Thousands of American servicemen and women will instantly recognize this rather odd combination.
But for Jeremiah Greaney, the last part was more than just a stopover on the journey home.
Greaney, a native of Newmarket, Co. Cork, recently returned from the Middle East after serving with the U.S. Navy as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Greaney, however, is no ordinary navy man. He’s a Seabee, a so-called “dirt sailor,” and he saw far more of the desert sands than the waves of the open sea during a lengthy tour of duty in Kuwait and Iraq itself.
Relaxing in a diner near his Bronx home last week, Greaney described an extraordinary chapter in his life, an experience that crammed an army of sights, sounds and memories into six months of danger, heat and the kind of comradeship that only a combat zone can forge.
Greaney, who recently celebrated his 40th birthday in a tent in Kuwait, first made landfall in America in 1984. What was a vacation turned into a lifetime commitment when he met, and later married, his wife, Doreen.
The couple have two daughters, Kathleen and Alison. Jeremiah, known to his family and friends as “Derry,” works as a machinist for the New York Times company.
His life would appear to the very essence of the successful immigrant’s tale. But there’s more.
Greaney’s life in America might have been very typical indeed only for the fact that Doreen happened to one day meet a recruiter for the U.S. Navy Reserves.
The recruiter’s task was to find recruits with the kind of engineering and construction skills required by the Seabees, a branch of the navy immortalized in the 1944 John Wayne movie “The Fighting Seabees.”
Greaney met the recruiter and duly signed himself into the reserves. In 1993, nine years into his American life, Greaney shipped out to New Orleans and later to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina for his basic military training.
“When you go into the Seabees you bring a skill with you,” Greaney said. “I was classified as a steelworker first class. There were also lots of construction workers and truck drivers, many of them firefighters.”
“I joined out of interest and a desire to see a bit of the world. I also felt a sense of patriotic duty to my new country.”
Greaney was assigned to the Seabees 21st battalion based in Lakehurst, N.J. The unit had never been called up for active duty in its history and in 1993, with the Gulf War fading astern, Greaney’s prospects for seeing the wider world appeared relatively modest.
He was required to serve for a couple of weeks every year to keep his newly acquired military skills honed. That was about it.
The outside world paid an uninvited visit to Greaney’s adopted city in September 2001 and things began to change.
“I got a phone call in January of this year asking me to verify my uniform size,” Greaney said.
Greaney didn’t have to ask where he was going when he saw his new uniform. It was desert camouflage.
“I was given just three days’ notice,” he said. “I had to fly down to Gulfport, Miss., for a medical and I arrived there on the morning of Feb. 3.”
What happened in the days after that is still a bit of a blur.
“We got our new uniforms, identification papers, insurance papers, medical shots, we were like pin cushions. We had CPR, biological and chemical warfare training. All in two weeks.”
In mid-February, Greaney flew to Kuwait via Germany and was posted to Al Jabar air base.
“The number of planes there was unreal,” said Greaney.
Greaney was keenly aware, as were his comrades, that the base was a prime target for the Iraqis. When battle was joined, Iraqi Scud missiles were fired at Al Jabar and Greaney had to jump into his chemical warfare gear more than once.
“Every time the siren went off your heart stopped,” he said. “We know we had only a few minutes. A couple of F16 fighters would immediately take off to intercept any incoming missiles.”
The invasion of Iraq was launched on March 20. By March 26, Greaney and the rest of his unit were rolling into the Iraqi city of Um Qasa.
“We were sitting in the backs of trucks and we felt like sitting ducks,” Greaney said.
Desert heat
Whatever about the unpredictability of the combat situation, the heat was a constant assailant.
“You would not believe the heat,” said Greaney. “It was like being in a frying pan. The temperature reached as high as 140 degrees. The wind itself was hot. And then there was the sand.”
It was at this early part in the war that Greaney discovered that he was not the only Irish-born serviceman in the U.S. invasion.
“We were putting up some bug screens,” Greaney recalled. “I was talking to some of the guys when I heard the question.”
The question was the Irish immigrant’s standard and abbreviated greeting: “Where you from?”
“I said Cork, he said Donegal.”
The encounter lasted only seconds. Two Irishmen in the U.S. military in a city atop the Persian Gulf. They were like ships in the night.
Greaney spent close to six weeks in Um Qasa, most of the time working in the docks.
