Fear And Loathing On Iraqi Roads

By Cathy Booth Thomas/Magnolia

They went off to Iraq to drive trucks for Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), hoping to score the ultimate jackpot--$80,000 tax-free for a year's work. Most were desperate to pay bills, to fix up houses, to send kids to college. For some, it was a patriotic duty. But in Iraq, wearing just a Kevlar jacket and helmet for safety, they found themselves in trucks with no armor, ferrying fuel to U.S. troops. They wielded hammers and cans of ravioli to defend themselves. And they came home with nightmares.

Even a tough guy like "Thor," an ex-Army Ranger from Dallas, is haunted by his experience. He suffered two broken shoulders, a torn rotator cuff and loss of vision in one eye while getting shot at, bombed and almost stabbed by an Iraqi who tried to drag him out of his cab. "I beat the guy to death with a hammer," he says, asking to remain anonymous. "Sometimes they threw themselves in front of the truck. I can't count how many people I've run over--20, 30 maybe. It got so bad the truck would bounce up and down."

Halliburton and its subsidiary KBR are targets in the political battle at home, but their drivers, men culled from the ranks of the desperate from Texas to New Hampshire, are taking real fire on the ground. Easter-week attacks on KBR's fuel convoys left four dead, bringing the company's death toll to 35, the majority of them drivers. Two drivers remain missing. Another, Thomas Hamill, escaped from his Iraqi captors and returned home to a hero's welcome. Hundreds more drivers have quit early and come back.

Yet every week, flights take off from Houston with new drivers. It infuriates Stephen Heering, 33, sitting in the safety of his home north of Houston in the town of Magnolia. Heering, a driver, needed to pay bills and save for his son's college education. He lasted just 4 1/2 months--until Iraqi insurgents bombed his truck and nearly killed him at gunpoint. "KBR said it would get better, but people started getting hurt bad," he says. "They'll find new meat. I guess that's the way it is in the money world. If it makes 'em money, they don't care if it costs them a life." In Ruby, S.C., John Shane Ratliff, 32, says he was attracted to the KBR job by the promise of as much as $120,000 a year and a desire to help his country. Instead, he found himself running a gauntlet of rocks as spikes were thrown at his tires. Once while driving, he took a rock to the head, which knocked him unconscious. His lone weapon was a can of ravioli his wife sent in a care package. "They didn't know what it was, something red shaped like that," he says. "Maybe they thought it was a bomb." He came home with $12,000--and taxes due, since he didn't stay the year required for tax-free status.

Halliburton, which provides counseling in Iraq and vacation leaves every four months, says fewer than 1% of its 24,000 employees have asked to come home. After the Easter attacks, CEO Dave Lesar visited 1,200 workers in Kuwait, but by then scores of drivers had asked to come home. Heering is now working with his father-in-law in construction. His past-due bills are paid, but there's nothing for college. Although he is angry and anxious, Heering hasn't called about counseling. Come fall, he plans to vote for George Bush, but he has harsh words for KBR. "If they send a truck on the road now," he says, "it's murder."

--By Cathy Booth Thomas/Magnolia with reporting by Paul Cuadros/Chapel Hill

With reporting by Paul Cuadros/Chapel Hill