Military Vehicles

Eleven Marines remain hospitalized and are expected to survive after a fatal rollover crash of a military truck at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, authorities said Sunday. One Marine was killed and eight others were treated and released after the 7-ton truck -- part of a six-vehicle convoy on regularly scheduled training -- rolled over an embankment on the base Saturday. The dead Marine was identified Sunday as Cpl. J. Gomez from Southern California. Base spokesman Maj.

In any other city, the sight of an old man standing next to a can on the side of a crowded street would go unnoticed. In Baghdad, it was enough to make U.S. Army Spc. Aurelio Cazares slow down his armored Stryker for a closer look and alert his gunner. The vehicle's gunner fixed his viewfinder on the man and the object and zoomed in, just as a sedan stopped in front of them, blocking the view and adding further suspense to the moment.

Two Marines were killed Wednesday evening and two others were seriously injured when two transport vehicles crashed along southbound Interstate 15 in north San Diego, according to the California Highway Patrol. One of the armored trucks had broken down earlier in the evening and was being towed by the other, said Maurice Luque, spokesman for the San Diego Fire Department. Marines from the broken truck had piled into the working vehicle, which was overloaded, and some were riding on top, he said.

A new high-tech vehicle that destroys roadside bombs has passed a series of U.S. military tests but has not yet been sent into battle, prompting charges that Pentagon bureaucracy is slowing the effort to protect American troops in Iraq. Last April, Army Brig. Gen. Joseph Votel, the commander of a Pentagon task force in charge of finding ways to combat the makeshift bombs known as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, endorsed development of the vehicle, called the Joint IED Neutralizer.

The 21-year-old gunner was standing atop the turret of a Humvee called Frankenstein's Monster when a bomb exploded on the ground beside him, sending a wave of sizzling shrapnel and ball bearings toward his head. Knocked down inside his vehicle by the blast, Spc. Richard Sugai regained consciousness minutes later and realized he was lucky to be alive. His savior: a glass cocoon of 2-inch-thick bulletproof windshields he had welded around the top of his turret three days earlier.

The U.S. military is investigating the possibility that soldiers fired into a crowd of Afghans at the scene of a fatal traffic accident that sparked a day of rioting here this week. "There are indications, as part of our initial investigation, that coalition soldiers did in fact use their weapons in self-defense," Col. Tom Collins, a spokesman for U.S. forces here, said Wednesday at a news conference.

As the radio crackled with a report that nearby soldiers had come under attack, the mood among Georgia National Guard members in their heavily armored truck grew tense. They were entering a stretch of road known as "the Gantlet" for its frequent small-arms fire and roadside bombs. Earlier in the summer, three members of the company were killed in a roadside blast not far away. Staff Sgt. Rodney "Bull" Bettis gave the driver a warning: Don't slow down. Speeding up is a common response to the rising threat from roadside bombs all around Afghanistan, an instinctual response to mortal danger.

FROM THE safety of his stateside home, John Cusack has made a movie to mock people like Blackwater contractors who, at great personal risk, provide a service to their country in time of war ["Cusack Goes to War," by Tina Daunt, May 23]. Since they get paid, he considers them "war profiteers" who "should be sent to prison." How infantile. Yes, people rise to provide needed goods and services in wartime; it doesn't follow that wars are started so such people can make a buck. That paranoid, Vietnam-era delusion aside, does Cusack really think it a crime for people to be paid for wartime labors?

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.

The Pentagon wants to replace the Humvee, which is carrying as much armor as possible on current models but is still getting blown up by increasingly powerful roadside bombs in Iraq. U.S. troops there have begun using 31 larger, heavily armored, 5-ton "gun trucks" to escort troop convoys, a primary Humvee mission. But the military still needs a light utility vehicle that is less vulnerable to makeshift land mines than is the Humvee, Pentagon officials and lawmakers said Thursday.