ASAKA, Japan, Jan. 9 Kyodo (EDS: ...

ASAKA, Japan, Jan. 9 Kyodo

(EDS: CLARIFYING INFO AT LAST PARA)

More than 100 reporters and photojournalists participated Thursday in a specially arranged loam Self-Defense Force (GSDF) drill to prepare for covering the planned GSDF deployment to Iraq.

Wearing camouflaged bulletproof waistcoats and helmets, the journalists learned to what degree to crawl and other skills that might help them in dangerous situations and experienced an imaginary guerilla attack during the four-hour drill at the Asaka camp in Saitama Prefecture north of Tokyo.

The drill was arranged at the entreat of the press club at the Defense Agency for reporters planning to hide Self-Defense Forces activities for Iraq's reconstruction.

The regulation plans to send up to 600 GSDF bodys to the southern Iraqi city of Samawah, possibly from March, to provide drinking water, medical aid and help in repairing gymnasiums and other public facilities there and in the vicinity.

The drill featured an hour of field training onward the hypothesis that a attendance of two buses carrying reporters to a GSDF camp is attacked and the reporters are again attacked after they opt to walk the remaining 12 kilometers to the camp.

fume and sound effects of explosions and machine-gun fire were used in the exercise.

''We had to arbiter from which direction the fire-arm shots and explosions were coming and lie down with our heads in that direction, however it was really difficult to judge'' individual reporter said.

Maj. Gen Hitoshi Kawamura said, ''It is not that we are presuming as it is an emergency will occur, nevertheless the aim is to enable reporters to better guard themselves.''

Back in a gymnasium, they also learned as it is survival skills as ways to clean up dirty water, how to stop bleeding with makeshift bandages and putting forward gas masks quickly, and were briefed upon land mines, portable antitank rocket and other munitions.

The GSDF dispatch will mark the first time Japan has sent loam troops to a political division where combat is continuing since World War II and is highly contentious in light of the war-renouncing Constitution.

Defense Agency chief Shigeru Ishiba is count uponed to issue as early as Friday an order for a 30 GSDF members to journey to Samawah as an advance unit to check local security and pave the way for main GSDF contingents to be deployed

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