"The mail is a way and beyond priority right now. Troops don't care about the water and the chow, the marines will drop everything for the mail," said Lieutenant Maria Mattison.

After a gruelling drive through dangerous territory, and some occasionally ferocious combat, the scene here in Baghdad is almost like a holiday.

Boxes of bananas, apples and tangerines have been broken out by supply chiefs, marking a nice contrast after the food rationing and water shortages they faced marching north on the city.

Marines are roasting in the sun, while repairmen have gone to work and restored a theatre hit by US bombing. Now there are regular screenings of Hollywood movies.

"Austin Powers in Goldmember," "We Were Soldiers," "Shrek" and "Triple X" are being screened in a theatre once used by the ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to address his troops.

"It was quite funny to watch 250 grown adults, all battle hardened marines, laughing in unison to a kids' movie like Shrek," one marine said after the show.

But if some marines at the beginning of the war compared their initial experiences of battle to something from the movies, they are grizzled veterans now and say the Hollywood violence is not quite the real thing.

One said the fight scenes in the action-packed "Triple X" "were nothing when compared with the engagements" in the southern Iraqi town of Nasiriyah, where several marines were captured by the Iraqis, before being freed on Sunday.

In addition to the movie theatre, which also doubles as a non-denominational church, there are other crucial amenities here -- hot showers, laundry and the odd game of football.

Some are souvenir hunting. One marine is filling the empty miniature bottles of Tabasco hot sauce which come inside every US military ration pack with Iraqi soil. He swears he'll be able to sell them for "big bucks" back home.

Posters of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein are being traded for knives, compasses and baseball caps once held by his Republican Guard and secret police, while Saddam T-shirts -- printed before he was swept from power -- are fetching up to five packets of Iraqi cigarettes in trade.

But the marines also know that they are not built to sit around for too long, and with a formal end to the war approaching, they've been told to get ready to end their new holiday camp and get ready to move on.

"Marines are known as the finest assault troops in the world, their purpose is to be feared and to win wars," Commander Gary Gluck told AFP.

"Their expertise does not include humanitarian missions and police actions and their time here could be coming to an end."

For most of these marines, their six month rotation ends in July and that includes the one month ship voyage home. Corpsman Charles Hall said the first thing he'll do when he gets home is to fire up his hot tub.

"Then a nice dinner with my fiancee, and we'll hit the town and go dancin'."

SPACE.WIRE