Fathers, Sons And Brothers: The Mission

Perhaps the worst place for a soldier in Iraq is Anbar province, the heart of the anti-American insurgency. And the most dangerous place there is on the road where the bombs are. It was the fate of the Iowa National Guard to be ordered to run convoy protection on the highways of Anbar province.

Two years ago, 60 Minutes and correspondent Scott Pelley began following the soldiers and the families of the 1st of the 133 Infantry, Iowa National Guard. On the road ahead of the Iowa guardsmen lay casualties, both in Iraq and at home.

There's a Subway sandwich shop and a coffee shop. The more the Army tries to make Al Asad like home, the stranger it seems: there's an armed guard posted outside the sandwich shop.

The guardsmen drew one of the most critical missions in the war: escorting the convoys that supply about 150,000 American troops. Everything is trucked in-millions of gallons of fuel, thousands of tons of supplies, from food to ammunition. The convoys are America's lifeline.

Scott Nisley is the guardsman who walked his daughter down the aisle. He's unique in the battalion. Nisely spent a career in the Marine Corps and retired as a major. But he missed the military and took the only job the Guard had to offer and sacrificed nine levels of rank. Now he's a staff sergeant, leading a patrol that scouts for the enemy ahead of the convoy.

Adam Wendling, who was so eager to get to Iraq, strapped a 60 Minutes camera on his helmet. On his very first convoy, the camera was off when Adam was hit by a roadside bomb. Seconds later, he turned the camera on.

"I saw a flash of red in front of me and then just felt like somebody hit me in the chest with a baseball bat, sucked all the wind out of me. And, there's smoke and debris flying everywhere, and it took, took a little bit to get back into sorts," he recalls.

Asked if he told his mother about that, Adam tells Pelley, "No, actually. I didn't. I didn't tell her about it. I didn't tell anyone about it actually."

The convoys are frequently attacked but there's not a lot the men can do about it. It's like waiting to get hit, endless hours of driving interrupted by an instant of terror. Some guys believe in God, some believe in the odds. Either way, they usually get through it.

To understand the experience, 60 Minutes cameraman Ray Bribiesca spent two months riding the roads with the Guard. The missions start before dawn and the routine is always the same.

There's the briefing, the prayer, and the blessing of the lucky ladle. Everybody gets ladled-it's a good luck charm that has been to Afghanistan and that the soldiers brought along to Iraq.

For this run, the 60 Minutes team squeezed into a new kind of truck called an "Armored Security Vehicle." Adam Wendling, the gunner during the mission, sits in a sealed turret, using a scope and joystick to aim his machine gun and grenade launcher.

"Adam, what's the mission? Describe to me what we're doing here," Pelley asks.

"Right now we're escorting KBR trucks," Adam explains.

KBR is an American contractor paid billions of dollars to deliver supplies. The convoy missions can last up to three days, some of them hauling supplies hundreds of miles from the Jordanian border. It's all hostile territory.

Asked what he can see up in the turret, Adam tells Pelley, "Right now I can mostly see desert rolling by. Mostly I just scan out in the desert to look for any potential threats."

Those threats are roadside bombs and suicide truck bombs. "Sometimes there are trucks out there, lurking in the distance and you keep an eye on them to make sure they're not doing anything they should not be doing," Adam explains.

Spotting roadside bombs is tough: imagine looking for suspicious wires at 40 miles an hour.

On this day, wires that were spotted led to a typical roadside bomb-artillery shells lying down with bottles of gasoline on top. A bomb tech wired it up to finish it off.

Who's planting these bombs? It's hard to say. This territory is in control of Sunni insurgents fighting the occupation. But when the bombs explode, there's never anyone around. Once in a while, the soldiers do get lucky. A group of men were stopped at a checkpoint; their car tested positive for explosives.

By August 2006, the guardsmen had been away from Iowa for ten months. They had escorted 20,000 trucks, 45 million gallons of gasoline and driven one million miles.

Sean Rohret, the guy who married Esther on a four-day pass before he shipped out, was driving a Humvee when a bomb went off. His armored Humvee was shattered.

