CENTRAL IRAQ - Pfc. John Michael Brown turned the tanker truck off the dirt road and began steering seven tons of metal, tires and petroleum down a steep incline.
"Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick," he said in his impression of a hill-climbing roller coaster, even though this part of the ride was going down, not up.
His truck mate, Spc. Jonathan Somers, was singing a 1960s tune: "There she was just a-walkin' down the street, singin' doo wah diddy diddy dum diddy doo."
The bridges on this desolate stretch can't support the weight of tanker trucks, so the 319th Transportation Company's convoy was going around them on horseshoe-shape detours that took them down below the road, then back up to it.
The sun had just disappeared under the horizon, so there was still some light left. The truck leveled off in the curve, and Pfc. Brown stepped on the accelerator and pushed it back upward. The tires dug into the thick, loose sand. A wrong move by the driver could topple the truck on its side or cause it to stick in the sand and slide backward.
Spc. Somers stopped singing and shouted at the truck, calling it by the nickname they gave it - the name of Capt. Quint's boat in the movie Jaws.
"Come on, Orca. Come on," he shouted.
With a sharp turn to the right, then to the left, the Orca crawled back onto level ground. The driver and his rider cheered.
This is how they deal with the pressures of their job and a hostile terrain waiting to take them down at every turn. After dark, drivers were ordered to turn off their headlights in a security procedure known as "blackout drive." A truck behind them in the convoy drove into a ravine, and one in front of them ran off the road and landed on its side, leaking into the sand gallons of diesel fuel precious to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, which the 319th supports.
A third truck ran off the road and became stuck in the side of an embankment but was later pulled free. No soldiers were seriously injured that night, but the crashes were signs of how fatigued members of the Augusta-based Army Reserve unit have become since the war in Iraq started.
Coping with stress
Teams return from long missions, only to hit the road again the next morning. Last week, Pfc. Brown and Spc. Somers were part of a convoy that was on the road for four days, was fired on by enemy soldiers, ran out of food and wound up in a firefight at the fuel point. Crashes and breakdowns have cost the unit about 40 percent of its fleet.
Trucks left on the roadside end up stripped and sometimes burned. About a half-dozen soldiers have been taken out of commission by injuries and medical problems. Still, the 319th is trucking on. Marine Maj. Jens Curtis, of the Transportation Support Group, which encompasses the 319th, said the Army reservists have learned that Marines logistics are very different from Army logistics.
While the Army's support units typically take supplies a safe distance from combat, the Marines take them a few kilometers from the front lines.
Despite the unit's losses, Maj. Curtis said, the 319th is still mission capable and getting a job done that the Marines can't do on their own. The 319th is moving bulk fuel forward as the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force advances toward Baghdad.
To avoid any more crashes, the Marines are trying to get convoys started earlier so most driving takes place during the day, Maj. Curtis said. Mission requirements are being met despite the problems.
"It's not pretty, but it's working," Maj. Curtis said. "Everybody's just being driven."
To cope with their fatigue and stress in hostile territory, Pfc. Brown and Spc. Somers sang their way from the desert of southern Iraq into the marshlands toward the basin of the Euphrates River.
At times the tight, dusty cab of the truck sounded like a karaoke bar without the music. The two soldiers disregard their vocal limitations, belting out songs over the loud grumble of the engine - Take It Easy, Piano Man, Gin and Juice and Tiny Dancer.
"A little song can be like a little piece of home," said Spc. Somers, 23. "It relieves stress, and it keeps our morale up."
They also spend their time talking about their personal lives, their ambitions, the war, religion and politics. The two have become close friends in the 319th, so close that Spc. Somers has asked Pfc. Brown to be a groomsman in his wedding after the war.
They met at Fort Stewart when the unit was activated in January. Spc. Somers' parents live in Augusta. He graduated from Lakeside High School and was attending North Georgia College & State University in Dahlonega before being called up.
Pfc. Brown, 21, of Orange Park, Fla., is one of 16 members of the Palatka, Fla.-based 228th Transportation Company attached to the 319th. He graduated from Orange Park High School and had been taking two semesters off from Florida Community College, working for United Parcel Service at an unloading dock before being ordered to Fort Stewart.
Shaving a mustache without hot water hurts, so Pfc. Brown has been growing his out. Stocky and burly, he's beginning to look like a young Ernest Hemingway. He wore goggles over his eyes to keep out the sand. Pfc. Brown said he likes his role in the war. Infantry soldiers don't get to see much of the countries they fight in, but he and Spc. Somers are getting the grand tour, he said.
Their journey to the fuel point began at Camp Viper, in a flat desert peppered with short, scraggly bushes. About half of the unit's remaining trucks were in the convoy, which was supposed to leave between 6 and 10 a.m. The truck teams were awakened at 4:30 a.m. The Marines were late assembling the convoy, which also included trucks carrying food, water and ammunition.
