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For Water Truck 103, a Perilous Path to the End
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"Static vehicle, right side." A car bomb?
"Bridge ahead." Any overpass is an ideal spot for an ambush.
"Two men with guns, right side! One has an RPG!"
"Eyes on!" Jones cried, and for a moment everyone expected an assault. But it was apparently just two U.S. soldiers on foot patrol outside Camp Cedar.
"Your mind moves quickly," Jones said. "You're not physically tired, you're mentally tired at the end of a run."
For all that wariness, the worst thing that happened to the convoy on the first day of its journey was a truck breakdown, a problem quickly solved by using the two spare trucks in the convoy to tow the cargo and the broken-down truck.
After six hours and 280 miles, the trucks pulled into Convoy Support Center Scania, a U.S.-run refueling base about 125 miles south of Baghdad.
"What a journey," Jones said. "That was one of the better ones."
Camp Scania
The Iraqi truck drivers, sweaty and tired, emerged from their trucks to get water and something to eat. Like most of his fellow drivers, Wahid Abid, the driver of the flatbed carrying Truck 103, was wearing white cotton pants and a white T-shirt. He was a Shiite from Basra and had been a truck driver since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
"Yes, certainly it's dangerous," he said before settling down with a meal and climbing into the cab of his truck, where he would spend the night. "I've been forced to work, because we need to earn money to live. We have no jobs, just this work."
Jones and his three British teammates slept on bunk beds in a large tent inside the camp and ate at the American mess hall, a well-stocked place serving Cornish hen, french fries, fruit smoothies and Baskin-Robbins ice cream. But they were still in Iraq.
Unlike the American soldiers sitting around them, the four Britons said, they weren't in Iraq to serve their country, bring democracy to Iraq, win respect at home or even rebuild the country. They were motivated, they said, by the same thing as the Iraqi truck drivers.
