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	Reporter’s Notebook by Amy Scott

"As David Griggs puts it, driving a fuel tanker truck is sort of like having a bomb strapped to your behind.

I guess that’s why people were so wary of a reporter lurking around such flammable material. One terminal operator I met on the trip asked me not to mention his company or even the town of Greensboro -- so great is the fear that terrorists might target oil supplies. Remember, this was during the “Orange Alert,” when Americans were rushing to buy duct tape at the hardware store. I was rarely allowed near “the rack,” where the tankers fill up. And even then, I had to leave what I thought was my harmless minidisk recorder in the cab -- so much as a spark from anything electronic could set the whole place off.

When gas gets this expensive, there’s almost something patriotic about buying it. I heard the same sentiment in North Carolina as I did reporting on the gas crisis in California a few years ago: “We don’t like it, but we’ll pay it.” Somehow, it seems if we keep those wheels on the road, the economy will bounce back; we’ll feel safe again. But in smaller towns like Reedsville, people were actually making changes. I met one woman on disability insurance who said she could rarely afford to drive anywhere at these prices. Another man said he’s thought about selling his gas-hungry Jeep if he has to pay more than $2 a gallon. Still, almost everybody I talked to supported the president’s determination to disarm Iraq. And, many of them believed that campaign was, in part, about oil.

I couldn’t have anticipated how personally this war would affect driver David Griggs. Only days before I rode along with him, he’d received the news that his son would go to the Persian Gulf. And for him, driving an oil truck and delivering this economic lifeblood was not that different from his son’s duty of going to war. “Like the politics of it or not, somebody has got to do that job,” he said. “Just like somebody’s got to do the job that I’m doing.” It was all part of the same fight for freedom and prosperity, even at the very highest cost.

One of the hardest things in a reporter’s job is keeping that mic in someone’s face when the decent thing to do would be to put it down and listen as a human being. But David Griggs was proud of his son, he wanted to talk about it, and he wasn’t ashamed to cry over a war he supported that could take his own son’s life.

As we left the school at the end of the day, the black water tower seemed to loom over us, like a portent of war. That tower was painted black because young men were coming home to this town in body bags, casualties of the “good war.” No one ever bothered to paint it back. Back in the Beltway now, I wonder how the rhetoric of war would change if policymakers had to work every day under that same shadow…

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--Amy Scott