By DAVID USBORNE
The first sign that something was about to happen on board the USS Peleliu, an amphibious assault ship in the Arabian Sea, was the sound of gunfire from below.
Soldiers of the United States Marines were testing their weapons one more time, firing from an open door into the ocean.
Soon afterwards, the soldiers began to file up to the main deck. Weighed down with up to 45kg of equipment each, many of them were sweating already.
Six CH-53 Super Stallion transport helicopters stood ready, their blades beating the humid sub-tropical air. But first, they listened to some words from their commanding officer.
"Eleven weeks ago, our country was attacked again," Lieutenant- Colonel Christopher Bourne declared, standing on a steel ladder, before boarding one of the helicopters. He and the men were going to fight the Taleban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
"They picked this fight. You're going to finish it," he said. He reminded them that their battalion had fought for the US after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.
The pep talk over, the men boarded the six helicopters. A motto had been painted on the door of one of them: "Creeping Death". A Navy chaplain, Lieutenant-Commander Donald Troast, watched the troops as they stepped on board, touching some of them on the shoulder. "I asked God to bless every one of them," he said.
It was a well-kept secret, but this mission, code-named Operation Swift Freedom, had been on the drawing boards for weeks. It represented one of the most ambitious war-time ventures undertaken by the US Marine Corps. The helicopter flight ahead of the men was to last four hours, non-stop, with hazardous mid-air refuelling.
Within hours, on Monday afternoon New Zealand time, these men would be standing on the fine sand of southern Afghanistan. More specifically, they would be at a tiny airstrip called Dolangi, south of Kandahar, the last redoubt of the Taleban.
They were to take control of the strip and prepare it for a large-scale landing of troops and heavy equipment.
Dolangi - until recently the favourite airstrip of Osama bin Laden - will become a military lily pad for the US in southern Afghanistan, a base for future operations.
Swift Freedom, delayed twice for undisclosed reasons, also marked a serious escalation of America's commitment to the war against terrorism. For the first time, the Pentagon has a substantial conventional ground force in Afghanistan. The US presence had been limited to some Special Operations forces.
"The Marines have landed and we now own a piece of Afghanistan," General James Mattis, commander of the attack force, dubbed Task Force 58, said from on board the Peleliu. It is the lead ship of the attack force of six ships and more than 9000 Marines and Navy sailors.
For the men on board the Peleliu, the wait had already been long enough.
"We're all psyched up about actually going and getting some payback," Jeff Feucht, aged 22, from Minnesota, told a reporter from the Associated Press who had been watching the preparations.
The soldier, getting ready to take his own place on board one of the helicopters, showed off his own knife with a 250mm serrated blade engraved with dragons.
Filling the hours beneath decks over the days and weeks had meant a variety of activities. Among them had been studying sheets of paper with choice phrases in Farsi, one of the languages the men might find useful as they begin their mission in enemy territory. The list included phrases such as "Lie down on your stomach!", "We are Americans", and "We are here to help".
The soldiers, meanwhile, wanted to make sure that no one, the enemy included, could forget why they had travelled from their home camps in North Carolina and southern California.
They stencilled symbols on to their weapons and equipment representing the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the date of September 11, when they were destroyed by terrorists.
Partly, it was the sheer distance involved, from the ships to the airstrip, that made the operation so daring. All of the aircraft involved, including the six Stallion helicopters, had to fly as far as 640km from their mother ships in what was described as the longest-distance amphibious and air deployment in the history of the US Marine Corps.
"We are going to operate at the very extremes of the ability of our machinery," confirmed Colonel Peter Miller, the task force chief of staff, before the start of the action.
Miller, who is British-born, added: "We would much prefer to be closer in, because it just makes it logistically that much easier for us. But the way this operation is designed, with the intermediate staging bases, we'll be able to pull this off."
The first of the US Marines touched down at Dolangi, nestled in the sand dunes about 55km south of Kandahar, under the cover of darkness at exactly 9 pm local time. Officials said they encountered no opposition.
That freed them to begin their first task without delay: setting up runway lighting to allow fixed-wing KC-130 aircraft to start landing with additional men and equipment. The lights were installed within 90 minutes of the Marines arriving and soon the planes were rumbling in.
"Everything went without a hitch," said Mattis, a 32-year veteran of the Marine Corps, who was also a commander during the Gulf War 10 years ago.
Under his overall command is a Marine brigade made up of soldiers from the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit based in Camp Pendleton, California, and the 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit of Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.
They were also expected to take considerable amounts of heavy equipment into the airfield, including about 63 Humvee light trucks, a mortar unit, 31 light armoured vehicles, six howitzers and four M-1A1 tanks.
The commander of the Lejeune unit is Colonel Andrew Frick, who, unusually, was sent by the Marines in 1997 to work with Sears Roebuck, the department store, for two years. Sears helps the US military with shipping and warehousing.
Among those celebrating the safe arrival of the Marines was US President George W. Bush. The men, he said, would assist in chasing down Osama bin Laden and his associates.
"We're smoking them out, they're running and now we're going to bring them to justice."
Their tasks will include blocking bin Laden's potential escape routes to Pakistan and Iran.
But with such large numbers of Americans on Afghan soil, the days and weeks ahead will not pass without casualties, Bush warned.
"Obviously, no president or commander-in-chief hopes anybody loses life in the theatre, but it's going to happen," he said.
Nor is anyone suggesting that the soldiers from on board the Peleliu will be going home to the US quickly. The Taleban, who now hold Kandahar as the last city under their control, continue to vow to resist.
General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said yesterday: "We think they'll dig in and fight and fight, perhaps to the end.
"We do not think it will be over any time soon."
- INDEPENDENT
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Marines itching for payback time against Taleban
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