TRAVEL TALES : WHERE TO SEE WHAT SEABEES DO.

Byline: Jeremy Bagott Daily News Staff Writer

``We build, we fight,'' goes the Seabee motto. In a sea of modern organizational blather, there could scarcely be a pithier, more focused mission statement for any group. Its clarity borders on the poetic.

The Seabees, otherwise known as the U.S. Naval Construction Battalion, don't blow whistles. They don't scrape paint off rusty hulls. They build, and if you get in the way, they blast. What's not to understand?

The fruits of the Seabees' labor, as well as a staggering array of weapons, construction equipment, uniforms, photographs and assorted stuff the fighting Seabees have commandeered from their numerous foes over the years can be viewed at the Seabee Museum at the Naval Construction Battalion Center, Port Hueneme - home of the Pacific Seabees.

``The museum is more than the sum of its exhibits,'' said director John Langellier. ``The real story of the Seabees is in the most mundane of objects, like the Coca-Cola bottles the Seabees improvised as electrical insulators in the Pacific during World War II.''

Immortalized by John Wayne in the 1944 film ``The Fighting Seabees,'' the Seabees have seen action in every major U.S. zone of conflict since their formation after the attack on Pearl Harbor. But they've also conducted little-known operations in parts of the world so remote you'd be hard-pressed to find them in any atlas - places such as the tiny Pacific island of Yap, where 80-pound stone disks are used as legal tender.

Veterans, history buffs and civil-engineer types will be euphoric. Others less so. A case containing battle-worn surveying flags, Wye levels, protractors, alidades and other surveying equipment that only a construction worker could truly love gives way to an exhibit room containing about 50 anti-aircraft cannon, mortar tubes and machine guns of all nations and vintages.

Ringing the weaponry are wall-size glass cases with the small arms of many nations and convincing dioramas depicting former Seabee enemies.

One life-size diorama features a North Vietnamese Regular and a cache of what was once his standard-issue field equipment. Beside him, a Viet Cong in black pajamalike attire stands beside numerous weapons of choice: assorted booby traps and homemade mines (long ago disarmed) and several punji sticks - sharpened bamboo shoots designed to pierce the standard-issue U.S. combat boot and infect the foot. Most chilling is a bear trap once rigged to ensnare the ankle of some unsuspecting GI.

In another room, a wall-size glass display case contains dozens of helmets, among them a British paratrooper's, a French infantryman's, an Italian carabiniere's and a well-preserved specimen of a Pickelhaube, the German spiked helmet worn in World War I.

A passageway leads to a large hall with dozens of cases containing hundreds of cultural artifacts acquired by the Seabees. Assembled here is an Okinawan shi-shi dog, an array of Japanese ceremonial scabbards, a Russian samovar, a Moroccan kaftan, a stuffed bald eagle and items too numerous to mention. All are contained in cases according to country and region: Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Melanesia, the Pacific Trust Territories, Micronesia, Polynesia, Africa, Europe and the Americas.

The many displays that aren't related to warfare speaks to the Seabees' humanitarian work.

When Saddam Hussein drove Kurdish refugees into barren regions of Northern Iraq after the Gulf War, President Bush called out the Seabees to provide comfort and sanitation.

Across from the museum, at the base's Heritage Park, bulldozers, cranes and a huge amphibious resupply vessel stand in silent tribute to those who once operated them.

The most unusual object ever acquired? Try a fully operable Japanese Zero one Seabee brought back as a souvenir after World War II. (The aircraft has long since been transferred to another museum, but it speaks to the Seabee's fabled can-do approach.)

To understand the degree of danger involved in stringing electrical wires or clearing a jungle runway while someone's trying to kill you, look at the metal storage bunker riddled with bullet holes during its weeklong life span in September 1967 in Dong Ha, Vietnam.

More recent Seabee missions include a foray into Bosnia, where the Seabees turned military encampments back into farm fields.

But whatever the mission, the Seabees remain unfazed. As the saying goes, the difficult is done at once, the impossible takes 1.5 working days.

For a Seabee Museum tour

Admission to the Seabee Museum is free. Visitor hours are 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday, 12:30 to 4:30 p.m. Sunday. The museum is closed holidays.

To reach the museum from the San Fernando Valley, drive west on the Ventura Freeway (101) about 50 miles, exit south on Victoria Avenue (toward the ocean), then east on Channel Islands Boulevard, south on Ventura Road, then onto the base. Tell the sentry you're a museum visitor and you'll be pointed in the right direction.

For more information, call [phone].

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Photo: The fruits of the Seabees' labor can be viewed at the Seabee Museum at the Naval Construction Battalion Center, Port Hueneme.

Joe Binoya/Special to the Daily News

Box: For a Seabee Museum tour (See Text)