"STUCK - Sgt. Doug Duhaime of Hesperia takes a momentary break during efforts to get his 45-ton tank retrieval vehicle free of a drift of soft sand that mired it near the Iraqi border with Saudi Arabia. "
DENNIS ANDERSON/Valley Press
Posted on 07/06/2003 7:40:25 PM PDT by BenLurkin
ALONG THE SAUDI BORDER - We knew the movie took a strange twist, stranger than usual, when we heard the lieutenant shout over the radio, "Get back to the vehicles! The nomads are coming!" Except, it wasn't a movie. It was happening. Real life just felt like a movie.
Armed bedouins, land mines, sporadic ambushes, camel caravans. Like Frank L. Baum's mythical land of Oz, some of the Middle East was wonderful. Some of it was terrible. And more than a few G.I.s daily felt like Dorothy searching for the ruby slippers.
"I, for one, would just like to go home," said Spc. Michael Keys, an amiable Palmdale bodybuilder who is soldiering with the National Guard in Iraq. "I'd like watch a little TV, lay back on my own couch, sleep in my own bed."
But that was not to be. As in Vietnam war journalist Michael Herr's book, "Dispatches," reality was a movie that just kept happening. For 150,000 Americans in Iraq, the movie is on unlimited run.
Keys and his "battle buddies" from a local National Guard unit were assigned to pull an indefinite tour in a combat zone, on missions that would take them from former Republican Guard bases to downtown Bagdhad to Iraq's border with Saudi Arabia.
We found the middle of nowhere on the sixth day of our first convoy. The middle of nowhere is located, more or less precisely, at 30 Degrees North, Latitude; 46 Degrees East, Longitude.
That "Lat-Long" grid coordinate figured to be about 40 kilometers north of the Saudi-Iraqi border, a triangular sweep of nothing but sand, ferocious beetles, the occasional camel herd, and yes, nomads, armed and ready for plunder.
So, to plunder phrases liberally from Teddy Roosevelt and his contemporary, playwright Eugene O'Neill, the crowded hours for the 1st Platoon, 1498th Transport, began around noon on the 1st of June, and ran for the rest of the long day's journey into night.
Tough day
The 1st Platoon's tough day began about a month after President George W. Bush declared the "end of major combat," and a couple of days after "minor" combat started killing one G.I. a day.
On this particular day, the Guard truckers faced twin antagonists, a wicked sand storm and the cover it gave to nomads who sweep across the desert in stake-bed trucks, looking for vehicles to strip. Momentarily separated from the rest of the convoy in the storm, one of the Cal Guard truck teams made a tactical error in a part of the world where margin for error is slender.
"Couple of our guys unhooked their tractor from the vehicle," Lt. Jorge Hernandez said. A former Marine leading his first command as an officer, Hernandez was agitated and anxious. Anxious for the safety of his troops, and the fate of his vehicles. The troops, priceless. The trucks, about a quarter-million taxpayer bucks apiece.
"They shouldn't have unhooked the trailer. It'll get stripped in minutes," Hernandez said.
About a third of the soldiers in 1498th, like Sgt. Jose Coby of Lancaster, hailed from Antelope Valley communities. Others, like Army Ranger William Mathers, came from the Sacramento area, and still more, like Sgt. Richard Mosley, came from Riverside County. Still others came from faraway places like Anthony Collins, originally of Massachusetts, and Tracey Ford from North Carolina, who showed up for a California Guard weekend to discover she was headed for a combat zone in Iraq.
Heavy duty
The unit's mission involved carrying armored vehicles on the longbeds of the enormous trucks - 91,000-pound tractor-trailers called Heavy Equipment Transport systems. The trucks carried tanks and other armor to 3rd and 4th infantry divisions to help the grunts and tankers fend off a mounting daily series of ambushes that have killed two dozen American soldiers since late May.
During the 1st Platoon's eight-day mission, the truckers drove through Basra and Bagdhad, inching along amid a swelling tide of humanity, some of that humanity armed with AK-47s. Every kilometer ticked off through every crowded street scene was a "nail biter" for the troops.
Further out in the country, hundreds of camels would swell out of the desert, urged on by Bedouin herdsmen. Colorful trucks would race the convoy, playing musical horns with themes like the "Colonel Bogey March" from "Bridge on the River Kwai."
Children would race to the roadside, sometimes to haggle for food or trade, selling blocks of ice and Iraqi army bayonets. Sometime the children just wanted to mingle with G.I.s, their smiles open or shy, their eyes filled with curiosity. "Hey, mistah!" they would call out.
Laughter, and sometimes bizarre, sudden dangers rode as companions to the truckers during the first of many 1,400-mile driving missions.
By day six of the unit's first major convoy into Iraq, the Guard truckers avoided land mines planted on the road. The truckers also avoided by an hour a road ambush that killed a pair of G.I.s and wounded six other Americans outside Fallujah. And the Guard troops avoided the scattered gunfire that is as common as blowing sand in Iraq.
"So far the Lord has still took a likin to us," company 1st Sgt. James Earl Norris wrote the Valley Press in an e-mail update last week. "We have had people in the areas of some of that action but so far all the stray cats have found their way home in one piece."
Heat and sand
On the highways of Iraq and Kuwait, temperatures daily soared as high as 130 degrees. On mid-afternoon of day six in Iraq, the sand was blowing a vortex across a windswept no-man's land near Saudi Arabia.
