THIS is a force of Marines that has run out of energy on a patch of mud in the central Iraqi marshlands.

What was supposed to be a ten-day sprint towards Baghdad ended yesterday when the US Marines 11th regiment came to rest. The force had all but exhausted its supplies of fuel, food rations, ammunition and water, and morale was at an all-time low.

The officers said that it lacked everything: “beans, bullets and Band-Aids.”

The final straw was an aborted mission on Thursday to capture an airfield that proved too small to bother about, and was surrounded by sniperinfested civilian buildings.

The tanks alone had used hundreds of gallons of diesel fuel on the 40-mile round trip. The return journey was made more difficult by the Marines’ own unexploded munitions, which littered the road. One young Marine stepped on a hidden dud round, losing his foot.

The young men spent their first break of the war stripped to the waist, sunbathing on the bonnets of their Humvees, occasionally looking up to enjoy a panoramic view of mud.

Some listened to the BBC on shortwave radios. An entrepreneurial soldier brandishing a pair of electric clippers had set-up a temporary barber shop. He offered two styles — bald and nearly bald — and was soon knee-deep in clumps of hair that had not seen shampoo in weeks.

Some units were down to just one day’s supply of food. Many of the vehicles’ fuel gauges were close to the red.

The man in charge of solving the logistics problem is Lieutenant-Colonel Keil Gentry, a fair-haired Marine who has moved around too much to claim a hometown. It is his job to refuel the American war machine and since the war began last week he has spent every day narrowly avoiding disaster.

First it was the sheer pace of the troops’ dash towards Baghdad. Then it was the awful mud storms. Now he must cope with Iraqi “civilians” who wave and smile at his supply convoys, then lob mortars and grenades as they drive past. “Everybody’s taken a few potshots,” Colonel Gentry said.

“The resupply guys, they got hit the other day by a handful of soldiers. The big threat is irregular forces: they take a few shots, fire a few mortars. I’m not so sure the Iraqis pick and choose their targets very carefully though.”

The Iraqis may be disorganised — and may cause few US casualties — but their tactics have managed to bog down the Americans’ supply chain. Heightened security has caused log-jams (“log” as in logistics, the Marines say) along Highway 1, the main supply route northwest.

Even advancing troops get caught in the chaos, remaining stationary in tailbacks for hours at a time. Officers fume in their sweltering Humvees as Cobra helicopters are forced to guard the convoys instead of hunting down Republican Guard units and their weapons caches. “We planned for it, we trained for it, but we really hoped it wouldn’t happen,” Colonel Gentry said of the guerrilla-style fighting.

Like the Iraqis, the Americans have improvised where they can. Some of the fuel, for example, is being delivered by civilian petrol tankers.

Some essential supplies like ammunition — a lot more of which has been used than expected — has been flown in by helicopter. “We thought this would be a liberation of Iraq. We thought the people would be throwing flowers at us,” Colonel Gentry said.

“But it’s been a lot more hostile than that.”

Times Recommends

• Fish and chip shops ‘selling cobbler as cod’
• T in the Park festival at Kinross
• Body Watch