THREE YEARS AGO TODAY ...

The American Legion Magazine
April, 2007

SSG Matt Maupin Missing in Iraq

BY MATT GRILLS

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Keith and Carolyn Maupin are tired of waiting. They want their son back.

Three years ago this month, he went missing in Iraq when insurgents ambushed a convoy of fuel trucks guarded by the 724th Transportation Company. A week later, he appeared in a video aired on Al Jazeera, surrounded by masked gunmen who wanted to swap the U.S. soldier for some of their own. Since then, precious little information has surfaced about Staff Sgt. Keith “Matt” Maupin’s whereabouts, other than a dark and grainy videotape purporting to show his execution. But Army officials ruled that inconclusive,

and his status remains “missing/captured.”

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“Doesn’t a mother always know?” she asks. “Sometimes I think I hear him say, ‘I’m OK, Mom. I’m OK.’ I’ll be praying or I’ll be talking to him, and I can feel him. And I wonder, is that my subconscious or am I really hearing this? I must be, because if it were my subconscious it would be every day. But it’s not every day that I hear him. So I hold on to that.”

For Keith, it’s simple. Hard as it is, he must give the Army more time to find its missing man.

“It’s not my job to prove he’s alive,” he says. “It’s their job to prove he’s been killed, and they can’t do that. So we’re going to have faith.”

Please bring him home, LORD!