Word: convoys
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When the troops arrive there, the two-story green-and-lime building housing the Baath Party seems deserted. Then a sniper across the road starts firing on the convoy and is answered. The battalion pours through the streets, grabbing two teens who tell the troops that 250 to 450 armed Baathists have headed east, the last of them having left as the Marines arrived. The teams collect names of party officials and details on their vehicles and weapons. The biggest find: a book listing the names of all local Baath officials...
Specialist Shoshana Johnson, a U.S. Army cook, is one of five soldiers from the 507th Maintenance Company taken captive after their convoy was ambushed while supplying the 3rd Infantry Division in its push toward Baghdad. She is America's first female POW since the Clinton Administration lifted the "risk rule" in 1994--in effect letting women take military positions where they might come under enemy fire or be captured. All told, 19 soldiers from the 507th were wounded, killed or unaccounted for in the first week of war, including two more women listed as missing...
...Fort Bliss, the 507th's home base, shock came first, then silence. No one on the post could tell the families of the dead and missing what had gone wrong, what a cook and a computer specialist, a mechanic and an aspiring elementary school teacher were doing in a convoy so close to battle, so unprotected. The 507th's usual job is to keep diesel tankers rolling, fix generators and service Patriot missile batteries. But it was attacked on March 23, at night, somewhere on or near Highway 1, one of the main north-south roads in Iraq...
...been easy. Even the survivors are confused. Initial reports from the battlefield said the 507th had taken a wrong turn while passing near the town of Nasiriyah, but U.S. Congressman Silvestre Reyes, whose El Paso district encompasses Fort Bliss, says he was told by a senior officer that the convoy was ambushed on a bridge and had not taken a wrong turn. The lightly armed unit didn't have a chance. It had no combat escort, he says. If that's true, the fault for the convoy's vulnerability would lie not with its leader but with Army commanders. Reyes...
...Lowy is covering his first war. He's learning fast. Riding with the 1st Brigade of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, he was traveling north last week with hundreds of military vehicles in a ground-assault convoy (GAC). Alongside 15 soldiers, Lowy was in a troop carrier moving through stifling desert mornings and nights so cold that the men sometimes used plastic bottles of their own urine as hand warmers. "When I get out of here," he says, "I'm going to make up a T shirt that says I SURVIVED...