In Iraq, ‘Road Warriors’ Deliver the Goods

It is 9 p.m. on a Wednesday, and Melvin Winter is going to war.

The 44-year-old truck driver from Greenville, Texas, turns the key of his white Mercedes flatbed truck, revs the engine and rolls up to a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. On this side is Camp Anaconda, a U.S. supply base. On the other is Iraq.

“Put your game face on,” he says, strapping on a helmet and bulletproof vest as the call to roll out crackles across the radio. “It’s time to put on the gloves.”

Over the next three hours, Winter and the other truck drivers in his convoy will rumble through a landscape of violence and fear. They will take fire from Iraqi insurgents. They will pass through blinding black smoke from roadside fires. They will be stuck for tense moments on a stretch of highway famous for its ambushes.

It will, in sum, be a normal day for the truck drivers of KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton Co. that finds itself on the front lines of the deadliest war the United States has fought since Vietnam.

Halliburton allowed a reporter to accompany a convoy on a typical run, providing the first glimpse of the hazards faced by its drivers, many of them blue-collar workers seeking to get ahead. Certain security measures were not allowed to be disclosed.

As the Defense Department has contracted out more and more jobs traditionally done by military personnel in order to focus its mission and save money, private companies increasingly have been plunged into the war.

None is more prominent than Halliburton, an oil services company once run by Vice President Dick Cheney. In 2001, the company won a multibillion-dollar contract to supply all the logistical needs of the U.S. military in Iraq.

As a result, it is difficult to overstate Halliburton’s importance to the war effort. Halliburton delivers soldiers’ mail and washes their clothes. It provides them with food, toilets and bunks. It ships fuel for tanks and builds conference rooms for generals.

The company and its workers have benefited, but at a cost. In Congress and the presidential campaign, Halliburton has come under attack because of its links to Cheney and Pentagon audit findings that it has overcharged the government hundreds of millions of dollars.

Workers have paid with their lives. Of Halliburton’s 30,000 employees in Iraq -- including more than 7,000 U.S. citizens and thousands of subcontractors from other countries -- 45 have been killed since the company established operations in March 2003.

No job is more dangerous than driving a truck. Of the 18 U.S. citizens killed in Iraq while working for Halliburton, 11 were truckers.

The drivers’ existence here is a real-life version of “The Road Warrior,” the Mel Gibson film in which a group of settlers in post-nuclear-war Australia tries to steer a truck through a desert filled with bad guys.

Recently, Halliburton’s convoys have been taking hits every day on some routes. The truckers endure sniper fire, car bombs, roadside explosions and rocket-propelled grenades. Iraqi insurgents mount ambushes to pick off trucks from behind. They throw bricks and drop 8-foot-long steel pipes from overpasses into the cabs.

In the most horrific incident, in April, insurgents blocked a convoy near the Abu Ghraib prison. Four Halliburton truckers were killed, two remain missing, and another, Thomas Hamill, escaped from his captors.

For an insurgency vastly outmatched by the U.S. military in firepower, shutting down supply lines has become an efficient alternative to direct confrontation.

“The front lines are no longer what we think of,” says Capt. Catherine Wilkinson, a spokeswoman for the Army’s 13th Corps Support Command, which oversees Iraq’s main logistics center. “The front lines are the convoys.”

There is not much the drivers can do. The Army provides security escorts, but the insurgents plant bombs along the relatively few cross-country routes the trucks must travel. Then they simply wait for a convoy, which sometimes pass as frequently as every half-hour on well-traveled routes.

Not all of Halliburton’s trucks are bulletproofed. Their windshields shatter. Bullets pierce the cab.

Mostly, the drivers punch the gas, and hope for the best.

“Sometimes it’s so calm and peaceful out there. Other times, you roll out the gate and think: I hope I make it, I hope I make it,” says Lou Hadley, who has been driving trucks here for nearly a year.

On this run, the convoy is carrying a load of tires, engine parts and other supplies into Baghdad from Camp Anaconda, a sprawling base about 60 miles to the north.

The drivers are typical: experienced truckers from the U.S. Military security prevents Halliburton from hiring Iraqis to deliver supplies to American troops.

As they wait for orders in the camp’s dusty parking lot, they stand out from the camouflaged soldiers, a motley crew from heartland America in the midst of the Iraqi desert. They wear tattoos and cowboy hats, big brass belt buckles and Bowie knives, blue jeans and sweat-soaked shirts.

Nearly all the drivers went to work for Halliburton for the money. Halliburton won’t disclose sums, but drivers have boasted of salaries of as much as $100,000 with bonuses -- with $80,000 of it tax free, as long as they stay in Iraq for a year.

It’s a long haul. The truckers work 84 hours a week -- that’s 12 hours a day, seven days a week. Home is a tent with 20 other cots and 5-foot-high divider walls in between. Meals are cafeteria style. Mortar attacks are constant.

Edie Hair, a 34-year-old from Ft. Hood, Texas, is a rarity here, a female driver. Her husband served 15 months in Iraq with the Army. When he got home, she went to work for Halliburton, leaving him to take his turn caring for their three daughters.

“I gotta put braces on my kids,” says Hair, a solidly built woman with thin blond hair, to explain her choice. “But I’m also supporting our troops.”

