How FOB Hammer Came To Be

How FOB Hammer Came To Be Video

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Red Horse airmen turned Iraqi plain into base in 6 weeks
By Erik Holmes - Staff writer

BESMAYA, Iraq — When the first elements of the 557th Expeditionary Red Horse Squadron arrived Feb. 17 at this dusty outpost 25 miles east of Baghdad, they faced a daunting mission: Transform a harsh and featureless plain, littered with bombed-out buildings and unexploded ordnance, into a forward operating base for 3,700 soldiers.

The timeline: less than six weeks.

Red Horse airmen, the Air Force’s combat construction crews, are used to tight schedules and austere conditions, but this was beyond what any of them had experienced during previous missions and deployments. “When they told us what the original schedule was, I said, ‘No way,’” said Senior Master Sgt. Andrew Baker, a District of Columbia Guardsman and the squadron’s senior enlisted airman on site. Yet the airmen finished the bulk of Forward Operating Base Hammer ahead of schedule. They erected 223 tents for barracks, headquarters, latrines and other support functions in just 20 days. When the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division rolled in on March 26 — part of the surge of more than 20,000 troops President Bush is sending into Iraq — the soldiers had a place out of the sand to rest their heads, eat and — luxury of all luxuries — even do their laundry.

From out of the rubble

The 200 or so members of the 557th working at Besmaya are two-thirds Air National Guard and one-third active duty. They come from nearly 40 units, with the Florida Air Guard’s 202nd Red Horse Squadron and the Virginia Air Guard’s 203rd Red Horse Squadron serving as lead units. They are among a growing number of airmen filling “in lieu of” taskings, jobs that would be performed by soldiers or Marines if their numbers weren’t stretched so thin. Most of the more than 5,000 ILO airmen serving in Iraq and Afghanistan do jobs that are similar to or the same as their usual duties, though the environments and organizations in which they work are often far from what most airmen would consider normal.

When Baker and his small advance team arrived, the former Iraqi Republican Guard base was deserted save for a few Marines advising an Iraqi Army unit one to two miles away. Nearly all the previous buildings had been reduced to piles of rubble by American bombs, and the airmen provided their own security with nothing more than their M16s. “You talk about outside the wire,” Baker said. “When we first got here, there was no wire. ... This is one example of where you couldn’t have contractors do it all. You need military.”

Living conditions were austere. The 18 airmen lived in barracks at the nearby Iraqi army camp. The mattresses were soiled, and the bathrooms were fouled by human waste backed up in the pipes. Unable to stomach the latter, the airmen found a septic tank in a field and built a platform over it to serve as an open-air toilet. With no dining facility to feed them, they ate MREs morning, noon and night. And then there was, and is, the dust. The consistency of talcum powder, it lies in drifts waiting to be kicked up by a vehicle’s tires or the slightest breeze. The airmen come in from work caked in the stuff, their nostrils coated and clothes saturated. It creeps into their tents and settles on their green, Army-issue cots. There is no escape from the dust, except to finish the job and get out.

Setting up shop

The advance team’s first task was to survey everything within five miles, so they knew their working conditions. With only two surveyors, Tech. Sgt. Jonathan Mickett and Staff Sgt. Brian Gray, it took nine days to walk the base and survey every natural and man-made feature of the more than 11,000 acres. The hundreds of data points Mickett and Gray collected included existing road and canal structures, allowing the team to adapt the master plan for FOB Hammer to conditions on the ground.

The surveyors also discovered about 60 unexploded munitions scattered at a dozen sites. They ranged from old Iraqi artillery shells to unexploded bomblets left by American BLU-97 cluster bombs. Mickett and Gray marked the sites so explosive ordnance disposal teams could deal with them later.

The advance team also had to locate a suitable source of water before the rest of the Red Horse unit could move in, Baker said. The closest source was a canal about four miles away, but the airmen were able to use existing canals to move it to within about two miles of the base. From there they pump the water to a 6 million gallon reservoir, through a reverse-osmosis water-purification unit and into storage bladders. The system can supply the base’s projected consumption of about 350,000 gallons per day.

The airmen were keenly aware they were vulnerable to enemy incursions, so they laid out a 9-mile-long, 8-foot-high earthen berm to protect the base. “Other than feeding folks, force-protection is No. 1, so we started pushing that from day one,” Baker said.

The airmen also constructed hundreds of Hesco barriers, large steel wire and felt force-protection structures that must be filled with dirt. Baker called them “the bane of our existence” because filling them is dusty and labor-intensive. Construction began in earnest when the main body of the Red Horse team arrived March 6. Regular convoys from Baghdad hauled in all manner of supplies and equipment, from the massive D-9 armored bulldozers needed to build the protective berm to pallets of lumber, from which they constructed tent platforms and hard structures.

In all, the team built three housing and support areas, known as land support areas. The materials for those facilities would fill 36 C-17 cargo jets. (Workers from Kellogg, Brown and Root, a civilian contractor, arrived later and built two more LSAs.) Construction is also underway on several hard structures, including five battalion headquarters, a brigade operations center and a 5,000-square-foot combat hospital. Most of the Red Horse team is slated to go home in early May, and the airmen plan to leave a nearly complete base for their replacements to finish.

Living with the Army
But this success has not come without some hiccups. Foremost among them is a constant shortage of building supplies and tools, said 1st Lt. Russell Powell, the squadron’s director of operations, deployed from the 366th Civil Engineering Squadron at Mountain Home Air Force Base, Idaho. “Logistics has been a huge deal for us,” Powell said. “We’ve been working through all the materials we can get.”

Bases all over Iraq have been diverting lumber to FOB Hammer, but there isn’t enough in theater to keep up with demand. Delays have begun to creep in as lumber has grown more and more scarce. “The materials are slowing us down,” said Staff Sgt. Johnny Gonzalez, a supervisor working on one of the battalion headquarters. “We can work around the tools issue.”
There is also some friction between the soldiers who own the camp — the formal handover took place April 1 — and the airmen who are building it.

The Red Horse commander, Lt. Col. Peter Garner, served 10 years in the Army and has tried — for the most part successfully — to maintain cordial relations. For example, the Army and Air Force leadership hold regular meetings to discuss progress, hear complaints and work out problems. But infantry soldiers and Air Force engineers hail from vastly different organizational cultures, and those differences can be difficult to reconcile. “I’m used to dealing with the Army as an engineer,” Garner said, “but not as a trigger-puller. It’s a different mindset.”

Other problems have emerged as more soldiers arrive on base daily. The airmen complain that soldiers are using already scarce construction materials, such as lumber and the metal gratings for Hesco barriers, to build shade canopies over their vehicle gun turrets. But the airmen are pushing ahead, clearly proud of what they have accomplished and determined to finish the job, or come as close as possible to finishing by early May.

The crew building the combat hospital has worked at a breakneck pace and is on schedule to finish the facility in less than three weeks. The job usually takes about four weeks. “The motivation is getting us home,” said Staff Sgt. Tommy Flynn, the job’s structural supervisor. “We can see the light now.”

Thanks Jim for sharing this resource...it's great!