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Alumnus Maurer heads Seabees in Iraq conflict
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Saad (left) was one of the students in Maurer’s (right)
ICAP training course to teach young Iraqi men construction
skills. “I don’t know how or where he got the
Cal hat, but he wore it every day,” Maurer says. “You
can see why I took a special liking to him.”
PHOTO COURTESY CLIFFORD MAURER |
U.S. Navy Commander Cliff Maurer (M.S.’88 CE), a career
military officer with a long list of naval assignments and decorations
to show for his nearly 20-year career, recently returned home
after leading Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 74 (NMCB-74)
to Iraq in two tours of duty. The first was during the fall of
Saddam Hussein in the early months of 2003; the second was one
grim year later, when the Iraqi insurgency first peaked and the
reality of war set in.
Maurer was reassigned last July to an administrative post in Washington,
D.C., on the Chief Naval Operations staff for shore infrastructure
management. A native of Allentown, Pennsylvania, and 1984 graduate
of the U.S. Naval Academy, Maurer credits Professor Ben Gerwick
at Berkeley with teaching him how to think thoroughly through
and execute a project, skills he says he needed every day he was
in Iraq.
“We had lots of tense moments in Fallujah,” Maurer
says, describing action in the Sunni Triangle, the 100-mile swath
from Baghdad north to Tikrit where 80 percent of Iraqi guerrilla
attacks occur.
“This conflict won’t be resolved in a few months,”
Maurer says. “It’ll take years, and it won’t
always be pretty. But what gives me hope is the Iraqi people themselves.
They’re a lot like us. Despite our cultural differences,
they are good people who value education and want to make life
better for their children. They were very appreciative of the
work we did.”
Maurer’s NMCB-74 unit was first deployed to Al-Jaber Airbase
in Kuwait in late 2002 to build the largest construction project
in pre-hostilities Iraq: a 22-acre parking apron and taxiway for
the Third Marine Air Wing’s F/A-18 Hornet aircraft. When
war was declared on March 21, 2003, the battalion moved to a critical
role in supporting the First Marine Expeditionary Force as it
moved into Iraq and successfully toppled Saddam’s regime.
“The Marines had to move quickly over the miles from Kuwait
to Baghdad,” Maurer says. “We were two or three days
behind them, making sure their MSR [main supply route] was intact
so their supplies could keep up with them.”
Maurer’s Seabees worked in and around Nasiriyah, building
and repairing bridges and completing an unfinished interstate. The
tour of duty earned them several awards, including the Presidential
Unit Citation and the Society of American Military Engineering’s
Peltier Award for outstanding performance in active duty. On May
30, 2003, they returned to home base in Gulfport, Mississippi, to
a hero’s welcome.
Construction battalions, also known as the Seabees, originated
in 1941, when World War II created a need for skilled civil engineers
who could do standard and specialized construction and battle-damage
repair as well as fight battles. Immortalized in John Wayne’s
1944 “The Fighting Seabees,” these battalions have
been much decorated in their 60-year history for both war and
peacetime operations.
As attested by their motto, “We build, we fight,”
construction battalions are often deployed for civil/military
operations (CMO), helping a wartime community rebuild its infrastructure
and spirit. This was the top objective when NMCB-74 was redeployed
in February 2004 to Fallujah, one of the war’s hottest hot
spots.
“CMO was our major reason for going back,” Maurer
says, “to help the Iraqis get their economy and community
back together—schools, medical clinics, anything that had
an immediate impact. But the insurgency was in full swing and,
unfortunately, the local people and their families were under
threat of being killed by the terrorists if they worked with us
or collaborated in the work of Coalition Forces.”
The battalion did succeed in initiating the Iraqi Construction
Apprentice Program (ICAP), an 8–12-week course in basic
construction and project management that also provided Iraqi men
tools and incentives to start their own construction companies.
Already disenfranchised by unemployment and a crumbling infrastructure,
many Iraqi men are unable to save the traditional dowry—in
Iraq the man’s responsibility—required to prove to
a woman’s family that they can support a wife. Consequently,
Maurer believes, they are easily tempted to join the insurgency
as a way of life.
“Construction is a universal skill, and we believed the
training would invigorate these men,” Maurer says. “We
were determined to help the Iraqis succeed in embracing their
own freedom.”
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