Special Report

On a Tuesday afternoon, a line of military supply trucks snakes through the Alabama springtime along the right lane of Interstate 20 going west. In between each truck cruise a few broad, low and dusty brown Humvees — looking nothing like their shiny and multicolored suburban cousins. Soldiers behind steering wheels rest elbows on open window frames and look straight ahead through sunglasses.

One more soldier can be found in an elementary school. It is barely noticed among shopping malls at a busy Tuscaloosa intersection that feeds the highway. Down a bright green and purple hallway is 1st Lt. Valerie Wilder’s classroom, with a square carpet in the middle where her first-graders gather to read. “Which is a harder command,” she is asked, “44 soldiers or 20 first-graders?” Ms. Wilder pauses to think, but can’t say.

Wilder returned from Kuwait in October of 2006. For a year she commanded a transportation unit for the Alpha Company of the 31st Forward Support Battalion based in Northport.

Fourteen convoys snaked in and out of Iraq carrying supplies under her command — some as long as 14 days on the road. That is how she knows that all IEDs do not kill. Her first trip was 11 days — to Mosul.

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“Hot as Hades,” Wilder remembers. As it grew hotter, they traveled at night. Her company lost no one, but the battalion lost six soldiers through the year.

“One I trained with in Indiana,” she says. His Humvee — packed with explosives — was crushed between two civilian supply trucks in his own convoy. “I kept asking to see a picture. I couldn’t remember him by name. When I saw him — you know, we are not supposed to break down. He was the cutest, nicest man — just about 20 years old. I just excused myself and went to the tent.”

Wilder is not a woman who easily breaks down. She typed the letter to the soldier’s mother explaining that she was the point of contact. She gathered up his meticulous locker. She washed the clothes in his room — some which still bore his scent. In a box with the letter she packed his things. She had been in Kuwait about a month.

“Listen, listen,” Wilder is saying with strong patience through the cell phone to her son, who is 10. “I’ll be there soon. Don’t call again.” At 4 p.m., he has been calling a straight hour since school let out. After all, his mother is home.

“He’s just taken this whole thing so well.”

And her? She says, “Girl, I left it in Kuwait.”