Sinai watch

National Guard, Dec 2002/Jan 2003 by Rogers, Rob

OBSERVER Spc. Hans Christenson monitors land and sea traffic from along the Red Sea in Egypt.

Pregon Guard infnatry unit takes truns keeping peace on Egypt-Israel border

SHARM EL SHEIKH, Egypt

The clouds hung gray and thin off the Red Sea, looking more like shadows of curtains cast above the water than distant thunderheads.

Oregon Army National Guard Spc. Hans Christenson looked out over the water from his post overlooking the shore. He was watching foot and boat traffic in the comfortable 80-degree weather. Visibility over the Red Sea was rapidly fading.

Christenson is a member of B Company, Ist Battalion, 186th Infantry from Klamath Falls, where he's a student at the Oregon Institute of Technology.

He has been on the giant sun-baked rock that is the Sinai Peninsula since the beginning of July; involved in one of the United States most important foreign-policy assignments.

"I'm just doing the mission," he said. Christenson, at his outpost north of Sharm El watched the graying sky He doesn't think the assignment has been too tough.

"It's been a pretty good experience just to see a different culture that a lot of people would never get a chance to really see," he said.

Over the past year, Christenson and hundreds of other Army Guardsmen have become the newest regular players in the multinational peacekeeping force near the border Egypt-- Israel border.

'Roles are Changing'

The 1978 Camp David Accords ended decades of intermittent fighting between the Middle East countries and led to the creation of the Multinational Force and Observers, or MFO, mission. Forces from 11 nations serve on the Sinai Peninsula to ensure the peace treaty is enforced.

The mission began in 1982 and has involved, for this nation's part, almost exclusively active-Army troops Last winter, however, the Army National Guard was summoned to free more active-duty units for the war on terrorism.

"We're in a new era and roles are changing," said Maj. Gen. Alexander Burgin, Oregon adjutant general.

The 1-186th is the second National Guard battalion to handle the mission. The Arkansas' National Guard's 2nd Battalion, 180th lnfantry (box, page 26) is on deck.

Burgin visited the Oregon troops in late October, inspecting his soldiers and getting a firsthand idea of what the assignment demanded.

More than 500 members of the 1-186th from southern Oregon are serving in the Sinai until the end of January.

It had cooled off considerably by the time Burgin arrived. In the first weeks of the assignment in July, temperatures regularly soared above 120 degrees.

By mid-Autumn, skies were overcast, threatening rain. The heat had backed off and Guardsmen were wearing pants instead of shorts to go into town at night.

Burgin is glad his troops have the chance to serve abroad. He believes that in many respects Guardsmen are better equipped to perform the MFO mission than active-duty personnel because of the Guard's citizen-soldier nature.

"They tend to be good ambassadors of our country ... in part because they're citizen-soldiers who spend a lot of time in their communities," he said.

In that respect he said they can better relate to the civilians where they're stationed-better than active-duty troops might be able to.

"They just do a better job," Burgin said.

But he worries about going to the well too often and drawing too deep. He knows he can only ask so much of the Guardsmen before family, employers and the soldiers themselves begin to feel the pressure of long and recurring assignments.

In the meantime, the Oregon soldiers are serving in their largest overseas deployment since World War II.

Checkpoint Duty

Across the horizon, the resort town of Sharm El Sheikh sits like a movie set with building facades that sparkle in the Sinai sun.

All over the city, unfinished concrete buildings-some mammoth hotel complexes, others small box villas-sit in a perpetual state of incompletion.

Checkpoint 3 Charlie sits in a sea of these abandoned gray and white structures. Some of the buildings were getting too close to the checkpoint and ordered stopped by the Egyptian government. Others simply ran out of funds.

"I don't know that they're a huge security issue," Staff Sgt. Travis Sigfridson said of the buildings.

But after three weeks on outpost and checkpoint duty, they become awfully familiar looking, he said.

The MFO's chief function is watching the environment around these outposts, about 30 in total, keeping track of area traffic.

Roughly the size of the southern tip of Texas, the Sinai is vast, largely unpopulated and covered with land mines. Sharm El Sheikh is a town comprised primarily of little more than resort hotels and dive shops, barely 20 years old.

When U.S. soldiers first showed up in 1982, Egyptians saw he potential of turning the remote MFO outpost into a tourist destination. Like water in the desert, the city is an oasis. It houses some 10,000 Egyptians and has its own commercial airport.

Bedouin tribes still wander across the open land, often bringing in mines they've come across and giving them to the soldiers.