They left the camp at 2:30 p.m. on a cool, sunny day. The soldiers were hot, though, wearing flak vests, helmets, boots and camouflage chemical suits.
"You ever have a song stuck in your head because of what you're doing?" Pfc. Brown asked as they pulled out. "Right now I've got Slow Ride, Low Rider and Magic Carpet Ride all stuck in my head."
The convoy moved north on a highway, passing herds of camels, shepherds - some with children - leading flocks, and residents traveling by donkey, bicycle and pickup truck.
Whirlwinds of dust spun in the distance. At one point, they saw two helicopters circling far away, shelling something below. Spc. Somers takes a stack of letters and cards from home along on rides and reads them over and over again. He kept a card from his fiancee wedged inside the front window and his M-16 wedged inside a handlebar across the front console.
There had been warnings about suicide bombers and Iraqi soldiers posing as civilians, so every civilian they saw was cause for alarm. A truck approached, and Spc. Somers put the M-16 in his lap, its barrel resting out his window. The truck was full of smiling, waving children.
"This is the most civilian vehicles I've ever seen," Pfc. Brown said.
"They're a little too close to the road for me," Spc. Somers said. "I like it better when they're a dot on the horizon."
Marsh, wasteland
The farther the trucks moved toward the river, the more the landscape began to look like California.
Bushes grew taller. There were puddles of water along the highway. Eventually, the brown desert gave way to patches of grassy marshland and palm trees.
Also along the highway are mud huts and brick shacks.
"I've got friends in low places," sang Pfc. Brown and Spc. Somers.
The environment changed when the Marines led the trucks off the highway. The land became a dirt wasteland, flanked on both sides by trenches, mounds of sand and more mud huts. Stray dogs scrounged food out of the meal packages tossed out of vehicles by Marines and soldiers.
They passed residents wearing robes and turbans who looked up at them, touching their fingers to their mouths, begging for food.
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Pfc. John Michael Brown points his M-16 rifle out the door of his 7-ton tanker truck while the convoy is stopped during a trip into central Iraq.
JOHNNY EDWARDS/STAFF
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It was in this area that the trucks crashed after dark. Pfc. Brown and Spc. Somers' truck was behind the one that fell over and leaked diesel. The two jumped out of the cab and, with other soldiers, tended to an injured specialist and formed a perimeter. Pfc. Brown and another soldier found a Marine outpost and summoned medical helicopters.
The Marines decided to halt the convoy for the night. Soldiers slept in the cabs of their trucks.
The next day, they unloaded their tanks at the same depot, in an area known as Camp Anderson, where a previous convoy was involved in a firefight and where they had seen the bodies of Iraqi soldiers the morning after. The bodies had been removed, and security seemed to have tightened. Camps of Marines, some living in tents, some in foxholes, lined both sides of the road for miles leading up to the fuel bladders. Across from the depot, prisoners of war were being held in a trench.
The long haul
The convoy took two days and traveled nearly 300 miles. It delivered 125,000 gallons of diesel.
Sleeping in the cabs of trucks wasn't comfortable. There was no leg room and no room to lie down. By the end of the trip, knees and buttocks ached.
Capt. Mohandas Martin, the commander of the 319th, said the exposure to combat has been an added stress to the men and women of the unit. Some are dealing with it better than others, he said.
Before the unit was attached to the Marines, the reservists expected to haul fuel from the rear of the war theater to the middle, if even that far forward. Now they're moving from the rear to the front.
The morning after the firefight, 319th truckers also saw bodies being zipped up in black bags, presumably those of Americans.
Mentally, the unit is operating at about 80 percent, Capt. Martin said. The soldiers are still recovering from the things they've seen, but they're getting stronger as a company every day.
Capt. Martin said he wishes the Marines had attached two transportation companies instead of one. He said he has also wondered why reservists were intermingled with active-duty Marines.
"I'm still trying to get an answer to that question - why us?" Capt. Martin said. "Why not an active-duty unit? When did we volunteer for this?
"But then you've got to pull back and say, 'Why not us?"'
Driving back to Camp Viper, Pfc. Somers said he believes the 319th has proved itself the best fuel-hauling company in the Southeast.
"For the amount of sleep we don't get, the amount of food we don't eat and the amount of fuel we haul, you'd think we'd have a lot more nights like that one, but we don't," Spc. Somers said of the night the trucks wrecked. "We've only had that one, and we keep rolling."
"A lot of us have said there's something supernatural about this unit," Pfc. Brown said. "For all its little problems and the things that go wrong, we've still delivered massive amounts of fuel, and it gets to the people who need it."
