For One Contractor, A Road Too Hard

[Southpaw Bookworm]

BURNET, Tex. -- At night, after their work was finished and the desert moon had risen over their camp, some of the civilian truckers who hauled military supplies across Iraq would gather at their base in Kuwait and watch videos.

They watched the same two or three clips over and over again, fast-forwarding through some scenes, rewinding to replay others, pausing to stare at the screen. In each, they noted the way the victim's hands were bound. They counted the seconds between the time his neck was cut open and when he stopped struggling. They would tie each other up and practice how to escape a similar fate at the hands of anti-American insurgents.

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But by the end of August, Petty, who went to Iraq to earn enough money to build a house for his wife and six girls, had had enough.

He had dodged roadside bombs, mortar fire, rocket-propelled grenades and bullets as he drove his unarmored flatbed between U.S. military bases in Iraq. He had lived that unnerving fear of being kidnapped by men in black hoods. And he was earning no more than he made driving a truck in the United States, with an extra run to Mississippi thrown in.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14325-2005Jan16.html