Word: convoy
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...member of the 160-strong company, however, will be conspicuously absent. He is Keith (Matt) Maupin, the only American soldier who is unaccounted for in Iraq. Ten months ago, insurgents ambushed a convoy guarded by the 724th and took Private First Class Maupin, then 20, captive. There have been conflicting reports on his fate. He was seen alive on one videotape, reported killed on another. Without proof of his death, the Army presumes he is still alive. His family fervently prays that is so. The months have ticked by, and Maupin has been promoted to the rank of specialist...
Occasionally, the constant flow of Iraqi prisoners through U.S.-run prisons in Iraq yields leads about Maupin's whereabouts. According to U.S. military officers in Iraq, an Iraqi detainee recently led U.S. forces to the shallow grave of William Bradley, a civilian killed in the assault on Maupin's convoy. The detainee also fingered a gang in his village of Abu Ghraib, west of Baghdad, as the men involved in the attack in which Maupin went missing. In the first week of January, U.S. and Iraqi special forces raided the village, seized eight suspects--one of whom...
Maupin's mission last April 9, Good Friday, was to ride shotgun on a fuel tanker that was part of a mile-long convoy. Under the protection of part of the 724th, civilian contractors were hauling diesel fuel in 17 tanker trucks across 60 miles from the U.S. military's main logistics base at Camp Anaconda in Balad to Baghdad International Airport. Just west of Baghdad at about 10:30 a.m., the convoy came under sudden attack on the six-lane Abu Ghraib Expressway. "We're taking fire in the rear!" radioed a truck driver. Within seconds, the entire convoy...
...soldier behind Maupin's tanker saw it explode, swerve off the highway and plunge into a ditch. "They were hammering the daylights out of us," says Thomas Hamill, the civilian convoy commander. "I believe they were planning on taking everybody in that convoy out." While the insurgents failed in that goal, they did kill at least six Americans among the roughly 50 in the convoy. The bodies of four civilians and two soldiers from the 724th, Specialist Gregory Goodrich and Sergeant Elmer Krause, have been recovered. Hamill was taken prisoner and escaped after a month. One of the authors...
Carolyn saw news of the attack on television at the school district's bus depot, where she is a dispatcher. "When I saw the attack on the convoy on TV at work, I knew it was Matt's," she says. On Easter Sunday, an Army major hand-delivered letters to Maupin's parents informing them that Matt was missing. The next day, the Army stormed Carolyn's home, where Matt had lived before shipping out. "There must have been 20 of them," Keith says. "There was a stress officer, a chaplain, a casualty-assistance officer." Neighbors plied the Maupins with...