Waiting Is Over for 350 Seabees Bound for Somalia

A jumbo jet roared aloft Friday from Point Mugu loaded with Seabees, the largest contingent of naval construction workers headed for Somalia to build campsites and repair supply routes for the multinational famine relief operation.

The 350 members of Naval Construction Battalion 40 had checked their gear, said farewell to their families and boarded a civilian Boeing 747 jumbo jet for the first leg of the 23-hour eastbound flight.

They are to unite Sunday with the other 209 members of their battalion and begin work Monday on a shipload of heavy equipment and supplies that arrived in Mogadishu this week--more than a month after it left Port Hueneme on a nearly 10,000-mile journey at the speed of 15 knots.

For many, the time between the supply ship’s departure and their orders to join it had been an agonizing wait punctuated by false alarms.

But Lt. Cmdr. Kevin Mikula of Port Hueneme, second in command of the battalion, said they could only wait for the equipment to arrive--much of it too heavy to airlift--before going to work.

“The state of the roads in Somalia, I understand, is so bad that any improvement will be of significant benefit to everybody,” Mikula said as his men waited in the midafternoon sun for the jet to be loaded and fueled.

“Some of them are no more than cart paths. Some of the roads have holes so big that people drive off the roads to go around them,” he said. “We’re dealing with a country that hasn’t had a government in a couple of years, and the government they did have wasn’t so good. They’ve got a lot of infrastructure problems.”

Fueling and loading took several hours, time enough for the Seabees to smoke cigarettes, talk and ponder the ancient military maxim “Hurry up and wait.”

“It was like, ‘You’re going. No you’re not. You’re going. No you’re not,’ ” said Construction Apprentice Mark Taylor of Augusta, Ga., stretched out on the pavement with his rifle and the battalion’s flag. “Stand by to stand by.”

New to the Navy, Taylor said he is excited about shipping out on his first trip abroad, but a little worried about diseases he might contract in Somalia.

As for the mission, he said, “It’s a good cause.”

“Personally, I think it’s a very important mission,” said Petty Officer Cecil Massey of Oxnard, a career military man who has served in the Army as well as the Navy. “These people are being oppressed by their own people. They need help.”

Chief Petty Officer Bruce Grant agreed. “I’m excited about it,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to go to Africa.” He is leaving behind in Port Hueneme his wife and two sons, who “always get anxious, no matter where we go.”

Looking worse than anxious, Constructionman 3rd Class Jim Coe of Ventura slumped against a fence, his bags heaped around him and a new wedding ring on his finger.

He was supposed to have wed Lisa Parker on Thursday in a big, ornate ceremony with bridesmaids, groomsmen, families and friends, followed by a long honeymoon.

Instead, they hurriedly got hitched by a justice of the peace advertising “Anytime Weddings,” drank some champagne at home and put off the festivities until October.

“I had the pager go off,” said Coe, 26. “Your heart stops and you get a sunken feeling, and somehow you just knew. When I saw the number was the number for work, it kinda dampened all the spirits.”

How did his new wife take it?

“Not good at all,” he said with a rueful smile. “She hates the Navy.”

Navy wives “never get used to it”--the fact that every seven months or so their husbands ship out, said Mikula. “The wives that are left behind, they tend to get pretty close together.”

Although most Seabees said goodby Friday morning before assembling for a mission briefing, Aurora Alonso of Oxnard wanted to stay as close as possible to her husband, Petty Officer 2nd Class Albert Alonso Jr.

She had followed the troop bus from Port Hueneme to the Point Mugu airfield, and she waited outside by her car with 3-year-old Albert Alonso III.

“I’m not leaving until the airplane takes off,” she said. “I feel closer to him being every step of the way with him. He just came back from Spain in December. It’s sad to see him leaving again. My son’s taking it hard.”

As the last Seabees boarded the jet, she said, “Hopefully, they’ll just hurry up and settle up everything and come home, and they won’t have to go anywhere for a while.”

PROMOTION: Port Hueneme’s commander is made a rear admiral.