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DoD repeatedly balked at pleas for MRAPs

Pfc. Aaron Kincaid, 25, had been joking with buddies just before their armored Humvee rolled over the bomb. His wife, Rachel, later learned that the blast blew Kincaid, a father of two from outside Atlanta, through the Humvee’s metal roof.

Army investigators who reviewed the Sept. 23 attack in Iraq wrote in their report that only providence could have saved Kincaid from dying that day: “There was no way short of not going on that route at that time [that] this tragedy could have been diverted.”

A USA Today investigation of the Pentagon’s efforts to protect troops in Iraq suggests otherwise.

Years before the war began, Pentagon officials knew of the effectiveness of another type of vehicle that better shielded troops from bombs like those that have killed Kincaid and the 1,500 other soldiers and Marines.

But military officials repeatedly balked at appeals — from commanders on the battlefield and from the Pentagon’s own staff — to provide the life-saving Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle, or MRAP, for patrols and combat missions, USA Today found.

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Insurgents adapting faster to U.S. defenses

‘We were in a Cougar, so we survived’

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DoD repeatedly balked at pleas for MRAPs

In a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates late last month, two U.S. senators said the delays cost the lives of an estimated “621 to 742 Americans” who would have survived explosions had they been in MRAPs, rather than Humvees. The letter, from Sens. Joseph Biden, D-Del., and Kit Bond, R-Mo., assumed the initial calls for MRAPs came in February 2005, when Marines in Iraq asked for almost 1,200 of the vehicles.

USA Today found that the first appeals for the MRAP came much earlier. As early as December 2003, Pentagon analysts sent detailed information about the superiority of MRAP vehicles to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, e-mails obtained by the newspaper show.

Later pleas came from Iraq, where commanders saw that the approach the Joint Chiefs embraced in the fall of 2003 — adding armor to the sides of Humvees, the standard vehicles in the war zone — did little to protect against blasts beneath their vehicles.

Despite the efforts, the general who chaired the Joint Chiefs until September 2005 says buying MRAPs “was not on the radar screen when I was chairman.” Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, now retired, says top military officials dealt with a number of vehicle issues, including armoring Humvees. MRAPs, however, were “not one of them.” Something related to MRAPs “might have crossed my desk,” Myers says, “but I don’t recall it.”

Why the issue never received more of a hearing at the top remains a mystery, given the chorus of concern. One Pentagon analyst complained in an April 29, 2004, e-mail to colleagues, for instance, that it was “frustrating to see the pictures of burning Humvees while knowing that there are other vehicles out there that would provide more protection.”

The analyst was referring to the MRAP, whose V-shaped hull deflects explosions and puts the crew more than 3 feet off the ground. It was designed to withstand the underbelly bombs that were crippling the lower-riding Humvees and killing their crews.

Pentagon officials, civilians and military alike, had been searching for technologies to guard against improvised explosive devices. The homemade bombs are the No. 1 killer of U.S. forces.

The MRAP was neither new nor unfamiliar to the Pentagon. The technology had been developed in South Africa and what is now Zimbabwe in the 1970s, making it older than Kincaid and most of the other troops killed by homemade bombs.

The Pentagon had tested MRAPs in 2000, purchased less than two dozen and sent some to Iraq. They were used primarily to protect explosive ordnance disposal teams, not to transport troops or to chase Iraqi insurgents.

But even as the Pentagon balked at buying MRAPs for U.S. troops, USA Today found that the military pushed to buy them for a different fighting force: the Iraqi army.

On Dec. 22, 2004 — two weeks after President Bush told families of service members that “we’re doing everything we possibly can to protect your loved ones” — a U.S. Army general solicited ideas for an armored vehicle for the Iraqis. The Army had an “extreme interest” in getting troops better armor, then-Brig. Gen. Roger Nadeau told a subordinate looking at foreign technology in an e-mail obtained by USA Today. In a follow-up message, Nadeau clarified his request: “What I failed to point out in my first message to you folks is that the US Govt is interested not for US use, but for possible use in fielding assets to the Iraqi military forces.”

In response, Lt. Col. Clay Brown, based in Australia, sent information on two types of MRAPs manufactured overseas. “By all accounts, these are some of the best in the world,” he wrote. “If I were fitting out the Iraqi Army, this is where I’d look (wish we had some!)”