In the early days there was occasional sniper fire. Greaney and his fellow Seabees carried M-16 rifles and were ready and trained to defend themselves, but most of the time they worked on repairing the city’s shattered infrastructure.
The reports were true, he said. Just about anything that had not been nailed down had been taken at the start of fighting.
By April, Greaney and his unit had been moved north to the city of As Samawah on the Euphrates River, about 100 miles south of Baghdad. It was here that Greaney and the Seabees felt a little like the cavalry riding to the rescue, though not in a purely combat sense.
“We were assigned to the Marines in As Samawah,” Greaney said. “They had not had showers in 40 days. We got to work building showers and piping in water. We did three days’ work in one and the Marines had their showers.”
Cleanliness was one thing. Food was another. Some news reports on operation Iraqi Freedom focused on food, and in particular the MREs, or Meals Ready to Eat.
“We had dried eggs that were green,” Greaney said. “So there were all these jokes about green eggs and ham.”
The Marines and Seabees chowed down nevertheless and were indeed able to sit on benches built by Greaney’s unit.
When the Seabees rigged up some air conditioning, it was like heaven in the desert.
“We had the resources and the people to make our lives easier and the Marines never stopped thanking us,” Greaney said.
Greaney’s unit moved with the Marines as they fanned out on daily missions. He was in Babylon and Nasiriyah though never got closer than 20 miles from Baghdad.
“The Marines took good care of us. We were doing so much work for them they didn’t want to lose us,” Greaney said.
Most of the Marines were barely more than boys. Most of Greaney’s unit was made up of older men in their 30s and 40s.
“It was like fathers and sons in a way,” Greaney said.
With work to do virtually around the clock — and that included two weeks’ security detail atop a Humvee manning a .50-caliber machine gun — Greaney had scant time to consider the precise reasons for the war.
Asked if he felt the war was justified, even as Iraqi weapons of mass destruction remain elusive, Greaney was quiet for a moment.
“I agreed with Operation Iraqi Freedom,” he said. “The people had nothing. And I saw some of the mass graves.”
Greaney was not just a witness to the evidence of Saddam Hussein’s physical brutality against many Iraqis, but also the fear he instilled in the entire population.
“I saw a voting card,” he said. “On one side was Saddam’s name and a place to vote yes or no. On the other side of the card was the name and address of the person who was going to cast the vote. A “No” vote, said Greaney, was a virtual death sentence.
Greaney said he was keenly aware of the mixed reception given U.S. troops by Iraqi civilians.
“They were happy to be liberated, but were scared that we might never leave,” he said.
By late July, the Iraqi part of Greaney’s six-month tour of active duty had come to an end and he returned to the comparative comfort of Kuwait. It was here, at a base known as Camp Fox, that Greaney marked his very sober 40th birthday.
“In all of the six months I had three beers and I have photographs of two of them,” he said, laughing.
The last of them was to be a particularly memorable brew.
While in transit, Greaney and his comrades never knew where they were going to land for refueling. On the way back to the U.S., they landed in Crete but nobody was allowed off the plane.
Greaney had managed to e-mail his brother in Ireland and let him know the date in early August that his unit was leaving Kuwait.
The family had managed to find out that three westbound U.S. military flights were to land at Shannon airport that day, but there was no sure way of knowing that Derry’s flight would be one of them.
As luck would have it, Crete was not the only stopover that day.
And the confinement in Crete would not be repeated at Shannon. Greaney’s Seabees were allowed stretch their legs for 90 Irish minutes.
“Then there was an announcement on the public address,” Greaney said. “They called my name.”
Greaney’s family had taken a chance and had made the journey to County Clare. His parents, brother, two sisters and three nieces were on hand to form a family honor guard.
“I had my pint of Guinness with my family. It was great,” Greaney said.
It was to be a day of two homecomings, one on Irish soil, the other on American.
Greaney is going to stay with the Seabees even though he has done his combat tour.
While it was tough being away from his wife and children, not to mention his job, it had all been worth it.
“The Times was great,” he said. “They made up the difference in pay for the six months.”
“It was miserable at times in the desert heat, but looking back I’m proud of what I’ve done.”
Greaney’s pride will be acknowledged by the military next month when he and the rest of his unit muster in Lakehurst for the presentation of medals for service in Iraq.
Greaney’s especially proud of the fact that he lived up the landlubber tradition of the navy’s Seabees.
“Yes,” he said, “I saw lots of ships. But I spent the tour on land. I was a true dirt sailor.”