A year after Iraqi civilians and U.S. soldiers tore down the towering statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad’s Firdous Square, a few dozen American civilians at a U.S. military base in Iraq climbed into a row of camouflage tractor-trailers and awaited instructions. Earlier that morning, the drivers, employees of Houston-based Kellogg Brown & Root Inc. (KBR), had been told that the roads outside Camp Anaconda, about 70 miles north of Baghdad, were labeled Code Red-off limits. That wasn’t a big surprise. Local radio and Armed Forces television had been reporting for days that U.S. military units and civilian contractors were under heavy attack. Weeks earlier, four security guards working for Blackwater USA had been shot, burned, dismembered, and strung from a bridge in Fallujah; that city was now in chaos. Still, here inside “the wire,” as the drivers called the well-guarded camp, civilian truckers counted on KBR for their safety.
Around 10 a.m., the KBR security adviser announced a change in status. The roads were now Code Amber, he said-open for traffic. If the men were concerned about the last-minute change, or worried about driving unarmored military vehicles instead of the white trucks they usually drove to distinguish them as civilians, there was nothing they could do about it: KBR employees must follow the instructions of their convoy commanders.
