A city rebuilds with elephants and prayer

About two miles inland from where Hasbi stands next to the beach, a group of young Indonesian soldiers stand ankle deep in mud, watching as two elephants wade through six feet of water surrounding a collapsed home. Because only so many bulldozers are available - perhaps 50 are deployed in Banda Aceh - the elephants are a welcome aid.

With trainers from the town's Elephant Conservation League clamped like clothespins around their necks and holding their giant ears to balance, the elephants dip their trunks into the water and toss trees and phone poles aside.

Chains clank as the trainer yells out "da duk (sit down)"; "Jalan (forward)"; and "berdiri (stand up)." A crumpled Honda Civic finally emerges from beneath a leaning house, which spills into the water with a splash.

First Private Sogeng Riyhanto, who is 24 - one of 35,000 Indonesian troops deployed to the city - is matter of fact. "It's the same as any other [work] detail, really," says the Indonesian soldier, wearing a surgical mask and smoking a cigarette in pouring rain. "We are trained for this. Central command gives the orders and we follow them."

Steel and wood aren't the only items to emerge from the muck. The soldiers move quickly to deal with fresh discoveries of bodies from excavation - still about 3,000 per day. Black body bags line practically all routes through town. On one afternoon, two trucks of Indonesian forces amble to a halt, dig, and then fill a mass grave right next to the road. "It's where our commander told us," says the driver before gunning his truck back up a steep embankment en route to another load of corpses.

One military attaché rolls his eyes and says the task will continue for months, if not years.

The military convoys have taken over streets where cars and scooters used to vie for space with cows and chickens. The Indonesian military seems to close and open certain corridors and areas at will - including Ulee Lheule, where Hasbi lives. Soldiers occupy nearly every corner, some using the barrels of their rifles to direct traffic along J.L. Iskandar Muda Boulevard, where the piles of debris grow as the road moves toward the center of town. Because of the 30-year separatist struggle of Aceh, the military's strenuous work of cleanup, protection, and maintaining order is colored by politics.

"I feel sorry for them," says Suhendri, a man who has brought his family by car from Bireuen, 137 miles south. He wants his children to understand the destruction first hand. "The [Indonesian military] have been given an impossible task without enough personnel or equipment amid a population which wants to pull away from their country."

Over at the airport, about six miles from where Hasbi stood, the US military is focused on its 80 missions a day to communities that stretch for hundreds of miles along the west coast of Sumatra. The workhorses of the operation - helicopters - descend in a steady cycle, blowing the orange plugs out of volunteers' ears and knocking the sweat off helpers like a slap in the face. Unprepared newcomers get knocked down. Hats fly off. Aid trucks from dozens of international groups back down a deeply rutted road, and bucket brigades get to work schlepping skids of Indonesian rice, medical supplies, water, high-protein bars, and other supplies into the helicopters, which then disappear over the gumdrops of mountain rainforest en route to the remotest villages.

The cacophony of the operation short-circuits conversation until the field is empty - a rarity, with four stations of entry and exit. In those moments, communication begins in earnest. Most of the time, volunteers sit or stand with eyes transfixed a few feet ahead, lost in thought. Over and over and over, from dawn to late afternoon, the work is a study in monotony, backbreaking work, and collective solitude.

Seaman Jeri Dollar, from the USS Abraham Lincoln, stationed offshore, says the experience is "hot, wet ... [and yet] It feels too good to be exhausted," she adds, wearing blue military fatigues and gloves, and sipping water through a mouthpiece from her camel pack.

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