CAMP NAVISTAR, Kuwait — The green trucks of the Iraqi Express line up daily along the Iraq-Kuwait border in a pre-dawn ritual for a trip that lasts four days and covers 1,200 miles.
Behind a makeshift steel plate on the door of a cargo truck, Sgt. Cesar Feliciano is nervous. His pregnant wife in Puerto Rico doesn't know he's riding a bomb magnet across Iraq for the first time, or that he'll do it every week this year.
"I don't tell my family about it, going on convoys. I tell them I'm going to be in a safe place, so they don't worry about it," he says. "I hope nothing happens."
But on at least one of five trips, drivers say, something does happen. Eighteen months after insurgents began to line Iraqi roads with bombs, many U.S. military vehicles continue to brave the most perilous roadways without armor.
Starting Tuesday, as fresh troops continue to cross the dusty berm from Kuwait into Iraq in the largest troop rotation in U.S. military history, no American military vehicle can travel outside a protected base without some sort of armor, military officials said last week.
The announcement was the result of a concentrated push to armor trucks after a National Guardsman asked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in December why soldiers were forced to scavenge for makeshift armor to protect themselves on trips into Iraq.
Nevertheless, the effort to further protect American soldiers, much of it undertaken on an ad hoc basis at military bases in Kuwait, is not finished. Even after the order takes effect Tuesday, about a quarter of the 25,300 military vehicles venturing outside bases will have only the makeshift steel plates known to soldiers as "Mad Max" or "hillbilly" armor. About 6,000 unarmored vehicles will be confined to the base camps.
Military leaders acknowledge that the improvised armor is a temporary measure until more factory-made armor kits can be produced. The makeshift armor has saved many lives, mechanics say, and some survivors have put their tales in writing.
Vehicles with the temporary armor will be used in Iraq until June, when the protection is to be upgraded, military officials told the Senate Armed Service Committee last week. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) said a soldier had written recently to complain that enlisted personnel were still scavenging for armor.
"We're still losing people over there on this issue, and it's just perplexing to understand what the reluctance has been in terms of trying to get it right," Kennedy said.
