For women in Iraq, the terrorist could be the guy working beside you

In the desert near Balad, the heat rises to a brutal 137 degrees. It blisters your lips, etches cracks in your skin. This is biblical heat, the kind that can drive a man insane.

At Camp Anaconda, one of the biggest American bases in Iraq, there was only one place to get water. The Tigris River ran just outside the wire perimeter. Every day, huge rigs — the kind that look like they should be toting oil — lined up at the depot to be filled with the filtered water needed for showers, cooking, flushing toilets, sustaining life.

One night in 2004, truck driver Mary Beth Kineston was working second shift. She's a tiny woman. With her freckles and bulky protective vest, she looked like a child as she sat behind the wheel in her cab. But she had driven trucks for three decades before signing up with Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), a Houston contractor that supplies over 30,000 civilian workers to the war effort in Iraq.

Sometime after 9 p.m., Kineston was filling up at the depot, sitting on top of her rig so she could tell the attendant when the tank was full. She was climbing down the ladder at the back of the truck, when a driver she had never met before approached her.

Ahmet Yanik was only an inch or two taller than her, but muscled like a wrestling coach, with a trace of a mustache. He worked for KBR's Turkish subcontractor, Kulak Company.

She yelled when he grabbed her leg and moved his hands upward. But the other drivers were sealed away in their air-conditioned cabs, unable to hear. Kineston scrambled down and beelined toward her cab. Yanik followed.

His hands were all over her now, trying to undo her pants. "No, no, no," she kept saying. She shouted that she was married, pointed to her wedding ring. It didn't matter. He slipped his hand inside her pants.

She kicked, she struggled, she fought so hard that she bruised her arm where it hit the steering wheel. Years later, she still wonders if she could have done more.

When Yanik finished what he came to do, Kineston managed to push him out and slam the door. She didn't even bother to put her pants back on properly. She just started driving.

It took her 20 minutes to reach KBR headquarters. There, shaking and crying, she spent three hours explaining to supervisors what had happened. For a traditional Catholic mother of three, this wasn't easy. "I was so embarrassed," she remembers. "I had to work with these guys every day."

Afterward, no one even offered to walk her home. Two days later, Yanik was back on the job.

Camp Anaconda is 68 miles north of Baghdad, in the Sunni Triangle, long known as the most dangerous place in Iraq. For a while, insurgents bombed the dining hall every day at 6 p.m. Once, Kineston's friend, a sniper for the Army, invited her to watch as he shot two men who were planting explosives in the fields outside the base. "Any given moment, they could've dropped a bomb, and I woulda been dead," she says.

She and her husband, John, were there for one reason: cash. Back home in Olmsted Falls, she'd heard radio ads promising $100,000 salaries for signing up with KBR, then a subsidiary of Halliburton. This was not long after the 2003 invasion, before "Mission accomplished" became a punch line. With Halliburton's former CEO Dick Cheney in the White House, KBR was winning multibillion-dollar government contracts in Iraq — more than any other private firm.

At the time, Kineston was hauling loads of clothes and produce cross-country. With a house to pay off and kids' weddings to fund, doubling her salary sounded like a good idea.

When she arrived in Iraq in January 2004, she was assigned to haul loads to other bases — first ice, then fuel. It was a sweet gig, until her convoy was attacked. Car bombs hit the front and back of the convoy, trapping the trucks between. The drivers, none of whom carried guns, ran around in panic until Black Hawks flew in and started shooting. They lost nine drivers that day, Kineston says.

Afterward, she and the other women were confined to the base for their safety. Kineston was assigned to the public works department, hauling water.

Her crew consisted of 45 men and two women. These men were different from the drivers Kineston had known for decades. Her supervisor would expose himself in front of her to pee, she says. Another co-worker left a sketch of a naked, spread-eagled woman in her truck. Meanwhile, she was constantly enduring comments like "You need to go to admin, because the guy's got a hard-on waiting for you."

This wasn't how drivers in America treated 50-year-old Catholic mothers. And with her husband away on convoys most of the time, he could do little to protect her.