Leaving For War

You'd hardly recognize it now, but before Hurricane Katrina, Gulfport, Miss., was a gorgeous seaside town.

Navy Seabees have been helping to rebuild what looks like a war zone here, reports CBS News correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, and they'll need the experience where they're headed next.

Petty Officer Christian Bricks lost his beach-view apartment in Gulfport, as well as everything he had except for his uniform. It's all he's needed these days as his battalion has been re-building schools, homes and lives in Gulfport.

But now, the Seabees are leaving, for Iraq.

Says Terry Latham, of Gulfport, "They're deploying and leaving with their homes in bad shape, and the future ahead of them and us, and the whole community is up in the air."

The problem with "Duty, Honor and Country" is sometimes there's not much room for home.

"It's hard," says Navy Chief Phillip Bennet, "but I raised my hand and took an oath to God and country and I intend on fulfilling that oath."

Bricks says he's been lucky to be home, even if now he doesn't have one.

"It's somebody else's turn to come back and come here and go through the rubble and see if they can find anything," he says.

For a moment, it looked like Bricks had found something in the rubble: a Seabee's uniform. But it wasn't one. Says Bricks, "You want something, you want something to say, yeah, OK this was here, this survived. But you can't find anything. You can't find anything."

His legacy in Gulfport — and the legacy of the other Seabees — may be in the hearts of those they helped. Like the Rieux family, who thought no one was coming to help them until the Seabees showed up.

"They didn't forget us," says Joe Rieux. "They didn't forget us."