The first contract for what would become the Iraqi Light Armored Vehicle, the Badger — made by BAE Systems and virtually identical to the MRAPs sought by U.S. forces then and now — was issued in May 2006. The vehicles began arriving in Iraq 90 days later, according to BAE. As of this spring, about 400 had been paid for and delivered.

The goal: Iraqis ‘stand up’ so U.S. can ‘stand down’

The rush to equip the Iraqis stood in stark contrast to the Pentagon’s efforts to protect U.S. troops.

In February 2005, two months after Nadeau solicited ideas for better armor for the Iraqis and was told MRAPs were the answer, an urgent-need request for MRAPs came from embattled Marines in Anbar province, the heart of the Sunni insurgency. Then-Brig. Gen. Dennis Hejlik, who signed the request, said the Marines “cannot continue to lose ... serious and grave casualties to IEDs ... at current rates when a commercial off-the-shelf capability exists to mitigate” them.

Officials at Marine headquarters in Quantico, Va., shelved the request for 1,169 vehicles. Fifteen months later, a second request for the same vehicles reached the Joint Chiefs of Staff and was approved. Not until February of this year did those vehicles reach Iraq.

The long delay infuriates some members of Congress.

“Every day, our troops are being maimed or killed needlessly because we haven’t fielded this soon enough,” says Rep. Gene Taylor, D-Miss. “The costs are in human lives, in kids who will never have their legs again, people blind, crippled. That’s the real tragedy.”

Not until two months ago did the Pentagon finally champion the MRAP for all U.S. forces. Gates made MRAPs the military’s top acquisition priority. The Pentagon now plans to build the vehicles as quickly as possible until conditions warrant a change, according to a military official who has direct knowledge of the program but is not authorized to speak on the record. Thousands are in the pipeline, at a cost of about $2.4 billion.

Gates said he was influenced by a news story — an April report in USA Today — that revealed the Marine units using the MRAPs in Anbar reported no deaths in about 300 roadside bomb incidents during the past year. His tone was grave. “For every month we delay,” he said, “scores of young Americans are going to die.”

One reason officials put off buying MRAPs in significant quantities is because they never expected the war to last this long. President Bush set the tone on May 1, 2003, six weeks after the U.S. invasion, when he declared onboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended.”

Gen. George Casey, the top commander in Iraq from June 2004 until February of this year, repeatedly said that troop levels in Iraq would be cut just as soon as Iraqi troops took more responsibility for security. In March 2005, he predicted “very substantial reductions” in U.S. troops by early 2006. He said the same thing a year later.

Given the consensus that the war would end soon, the Pentagon had little use for expensive new vehicles such as the MRAP. The MRAPs ordered for the Iraqis were intended to speed the day when, to use Bush’s words, Iraqi forces could “stand up” and the U.S. could “stand down.”

Nadeau, who wrote the e-mail that led to MRAPs for the Iraqis, now says he did so because “the U.S. government knows that eventually we’re going to get out” of Iraq. The United States wants “to help get (the Iraqis) in a position to take care of themselves.”

For U.S. forces, the answer was something short of the MRAP: adding armor to Humvees. Nadeau and others say the choice made sense because Humvees were already in Iraq and the improvements — adding steel to the sides, upgrading the glass windows and replacing the canvas doors — could be made quickly and far more cheaply. Adding armor to a Humvee cost only $14,000; a new Humvee, armored at the factory, cost $191,000; today, a new MRAP costs between $600,000 and $1 million.

The solution to the IED problem in 2003 had to be “immediate,” says retired Vice Adm. Gordon Holder, director for logistics for the Joint Chiefs in mid-2004.

“We had to stop the bleeding,” Holder says, adding that MRAPs seemed impractical for the immediate need. “We should not take four years to field something the kids needed yesterday.”

Would it actually have taken four years to get the MRAPs to Iraq?

That depends upon how much emphasis the Pentagon and Congress placed on speeding production. Force Protection Inc., the small South Carolina company that landed the first significant MRAP contracts, was criticized this month by the Pentagon’s inspector general for failing to deliver its vehicles on time. But bigger defense contractors were available then — and in recent weeks have secured MRAP contracts that generally call for deliveries in as little as four months.