Clay Henderson, 34, is the convoy commander and the veteran of the group, with nearly a year in Iraq. A big man with a beard and long hair, he dreams of owning his own ranch one day in the Louisiana countryside where he now has nine horses.

“I want to mess around and do something fun instead of getting up at 3 a.m. and working until midnight and have nothing to show for it at the end of the year,” he says.

It’s an irony not lost on the drivers: They have come all the way to Iraq to make enough money to realize the American dream.

“I’d say 90% of the people over here are in it for the money,” says Winter, who is saving to trade up from a double-wide trailer to the 3,500-square-foot home he hopes to build one day. “One year over here, it’s equal to two to three years working in the U.S. You can advance considerably.”

If you make it a year. Turnover is high, the drivers say. One says he came to Iraq with about 20 friends. Of those, only three remain a year later. Halliburton said it could not provide statistics for the truckers’ turnover rate. But company policy is to send anyone home who wants out of their one-year contract, no questions asked -- but no tax benefits, either.

“If you don’t get nervous, you’re stupid. If you don’t get nervous, it’s time to go home,” says Billy Lee Tripp, 44, a La Vernia, Texas, native who is as wiry as a stray cat.

Nervousness rises as night begins to fall. With an orange sun flaring in the west, the truckers and their military escorts gather in a circle to plan the night.

The route will take them right through the middle of “IED Alley,” named for the roadside bombs that the military calls improvised explosive devices.

In addition, locals have recently taken to lining the highways and bridges, dropping rocks to smash the windshields. Hair, the woman from Texas, had five windshields replaced in a month.

Sgt. Hosea Lark, the military commander for the run, orders his soldiers to pass out chemical light sticks to the truckers. He tells the truckers to activate the sticks and toss them out the window to alert their escorts if they get hit by rocks.

“If you see a rock thrower, blast [him] away,” Lark tells his men from the Army National Guard’s 1171st Transportation Company. “The risk is extremely high.”

After the briefing, truckers and soldiers huddle in prayer. Then all scramble into their vehicles, forming a long convoy of military security escorts and Halliburton trucks.

Winter goes over final preparations in his cab, pockmarked by a single round from an AK-47 that he calls his “lucky bullet hole.”

Near at hand, he places bottles of water and lemon-flavored Gatorade, three packs of cigarettes and a handful of tampons -- which can be used to stanch bleeding.

Then the convoy rolls out. In minutes, the landscape changes from the bustle of the base to a wide open plane of scrub and blacktop lighted by the moon.

Soon, the trucks turn onto the main highway leading toward Baghdad.

“From this point on, it’s not safe,” says Winter, a round-faced man with metal glasses, a tan shirt and blue jeans.

The road quickly becomes a place of lurking danger. Iraqis motor alongside the convoy in both directions. The endless piles of rocks and trash by the side of the road are potential hiding places for bombs.

“If you roll out thinking that everybody is trying to kill you, you’re better off,” says Winter, a veteran of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, shrugging off a question about the danger.

Thirty minutes down the road, fires burning in clumps by the side of the road become visible. Huge clouds of acrid black smoke roll across the road, maybe from trash burning, maybe from recent combat. The cab becomes hot, smoky. The drivers run with the windows down, to keep the cab’s windows from being shattered by explosive concussions.

“Mash the gas. Drive it like it’s stolen,” Henderson’s voice comes across the radio.

The convoy bolts up onto an elevated highway that runs across marshland, providing a hellish view of fires, billowing smoke and haze. After a while, they descend and make a slow turn to join another highway. Suddenly, the radio crackles.

“AK-47. Right side. It’s hitting your truck,” a KBR driver calls out to the military escort in front of him.

Ahead, perhaps a thousand yards, red tracers light up the sky as the military escort returns fire. Radio calls report fire from the left and the right.

“It’s pretty bad,” one driver calls out. “You got bullets flying from both sides.”

And then, just as suddenly as it began, the shooting stops. Henderson calls on the radio for injuries. The radio stays quiet.

“It didn’t hit nobody. Keep rolling,” Henderson says. “Keep rolling.”

The trucks speed up briefly, but then slow again. Ahead, brake lights from another convoy fill the road, a major highway with four lanes in both directions.

The truckers get nervous. The highway that had been filled with Iraqi cars is empty. The stretch of road had seen both sniper fire and bombs in the past.

“There’s not enough traffic. Be advised of it,” one trucker calls out.

“Let’s go, let’s go,” Winter says under his breath. “This is not a nice neighborhood.”

The convoy comes to a halt. Gunners in the military escorts train their weapons on the moonlit fields and low, two-story homes around them.

The truckers don’t know what is happening. Neither does the military. The radio is filled with unanswered questions. The convoy has stopped in the middle of one of the most dangerous places in Iraq. Their best defense, speed, has been stripped away.

The convoy ahead begins to move. The truckers who have hopped out of their trucks to take shelter jump back into the cabs.

Half an hour later, the convoy hits the exit for the Baghdad airport, where the truckers are dropping off their load at a military base.

The trucks pull into a dusty parking lot. The drivers climb down, drop their trailers and talk quickly among themselves.

“It was a good run,” Winter says. “It was only small-arms fire. That’s a good run.”

Then they get back to work. It is 12:30 a.m. The moon is high. Time to make the run back to the logistics base, through the same gantlet of gunfire and smoke.

The road awaits.