Went out to the truck over the weekend and followed all of your advice so far:
I decided to start at the source with the batteries. Started checking all the fuses in the battery box and checking that the fuse sockets were clean and conducting to the mounting rungs. traced each connection to its destination at the battery and noted the wires heading into the 'clean power harness'. Inspected the wires heading over to the harness and..... THERE IT WAS! A hole in the wire insulation revealing a totally dusty green interior that no longer contained any copper in that section due to extreme corrosion.
The only reason why the truck was cranking was because a previous on-site mechanic had 'rewired the starter' because we thought the starter wiring was damaged. What he had actually done was wire up a band-aid fix that connected the starter to the switch directly from the battery, bypassing the crank relay etc..
With the clean power wires repaired I was able to pull codes from the ECM via the manual diagnosis button. Here's what I got:
111 [ECM GOOD]//
224 [KAM PWR, KAM CORRUPT]/
615 [PROGRAMMABLE KAM CORRUPT FAULT]/
//
A week or so ago we replaced the cam position sensor thinking that was the problem when we began trying to fix this truck. We were unable to check codes at that time due to the broken wire, but I was just guessing that the cam sensor may have failed because that seems to be pretty common.
I cleared the codes and got no new codes after cranking, just:
111 /// (three blinks at the end from the code-separator indicator)
But it still didn't start because (we think) that same onsite mechanic replaced the fuel filter and didn't fill it with diesel before putting it in because we had none on hand and no tube to syphon some. He said, "you have a bleed pump, you'll be fine". When we tried to bleed it yesterday we were unable to get consistent spurting out of the purge valve. At some point we weren't able to get any more spurting from the purge valve. We're pretty sure the fuel system is not delivering because of this and that's our only problem now. We ran out of time and will try to figure out how to bleed that system as well as put some fuel into the new filter. Maybe we're in the clear.
Any thoughts are very welcomed.
Thanks everyone for the insight and assistance. The diagrams were correct, the VIN lookup you did was accurate. Much appreciated.