Corpsman asks for help from home for comrades in Iraq

AUBURN – Patrick Gravel wants to keep his Marines warm.

The 26-year-old Navy corpsman from Auburn – part of a Navy-Marine team serving in the western Iraq city of Rawah – has issued a plea for warm socks, long johns, lip balm and hand warmers.

More than three years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Marines still need help to keep themselves warm on the cold, desert nights.

“I am asking you all for help with keeping my boys warm while on post in the guard towers,” Gravel wrote in an e-mail. “Please!!”

It’s a request that startled his parents.

“He never asked us for anything before,” said his mother, Dottie. “And this is his second time in Iraq.”

During his first tour, Gravel was with an elite, MASH-style unit. This time he’s part of a 36-person unit in the Euphrates River valley.

He left Maine on Sept. 9. His plea came only 10 days later.

“He has what he needs,” Dottie said. “He’s just concerned for these guys.”

That e-mail has spread to several local veterans groups, who have begun collecting the items in the request. American Legion Post 153 in New Auburn is taking donations from the public and preparing a large parcel for shipment to each of the 36 people in Gravel’s team.

“We’re going to send it over just as soon as it comes in,” said Post Commander Emmett Stuart. “I wish we didn’t have to. I think the government ought to provide that stuff.”

Stuart has grown weary of such requests. Since the start of the war, the legion has been filling requests for socks and lip balm.

“It’s like the armor problem,” he said, citing a reply by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to criticism that U.S. soldiers could be better protected with body armor and armored vehicles. “He says, ‘Make do with what you have.’ That’s a crock.”

To Gravel, the problem is the Iraqi nights.

“The weird thing is that in the middle of the day it is around 100 (degrees) outside or warmer,” he wrote. “At night it gets into the 60s, which as you can imagine, is like going from the Fourth of July to Thanksgiving every day. And it is supposed to get colder.”

Gravel, who graduated from Edward Little High School in 1999, was an Eagle Scout and volunteered in the Maine Conservation Corps.

He left his job at L.L. Bean after 9/11 and joined the U.S. Navy. His dad, Charles, served in the Navy. So did his grandfather.

In 2004, Patrick graduated from the Navy’s Basic Hospital Corps School in Great Lakes, Ill.

His wife, Crystal, is also in the Navy. She lives in Portsmouth, Va., with their son, 20-month-old Konnor.