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| Sri Lanka |
| US marines undertake "gut-wrenching" clean up in Sri Lanka |
| 2005-01-11 |
| EFL Despite their training and combat experience, the US marines working in tsunami-hit Sri Lanka admit that picking through the shattered remains of peoples' lives has been a heart-rending exercise. A few dozen of around 400 marines stationed in or off the southern city of Galle pick up brick after broken brick, the pieces left behind after the Asian tsunami ravaged the seaside village of Gintota. Like survivors right across the three-quarters of Sri Lanka's coastal belt obliterated by the December 26 tsunami, they use their hands -- some gloved in black leather or khaki wool, others simply bare. They toss what's left of entire lifetimes into the mouths of camouflaged bulldozers, brought by the US military themselves, which then transfer the detritus into their dump trucks. Then it's off to a makeshift tip. "There was rubble everywhere. It was like the Twin Towers," in New York destroyed in the September 11, 2001 attacks says Private First Class Damon Carr, describing the scene when he arrived. "I didn't know where we were going to start from; everywhere you looked, there was rubble." He found a photo album with a family snap of half a dozen people and says he handed it back to the mother pictured in it. She was the only one still alive. "I almost cried," he says. "We're marines, we've been trained, but I never thought I'd be standing here, picking up the pieces of someone's whole life." They are your sons. They are your neighbors. They may be your husbands. However you chose to phrase it: They are our Marines. |
| Posted by:Dragon Fly |
| #2 A lot of chaplains are going to be well employed when these Devil Dogs come back from this deployment. Combat's one thing, you expect to see some crazy shite, otoh, seeing innocents massacred by mother nature borders on the incomprehensible. My heart goes out them and the survivors. A very tough deployment to pull to say the least. |
| Posted by: Jarhead 2005-01-11 4:32:27 PM |
| #1 America's and the world's finest. |
| Posted by: Captain America 2005-01-11 1:54:51 PM |