A bigger obstacle: At the time, the MRAP didn’t fit the Pentagon’s long-term vision of how the military should be equipped. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld regarded the war in Iraq “as a means to change” the military, “make it lighter, make it more responsive, make it more agile,” Holder says. MRAPs, heavier and slower than the Humvee, wouldn’t have measured up, he says.

The commander: ‘My No. 1 threat’

By June 2004, the military had lost almost 200 U.S. troops to the homemade bombs. Gen. John Abizaid, then head of U.S. Central Command, told the Joint Chiefs that “IEDs are my No. 1 threat.” He called for a “mini-Manhattan Project” against IEDs, akin to the task force that developed the atomic bomb during World War II.

The Pentagon organized a small task force that, two years later, morphed into a full-fledged agency — the Joint IED Defeat Organization. Its leader, Montgomery Meigs, is a retired four-star general. Its annual budget totals $3 billion. Its mission: to stop IEDs from killing U.S. troops.

The insurgents often managed to stay one step ahead of JIEDDO, however. They changed the kind of explosives they planted and varied the locations of the devices and the way they detonated them.

When the Pentagon added armor to the sides of Humvees to guard against bombs planted along roadsides, the insurgents responded by burying bombs. The bombs could blast through the vulnerable underbelly of the Humvees. The insurgents over the years also moved to larger, more sophisticated bombs, some packed with as much as 100 pounds of explosives.

To Pentagon decision-makers, the Humvee seemed able to handle the threat early in the war — roadside bombs, rather than those buried in the roads. “If anybody could have guessed in 2003 that we would be looking at these kind of [high-powered, buried] IEDs that we’re seeing now in 2007, then we would have been looking at something much longer” term as a solution, Holder says. “But who had the crystal ball back then?

Nadeau, now a major general in charge of the Army’s Test and Evaluation Command in Alexandria, Va., says buried IEDs did not become a serious threat to the armored Humvees until 2006.

That runs counter to the congressional testimony of two top Marines, Gen. William Nyland, assistant Marine Corps commandant, and Maj. Gen. William Catto, head commanding general of Marine Corps Systems Command. In mid-2005, they reported an “evolving” threat to the Marines from underbelly blasts. They said, however, that armored Humvees remained their best defense.

The congressman: MRAP’s ‘simple’ advantage

Just after lunch on June 27, 2004, a group of enlisted men parked a handful of armored vehicles near a cinderblock building at Marine headquarters in Fallujah, Iraq.

A congressional delegation had arrived, and among the dignitaries was Rep. Duncan Hunter, then the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. Hunter wasn’t just a powerful congressman. He was a Vietnam War veteran, and his son, then a 27-year-old Marine lieutenant also named Duncan, was stationed there.

More important to most of the Marines, the California Republican had been instrumental in pushing the Pentagon to get better armor for them. Humvees with cloth doors — canvas, like the crusher hat that Hunter wore that day — had been standard issue when the war began. The fabric worked well to shield the sun; it offered no protection against explosives.

Then, as now, Hunter was impatient with the slow pace of procurement in Iraq. That winter, he had dispatched his staff to steel mills, where they persuaded managers and union leaders to set aside commercial orders to expedite steel needed to armor the Humvees. By summer 2004, the Army had shaved four months off its schedule for installing armor.

In Fallujah, he recognized the Humvees. But he couldn’t identify the two vehicles next to them. One was called a Cougar, the other a Buffalo. Both were MRAPs, made by Force Protection Inc., and both, he was told, were coveted. They were used by explosive disposal teams, but combat units “looked at them and said, ‘We want those,’” Hunter recalls.

Throughout most of Iraq, they still haven’t arrived. Despite requests from the field, Pentagon officials decided to ration the vehicle. In 2003 and 2004, they bought about 55, and only for explosive disposal units. But they chose a different approach for protecting the rest of the troops: adding armor to thousands of Humvees. The choice was problematic. The Humvee’s flat bottom channels an explosion up through the center of the vehicle, toward the occupants.

Memos and e-mails obtained by USA Today show a steady stream of concerns about the decision to armor the Humvee. Most went up the chain of command and withered:

• December 2003: Troubled by the mounting death toll from IEDs, the Joint Chiefs began to explore options for better armor. Detailed information on the Wer’Wolf, an MRAP made in Namibia, was passed to an aide collecting information for the Joint Chiefs.