"Don't move any farther, there's pressure plates, do move any farther!" a soldier warned. They're worried about pressure plates in the dirt that might detonate another bomb.

The truck commander and the gunner walked away from the blast. Rohret did not.

"I remember being very, very afraid. I was taken out of the truck, which was painful because of my broken back. I remember I passed out on the helicopter," Rohret remembers. "I had a collapsed lung, tension hemothorax, where my lung cavity filled with blood, ruptured spleen."

60 Minutes found Rohret three weeks later at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. "I have four broken vertebrae which are still broken," he explained.

Even with all those wounds, he's okay and headed back to Iowa. But 60 Minutes wondered whether the trauma had shaken his faith in the mission.

"As an activated national guardsman, I work for the president. I believe that the people that make the decisions and put me into that position have the education and experience to know exactly what they're doing," Rohret says.

In the summer of 2006, the Guard had settled in at the Al Asad base. When they left Iowa they talked about spreading democracy, but it has become more about looking out for each other and getting through the day.

The young guardsmen had figured out how to splice their iPods into the intercom systems so, now, there's road music. Which music depends on whether it's a son or a dad at the wheel.

It turns out, most of the cargo trucks are in lousy shape and stopping the convoy is dangerous. If a truck goes lame, they destroy it so it doesn't fall into the wrong hands. A gasoline tanker was disposed off with an incredibly well-aimed grenade.

When they're off the road, they're usually online. Home has become a show on the Web.

Remember Margo Bodensteiner, who met her husband Jim to conceive a child before he left? That was nine months ago.

"We're going live to Iraq and it's over the Internet we're going to introduce little Irelynn here to her daddy," Margo explains.

"Can you hear me? Everybody looks good. Ok, I'm ready," Jim Bodensteiner says.

"Are you sure?" Margo asks.

"Of course I'm sure," he replies. "Oh my, look at that. Hey babies, what ya doing? Look at that hair, she's beautiful. I just wish I was there to hold her."

A year before, Denver Foote did get to hold his baby, but now Landen is growing up on the other side of the glass. "I don't think he really knows what's going on," Denver says. "She's done really, really good. She sent me numerous videos. Every single day."

"I bought a life-size standup cutout and that's standing in our living room and he'll point to that every night and tell you exactly who that is. And ask him where it is and he'll come right up to it," Denver tells Pelley.

60 Minutes noticed there's a lot of self-editing on the family Web casts. The guardsmen tend to gloss over the danger, and the wives don't talk much about the trouble at home, even after months of separation.

In August 2006, ten months after soldiers left Iowa, 60 Minutes looked in on Shannon Foote, who planned to be a "Supermom." Shannon was living with her in-laws and working at a daycare.

"Like we go to the park or to the mall or out to eat and we see every other little boy has his dad sitting right there. Both their parents. It's just really hard watching a family be a family together," she says.

It's also hard for Brenda Ites, whose husband Mike and son Josh are in Iraq. Before they left, she told 60 Minutes she was happy they were going together. A year later, with her youngest son, Matt, she told Pelley she's fighting depression.

Asked if there have been some dark days, she says, "Oh yes. Darker than I even want to admit. But I also realize those are feelings that are coming with, that may not actually be factual. They may just be what I'm feeling at the time. And I try to dwell on the facts."

"What are your concerns for Brenda with you out here all this time?" Pelley asks Brenda's husband Mike Ites in Iraq.

"Oh, my concerns for her right now, it's her mental health. She fights with it a lot. I don't know if you'd call it inner demon," he says. "Until I get home she's going to be depressed and the longer I'm gone, the deeper the depression goes."

For a full year after they left Iowa, the guardsmen were more lucky than not. But one day in Sep. 2006 the luck ran out for Battalion Commander Ben Corell and his citizen soldiers.

"It was a beautiful fall day. We were in the process of chasing down a suspected insurgent vehicle and the vehicle was trying to outrun the forces we had on the ground," Corell remembers. "I knew coming into this we'd have some long days I'll tell you when the reality sinks in that two people you care about, that you've lost them, it's a heavy load. And my knees got weak."