BALAD AIR BASE, Iraq — Sgt. Austin Williams steers his armored Humvee wildly down the busy Baghdad highway, leaning on the horn, doing 50 if he’s moving at all.

Sgt. 1st Class Joe Litchard stands in the turret, eyes wide behind goggles, swiveling his M249 Squad Automatic Weapon in search of threats. Riding shotgun, Spc. David Wallace sticks his arm far out the window, waving a baton threateningly toward the edge of the road as the Humvee whizzes past traffic.

“Get out of the [expletive] way!” bellows the 19-year-old Wallace, ignoring the tobacco plug in his lower lip. “Get out of the way!”

Behind them trails a parade of 30 semi-trailer trucks and more armored Humvees, racing just as fast and almost as crazily.

Williams, 34, called “John-o,” swerves in front of Iraqi drivers who don’t immediately pull over. Up ahead, a white Toyota pickup with a refrigerator in the bed stays in the left lane, blocking his way.

Never slowing, Williams slams into the truck from behind — boom! — shoving it out of the way.

Turning around, Wallace looks at a passenger behind him and says, “This is where we make our money.”

Welcome to the Iraqi Express, the daily cowboy convoy carrying spare truck parts from Camp Navistar, on the Kuwait-Iraq border, to Logistical Support Area Anaconda, the Army’s central supply depot at Balad Air Base, 50 miles north of Baghdad.

“This is hard, hard dirty work,” said Lt. Col. Jim Sagen, commander of the 106th Transportation Battalion, which oversees all the companies that operate the Iraqi Express. “It’s as tough as any infantry exercise, and it’s dangerous.”

For a crew of truckers from the 1487th Transportation Company of the Ohio National Guard and their fighter escorts from the 518th Gun Truck Company, Halloween starts with a pre-dawn wakeup call and a to-go breakfast of meat-and-cheese biscuits washed down with Coke. They line up their trucks as the sun rises.

As on every trip, they’ll work a six-day cycle: two days to Balad, two days back home, one day to fix trucks, and one day of rest.

The Halloween convoy started 30 minutes late because an earlier convoy drew rifle fire in Safwan, a crossroads town just two miles across the border known chiefly to soldiers for the children begging for food or toys.

It used to be the eight-hour voyage to Camp Scania, a truck-stop camp 58 miles south of Baghdad, that caused little stress because it passed through the peaceful Shiite section of Iraq.

But attacks have spread south in the past three months as the rebellion has widened, truckers said. Now they don’t feel safe anywhere in Iraq.

Along the six-lane highway the Army calls Main Supply Route Tampa, the 6½-mile unpaved section the truckers call “dirty Tampa” causes extra jitters. That rough road boosts the chances of breakdowns and kicks up dust that makes it harder to see enemies.

The first day’s drive passes without incident, with the convoy rolling into Scania midafternoon. That evening, though, the convoy commanders deliver bad news: Instead of their usual pre-dawn departure, they’ll be leaving for Anaconda at 7:30, behind other Baghdad-bound convoys.

That means the Iraqi Express will pass through the treacherous Main Supply Route Sword, a 12-mile stretch of divided highway in a ratty part of Baghdad’s western suburbs, at midmorning. They’ll be driving in heavy traffic, instead of before dawn, making them more vulnerable to unplanned stops — and attacks.

The next morning, frustration starts less than half an hour after leaving Scania as the Express is forced to stop at a Bailey bridge (an Army replacement for one blown up by insurgents) behind a cautious National Guard convoy on its maiden Iraq mission.

“We’ll sit out here all … day,” griped Williams, in the thick drawl of his native North Carolina. “We’ve been mortared out here before.”

The Express nudges its way across the bridge ahead of the slower convoy and then barrels on toward Baghdad. At 11 a.m., it exits onto Sword and soon hits thick traffic. Williams honks, dodges, weaves and smashes while Litchard glares and Wallace hollers.

Iraqi drivers scowl in angry fear. The soldiers don’t care. Guerrillas use cars to block convoys so they can get a better shot.

“If you get a convoy slowed down, you are going to get hit,” Litchard says later. “We just can’t slow down.”

Later, a voice shouts over the radio: “Shots fired! Shots fired!”

The speeding convoy climbs up an exit ramp and back onto Tampa. With the road slickened by rain and oil, Williams struggles to keep control.

Then the radio crackles again.

“Regulator 3 has flipped over!” barks an urgent voice, using the call sign of a gun truck near the rear of the convoy.

Williams grinds to a stop, jumps out, grabbing his rifle, and halts oncoming traffic. Wallace shouts into the radio, calling for a medevac helicopter. Twenty minutes later, it lands on the highway while two Apache attack helicopters hover menacingly nearby.

The overturned Humvee is almost a mile to the rear. The front of the convoy waits tensely for word on casualties.

Today the news is good. The driver, Spc. James Gregory, 20, and two of his passengers, Cpl. Ryan Swenson, 25, and Capt. David Tippett, 49, all are uninjured.

The gunner, Sgt. Steven Lourigan, 26, suffers a broken arm. He’ll rejoin his unit in a day or two, after a short stay at a combat support hospital in Baghdad. He is the 1487th’s first casualty in six months of Iraqi Express trips, Staff Sgt. Dan Miller, commander of the Iraqi Express spare parts convoy, says.

The soldiers swarm around the vehicle and pick up everything (except some bottles of Gatorade, which are handed to some nearby middle-school age Iraqi boys).

Anything left behind must be torched or blown up so the enemy can’t use it. The Humvee is flipped upright and towed away by a “bobtail,” Army-speak for a truck cab that’s not pulling a trailer. Within an hour, the convoy is ready to roll.

A military policeman from the 10th Mountain Division who stopped to help tells some of the soldiers they are lucky. A few hundred meters behind them is a much nastier neighborhood. If the crash had happened there, the convoy almost certainly would have been attacked.

Williams blames the crash on their overburdened vehicles, made top-heavy by the add-on armor and roof gun mounts. He wishes the 518th Gun Truck drove some of the brand-new M1114-model armored Humvees parked at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, waiting for delivery to Iraq.

“I’ll bet you a month’s salary, in an 1114 this wouldn’t have happened,” he says.

After the wild ride through western Baghdad, the rest of the trip to Anaconda is cake. The soldiers leave off their cargo in a truck yard. Tonight, there’ll be showers, hot chow and some rack time.

Sitting on cots in their sleep shed that night, they swap stories, and congratulate each other on getting through alive.

Tomorrow, they’ll rise before dawn and tie down their Kuwait-bound cargo for the perilous journey back to Navistar.

The Iraqi Express will roll again.

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