Troops Tap Resourcefulness to Fill Desert Needs

Drawing from a desert well that has served Bedouins for a thousand years, a state-of-the art pumping and treatment facility provides five gallons of water a day per soldier for more than 100,000 troops on the front line.

“It’s the biggest operation of its kind in the Army,” boasted Lt. Col. Robert Sears, commander of the Army Reserve unit from Van Nuys, Calif., that built and maintains the pumping station. “This is the first time we’ve ever been able to use our talents.”

The face of battle can be as mundane as a soldier filling a tanker truck with water. Yet these are vital tasks that can play a strategic role in determining that slim margin between victory and defeat.

For instance, the station set up by Sears’ unit supplies water for more than the troops. A hose six inches in diameter snakes through two miles of sand to a field hospital.

Alongside the hose runs a telephone wire. Someone at the hospital can call up and simply ask that the faucet be turned on. Capt. Charles Lee estimated that the hospital will require up to 100,000 gallons of water a day if a ground war is launched.

Lee said he has no idea how deep the well is or how much water it contains. They will just pump until it runs dry or until they move forward with the troops.

But before a drop of that water was pumped, military legal officers had to arrange to lease the water from the well’s owner, the Saudi government.

At the hospital on the other end of the hose, Army Sgt. Jitendra Shukla carries out another essential, nuts-and-bolts duty--stocking supplies, sometimes by whatever means necessary.

“On paper,” he said, “every hospital is supposed to be resupplied by a certain medical depot. But where is the medical depot getting its supplies? Who supplies the supplier? If someone gets there before you, he gets the supplies and you don’t.”

Shukla has learned a few things in 14 years in the Army. He has made friends with two or three key people at the supply depot as insurance.

“That way, when my guys need something, they know us and they’ll try to help us get what we need,” he explained.

Preparations of a different sort are under way at the Army’s 27th Engineer Battalion, a combat unit attached to the 82nd Airborne Division. There, troops are learning to use homemade kits to “hot-wire” vehicles in case they wind up in Iraq or Kuwait without the equipment they need.

“If we find something we can use,” like a bus, a bulldozer or a Buick, “we’ll use it,” said Col. Robert E. Flowers of Kane, Pa.

” . . . If you know there’s equipment there on the ground, you can jump in and make use of it if you can get it started,” he said.

Two sets of rules have been established for these instant procurements. Military equipment can be hot-wired and used without concern for its owners. But, in the grand government tradition, there is paperwork involved in taking civilian vehicles.

“We have papers to fill out to leave with the owners, so they could later claim compensation,” Flowers said. “It’s a receipt, in effect, in Arabic and English. We don’t want to create any unnecessary ill will later on. Lord knows there’ll be enough of it.”

This story was written from pool reports subject to censorship by the U.S. military.