CAMP 93, Kuwait (AP) -- While other military units train for tank battles and air assaults in Iraq, Navy Seabees are laying concrete and refreshing their bridge-building skills.

The Seabees, the Navy's construction force, may not be front-line soldiers, but their role -- paving roads and building bridges for tanks and Humvees in hostile territory -- may be nearly as important in the event of war in Iraq.

``We're here to support the force,'' said Naval Capt. William Rudich, commander of the 30th Naval Construction Regiment, based at Camp 93 in northern Kuwait.

The Seabees -- whose name comes from a play on Construction Battalion, or CB -- were created during World War II to handle construction projects in areas too dangerous for civilian engineers.

Though they are not sappers who defuse bombs, nor the combat engineers who quickly install floating pontoon bridges to get troops across rivers, the Seabees have a legendary reputation of their own. John Wayne immortalized them in his 1944 film ``The Fighting Seabees,'' which told the story of the force's creation.

They have built bases in the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam War, purified water in Somalia, helped rebuild Afghanistan's demolished infrastructure and built the detention facility for Taliban prisoners at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

Their motto is ``We build, we fight.'' Their symbol is a bee with a sailor's cap wielding a machine gun, a wrench and a hammer.

``We go everywhere the Marines go,'' said Rear Adm. Charles Kubic, commander of the Seabees, whose home port is Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

The Seabees recently built an airfield for Marine planes at a secret location in the Kuwaiti desert. It took 60 days to build.

Many of the more than 1,000 Seabees in the region are based at Camp 93, a desert camp of tents named in honor of the passengers who fought hijackers aboard United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001.

With a clang of mallets against metal, about 25 Seabees worked Thursday to refresh their bridging skills, connecting segments of olive-green steel to create a 60-foot-long bridge to nowhere in the desert in a few hours. Then they pulled it apart.

A few hundred yards away, another team worked to assemble a longer, stronger and wider portable bridge of shiny steel that can hold 110 tons at a time.

Marine Maj. Gen. James Amos flew to Camp 93 on Thursday to present the Seabees with two Marine swords to thank them for the new airfield along with ``probably the largest ... aviation ordnance storage area since Vietnam.''

``I don't think we'd be able to do what we think we have to do had the Seabees not been there,'' he said.