Samarra, Iraq - About the time a U.S. soldier asked Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld last December why his unit had to armor its vehicles with scrap metal, a Wisconsin National Guard company already was driving in Iraq in trucks armored with steel scavenged from a junkyard in Kuwait.
Charlie Company soldiers spent almost a week scrounging for any steel they could find and welding it onto trucks and other vehicles that would take them from a base in Kuwait north through Baghdad and finally to Samarra, in the heart of the Sunni Triangle.
Armor is a necessary survival tool as insurgent attacks using remote-controlled roadside bombs take an ever-growing toll on U.S. troops.
Those roadside bombs, known in military parlance as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, have become more powerful and more frequent - the weapon of choice for insurgents in a country awash in munitions. Questions about inadequate armor have prompted criticism of the U.S. military from Congress and the families of troops killed in an IED attacks.
The armor question for Rumsfeld came from a Tennessee National Guard soldier in the same regimental combat team as Charlie Company. The defense secretary answered, in part, that "you go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have."
The soldiers of Charlie Company already had figured it would be up to them to scrounge.
"We complained about it, but that wasn't going to get us anywhere," said Capt. Peter Ashbeck, Charlie Company commander. "So we had guys staying up all night welding armor on the 5-tons (trucks) and Humvees.
"Complaining to the secretary of defense wasn't going to get us armor the next day."
Scavenging isn't something that's taught in basic training, but many National Guard units are known for being resourceful. Charlie Company is no different. Spec. Daniel Wenger, 24, a welder from Fountain City, did most of the welding. Several other guys handled the shopping list.
"You'd send people on missions. They'd say, 'What do you need?' I'd say, 'Rods,' " said Wenger, who had difficulty persuading maintenance officials to let him use welding equipment.
Wenger said his buddies would return holding bouquets of welding rods and ask him if that's what he needed. He smiled and nodded.
Many Charlie Company members later heard about Rumsfeld's comments, "but we'd already done our thing and gotten in country" by then, said Spec. Evan White, 25, of Oconomowoc.
Sgt. David Till, 28, of River Falls and Spec. Jason Spangler, 24, of Holmen were among the chief scroungers, twice making the three-hour drive from their base, Camp Buehring, to a scrap yard at Camp Arifjan - also in Kuwait - to find whatever they could get their hands on.
On Thursday, Till, who plans to buy and restore a '68 Camaro when he returns home, was still in awe of the KBR Retrograde Yard at Camp Arifjan. KBR is a Halliburton Co. subsidiary that provides many services to U.S. troops in the war zone.
"They set us free on the ultimate of junkyards," Till said. "It was the junkyard of junkyards. I want to go back there."
Till and Spangler spent five days pulling out piles of things - quarter-inch thick steel plates, vacuum cleaners, camouflage netting, tool boxes filled with shovels and machetes which they later used to trim the grass around their patrol base in Samarra.
Much of the stuff was sorted out at Camp Arifjan - scrap metal in one area, for example - but Charlie Company soldiers still had to dig through acres of stuff to find what they needed. They met people at Arifjan who would tell them they didn't have what Charlie Company needed, but they should contact somebody in another area of the massive base. That person, in turn, would tell them another person to find, Spangler said.
"If you had a nose, you could find it. They had a football field of camo net," said Spangler, who also saw lots of bomb-damaged Humvees, some with blood still on the seats.
All of the scrap and other equipment had to be checked out by authorities at Camp Arifjan. Charlie Company trucks were weighed upon leaving, and the soldiers needed proper documentation to take the items. But other than that, they said, they were free to take what they could find.
"We found replacement windows, whole doors," Till said. "If you look at some of our trucks, they look like 'Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,' but it does the trick because they're safer."
As soon as the scroungers returned to their base in Kuwait, Wenger began welding the steel plates, which were slid into the door panels of the 5-ton trucks and light mobility tactical vehicles that were used to travel to Samarra.
Wenger and the soldiers who provided the muscle worked 14- to 15-hour days for several days to get their vehicles armored.
Once they arrived at their home in Samarra, Patrol Base Olson, the Humvees used by the previous U.S. military unit here were added to Charlie Company's fleet.
The Humvees are the latest version - Model 1114 - which have armor-reinforced doors and windows and air conditioning.
Most of the Charlie Company soldiers didn't gripe about having to make their vehicles safer, except for those who had to pull the long work shifts, figuring it was what they had to do to get on with their mission.
"We made do," Till said. "That's the beauty of the National Guard. We fix things up and make them better instead of just complaining."