Mail for Troops Is Piling Up in the Sand : Military: More than 200 tons of letters and packages are still unsorted at an airfield in the desert.

More than 200 tons of mail for U.S. troops deployed for Operation Desert Shield waits unsorted in the sand at an airfield here, too much to suit Air Force Staff Sgt. Rance Bell.

“What we really need, Colonel, is space--space and people,” Bell pleaded to a senior officer Friday.

Before the Iraqi takeover of Kuwait, Bell had an easy, if lonely, job processing what little U.S. military mail came in to the Arab world. Since Desert Shield began, the flow of letters and packages has doubled weekly, leaving Bell in what he calls “a nightmare situation.”

After the latest avalanche of mail was unloaded Friday from Air Force C-141 transports, the backlog of unprocessed letters from home took up an acre or more of sand. Bell counted and found 205 cargo pallets yet to be handled, despite a round-the-clock effort to sort and distribute mail in the converted aircraft hangar that has been turned into the main American post office in Saudi Arabia.

“Four days ago, we had fewer than 100 pallets,” Bell said.

American officers say mail volume has been about average for a U.S. military operation of this size. But the immensity and quickness of the U.S. buildup here have swamped the small detachment assigned to postal duty and put more demand on scarce facilities.

For a while, the unsorted mail was kept in a yard outside the post office hangar. But the yard was commandeered for more crucial supplies, forcing handlers to scatter the mail around the sandy fields beside aircraft taxiways.

With so much mail on the ground, the process of sorting and distributing it has been slowed even more. “You try to work the older mail first--but sometimes it is hard even to find the older mail,” said Capt. Phillip Jewitt, the Air Force officer in charge of postal service in eastern Saudi Arabia.

Early Christmas mailings by Americans with loved ones in the Middle East are partly to blame for the onslaught, Jewitt said, which suggests that the backlog will likely intensify as the holidays near. The number of troops assigned to Operation Desert Shield is also expected to grow by another 200,000 by mid-January.

More than in past military operations, letter-writing campaigns back home have resulted in a high volume of mail--as much as 30%--addressed simply to “Any Soldier.” Those letters add to the crush, but they are worth more in morale than they cost in efficiency of mail distribution, Jewitt said.

“I would hate to discourage it,” Jewitt said. “The guys really appreciate that stuff. It makes them feel that somebody cares that they’re over here.”

Before the current backlog, some mail came through with surprising speed, Master Sgt. Gloria Greenwood said. “I got a package from Ohio in eight days,” she said. “I was impressed.”

But some soldiers say that the mail delivery has seemed much slower recently, especially for letters.

“I got a letter today that was mailed on the 6th (of November),” said Air Force Staff Sgt. Tim Tennant of San Diego, whose wife is also deployed in the Persian Gulf.

The workload is much different than Sgt. Bell expected when he transferred to Saudi Arabia last spring from Rhein-Main Air Base in Frankfurt, Germany, which at the time contained the world’s busiest military postal center. He said he looked forward to an easier time in Saudi Arabia, where the staff was 18 people and “a heavy day was 50 or 60 bags of mail.”

Now, more than 160 people are assigned to mail-sorting duties, and 50 bags can be processed in less than half an hour.

“I guess I went from the frying pan into the fire,” Bell said Friday, sweating despite a brisk wind that softened the midday heat. “But I’ve been doing this for eight years. I know how to move mail.”