Monster trucks with a mission: Saving lives

The videos from Iraq arrive every few days in Scott Holloway's e-mail account.

They show vehicles vanishing in a bomb blast, plumes of sand and ash rising from the ground, fire licking at steel.

From his office, Holloway studies the nature of this war, the men and women under attack, and the trucks -- especially the trucks. How to make them fast enough to outrun trouble and strong enough to withstand gunfire, maybe even a roadside bomb.

Holloway once planned to make armor-plated SUVs for celebrities and rap stars. The war in Iraq turned his vague idea into a booming business, sending him to some of the world's most dangerous places, where his $250,000 trucks -- think Abrams tank with the soul of a sports car -- are used by private security firms working alongside the military.

The war has changed the former 3M research scientist, too. With his shaved head and earrings, Holloway, 37, looks the part of an international security expert. He explains it this way: "The industry's full of people with strong personalities." Plus, he adds, "I look cooler."

But Holloway no longer blends in easily in the neighborhood that he and his wife and two sons call home.

"He's transformed," said his wife, Darcey.

His 48th address

First, something to know about Scott Holloway: He lives in a house that he counts as his 48th address. He attended 16 schools before graduation as his mother moved from town to town. He often lived with his grandmother. His father, absent from his life since Holloway was a toddler, might be dead. Holloway's not sure. They last spoke two years ago.

"He didn't come from a super-stable background," Darcey said. "I think that Scott has a greater tolerance of risk than the average person."

Maybe it was his patchwork background, or maybe Holloway was always destined to be his own boss, but his journey to Iraq began the day he walked away from his job at 3M, trading the security of a pension for the thrill of becoming an entrepreneur.

The Holloways met at a night club in Ohio. Scott was still in high school, Darcey a college sophomore. They were married before a year had passed.

Darcey is an analyst for 3M Global Trading, and she provides the health insurance for the family these days. She calls her husband brilliant, but admitted: "I've had to challenge myself to expand so I'm not inhibiting him in what he's wanting out of his life.

"Would I have chosen this route? No, because it's stressful."

The offices of Mojave Laboratories Inc. in Oak Park Heights are a 5-minute drive from Holloway's home in a planned neighborhood on the outskirts of Stillwater. If it's strange to imagine armored trucks in the back parking lots of Mojave, across the street from the high school, know that Holloway is just one of 84 defense contractors in the state, according to the Defense Alliance of Minnesota. The contractors range from people who build things such as brake parts in their private workshops to corporate behemoths such as Honeywell and Alliant Techsystems.

Walk inside the office and you might find Holloway at his desk, a pile of computer parts and other high-tech gear piled nearby. At 3M, he experimented with ceramic fiber technology. At Mojave, he has learned about trade barriers, the import-export business, venture capital and how to FedEx something to Anbar Province, Iraq.

Holloway designs the trucks, figuring out how to turn his concepts into reality. Using a 3-inch-thick window that weighs 180 pounds, for example, also means coming up with a way to make it possible for a driver to roll it down. "I'm the techie guy who likes to put fun stuff in trucks," he said.

The first U.S. Marines to rush into Iraq drove mostly unarmored Humvees, trading the safety of heavy armor for the speed and agility of an unarmored vehicle. It was thought early on that soldiers would need to step out of their vehicles frequently to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqis. It was only months into the war that the military view on armor began to shift.

"They were getting their asses kicked," said Tony Scotti, a military veteran who teaches driving techniques to soldiers and police.

Early improvised solutions were sometimes worse than the original problem, he said. Someone might put a heavy machine gun on the bed of a pickup truck, raising the truck's center of gravity so high that it easily tipped over. The armoring solutions weren't much better. A piece of armor welded onto a truck works only if the welds hold. If a bomb knocks the armor off, the people inside are at risk of dying not only from the bomb blast, but also from the collapse of the armoring system.

Scotti put private security firms in touch with Holloway.

A crew of nine assembles the vehicles in Mojave's workshop. They start with a Ford F-550 chassis, which gets modified in numerous ways to carry more weight. A single truck is about 25 feet long, about as long as some houses are wide. It's a massive thing, with three doors on each side. It weighs 7 tons but can travel as fast as 100 miles per hour.

The gun trucks are popular with security contractors. Holloway has sold close to 20 so far, but he expects orders to double this year. He has ambitions to reach $100 million a year in sales. Holloway wants to gain security clearances for Mojave Labs so that his engineering team can listen in on plans for military operations. He imagines a day when his engineers and builders construct specialized vehicles to fit the needs of each mission. No more watching videos after the fact.

From what Holloway has heard, military officers love the few trucks he has sent over.

"When one of our trucks is embedded in a military convoy, they want to ride in it," he said.

Holloway often travels to places his wife and older son only read about in the news. He's out of town two weeks out of each month. The family now has an established tradition, the daily phone call, relying on the advanced cell phone Scott uses that can locate him almost anywhere in the world.

He narrowly missed a bombing in Amman, Jordan, when attacks were carried out at four hotels frequented by Westerners. He had planned to be in Amman that day, then changed his plans at the last minute.

"In hindsight you're going, 'Man, did we just miss it?' " Darcey said. "'Did we just get lucky? Did we just get blessed?' "

It's not easy telling other people what her husband does because most people assume it's something illegal, like gun-running, she said. If she tells a couple about Scott's work, the man might say, "Cool," and then nothing else. The woman might ask whether Darcey isn't worried about her husband.

The questions remind Darcey of the changes in her family.

"He's gotten body armor, you know," Darcey said. "You don't talk to your friends and say, 'OK, my husband just went and bought his body armor,' and have people be able to relate to that."

Changing persona

Holloway went to renew his driver's license not too long ago. The woman behind the counter did a double take.

He didn't look anything like his picture.

It's true that Holloway looks less like an engineer today than he did a few years ago at 3M. He had hair back then. He wore button-down shirts. He looked like the other dads in Liberty, the Stillwater development where he and Darcey raise their boys, Ethan and Will. Now he shaves his head but leaves a few hairs on his chin, a kind of minimalist soul patch. He has two silver stud earrings.

The changes have appeared one by one to remake Holloway, the corporate research scientist into Holloway, the international security expert.

There's a practical reason for Holloway's changed appearance. No one wants to buy a gun truck from a guy wearing Dockers.

So has the war changed him? Holloway said he has become more himself now that he's free of corporate culture. He couldn't dress this way at 3M. Now, it's no problem.

His feeling about the war is that security is not a political problem, that no matter what someone thinks about what's happening in Iraq, a gun truck may save lives.

He thinks the war will come here, eventually.

"I think it's bound to happen," he says. "It's going to become bigger and bigger and more and more global and in my opinion it's going to become uglier and uglier. What I'm doing is essentially laying the groundwork for a business that will essentially help combat that."

Matt McKinney • 612-673-7329