Boots on the Ground

By Mark Thompson/Gnjilane

It was a scene capable of pounding Adolph's Meat Tenderizer into the heart of the toughest marine. On a flat stretch of road overlooking the Kosovo town of Gnjilane last week, the arrival of Marine helicopters brought hundreds of ethnic Albanians joyously streaming up the rolling green hills. After nearly a week of pushing fitfully northward through Greece, Macedonia and Kosovo, the leading edge of the corps's force had finally reached its destination. And the locals--at least the Albanians who had endured more than two months of Serbian terror--wanted to make their new overlords feel welcome.

The local rapture came as no surprise to the Marines after what they had seen as they worked their way north: a land badly in need of some peacekeeping. From a Marine's-eye view, the ruined houses stood mute, their missing roofs giving second-story windows a glazed-eye look. From a helicopter, the swaths of destroyed houses looked like crude blueprints, their remaining walls showing every bedroom, some with beds still inside. "Hopefully, we won't have to do any of the fighting we've trained for," said Lance Corporal James Palubicki, 21, of Crystal Lake, Ill. "We just want to help the refugees come out of the mountains and get back to their homes."

Such missions are growing for the Marines and the entire U.S. military, and they are the model for future wars by the U.S. Religious and racial conflicts are bubbling over around the globe. During this presidency alone, the Pentagon has stumbled painfully into clan warfare in Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia. In such conflicts, $2 billion B-2 bombers may be able to punish from the air but it takes G.I. boots on the ground to secure the peace. And according to the doctrine of the former Joint Chiefs Chairman, General Colin Powell, America should always go into these conflicts as the biggest, baddest force on the block. Go in to win, Powell said, and know how you're going to get out. These new conflicts--with their delicate ethnic nuances--make that harder. The Marines' mission in Kosovo is more war-as-car-repair, trying to keep both mechanic and customer from killing each other and the car running for at least a while at an acceptable cost.

That cost is measured in dollars alone. There is no acceptable cost in U.S. lives in Kosovo, where the Pentagon is emphasizing "force protection." While the last American war in Europe might have been characterized by infantry charges in which human lives were willingly spent for tactical ends, this mission will be characterized by a desire to establish peace with the same zero-casualty figure the Pentagon managed during the air war. So, Marines in Kosovo are on hair-trigger alert. "There's a big difference between combat and peacekeeping, and it can switch quickly from one to the other," says Sergeant Major John Sekula, the Marine battalion landing team's top enlisted man. "The biggest thing we have to focus on is the individual Marine's restraint--how he reacts to the looks, the taunting, the throwing-the-bird, the rock throwing." For the Marines, the basic rule in Kosovo is, De-escalate unless you're threatened--in which case, shoot.

There is concern that the preoccupation with zero casualties may boomerang. "Force protection has taken on a higher degree of importance than the other battlefield dynamics of firepower, leadership and maneuver, and has often stifled the flexibility of the operational commander," retired Army Colonel Max Manwaring wrote recently. The U.S. desire to avoid risking troops, though understandable, "sends mixed signals to warring factions, reduces U.S. credibility with coalition partners as well as antagonists, and hampers civil-military cooperation," he wrote. "Excessive emphasis on force protection can be politically and militarily dangerous."

The Marines are facing a variety of threats in Kosovo. To begin with, they must confront the extensive land-mine emplacements in Kosovo. Company commanders have been warning their 200-man units that the Serbs have long specialized in making mines out of plastic so they can't be located with standard mine-detection gear. The allies are using mine plows and remote-controlled vehicles to detonate such mines before sending troops in. The Serbs, however, are clever about planting underground bombs. There's concern that they've done what they did in Bosnia, trip wiring antitank mines to antipersonnel mines so a smaller mine explodes when a bigger mine is moved, or daisy chaining mines so that triggering one detonates an entire minefield. Though the Serbs have turned over maps of their minefields to NATO officials, no one wants to walk onto a field that Yugoslav generals "forgot" to put on the list.

The Marines must also confront the increasingly aggressive Kosovo Liberation Army. A standoff last week with 116 K.L.A. fighters over their right to be armed ended only when Cobra helicopter gunships and other Marine firepower moved in. The rebels gave up more than 100 rifles, 37 blocks of TNT and other materiel.

The Marines want to nurture the return of civilization to this blighted province. No one knows how long that will take. In spite of the Clinton Administration's pledge nearly four years ago that U.S. troops would stay in Bosnia for only 12 months, more than 6,000 remain there today. So there will be no timetable for Kosovo. The Administration has acknowledged all along that it was going into Kosovo without an "exit strategy." It will be up to these Marines to help make one.