A Day In The Life

I drive a truck. Among the slew of other glorious jobs I perform truck driving is one of them. I never intended on driving trucks in the military but Uncle Sam saw fit to retrain a lot of us last year to fill the need for supply haulers in Iraq. So here I am the last two months of my deployment back out on the road in a big army semi. It is a broken down piece of crap that looks like it came out of the losing end of a monster truck show. The bumper is cracked, the brush guard doesn’t fit right, the seat belts are temperamental, my headlights choose to alternate between various stages of working and not working, and I’m lucky if something doesn’t go wrong each convoy.

By no means is my job held in high esteem. I am not driving a 25-ton beast of a Stryker vehicle nor am I in a cool looking tank with a giant gun coming off the top of it. No one looks twice as we drive down the road in our trucks. If my truck ate wine and cheese it would do so out of a box and an aerosol can.

So just what is it like to be a truck driver in Iraq you may be wondering? Well since we don’t get much airtime in the news (unless we’re dying) I’ll go ahead and share with everyone about a day in the life of a truck driver in Iraq.


Me Doing What I Do Best: Smiling


Long story short we spend our off days from the road getting our trucks ready for the road. For example we check the tires, belts, fluids, and the general drivability of our trucks. We make sure nothing is wrong with the truck that will get us into trouble out on the road. Most of the time this goes well but something always manages to go wrong that we can’t predict before hand. A tire might hit a pothole and pop or a whole wheel hub might crack and fall off under the weight of the added armor intended to protect us from IED’s but never intended for in the original design of the trucks. The extra weight of the armor leads to a lot of problems with these trucks but is a necessary evil since it ultimately helps to save our lives.

Once our trucks are ready to go, and the time has come for a mission, we prepare to go out on the road by getting the latest intel for the area we are traveling in and rehearsing just how we are going to go getting to our destination. We leave time to discuss what we will do if a truck breaks down or gets hit by an IED or if we happen to come under fire. Once finished we climb in our trucks and ready to leave the base.

The thing about being a truck driver in the military is that it is not a glorifying or attention grabbing job. We aren’t fighter pilots blazing through the air, we aren’t kicking doors in with our steely knives looking for bad guys, and we definitely aren’t jumping from airplanes behind enemy lines in the dark of the night. My uniform has my name on it and not a bunch of cool guy patches that let everyone know how badass of a soldier I am. Not that there is anything wrong with anything of these things, we are often jealous of these guys and the cool stuff they get to do. The thing about our job is a lot of the aforementioned guys think we are crazy to be out on the roads in Iraq with little security driving in slightly up-armored vehicles. We pretty much go out every night and take our chances with what we are going to encounter along the way. I often wonder why we couldn’t just train monkeys to do our job because it sure isn’t that hard.

While on the road we are taught to look around and scan our field of vision for anything that might go boom in the night. As hard as we may look there is just no way to find everything out there especially with how trashy some of these cities are. If we really wanted to turn things around on the roads in Iraq we would invest in the broken window policy that helped Rudy Giuliani turn around New York city. We would clean the streets up and fix all of the roads and curbs. Every time they were blown up we would be back out there fixing them so that if anything looked out of place we would know it. But with the roads in such disrepair and trash strewn everywhere it is hard to tell rubble from bomb, not that we really even could at 45 miles an hour and if we were to slow down it would enhance the chances of causing damage when we were hit. Now I honestly don’t believe such a policy as fixing all the roads in Iraq is even feasible but I do think it would be a good solution if we were able to do such a thing.

Once out on the road we travel at our predetermined speeds and intervals and just sit there hoping not to get hit with a bomb. It is much like being on a “hot” base and hoping not to get hit with a mortar. There is really nothing we can do to avoid getting hit with an IED besides taking the necessary precautions to eliminate unnecessary damage by doing such things as wearing our seatbelts and keeping our body armor on. We often sit in our trucks bumbling down the roads and have conversations that go something like this: “Yeah I saw the Buckeyes win last week yeah that was a great ga--oh look at that trash in the road I hope it isn’t an IED. Don’t blow up, don’t blow up, don’t blow up. Okay we are passed it now. So yeah it was a great game on Saturday.”

We are used to the game by now so we just go on with our daily business without sweating the small stuff. If something blows up, as it has, we do what we have to do to get out of the area and continue on with the mission. We can’t stop to go and find who tried to blow us up and we often times have no clue which direction to shoot in if there is even anyone out there to shoot at. Like I said we by no means have a glorifying job. All we are supposed to do is drive our trucks to the designated spot and nothing else.


Just so you know I really exist


Once we make it to our destination we drop our loads and try to rest for a while before we turn around to do it all over again. Such is the life as a truck driver in the army. We perform a necessary job and the war effort wouldn’t move ahead without us but you are not likely to see us in the news or any movies made about us in the near future. We definitely don’t do our job without complaining but we do get the job done, anyway else and it simply wouldn’t be the army. We get to travel around Iraq and that is good enough for us. At least we aren’t stuck on our bases wondering what is going on outside the wire. We get to go out there and “experience” it first hand and feel like we have accomplished something each day when we have a successful convoy. We are the driving force behind much of what goes on in Iraq. We supply fuel, food, ammo, supplies, vehicles etc each time we hit the road and without us the planes wouldn’t fly, the Strykers wouldn’t drive, and the “cool guys” wouldn’t have vehicles do infiltrate with. C’est la vie.