Word: maupin
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...Maupin arrived in Iraq last February. Most of his unit was based near Baghdad, attached to various support commands. One of its key missions was to protect the civilian convoys that bring everything from beans to bullets to U.S. forces scattered around Iraq. Because of their vulnerability, the convoys are key targets for insurgents. In the three letters Maupin, who had never traveled by plane before enlisting, wrote his mother, homesickness came through. "Hey Mom--I wouldn't come here on a bet--this place sucks," he wrote. ("He never used that word before," Carolyn says.) "I just want...
...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...
...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 casseroles, pies...
...week after Maupin disappeared, he surfaced on a video shown on al-Jazeera, the Qatari satellite channel. It showed him alive, surrounded by five gunmen masked in kaffiyehs. "My name is Keith Matthew Maupin," he said into the camera. "I am a soldier from the 1st Division." Wearing his uniform and boonie hat, Maupin appeared unharmed but dazed. "He didn't look hurt, but he was nibbling a little on his lip, which I've never seen him do before," Carolyn remembers. "I was impressed that the captors didn't have their guns pointing at him." They said...