Re: Missing in Iraq

Date: May 20, 2004

"Missing Texas trucker's friend still prays for miracle from Iraq

Associated Press

Along the Texas Gulf coast, a prayer is lifted up for a truck driver still missing in Iraq after his convoy was attacked.

Suzanne Behringer, who lived with Bill Bradley for seven years and was with him in the days before he left for Iraq in March, is hoping that a gift she gave the contract employee for a Halliburton subsidiary will help him survive.

"Before he left, I bought him a St. Christopher medal," Behringer said. "He was a Marine, and it had the Marine insignia on the back. I had it blessed by a priest."

The 46-year-old former trauma nurse said her last contact with Bradley was by telephone.

"I called him and told him before he left that I loved him and that I always had loved him," Behringer told the Houston Chronicle in Thursday's editions. "Now, all I can do is wait."

She had kept in close communication with the 50-year-old Bradley after he moved to Chesterfield, N.H. in 2002. He returned to Galveston in February to pursue a job driving trucks for Houston-based Halliburton in Iraq.

Bradley became a fuel truck driver with Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, and left New Hampshire on Feb. 11, arriving in Kuwait with a team of other Halliburton contractors on March 14.

Insurgents attacked his fuel convoy on April 9 outside Baghdad. His convoy was behind a truck carrying Thomas Hamill, a co-worker who later escaped from his Iraqi captors.

At least one other worker, Timothy Bell, of Mobile, Ala., was also missing. Halliburton reportedly lost more than 30 employees since the war in Iraq began. The company was headed by Vice President Dick Cheney in the 1990s.

The videotaped beheading in Iraq of American Nick Berg haunts Behringer.

"If I ever saw that on TV and it was Bill, I'd lose my mind," Behringer said, breaking into tears. "How could anyone be so filled with hate that they'd do something like that?"

A photo of Bradley in his Marine Corps dress uniform is displayed on a table in Behringer's living room. She said he was still a teenager when he got out of boot camp.

Behringer said she met Bradley as she walked along the Strand in Galveston one night in 1995.

"He asked the band if they would play a slow song so he could dance with me," she said.

When the couple separated in 2002, Bradley went to New Hampshire where he lived with another woman.

Behringer said since his disappearance, she has talked on the telephone with Wilma Procter, with whom Bradley lived in Chesterfield, N.H. Bradley's involvement with Procter makes no difference, Behringer said.

She said a Halliburton manager told her Bradley's truck was 14th in the 20-truck convoy.

"The truck before him, the truck after him and Bill's truck were not blown up," she said. "I still believe he is alive."

Information from: Houston Chronicle "