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ONE SAILOR HAS A SHOTGUN LOADED with rubber pellets slung over his shoulder. The other carries a baton. They travel a dusty sand path between tall fences covered in coils of concertina wire, looking for signs of trouble.
The detainees on “Navy Row” are secured inside their dwellings. Each 10-person unit is made of two shipping containers welded together and air-conditioned. Metal is the building material of choice — it can't be set afire.
Inside each unit are two toilets and a sink. Grates cover the windows. The empty sand courtyards used for recreation separate the rows.
At Camp Bucca, this is where the worst offenders live — extremist leaders capable of rallying the more moderate. And this is where the majority of the 550 U.S. Navy officers and sailors at the detainee facility work.
They are serving as “individual augmentees,” aiding the Army and Marines by temporarily leaving their regular roles on ships or in shore commands to serve on the ground in Iraq.
The number of suspected insurgents in U.S. custody has rapidly increased because the ongoing troop surge is resulting in more captures. Camp Bucca, a plot one mile wide by two miles long, now holds 20,000 detainees. Five thousand service members guard them.
The U.S. military is trying to prevent detention camps like this one from becoming recruiting centers for insurgents.
“We absolutely cannot allow this to become a jihadist university,” said Navy Capt. Bruce A. Derenski, commander of the area at Camp Bucca where the U.S. service members live. “At some point, we go home and they go home. We would be releasing that plague on Iraq, and there is no way in good conscience we can do that.”
Last September, military officials intensified efforts to identify members of radical militant groups and separate them from the general population, said Derenski, who previously commanded the New Hampshire, a Virginia-class submarine under construction at Electric Boat in Groton.
The extremists live in a restrictive environment, while the more moderate live in tents and wooden buildings and are allowed to move freely within their fenced-in compounds.
The strategy at Camp Bucca is to rehabilitate detainees through education and vocational programs so they will be employable when they are released.
The military measures the success of its educational programs by the number of people who don't offend again. Six thousand have been released to date, with fewer than 100 recaptured.
Those who work at the Navy compound, known as the “waterfront,” say their goal is to control their group of detainees so the strategy can work on the rest of the population.
“These people, I don't think they'll change anytime soon,” said Seaman Jordan Westall, who was just finishing his shift Thursday afternoon. “They don't care. They tell us that September 11 was the best day in American history, and that Osama bin Laden is great.”
Westall, who was previously assigned to the Groton-based USS Toledo, and other Navy guards patrol the paths on foot and keep watch from above in guard towers. They move the detainees around by unlocking and locking a series of doors in the fences when it's time for showers, recreation or a trip to the visitation center to see relatives.
On Thursday afternoon, the detainees walked in groups of two or three around the courtyard or sat in the shade cast by a guard tower reading and talking, all under the careful watch of the sailors.
Machinists Mate First Class Sean McCarthy compares guard duty to “baby-sitting dangerous children.”
“You've got to feed them, send them to the bathroom, watch them, make sure they don't run off, take them to the hospital,” he said. “Most are well-behaved. But a few of them are going to fight the system as much as they can.”
The Day has two journalist, Jennifer Grogan (staff writer) and Tim Cooke (photographer)embedded in Iraq with sailors from New London SUBASE.
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