ANTHOLOGY AND ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY                                     155


Earlier in this anthology, Molly Moore described the war from the perspective
of the commanding general's headquarters. In these articles, Moore takes us to
the opposite extreme, showing what the war was like for the individual Marine.


Out Front at the Front:
Marines Brace for Task of Clearing Mines

By Molly Moore

The Washington Post, 19 February 1991


   WITH U.S. FORCES, Northern Saudi Arabia, Feb.         18--One night soon,
Marine Lance Cpl. Stephen Mitchell, 20, expects to drive a 26-ton mine-bre-
aching personnel carrier across the Kuwaiti border and into a sandy sea of
buried mines.
   "I'll be one of the first ones across the line,' said the lanky Washington,
D.C., native, unconsciously fingering, the two metal crosses that hang from a
silver chain around his neck-one sent by his mother, the other by his aunt.
"Sometimes I sit and wonder, and try to picture in my mind what it will be
like."
   All too frequently the picture is horrifying.
   111n training, there is always one little thing that will go wrong," he said with
a shudder.  "It gets you down.  Will it happen in combat?  It's real hard, real
hard."
   When the traveling chaplain, or Mitchell's buddies who sleep with him inside
the hulking metal vehicle dubbed "The Big Red One,"        can't console him,
Mitchell relieves the pressures on bis mind by "going to the paper and pen and
writing it down."
   Often he mails his deepest thoughts to his girlfriend.  He has pasted her
picture inside the personnel carrier that will push his team of mine breachers
ahead to clear the way for the American tanks and infantry units that will battle
Iraqi forces.
   For many of the thousands of American troops now moving into their final
positions across the northern Saudi Arabian desert, within sight of the nightly
allied bombing raids against Iraqi forces, the easiest mental escape from the
formidable task that lies before them is simply avoiding the issue.
   "Most people don't talk about what happens when we go in," said Navy
medical technician Douglas Smith, 35, of Baltimore, a reservist on the crew of
a mine-plowing tank who wail serve as a medic if his crewmates are injured.


Copynght 1991 The Washington Post. Rcprinted with Permission