• March 30, 2004: Gen. Larry Ellis, in charge of U.S. Forces Command in Atlanta, sent a memo to the Army’s Chief of Staff, Gen. Peter Schoomaker. U.S. commanders in Iraq told him that the up-armored Humvee “is not providing the solution the Army hoped to achieve,” Ellis said. He didn’t recommend MRAPs but rather suggested accelerating production of a combat vehicle called the Stryker. In response, the military said new Humvee armor kits would suffice.

• April 28-29, 2004: Duncan Lang, a Pentagon analyst who worked in acquisition and technology, suggested purchasing a version of the MRAP, the Wer’Wolf , put before the Joint Chiefs in December 2003. “A number,” Lang said in an e-mail to colleagues and supervisors, could be sent to Iraq “as quickly as, or even more quickly than, additional armored Humvees.” He called it “frustrating to see the pictures of burning Humvees while knowing that there are other vehicles out there that would provide more protection.”

Although Hunter favored adding armor to Humvees, he now calls the military’s devotion to that approach a costly mistake. “It’s true that they saved more lives by moving first on up-armoring the Humvees,” he says. “The flaw is that they did nothing on MRAPs. The up-armoring of Humvees didn’t have to be an exclusive operation.”

The aide who collected information for the Joint Chiefs, Lt. Col. Steven Ware, now retired, says, “We probably should’ve had the foresight” to start buying MRAPs earlier. But “we just couldn’t get them there fast enough.” Adding armor to the Humvee “was better than nothing,” he says.

The lieutenant colonel: ‘Hope no one gets wasted’

A PowerPoint presentation, dated Aug. 25, 2004, shows wounded troops lying in hospital beds. Most are bandaged. One is bloody. His left eye is barely open, his injured right is covered by a patch. Each was maimed by an IED. Each, save one, was in a Humvee.

Then, another slide: “Numerous vehicles on the market provide far superior ballistic protection” than the Humvee, wrote then-Lt. Col. Jim Hampton, the man who prepared the presentation for the operations staff of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Baghdad.

When he got to Iraq in early 2004, Hampton was tasked with looking at armor options to protect the Corps of Engineers, the agency sent to help rebuild Iraq. For weeks, he studied armor options — many of them were vehicles with V-shaped hulls. His conclusion: The corps should get MRAPs to protect its people — specifically Wer’Wolves. Hampton says he asked for 53 Wer’Wolves. Eventually, the corps got four.

Hampton, opposed to up-armoring the Humvees, warned his superiors, he says. He even e-mailed his wife from Iraq. “Hey Babe,” his e-mail read. “Just a little aggravated with the bureaucracy. ... I sure hope no one gets wasted before the powers-that-be get off their collective fat asses.”

By November, Pentagon analyst Lang had grown discouraged, an e-mail shows. “I have found that you can never put the word out too many times,” he wrote Nov. 17. “I send it on to (the Secretary of Defense’s office), Army and (Marine Corps) contacts I have. ... Some of it is getting to the rapid fielding folks and force protection folks that are looking at Iraq issues.”

Lang closed the message with a variation on the impassioned plea he had made before: “For the life of me, I cannot figure out why we have not taken better advantage of the sources of such vehicles out there,” he wrote. “We should be buying 200, not 2, at a time ... These things work, they save lives and they don’t cost much, if any, more than what we are using now.”

By December 2004, at a town hall meeting with troops in Kuwait, a soldier asked Rumsfeld about the lack of armor on military vehicles. Rumsfeld explained the situation this way: “You go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”

The concerns voiced by troops at the town meeting might have had an impact. Within a week, the Marine Corps Systems Command in Quantico posted its first notice seeking information about the MRAP from potential contractors.

Back in Fallujah, the desire for the Cougar had grown. By February 2005, the Marines were formally asking for more. Field commanders sent their first large-scale request for MRAPs, seeking 1,169 vehicles with specifications that closely mirrored those of the Cougar. They no longer envisioned the vehicle as limited to explosives disposal teams; they wanted MRAPs for combat troops, too.

Then-Maj. Roy McGriff III drafted the request signed by Hejlik. “MRAP vehicles will protect Marines, reduce casualties, increase mobility and enhance mission success,” the request read. “Without MRAP, personnel loss rates are likely to continue at their current rate.”

