In order to make sure he had everyone’s attention, U.S. Navy Cmdr. Kenneth Stein, the senior medical planner for Exercise SHARED ACCORD 2010, repeated a saying the exercise’s logistics officer often dropped on his men: “Africa wants to kill you.”
The phrase served as a preface to the July 26 safety brief he delivered to a warehouse full of advanced party Marines awaiting a flight from Atlanta to Mozambique and SA10, a humanitarian mission and bilateral military exercise held annually throughout Africa that will bring together more than 1,000 U.S. service members and Mozambican soldiers Aug. 3-13.
Bugs, germs, hippos and snakes; the reserve medical officer’s hip pocket class on the perils of south eastern Africa described everything from a disease that produces brain boiling fevers to the stunning speed and lethality of a scorpion’s venom.
The threat of hostile humans was low, but Mother Nature made sure the task force – mostly reserve Marines with the 25th Marine Regiment along with a number of sailors, airmen and soldiers - would still need to be on the defensive.
Malaria, a potentially deadly disease often spread by mosquitoes, ravages large parts of the world and is especially prevalent in the Mozambican wild.
To the medical staff, it represents the largest threat.
“You have ten guys that acquire malaria while in country and that’s it for the exercise,” said Stein. “It’s virtually finished.”
Each service member listening to Stein’s class was wearing a uniform recently treated with a powerful insect repellant and had, somewhere in his or her packs or gear, a bottle of antibiotic pills meant to keep malaria at bay.
Task force unit leaders and corpsmen maintain rosters that troops are required to initial daily after taking their tiny blue doxycycline capsules. With the memory of last year’s SHARED ACCORD and the 12 Marines who returned home from it with malaria still fresh in the command’s mind, little is being left to chance.
“Not only are we going to have the roster and document everything, but we’re also going to watch them do it,” explained U.S. Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Melissa Hamilton, a corpsman with 4th Landing Support Battalion out of San Jose, Calif.
“The bottom line is personal responsibility,” said U.S. Navy Cmdr. Douglas Johnson, the exercise surgeon. “It’s about getting them used to taking that pill every day.”
Still, malaria is but one natural enemy amongst many.
Mozambican beasts and bugs have the Marines, operating in remote villages and training areas, surrounded.
A black mamba, the fastest serpent in the world, has venom that can kill a human adult in less than an hour. Stealthy insects see potential homes in uniforms. Mice and rats can carry fleas into sleeping areas, inviting the plague in with them.
If just one person falls prey to the wildlife, it could have an effect on the entire exercise, explained Stein.
“Say somebody was bitten by a black mamba, that puts everybody on a heightened state of readiness and they may not focus on their mission because they’re worried about snake-bite,” he said. “You’re tying up a clinic investigating, tying up a doc investigating, tying up the command and you may potentially lose that individual.”
The best defenses, Marines in the bush have found, lie in strictly followed rules and routines.
Every night before he crawls into his olive green two-man tent, Lance Cpl. Kyle Beddia, a radio operator with the 25th Marine Regiment, sprays down his canvas home and the surrounding earth with a healthy dose of permethrin, a potent insect repellant.
Every morning he shakes out his boots on the cardboard in front of his tent, evicting unwelcome guests before he gets dressed.
“The last thing I need is to put my foot down on a scorpion,” he said.
Beddia expected a lack-luster annual training session where he’d set up and take down communication systems with little excitement. Instead, he found himself fending off strange, palm-sized spiders with bug spray and boot heels in between radio checks.
“I hate, I hate bugs,” he admitted. “So being here is a real trip.”
The rules and routines only expanded at the battalion level.
Tall grass has been razed or burned around high-traffic areas like water points and hygiene zones to deny snakes a hiding spot. Food isn’t allowed in or near sleeping areas to keep scavengers away. Whole platoon formations hold their familiar daily antibiotics high in the sky and down them together.
U.S. Marine Lt. Col. William Clark, 2nd Battalion, 25th Marines Inspector-Instructor, has 190 service members under his charge at Boane in southern Mozambique. Almost every pair of boots there wears a rusted crimson stain courtesy of the red earth of the camp – the deeper the stain, the longer the time in the field, and the higher the risk.
Yet, the rules and routines, Clark said, are only one side of the equation.
“You can have all the best set precautions in world, but if no one’s there to enforce and supervise, we’re not going to be successful,” he explained.
U.S. Marine Sgt. Maj. Joseph Gaines, 2/25’s I&I sergeant major, agreed.
“It starts with small unit leadership and works its way to the top,” he said, explaining that fire team and squad leaders enforce small-scale daily measures, while the combat operations center monitors overall unit health.
Despite its prevalence, the constant battle with nature is still just one dimension of SA 10.
Somewhere in between trying to keep their troops out of battalion aid stations, the command still has a mission to accomplish: provide humanitarian and civic aid programs and increase the Mozambican armed forces peacekeeping abilities.
After only a week in the field, however, the once new and foreign safety measures, along with the threats they were meant to mitigate, had become just as everyday as boot bands and flak jackets.
“To us, at this point, all the precautions are second nature; they’re just an enhancement,” said Clark.
As he spoke, some 80 Marines, along with nearly 200 Mozambican soldiers, were going through a combat marksmanship course on a nearby range Aug. 5.
With doxy coursing through their veins and insect repellant coating their skin, the Marines called shooting patterns and fired them much as they would back home in the states during an average drill weekend.