Every morning since Shoshana Johnson went off to war nearly two months ago, her father has woken up and turned on the TV in their home in El Paso, Texas, hunting for cartoons for his granddaughter Janelle, 2. "We go through a kind of ritual. We turn on the TV and that keeps her absolutely quiet while I get her milk," says Claude Johnson, with a sparkle in his eye. "So I got up last Sunday to turn on the TV, searching for cartoons, and I saw on Telemundo that Iraq had prisoners of war." The sparkle disappears.
Johnson, who was born in Panama, understood all too well what the Spanish-language network was saying. One of the POWs was an African-American female, 30 years old, named Shana--Shoshana's nickname. Not quite ready to believe the worst, he called Telemundo, which confirmed that his daughter had been spotted on Iraqi TV. It would be six long hours, however, before officials at Fort Bliss called Johnson and his wife Eunice to confirm what the couple had already surmised from surfing TV channels and the Internet. Their gentle daughter--a single mom who, when she was a child, "wouldn't fuss, wouldn't fight"--had become a prisoner of war.
Specialist Shoshana Johnson, a U.S. Army cook, is one of five soldiers from the 507th Maintenance Company taken captive after their convoy was ambushed while supplying the 3rd Infantry Division in its push toward Baghdad. She is America's first female POW since the Clinton Administration lifted the "risk rule" in 1994--in effect letting women take military positions where they might come under enemy fire or be captured. All told, 19 soldiers from the 507th were wounded, killed or unaccounted for in the first week of war, including two more women listed as missing.
At Fort Bliss, the 507th's home base, shock came first, then silence. No one on the post could tell the families of the dead and missing what had gone wrong, what a cook and a computer specialist, a mechanic and an aspiring elementary school teacher were doing in a convoy so close to battle, so unprotected. The 507th's usual job is to keep diesel tankers rolling, fix generators and service Patriot missile batteries. But it was attacked on March 23, at night, somewhere on or near Highway 1, one of the main north-south roads in Iraq.
Reconstructing the attack has not been easy. Even the survivors are confused. Initial reports from the battlefield said the 507th had taken a wrong turn while passing near the town of Nasiriyah, but U.S. Congressman Silvestre Reyes, whose El Paso district encompasses Fort Bliss, says he was told by a senior officer that the convoy was ambushed on a bridge and had not taken a wrong turn. The lightly armed unit didn't have a chance. It had no combat escort, he says. If that's true, the fault for the convoy's vulnerability would lie not with its leader but with Army commanders. Reyes is reserving judgment while the Army investigates.
For the families, the lack of official information adds to the heartbreak. "Everybody that I spoke to at Fort Bliss said they had no knowledge," says Johnson. "I said, 'I got information off TV and off the Internet. What's up? You people don't know anything?' They said, 'No, we don't know.'"