put a squad of heavily armed sailors ashore to intercept gun-smuggling “insurgents.”

The Navy ground combat element went in shooting, but it’s quiet now both ashore and afloat, the loud diesel motors shut off.

Hospital Corpsman 2nd Class Neath Williams keeps a weather eye from under the tree.

“We’re just hanging out here,” he said. “We don’t want to be in the middle of the river.”

He stands aboard a dark green assault craft, gripping an M-240 machine gun. His medical kit and backboard are stashed under the gun.

Williams has been in the Navy for seven years, but he’s spent it all with Fleet Marine Force. He went into Iraq in 2003 with the Marine invasion forces as a member of a shock trauma platoon.

He’s in good enough shape to seriously consider Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, but now he’s in Riverine Squadron 1, headquartered at Naval Amphibious Base Little Creek, Va. It’s his first actual Navy assignment, and he couldn’t be happier.

“I like this group. Everyone wants to be here. That makes it worthwhile,” he said in the darkness. “We’re all on the same sheet of music. I’m with a whole bunch of guys who want to be riverines.”

That’s what they call themselves — “riverines,” not “dirt sailors” or “devil squids.”

They came from all over the fleet — off destroyers, from the Seabees, out of the gators and small boat units. Two of the 225 sailors in the squadron came right from boot camp, and the brown-water Navy is the first Navy they’ll know.

They don’t look like Marines and they don’t look like soldiers. They look like sailors in camouflage utilities armed with carbines and machine guns. And they think they’ve found the coolest job in the Navy.

As former fleet sailor Senior Chief Boatswain’s Mate Bruce Diette put it, “I volunteered for this duty. I think this is the best thing the Navy has going on right now.”

Taking care of business

Riverine Squadron 1 is the newest combat unit in the Navy. It’s part of Navy Expeditionary Combat Command, a new type of command formed specifically as a naval force for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other operations. It puts the new riverine unit, Seabees, explosive ordnance disposal, divers, coastal warfare squadrons and expeditionary logistics under a command that can put forces up inland waterways, through the river deltas and on the green littoral sea, whether it’s for expeditionary combat or humanitarian relief.

And the fact that a dozen sailors armed like an infantry squad are now shooting up a ferry crossing in North Carolina just upriver shows the Navy has jumped in with both feet.

The disembarked sailors have found their “insurgents” and it’s time for them to come out. The diesels roar, the boats maneuver and blank machine gun fire flashes and thuds.

As the boats carrying the ground force speed by, gunners behind the .50-caliber machine guns fore and aft on Williams’ boat start thumping out covering fire. Soon, the corpsman joins in with his M-240. He clearly enjoys the work.

“We’re pretty much ready for whatever they throw at us,” Williams said later. “By the time we’re done with training, I know we’ll be able to take care of business.”

Changing the sailor ‘mind-set’

Williams is gung-ho, but whether the squadron’s sailors are ready to go to Iraq in the spring will be up to the Marines who have trained them.

This past summer, the squadron went through Marine infantry training at Camp Lejeune, N.C., and now the unit is under a cadre of combat veterans who are teaching the sailors how to operate on rivers.

Although the Navy had a strong riverine force in Vietnam, its brown-water force atrophied in the years following the war. The remaining expertise resided with special warfare units who support SEALs. In recent years, conventional river operations were left to a Marine small craft company. But after operating up and down the Euphrates River in Iraq for two years, that unit was disestablished in 2005 under Marine force restructuring. The riverborne Marines in Iraq now are reserve provisional units that will be relieved by the Navy squadron this spring.

For the Marine training cadre getting the Navy riverines spooled up, the biggest lesson they’ve tried to impart is “a sense of urgency.”

In the most diplomatic ways possible, the combat veterans talk about changing the sailor “mind-set.”

Gunnery Sgt. Thomas Scudder is the senior staff noncommissioned officer for the Marine detachment of the joint Special Missions Training Center at Camp Lejeune.

A former reconnaissance Marine and infantry platoon leader with two Iraq tours, Scudder puts the sailors into situations where they need to make decisions quickly. Every sailor has to be able to man every spot on the boat, and no task can be put off for later.

“Things need to be done right away. It’s not, ‘Hey, we’ll get around to the boat later.’ It’s not lackadaisical. You don’t go back and play Xbox or anything like that,” he said.

Scudder has seen the sailors evolve since they’ve been under Marine training.

“Marines are brought up one way. The Navy is brought up another,” he said. “There’s a lot of good ones, a good mentality and a good sense of what they’re getting themselves into. They’ll find out exactly when they get there.”

He means it.