The Marine major: ‘Unnecessary’ casualties

They convened at the Marine Corps Air Station in Miramar, Calif., on March 29-30, 2005. The occasion: a safety board meeting — a regular gathering to address safety issues across the Corps. In attendance: five three-star generals, four two-stars, seven one-stars — and McGriff.

Addressing the generals, McGriff recommended analyzing every incident involving Marine vehicles the same way investigators probe aircraft crashes. Look at the vehicle for flaws, McGriff recalls telling the officers, and examine the tactics used to defeat it.

Lt. Gen. Wallace Gregson, commander of Marine Corps Forces in the Pacific, and Lt. Gen. James Mattis, leader of the Marines’ Combat Development Command, listened and then conferred for a moment.

The room grew quiet. “Then they said, ‘OK, what do you want to do?’” McGriff remembers.

He quickly recited the very plan that the Pentagon would embrace in 2007, more than two years later: “A phased transition. Continue to armor Humvees. At the same time, as quickly and as expeditiously as possible, purchase as many MRAPs as possible. Phase out Humvees.”

The room again grew silent, McGriff says. Then Mattis finally spoke: “That’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

Mattis’ words failed to translate into action, however. The urgent-need request McGriff drafted went unfulfilled at Marine headquarters in Quantico. A June 10, 2005, status report on the request said the Marine Corps was holding out for a “future vehicle,” the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, more mobile than the MRAP, more protective than the Humvee, due in 2012.

McGriff foresaw some of the turmoil over vehicles in a prophetic 2003 paper for the School for Advanced Warfighting in Quantico.

“Currently, our underprotected vehicles result in casualties that are politically untenable and militarily unnecessary,” his paper read. “Failure to build a MRAP vehicle fleet produces a deteriorating cascade of effects that will substantially increase” risks for the military in Iraq while “rendering it tactically immobile,” he warned. Mines and IEDs will force U.S. troops off the roads, he said, and keep them from aggressively attacking insurgents.

Despite his views then, McGriff, now a lieutenant colonel, says he understands the delays: MRAPs needed to be tested to ensure they could perform in combat. “Nothing happens fast enough when people are fighting and dying,” McGriff says today. “In the end, I think the Marines got the MRAP capability as quickly and safely as possible.”

Others in the Marine Corps disagree. Marine Maj. Franz Gayl, now retired, was science adviser to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq, and saw how Marines were still being killed or maimed in Anbar the fall of 2006. If the Marine Corps had decided MRAPs were a top priority, he says, it could and should have pursued them with the same urgency the Pentagon is using now to get them to Iraq. “The ramp-up of industry capacity was delayed by over one-and-a-half years,” Gayl says, “until it became the dire emergency that it is today.”

Gayl, who works as a civilian for the Marines at the Pentagon, has filed for federal whistleblower protection because he fears retaliation for speaking out.

Secretary Gates: ‘Lives are at stake’

After McGriff addressed the generals, another 15 months passed. Then, the Marines in Iraq reiterated the request for MRAPs. This time, they sent the request directly to the Joint Chiefs. This time — success.

In December 2006, the Joint Chiefs validated requests from Iraq for 4,060 MRAPs — and the formal MRAP program was launched.

By March of this year, Marine Corps Commandant James Conway called the vehicle his “No. 1 unfilled war-fighting requirement.” In part, that’s because he saw it save lives in Anbar province. Brig. Gen. John Allen, deputy commander of coalition forces there, says the Marines tracked attacks on MRAPs since January 2006. The finding: Marines in armored Humvees are twice as likely to be badly wounded in an IED attack as those in MRAPs.

Perhaps more convincing: No Marines have been killed in more than 300 attacks on MRAPs there.

The news drew the attention of Gates, just four months into his job at the Pentagon. He was traveling back from Iraq and read about the MRAP’s success in the Pentagon’s daily news roundup. Weeks later, at a news conference, Gates told reporters that the Pentagon would begin rushing MRAPs to Iraq “as best we can.”

Late last month, top Pentagon officials approved an Army strategy for buying as many as 17,700 MRAPs, allowing a one-for-one swap for its armored Humvees. About 5,200 MRAPs had been approved for the other services.

