I didn't go on the road.

In the morning, I stayed back and did chores. I burned manure, did dishes, got fuel for the generator, dumped the used shower water out on the driveway and filled the shower tanks.

At night, I pulled extra shifts of guard duty, and four hours of radio watch every night. I averaged six hours of watch a night.

In the hot middle of the day I did things like taking parts off broken trucks so that the dollar cost of the missing parts equaled half the worth of the truck, so that we could turn it in as being "unfixable."

The trucks we were issued were worth about $6,000 on the books. They were WWII era trucks. We were some of the first people in Iraq, and the powers that be didn't want to lose good trucks by sending them in first, which makes sense...shrug.

The drivers went out every morning at 4am and drove a route that would take me 20 minutes to drive...and it would take them all day. They drove slower than I could walk, and stopped frequently. They got shot at. They wore a jacket for carrying ammo over a lead-lined flack vest over a thick shirt and a t-shirt in a hot truck in 120-degree sun.

If their trucks were broken, though, they didn't have to go.

Nothing we had to do made any sense. Everything we did was made as painful as possible, always the least efficient and least practical way of doing something was used.

I was ordered to find out what was wrong with a truck that didn't start. It sounded like the batteries were dead..."cranks but doesn't start."

I tested the batteries. They were good.

I walked past the dipstick and tried to push it in. It was sticking out about an inch. How odd.

I took the starter off and brought it to a specialty shop and had it bench tested. It was fine. I put it back on.

I walked past the dipstick and pulled it out and looked at it and put it back in and pushed on it really hard to try to get it to go back in.

I replaced the batteries even though they tested good.

I pushed down on that darn dipstick again. It bugged me.

I traced wires around and jabbed my light tester and my voltmeter into wires.

I pulled the dipstick out again. I put it back in. It still didn’t fit. I compared it to the dipstick on a similar truck. It was the right dipstick.

Out of frustration, I replaced the batteries a second time. I took all the connections apart and cleaned them really well.

I half flicked at the springy dipstick with my finger and watched it buzz back and forth. Frustrating days passed with no enlightenment on why the truck wouldn’t start.

Coleman walked outside. She was a queen who didn't have to do anything like work. Life isn't fair. She had been sitting inside talking to the saboteurs all day so she knew what was wrong with the truck. She made a beeline for the dipstick.

"Anderson...I think there's sand on the end of this dipstick." she said. She shoved the dipstick under my nose. I hadn't been looking for ... 'too much sand in the engine to allow it to start.' When the oil was drained, most of a five-gallon bucket was full of tarry black sand. I took the valve cover off and there were rocks in the compression chamber, one truck had a tootsie roll wrapper sitting on the piston...and rocks and sand... rocks and sand ...lots of rocks and sand.

Our saboteurs didn’t just put sand in engines. They rode clutches to make them pop. I had to drop trucks off at the specialty shop to have their major parts replaced.

“This truck has been in here for a new clutch three times.” The thick greasy sergeant looked at me with contempt. I shrugged. I got really good at replacing hydro-vacs.

It didn't really matter until someone got hurt. Sabotaging trucks isn't the worst thing in the world to do, but the problem was that the trucks were really tough. They would run for weeks with a bucket of sand in their bellies and then they would die on the road. When one of these trucks broke, the soldiers stopped, got out and hooked it up to a toe-bar. As they were pulling away the towing truck got hit with an RPG. Two soldiers were hurt pretty bad. Our officers said that they wouldn't have been attacked if the truck hadn't broke. I don't think they would have been allowed to drive any faster than a crawl anyway, so they would have gotten shot anyway. The truck was just an excuse to blame the drivers for getting shot when they were set out like targets on a shooting range. Soldiers went through investigation and trial, some went to prison, and some were discharged. One who was a witness against the saboteurs went crazy and killed himself. The whole thing...head-shake...was weird.

The commander who was in the middle of all this, dumped his command in the nick of time and went to the Pentagon, and the incoming commander lost his career over it.