CHESTERFIELD, N.H. (AP) – A New Hampshire truck driver still missing in Iraq following an attack on his convoy of tankers took the job for the money and the adventure, his friend said Monday.

William Bradley, 50, of Chesterfield, a fuel truck driver with Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root, left New Hampshire on Feb. 11 and arrived in Kuwait with a team of other Halliburton contractors on March 14, his friend, Bill Cherry, said.

On April 9, insurgents attacked his fuel convoy outside Baghdad. Bradley’s convoy was behind a truck bearing Thomas Hamill, a co-worker who has made headlines since he escaped from his Iraqi captors.

Bradley’s truck reportedly escaped grenade and rifle fire that day, said one of his friends, Suzanne Behringer of Galveston, Texas.

Still, Bradley has been missing for a month – one of a few Halliburton employees still unaccounted for, the military said.

“He had an adventurous type of soul to him,” said Bill Cherry, a fellow Harley Davidson motorcycle rider with Bradley. It was good pay and “I think it was an adventure, too,” he said.

“He was very, very open to people. He would just walk up to people and just start talking, in a fun way.”

Bradley called to say hello the morning the convoy left and “said he was doing OK,” although the compound where they stayed had been hit by mortars, Cherry said.

“I asked, Can’t you get out of there?’ He said he didn’t feel he needed to. He had kind of a cavalier attitude. He said, I’m still alive.”‘

Cherry, who is the sale manager for Harley Davidson Monadnock Motorcycles in Swanzey, said he understood Bradley’s contract was for a year, but that he could leave at any time.

He said he heard about the job and had to pass a psychology test in Texas to get it. “Three days later he was on his way to Iraq,” Cherry said.

“He said goodbye and I gave him a hug,” Cherry said. At that time, “things hadn’t gotten out of hand,” he said.

“We’re all very, very concerned,” Cherry said.

Meanwhile, Bradley’s girlfriend, Wilma Procter, also a truck driver who moved to Chesterfield with him and made cross-country trucking trips with him left word on her cell phone that she probably is on the road. She ends her message with one of hope: “Bill, if this is you, I love you. Please come home.”

Hamill, 44, spoke only to friends and relatives after returning home to Mississippi on a flight from Germany early Saturday. He released a statement through the company Saturday saying he is praying for “my two missing colleagues, the safety of my friends and co-workers in Iraq as well as the families of those who have lost a loved one.”

In a photo Bradley had sent back to Procter, he is standing near a man who resembles Hamill. The photo shows Bradley in a helmet and bulletproof vest at Camp Anaconda, a U.S. base near Balad.

Bradley grew up in Wichita, Kan., and still has family there. Bradley, a former Marine, lived in Galveston and then moved to New Hampshire.

Timothy Bell, of Mobile, Ala., also still is missing. Halliburton reportedly lost more than 30 employees since the war in Iraq began one year ago. The company was headed by Vice President Dick Cheney in the 1990s.

Wendy Hall, a spokeswoman for Houston-based Halliburton Co., said last week that the company has no new details about the missing workers.