On the Road

Paving the way for NATO peacekeepers and Kosovar refugees returning home, 200 to 300 men and women from a construction battalion at Port Hueneme Navy base will head to Albania in the coming weeks to help rebuild the country’s decimated roads.

Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 3 sent 150 Seabees to Albania in the last two weeks, and another 200 to 300 will leave from Spain over the next couple of weeks. The deployment could last as long as seven months, at which point a Seabee battalion from Gulfport, Miss., will take over.

Albania’s roads haven’t received any care since they were built 50 years ago, and now much of the asphalt is pocked and potholed, worn with ruts or collapsing at the edges, said Lt. Cmdr. Richard Cook, the battalion’s executive officer, from Rota, Spain.

“The troops have to travel these roads,” he said. “A 60-mile convoy literally took 20 hours. You have steep inclines, hairpin turns down a mountain, things you would never see in the U.S.”

The Seabees, as construction battalion members are commonly called, have been stationed in Rota since mid-May as part of their regular seven-month rotation, said Linda Wadley, a spokeswoman for the naval base. A small group of Seabees will remain in Spain, or at nearby sites.

Part of the lone Navy battalion to be deployed to Albania, the Seabees will be joined by Italians, Germans and an Army battalion, Cook said. They will repair 100 miles of road, which connects Kukes, the site of a major refugee camp, and Tirana, the country’s capital.

For the most part, they will be far from cities, living in tents and eating military rations, Cook said, and can expect to work 12 hours a day, 6 1/2 days a week.

Because asphalt is a rare commodity in Albania, Cook said, they will be leveling the roads with gravel. They’ll bring with them about 100 pieces of heavy equipment, such as bulldozers, graders and dump trucks, and about 40 containers of cargo.

The biggest challenge to the battalion will be the heavy workload and the isolation, said Cmdr. Will McKerall of Port Hueneme’s Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 40. That group returned from similar work in Bosnia only a month ago.

“There’s very little freedom,” he said. “You have your hooch, where you live, and when it gets on to the winter, it can be a real drag.” Although contact with Albanians is not a part of the mission, the Seabees and villagers are bound to meet, as they did in Bosnia.

“The country is extremely poor, and even though the Seabee camp is in the middle of nowhere and there are no houses around, as soon as they start setting up camp, kids come out of the woods,” said Cook. “A lot of these kids have never seen someone black before. They stare and point.”

McKerall suspects that if the deployment continues, as it did in Bosnia, the Seabees’ task would evolve from rebuilding roads to setting up base camp facilities, handling electrical and plumbing systems and drilling water wells. Eventually, the Seabees might move from tents to more permanent wooden structures.

Even with the war over, instability is a way of life in the area, he said, adding that the locals would most likely be appreciative of the Seabees’ work.

“I believe that once things stabilize the Albanians will be very accepting of the Seabees,” said McKerall.