Help raced to Marine in slow motion

KANDAHAR, Afghanistan -- They heard the explosion and ran over to see a Marine down, bleeding badly after stepping on one of the many mines planted around the airport here.

With adrenaline pumping, the team of Marine bomb-disposal experts had to fight their first instinct Sunday: to race into the field to save Cpl. Chris Chandler.

"It's got to be very slow and methodical. You can't rush this," one of the men, Sgt. Michael Gattis, recalled Monday.

So while they kept Chandler talking -- where are you from, how many brothers and sisters do you have, anything to keep him coherent -- they dropped down and began to probe the soil for mines, looking for a pathway to pull Chandler and two others to safety.

"He was worried that we were going to hurt ourselves," Staff Sgt. Michael Leurini said. "My comment to him was, "We get paid 150 extra dollars a month for that, so not to worry about it.' "

Chandler, an infantryman from the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, lost his foot in the explosion, said Capt. David Romley, a Marine spokesman.

Chandler was taken by helicopter to the Marines' other base in Afghanistan, Camp Rhino, in the desert southwest of Kandahar, then transported to an undisclosed hospital in the region, where he was in stable condition.

Two other Marines, Sgt. Adrian Aranda and Lance Cpl. Nicholas J. Sovereign, received minor wounds and remained at Camp Rhino for treatment, Romley said. The three were providing security for a team that was going to check a nearby building for unexploded bombs.

Marines knew when they took over this airport Thursday night that it was heavily mined, a legacy of the years of war in Afghanistan dating to the 1980s Soviet invasion.

The field where Chandler was injured Sunday already had been swept for mines and declared clear. Romley said the Marines' mine detectors generally look for metal mines and often cannot detect mines made of ceramic or plastic.

Gattis, Leurini and the other members of their bomb-disposal crew are trained in mine field rescue -- this was their first -- but that isn't their specialty. Their job is disposing of unexploded bombs and munitions, a big task at this airport where the Taliban stored large stashes of weapons.

The team found at least two other mines while rescuing Chandler. To clear a path, they poked gently with knives just under the surface of the dry, hard-packed soil, taking care to touch only the sides of any mines and not the tops.

As they moved toward the wounded men, the team laid down a white tape to show them the way out. Chandler and the others were on a UH-1 Huey helicopter on their way to Camp Rhino a little more than an hour after the explosion.

"When you come into this field, you come to terms very quickly with what you're dealing with ... that you could lose your life at some time. Once you come to terms with that, it makes the job a lot easier," Leurini said.

Navy Lt. Mike Runkle, an explosive ordnance technician visiting the site, said searching for mines is difficult.

"That's been the trick to mines. They're buried in the ground and you may be the first to know they're there by actually functioning one," Runkle said.

On Monday, three former mujahedeen fighters who had fought against Soviet forces and more recently against the Taliban visited the airport to help Marines locate mines. Also on Monday, Navy Seabees were working to re-establish electrical and water service to the airport.

In other developments:

In Kandahar's Mirwais Hospital, nine armed al-Qaida fighters threatening suicide were moved to a ward with barred windows after four comrades escaped over the weekend, nurse Syed Rahim said.

The leader of the interim Afghan administration, Hamid Karzai, arrived in London for talks with the British Foreign Office's senior Afghan experts. He was on his way to Rome to meet with the exiled Afghan king, Zahir Shah.

In London, Prime Minister Tony Blair said that Britain will lead an international peacekeeping force in Afghanistan and that the first troops could be on the ground when a new interim government takes power this weekend if agreement is reached with local leaders.

The United States said it is scaling back its schedule of food drops over Afghanistan following the success of the U.S.-backed drive to destroy Taliban rule.

"We're going from a regular flight schedule to more of an as-needed basis," said Lt. Col. Edward Loomis in Stuttgart, Germany.

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