http://www.post-trib.com/news/282578,border.article

Border warriors

March 4, 2007

By JON SEIDEL Post-Tribune


TECATE, Calif.– Brushing dirt from a one-story neighborhood rooftop, their eyes are on their work. Two men with brooms hide their faces from the sun and show indifference to a nearby work crew.

The second group is fixing road culverts, cutting and welding steel to fortify a rocky, old dirt road that catches every footprint and tire track crossing it. They show the same disinterest in their neighbors as the men on the roof.

Working at midday, yards apart under the same beating sun in these dry rolling hills, the men are separated more by a steel fence and a political chasm.

Welcome to the border crossing between the United States and Mexico. Relations at the fence, tense as they can be, are normally left to U.S. Border Patrol agents or the people of California’s San Diego County.

They know the drill just north of Tecate, Mexico, where the men are sweeping the roofs.

But the men by the culverts are strangers from Northwest Indiana. Many are members of the 113th Engineer Battalion, brought here with a joint Indiana task force for the federally funded Operation Jump Start. Hoosiers in the Indiana Air National Guard’s 122nd and 181st fighter wings join them here.

Many of these soldiers fought in Iraq in 2005. Now the realities of another national politically charged debate play out before them.

Twenty-three illegals, known as “competitors” to police, were caught by one of the Hoosier work sites in California early Thursday morning.

“We saw some of them over by our yard,” Staff Sgt. Sherman Humphrey of LaPorte said.

But National Guard soldiers are not here to arrest or detain. They call themselves the eyes and ears of the U.S. Border Patrol, which is already omnipresent in these hills.

Its agents handled the round-up of the competitors Thursday.

“That was a big catch for them,” Humphrey said.

Building Camp Morena

Farther north of the border, southern-style ranches rise between the hills. Dry brush and cacti grow between the rocks.

Well off the beaten track, a 65-year-old, little-used military base has fallen into disrepair. Indiana Guard troops are also here at the place they call Camp Morena.

“We’re pretty much in the middle of nowhere,” Lt. Sean Hunter of Valparaiso said.

This has become a training ground of sorts. Soldiers have families back home, and many of them will want to build houses in Indiana sooner or later.

“We’re looking into that now,” Sgt. Dane Wheeler of Hobart said.

Wheeler is an electrician, but he wanted to spend his time at Morena working with fresh drywall in Morena’s Building 1. He knows he’ll need that work if he gets his house going.

“This is excellent,” Wheeler said, effusing over the prospect of applying tape and mud to walls.

Meanwhile, home for the visiting Indiana National Guard is far from here, at Naval Amphibious Base Coronado just outside San Diego.

Morena would make for a better place to camp, but it’s uninhabitable now. Indiana Guard members want it to be ready before the nine-week mission is finished in early April.

When it is done and the Navy opens its doors here, though, officers will work in a building renovated almost entirely by members of Joint Task Force Hoosier.

The troops working at these two sites are near one of the quietest border crossings in California.

From calm to chaos

An hour away, cars pile bumper-to-bumper in a chaotic free-for-all to get into San Ysidro, one of the busiest border crossings in the world.

Tecate immigration agents don’t see a quarter of San Ysidro’s crossings.

Legal crossings at San Ysidro average 44 million a year. Tecate’s annual average is 2.8 million.

America marks its border clearly, and Mexicans who want to leave their country see constant reminders of the line they want to cross. The same steel fence north of Tecate runs all the way west into the Pacific Ocean, marking off Tijuana’s borders.

Overdeveloped and impoverished, Tijuana is ready to spill over that fence. Tijuana residents living on the border already dump piles of trash into America.

No one is there to clean it except the Border Patrol, which patrols a paved, two-lane road by the primary fence.

On the north side of that road by Tijuana is a taller secondary fence. It angles toward Mexico near the top and creates another barrier.

Master Sgt. Michael Drake, a spokesman for the California National Guard, said the road between the fences was a muddy, rutted and ripped-up mess until Operation Jump Start. National Guard engineers from other states paved it to speed up the travel.

“You can see the Border Patrol just racing up and down it,” Drake said.

Farther north on the American hills, agents also watch the terrain from a distance with thermal imaging. Competitors hiding behind the brush, Drake said, stand out clearly.

“We can tell what type of cigarettes he’s smoking, just about,” Drake said.

President Bush started a new push last week to approve a guest-worker program for immigrants from Mexico. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez made a pitch Wednesday to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in Washington, D.C.

Mexicans in Tijuana said people crossing over illegally are looking for work and little else.

A shopkeeper in Tijuana said most people in Mexico earn an average of about $70 a week.

Even for menial work, the money flows a lot faster in the United States, he said.

“They can do it in one day over there,” the shopkeeper said.

After Wednesday’s hearing in Washington, senators from both parties told reporters there is enough political support for the guest-worker program to become a reality this year.

Chertoff and Gutierrez said it would give millions of Mexicans a new chance at legal residency in the United States.

A purpose and a role to play

Cigarette between his lips, Sgt. Ted Uzelac of Portage jumps down from the rocks to the dirt road and up to the back of a dump truck.

Wrapped in a suede jacket on a chilly day, shading his face with a green welding mask, he’s getting ready to cut a piece of steel for a culvert.

Right before he begins a cut, he stomps the cigarette into the ground and slips on a pair of gloves. He does a double-take. The gloves were two lefties.

When he gets to the steel, right hand bare, he carefully runs his blow torch across a measured piece of metal.

He finishes, checks his work, and helps fit it into a culvert at the edge of the road.

Then he lights another cigarette.

This is the kind of work the men do all day.

It can be tedious, but they get to do it in the California sun, surrounded by mountains, wildlife and a breathtaking view. They’re proud, too, that they’re helping their country.

Iraq was the last mission for many of them. Some have volunteered to go back. Many say

the scenery here, especially Tecate, isn’t that different from Mosul.

“The way it looks is the same,” Sgt. Jason Reed said. “It brings back memories.”

There’s no hostile fire, though. And compared to a year in Iraq, this trip goes by in a blink.

“It’s nothing like Iraq,” Spc. Matt Farner said.

Many will keep strong memories of this trip when they leave, though.

Spc. Chester Jones, a lifelong Gary resident whose 10 years with the National Guard have taken him to Germany, Italy and Iraq, never thought he would find himself in California’s foothills, gazing from American soil onto a Mexican city.

“I never thought I actually would have a reason to come out here,” Jones said.