U.S. Marines play basketball on a makeshift court at their base in the western border city of Husaybah, Iraq
"News travels slowly to American troops deployed in the desert plains of Iraq. Days after the bombing of a Shiite shrine convulsed the country in religious violence, word hadn't reached U.S. Marines some 160 miles away. "We don't know what's going on in Iraq, except for what's going on here," said Cpl. Matt Waldman of Somerset, N.J., of the 3rd Battalion, 6th Regiment. "We're so far away that we don't hear anything."Cpl. Waldman also admitted that he had not heard of the DP World/America port controversy until that same Saturday when George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld finally found out about it.
