What Happened to Matt Maupin?

Monday, Feb. 14, 2005 By MARK THOMPSON
CAPTIVE A video image taken from Al Jazeera television on April 16, 2004 shows a U.S. soldier who identifies himself as Keith Matthew Maupin held captive by insurgents in Iraq
AL JAZEERA / REUTERS / LANDOV
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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 was under a barrage from an estimated 150 insurgents lurking in roadside shacks. Bullets, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars peppered the vehicles. Fuel, pouring from punctured tankers, turned the highway as slick as ice.

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A 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 of Escape in Iraq, he says he knows very little about his captors and nothing of Maupin's fate. Another civilian, Timothy Bell, 45, of Mobile, Ala., remains missing.

Carolyn saw 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 and deli trays--and an extra refrigerator to hold it all. The Marines sent Micah home temporarily from his base in Pensacola, Fla., and agreed not to send him overseas until his brother's case is resolved.

A 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 on the tape that he might be swapped for insurgents held by the Americans. U.S. officials quickly rejected any such deals and pledged to do everything possible to rescue Maupin.