After one training evolution that involved two boat crew casualties and a broken boat, Scudder scolds the sailors for being hesitant while under fire.

“Violence,” he tells them. “You need to understand. Shoot. Shoot. You have the weapons. Use the damn things.”

One of Scudder’s trainers put it succinctly while waiting to ambush the sailors from the riverbank.

Cpl. Jackson Wilson was a coxswain on a Marine riverine boat during the second push into Fallujah in November 2004. It was a bloody battle, and the enemy fought hard. His crew went through thousands and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

Because a boat is a fat target on a river, “make sure you do what you’re told to do, and do it quick — real quick,” he said. “You need to gain fire superiority immediately.”

When it comes to operating in a small boat crew in combat, he said to remember one thing: “immediate obedience to direct orders.”

Keeping the mission straight

Lt. Cmdr. Mike Egan, executive officer of Riverine Squadron 1, comes from the EOD community. He began his Navy career 25 years ago as an electronics technician on the submarine Tinosa.

The command has three boat detachments of 50 sailors each and a headquarters element with 75 sailors. Within the boat crews are sailors with extra maritime interdiction training; they make up the ground combat element.

Egan said there’s still some debate over how much the riverines will go ashore, but the riverine mission is clearly for the Navy.

“The Navy’s focus is always on the water. The Marine focus is always on the ground. As long as we always keep that straight, there won’t be any mission creep that we really need to be concerned about.”

As the first squadron gets ready for a six- to nine-month deployment in Iraq, a second squadron is being manned and a third will follow. After going through the same training, Riverine Squadron 2 will take over for the first squadron in Iraq.

But Egan said his guys will have more work when they get back.

“There are already missions and requirements for us in different parts of the world, like South America and Indonesia, anywhere you can imagine that has extensive waterways.”

High speed, low drag

Egan’s sailors feel fortunate to be riverines.

It’s a Saturday morning and Diette, the senior chief boatswain’s mate, just got off a mission where he was the patrol navigator. When the Marine opposing forces ambushed the sailors, Diette and the patrol leader were “killed.” The cadre also “disabled” a boat that had lashed up for towing.

Before this, Diette was the leading chief petty officer of the deck division on the destroyer Howard. Under Marine training, he’s seen more flexibility for “free thinking” and more responsibility for young sailors.

He’s learning how to call in artillery and air support. He’s watching his young sailors learn and grow and work toward an expeditionary warfare qualification.

He loves it.

“It’s real high-speed, low-drag. All I know is, I was lucky,” he said. “I’m working with motivated sailors who will not give up in any situation.”

According to Diette, one aspect of riverines that differs from his fleet experience is that his E-3s manning belt-fed machine guns have weapons release authority, and they’re expected to use it.

“A lot of people are not really going to understand that when they read it or hear it, but I would invite them to come and get on the boat and run a mission and see how much goes on with 20 guys to really understand it.”

One of those young sailors is Boatswain’s Mate Seaman Michael Huggins. He’s 19, right out of boot camp, and now, he’s a riverine bow gunner.

When he was the only one of 80 in his recruit division to get orders for the riverine squadron, no one could tell him what it was.

Now he’s living and working with four other sailors — his boat crew — and it’s the Navy he knows.

“Everybody tells me how lucky I am,” he said. “I am looking forward to staying in the Navy as long as I am doing this.”

[onep0int]

RIVRON 1 Completes Another Phase of Maritime Security Training
Story Number: NNS060913-10
Release Date: 9/13/2006 10:31:00 AM
http://www.news.navy.mil/search/disp...story_id=25539
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Brown-water Sailors Begin Training with Boots on Ground
Story Number: NNS060710-06
Release Date: 7/10/2006 12:37:00 PM
http://www.news.navy.mil/search/disp...story_id=24606
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A couple of pix that don't appear in the pix in the story in the first link above;

060626-N-7987M-028 Camp Lejeune, N.C. (June 26, 2006) - Sailors assigned to Riverine Group One (RIVRON-1) work together during an intense exercise to clear a simulated hostile town. RIVRON-1 is training with Marines at the School of Infantry on board Marine Base Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, in preparation for deployment. U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Mandy McLaurin (RELEASED)

060626-N-7987M-011 Camp Lejeune, N.C. (June 26, 2006) - Sailors assigned to Riverine Group One (RIVRON-1) maintain a checkpoint as a convoy leaves the training perimeter for gate security training. RIVRON-1 is training with Marines at the School of Infantry on board Marine Base Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, in preparation for deployment. U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Mandy McLaurin

http://www.necc.navy.mil/rivronone/index.htm

That's Riverine Squadron 1's homepage. There's alot of good videos on what these guys are doing.