Marines find diamond in the rough on Camp Fallujah

Photo By Master Gunnery Sgt. Mark Oliva | It doesn't take long for baseballs to get beat up at Camp Fallujah's sandlot baseball field. Marines from Regimental Combat Team 5 play nearly every week, swatting bats at long shots toward the fence. The games give Marines a chance to break the stress of deployment and relive childhood dreams of baseball greatness.  

FALLUJAH, IRAQ

09.15.2006

Story by Master Gunnery Sgt. Mark Oliva 

I Marine Expeditionary Force

by Gunnery Sgt. Mark Oliva
Regimental Combat Team 5

CAMP FALLUJAH, Iraq (Sept. 15, 2006) -- Marines with Regimental Combat Team 5 found themselves a diamond in the rough on an empty dirt lot here.

Several Marines meet weekly to play pick-up baseball games. They're nothing fancy. The baseball diamond doesn't even have a blade of grass on the infield. But for these boys of summer, it's their field of dreams, and it takes them away from Iraq and back to their glory days when they could have been swatting away at the next walk-off homer.

"Everybody goes back to their past when they get out here," said Staff Sgt. John L. Heine,a 28-year-old from Buffalo, N.Y. "The stories come out and we're all trying to play at that level again, even though the skills have faded away."

Every Sunday, they gather at the baseball field roughed out from the desert floor. It's humble as far as fields go. There's no chalk for baselines, just white engineer tape. The fence is a small plastic kind that could be found on a construction site, and the backstop is a mesh net. The field is anything but level— it is gouged and pockmarked with the occasional helicopter passing low, interrupting games.

This is sandlot baseball at its best.

Most days, there's hardly enough Marines to field a proper team, so they rotate. Each team provides their own catcher. Pitches are slow to give every slugger a chance to park one over the fence. That's only a couple hundred feet away too.

Rules are subject to interpretation. Two strikes keep the innings going faster. Ground-rule doubles are called when the ball hops over the low fence, and plays at the plate are usually decided by who spouts out the best trash talk.

It's reminiscent of the days when they played for the love of the game and wood bats meant you were playing with the big boys. For about two hours each week, these Marines aren't in Fallujah. They're in their back yards or high school fields, sending a ball sailing so far it might need a postage stamp to land.

• Date Taken: 09.15.2006
• Date Posted: 09.20.2006 15:22
• Story ID: 7790
• Location: FALLUJAH, IQ