"My lieutenant thinks you guys are doing a great job," Staff Sgt. Sterling Pinto told a few guys from the California unit.
As the Guard truckers labored to retrieve a 60-ton combat bridge abandoned in the drifting sand and headlong rush of the invasion, nobody thought the engineer lieutenant's high opinion of their work was particularly thrilling news.
Pinto is a Navajo from New Mexico, and a combat engineer who rolled into Iraq a few weeks before with the 3rd Infantry. Pinto's officer was Lt. Mike O'Hare, of 54th Combat Engineers. For several days, the guard troops were under O'Hare's orders.
"He says you guys have gone places with us that nobody else would go."
The soft-spoken Pinto had that part right.
If the 1498th truckers drove into the bowels of 130-degree Farenheit hell along the Saudi border, it was because they were just beginning to learn the Iraqi ropes that first week of June. As historian Stephen Ambrose observed of soldiers on D-Day, the 1498th truckers, fresh into the combat zone, took chances on that first mission they would not later repeat.
At 1300 hours on June 1, the regular Army lieutenant from 54th Combat Engineers was about as popular with the Cal Guard truckers as Capt. Ahab was to the crew of the Pequod when they got a look at the size and the attitude of that white whale.
The "pick-up and back-load" mission began a couple of days earlier at 3rd Infantry H.Q., a dog house of a base called Camp Dogwood outside Bagdhad. Tired, filthy and low on water, the 1st Platoon leaders did a "dope deal," which is Army slang for a little bit of horse-trading.
"We traded a hot meal, a shower and some (bottled) water for a mission," Hernandez said later. He added, "It turned out to not be such a great trade."
Lt. O'Hare of West Point wanted the Guard troops to retrieve his combat bridges from where they'd been left along the invasion route down near Saudi. After the pick-up, it was a straight shot to home base at Camp Victory in Kuwait. Simple as putting your hand on a hot stove.
By day six of the 1st Platoon's mission, the guard truckers were beginning to drain off their dwindling supply of bottled water. Food was plentiful: continuous Meals Ready to Eat. Even if you couldn't stomach MREs, you could live for days without food. Without water?
"If we get stranded out here and the water runs out, it's simple. We die," said Spc. Peter Mavropoulos.
Mavropoulos was the master trucker who shared the cab with a Valley Press editor and his team leader, Sgt. Doug Duhaime, of Hesperia. The two could shackle and chain anything with wheels or tracks. In the cab of their truck, they carried everything, including each others' punchlines.
"We're not not gonna die," Duhaime said. "There's alway a 'Plan Bravo,' and then a 'Plan Charlie.' After that, we die." Rim shot.
Some barrel of laughs, that Mavropoulos and Duhaime. Sophisticated humor. We laughed our way across a thousand miles of blasted Iraqi armor and occasional mine field markers.
"Wonder if that's a new mine field, or an old one?" Duhaime said as the big trucks navigated a suspicious curve in a field of wrecked Iraqi tanks.
"Does it really matter?" Mavropoulos asked. "If the camel explodes, it's a new field."
Mercifully, the camels drifted lazily through the wrecked ordnance, and Duhaime tossed MRE bags of chow to their bedouin master. The camel herder smiled at us. As he would at any mutants from Mars.
Thirty degrees, north; 46 degrees, east. The sandstorm wrapped our vehicle like a blanket. In that buff brown, gritty void, the nomads arrived, looking for vehicles to strip. We could hear Lt. Hernandez on the radio, urging on his driver, Keys, Palmdale's answer to Arnold Schwarzenegger. "Go! Go! Go! Go!"
Keys answered the order with the Army pep yell that signifies anything except disagreement: "Hooah! Hooah! Hooah! Hooah!"
Somewhere out in the storm, the pair was driving on a maddening search for the Cal Guard trucker team that heedlessly unhooked a 45-ton trailer from a 45-ton tractor rig.
The prize was in sight for the Kalashnikov-wielding nomads: some 36 pairs of "dualie" wheels, enough rolling stock to keep a south Los Angeles chop shop going for a couple of days.
"The nomads take anything they can make use of," we were told by Lt. O'Hare, our freckle-faced Ahab. "You've got to get there first or anything they get will be stripped to the bone."
We had seen that. Trucks and trailers that looked like dinosaurs whose bones had been picked clean by some desert Godzilla. Sure there are terrorists in Iraq. And renegade Saddam backers. There's common bandits, too. Travel affords the opportunity to meet interesting people who will kill you if the moment is really special.
The relative safety behind the sand bags and machine gun towers guarding Camp Victory beckoned like Dorothy's lost vision of Kansas. We were only about 150 miles from home base, but it felt like about a million.
"The nick of time," Hernandez said a little while later. The appearance of armed G.I.s discouraged the nomads. They vanished into the desert like the "sand people" in "Star Wars."
It only took two more days and a couple of major breakdowns to get to home base at Camp Victory in Kuwait. Camp Victory was also 130 degrees in the shade. And there was no shade. But there was a chow hall, showers, bagged ice, cots with PX mattresses, and DVD movies. All behind the safety of the sand bag bunkers and machine towers.
There's no place like home. There's no place like home.
DENNIS ANDERSON/Valley Press
But, what a job he's doin'.
"Why? Why Lord? Why do you torment me with idiot E-2s that sticketh my vehicles in sand?"
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