THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, March 16, 1996 TAG: 9603160353
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A9 EDITION: FINAL
SERIES: Operation Joint Endeavor: Bosnia
SOURCE: BY JACK DORSEY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: ABOARD THE GUAM LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines
It's 10 at night and the dim, yellow lights of this big ship's hangar bay, plus the lack of the normal daytime racket, make for a calm, almost lazy atmosphere just before the crew gets ready to turn in.
But a squad of Marine combat engineers is wide-eyed as they watch what Danish Tech Sgt. C.J.W. Petersen has brought aboard.
Petersen, a member of the NATO staff in Bosnia, is making house calls on the four ships of the amphibious ready group that has been standing offshore in the Adriatic Sea near the coast of the former Yugoslavia.
Led by the assault ship Guam, the 2,000 Marines, together with 1,900 sailors in the group, are NATO's ready reserves - available to go ashore in a heartbeat if they are called.
Petersen, as part of his ship-hopping tour, has brought a duffle bag full of inert Yugoslavian-made mines to this late-night class. There are some Russian and Italian designs, too.
He wants to share with the Marines his knowledge about this deadly tool of war. It is a weapon they easily could face if they had to go ashore in Bosnia.
The green plastic devices - some resembling the Claymore mines prevalent in the Vietnam War, others the size of grenades, resembling a car's fuel filter - are among 36 of the most commonly found mines strewn around the embattled country.
Petersen demonstrated how easy it is to arm one anti-personnel explosive, 4 inches tall and 3 inches in diameter. The fuse is screwed into the top of the device, which then can be activated by trip wire to blast shrapnel in all directions.
They are frequently booby-trapped, said Petersen. Some have 2-foot-long tilt-rods attached to the top so they can be buried in the snow, yet still be tripped by passing troops or trucks. A small sail attached to the tilt-rod's tip converts it into an anti-helicopter mine as well.
``He's telling us a lot of stuff we didn't know,'' said Marine Lance Cpl. Benjamin Laylamb of St. Paul, Minn., one of the combat engineers.
``We knew all the basics, but this is something pretty unique.''
Petersen tells the Marines that during nearly four years of fighting by the three main warring factions in Bosnia, mine warfare became a large part of the daily routine.
``Everybody had training with mines,'' he said. ``They would get these patriots together and hand them boxes of these things. Then they would show them how to screw the fuse together and send them out. Everybody can do that.''
There are not a lot of maps around to tell the NATO forces where the mines were planted.
Simply put, said Petersen, the mines were dropped ``wherever.''
An estimated 1 million to 5 million unexploded mines are planted in Bosnia. NATO forces are not planning to remove them en masse, only those they find in their way.
The Defense Department announced recently the creation of a new computerized land mine database for use by troops in Operation Joint Endeavor in Bosnia.
The three-disk set, called BosniaFile, contains information about the most commonly found mines in the country.
The one cardinal rule among troops in Bosnia is: ``If you didn't put it there, don't pick it up.''
One Army sergeant tells the story of a camera that was spotted on the side of a road. It stayed there a week, he claimed, until ordnance men, believing it to be an explosive, blew it up.
``Turns out it was a perfectly good camera someone just lost,'' said the sergeant.
The Marines on the Guam don't plan to take chances.
``We don't monkey with it,'' said Laylamb. ``Chances are it's been booby-trapped as well. We'd probably stick explosives out to the side and just blow it up.'' ILLUSTRATION: MARTIN SMITH-RODDEN/The Virginian-Pilot
Aboard the Guam,
Sgt. C.J.W. Petersen, a NATO staffer in Bosnia, speaks about
identifying and defusing mines to Marines Combat Engineers.
A road sign near Tuzla reminds soldiers of a perilous part of the
war.
by CNB