Now, Pentagon officials decline to say exactly how many MRAPs they need. One official says they’ll build MRAPs as fast as possible, then recalibrate the military’s needs as they assess operations in Iraq, a tacit acknowledgment that they may need fewer MRAPs as U.S. troops are withdrawn.

During a news conference last month, Gates worried that the firms building the MRAP won’t be able to get the vehicles to Iraq fast enough. “I basically said that I didn’t think that was acceptable,” Gates said. “Lives are at stake.”

The young lieutenant: ‘Safest vehicle ever’

As the sun began to bake the Iraqi desert last month, Marine 2nd Lt. George Saenz headed back to his base on the outskirts in Fallujah. He felt oddly joyful.

Saenz had just spent hours leading his platoon through one of the most excruciating battlefield jobs — inching a convoy along the streets of Fallujah, searching for IEDs planted in the asphalt or dirt.

The night before had proved dangerous. Two bombs had blown up underneath Saenz’s convoy, including one beneath his vehicle. As he turned through the gray blast walls protecting Camp Fallujah, he says he couldn’t help but think: “If I had been riding a Humvee, I wouldn’t be here right now.”

Saenz knew why he was alive. His platoon in the 6th Marine Regiment Combat Team had replaced its Humvees with MRAPs. The two blasts produced just one injury — a Marine whose concussion put him on light duty for a week.

“We’re probably in the safest vehicle ever designed for military use,” Saenz says, recalling his platoon’s record: Three months. Eleven bomb attacks. No one dead.

To be sure, the vehicle isn’t perfect. Saenz’s team warns that MRAPs drive like trucks, plodding and heavy. Some models are so bulky they leave blind spots for troops peering over the boxy hood and so noisy you can’t hear someone sitting two feet away.

“They’re just so heavy,” says Sgt. Randall Miller.

And, after substantial testing, the military has concluded that the MRAPs are vulnerable to the explosively formed projectile, the newest and most devastating variation of the IED. More armor has been developed for the MRAPs the Pentagon ordered this spring.

But Miller isn’t complaining.

On his first tour in Iraq in 2004-05, Miller searched for land mines near the Syrian border in a Humvee. His detection technique was simple: “Go real slow, cross your fingers.” He still drives slowly but feels safer knowing the MRAP’s V-shaped hull will deflect a bomb blast. “I’ve seen our guys get hit and walk away,” Miller says. “They’re awesome, awesome vehicles.”

The widow: ‘Should have done it’ sooner

Who is to blame for the delay in securing safer vehicles for the 158,000 U.S. troops now in Iraq?

Jim Hampton, now a colonel, has retired. He questions why Congress and the Pentagon didn’t do more to keep the troops safe. “I have colleagues who say people need to go to jail over this, and in my mind they do,” Hampton says.

Hunter, the California Republican now running for president, blames the Pentagon, which he says “doesn’t move fast enough to meet the needs of the war fighter. ... We have a system in which the war-fighting requirements are requested from the field ... and the acquisition people say, ‘We’ll get to it on our schedule.’”

Other members of Congress blame Rumsfeld.

Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., wonders if Rumsfeld’s forceful personality silenced some of the generals. “Rumsfeld so intimidated the military that I’ve lost confidence in them telling us what they really need” in Iraq, Murtha says. If the Pentagon “had just listened to the guys in the field,” Murtha says, “we’d have [MRAPs] in Iraq right now.”

USA Today could not determine what role, if any, Rumsfeld played in MRAP deliberations. A spokesman for Rumsfeld, now running a foundation in Washington, D.C., said last week the former defense secretary would not comment.

Aaron Kincaid’s widow, Rachel, doesn’t know who should be held accountable. She is haunted by the idea that getting MRAPs to Iraq earlier might have saved her husband’s life. The bomb that blew apart his Humvee a month after he shipped out to Iraq lay along the path he and his unit took, and no one noticed.

Today, she wonders: Was his death really about the path that “he took, or about the path the Pentagon spent years avoiding — the path that, in May, finally led them to the vehicle that might have saved her husband’s life?

“You think there is always something that could’ve been done to prevent it,” Rachel Kincaid says of her husband’s death.

“If that’s been around for that many years,” she says of the MRAP, “why hasn’t it been used? They should’ve done it at the beginning of the war. They should’ve done it three years ago, four years ago.”