[PAA-Discuss] FW: America's Hidden War Dead

[Lee Loe]

  _____  

From: hckiely [mailto:hckiely at comcast.net] 
Sent: Monday, March 26, 2007 4:42 PM
To: Undisclosed-Recipient:;
Subject: America's Hidden War Dead


  


    Go to Original
<http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0703260081mar26,1,598442
1.story?coll=chi-news-hed> 

    America's Hidden War Dead
    By Howard Witt
    The Chicago Tribune

    Monday 26 March 2007

More than 770 civilians working for US firms have lost their lives
supporting the military in Iraq, and some families are now speaking out.

    Houston - Like thousands of other Americans who have served in Iraq
since the U.S. intervention began four years ago, Walter Zbryski came home
in a coffin. Only his coffin was not draped in an American flag or
accompanied by a military honor guard.

    Instead, the mangled body of the 56-year-old retired firefighter from
New York City was shipped back to his family in June 2004 in the bloodied
clothes in which he died, with half of his head blown away, according to
Zbryski's brother Richard.

    "I viewed the body," Richard Zbryski said. "What really upset me was
that he was laying there floating in at least 6 inches of his own body
fluids. They didn't even clean him up for us."

    Zbryski's death was not counted among the official tally of more than
3,200 American military personnel who have been killed in Iraq, nor was it
noted by the Defense Department in a news release. That's because Zbryski
was not a soldier-he was a truck driver working in the private army of
hundreds of thousands of contractors hired by the Pentagon to support the
logistical side of the massive American war effort in Iraq.

    More than 770 civilian contractors working for American companies have
died in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion began on March 20, 2003, according
to an obscure office inside the U.S. Department of Labor, which loosely
tracks the figures. If those deaths-of truck drivers and cooks, laundry
workers and security guards-are added to the military toll, the human cost
of the U.S. war effort in Iraq is nearly 25 percent higher.

    Now the family members of some of those American workers killed and
injured in Iraq are raising their voices, complaining that the contributions
of their loved ones have been forgotten by the U.S. public. Some allege that
the workers were put in harm's way without adequate protection. Others
charge that their own financial and psychological hardships have been
ignored by the contracting companies that promised to help them.

    "I think these deaths are glossed over and swept under the carpet," said
Hollie Hulett, whose husband, Stephen, 48, was killed in an ambush in Iraq
on April 9, 2004, while driving a truck for KBR, formerly Kellogg, Brown &
Root, a subsidiary of oil services giant Halliburton. "I don't think
anybody, including the Pentagon and the companies that hire these
contractors, want it to be known that it is that dangerous over there and
they are sending them out into a mess."

    Critics of the war, and some members of Congress, have begun pressing
the Bush administration to disclose more details about the Pentagon's
reliance on private contractors to pursue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Defense Department officials conceded in congressional testimony last year
that they do not keep track of how many contractors are at work in Iraq and
Afghanistan or how many casualties they have suffered.

    "We want to know how many contractors and subcontractors there are, the
total cost of the contracts, the number of dead and wounded contractors,"
said Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who has introduced a bill to require the
Bush administration to collect and publicize such information. "This is
basic information.... When you don't even count [the contractor deaths], you
mask the cost in life of this war."

    The most common estimate of the number of contractors currently working
for U.S. firms in Iraq is 100,000, according to military analysts, but that
figure includes unknown proportions of Americans, Iraqis and citizens of
other countries.

    Casualties Understated?

    The most recent statistic for deaths among those contractors is 770 as
of the end of 2006, according to the Longshore and Harbor Workers'
Compensation Division of the U.S. Labor Department, which computes the
figures from workers' compensation claims filed under the federal Defense
Base Act.

    But those figures, which also count 7,761 contract workers injured in
Iraq, appear to understate the actual number of casualties because they do
not include killings of off-duty workers. Nor do they specify the
nationalities of the dead and wounded.

    What is more clear is that KBR, the Houston-based company that holds the
largest Pentagon services contract, has more than 50,000 employees and
subcontractors at work in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait who are driving fuel
and supply trucks, cooking meals, delivering mail and generally supporting
the U.S. military in the region. So far, according to the company, 99 KBR
employees have been killed on the job, most of them in Iraq.

    The war-zone jobs come with health and other benefits and are
high-paying - contract workers in Iraq can earn $80,000 or more, most of it
tax-free-and KBR has more than 500,000 applications from interested workers.
But company officials insist that they provide repeated and explicit
warnings about the dangers in Iraq to every job applicant during an
extensive orientation program in Houston.

    When employees are injured or killed in Iraq, officials at Halliburton
headquarters say they are committed to helping the workers and their
families.

    "The work KBR employees perform in Iraq is often done under harsh and
difficult conditions," Halliburton spokeswoman Cathy Mann said in a written
reply to questions from the Tribune. "Therefore, KBR recognizes the
importance of helping its employees and their families during difficult
times and is committed to do so in any way possible."

    But former KBR workers and their families, some of whom are suing KBR
and Halliburton over the deaths of their loved ones, say they got little
help.

    "It was like pulling teeth trying to find out from KBR what happened to
Steve," said Hulett, whose husband was among six KBR employees killed when
their convoy was ambushed along a route where fighting between Iraqi
insurgents and U.S. forces had been raging for several days. "Later on, I
asked KBR to continue paying my health insurance - I couldn't afford the
COBRA for it, almost $800 per month. They refused. They wouldn't help."

    Richard Zbryski, whose brother was a KBR truck driver, said company
officials "were going to dump my brother at the airport, and that was the
extent of them taking care of it"-until he said he contacted several New
York newspapers about the story. Soon afterward, Zbryski said, KBR agreed to
cover his brother's funeral costs.

    Nightmares, Flashbacks

    Ray Stannard, a former KBR truck driver who was among 11 contractors
wounded in the same ambush in which Hulett was killed, said he still suffers
nightmares and flashbacks from that harrowing day and wonders if he might be
suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

    "The first day I got back, I thought I was going to get help from KBR,"
said Stannard, 48, who now drives long-haul trucks out of El Paso, Texas. "A
lot of us who survived that thing, we are all having nightmares. But they
never even called us to follow up. When I got ahold of one of the KBR
secretaries higher up, she said they had a lot of people who have gone
through that, you're not anything different than anyone else."

    The former KBR workers and their families said they had encountered
criticism from skeptics who said the dead and injured workers ought to have
known the dangers they were facing and deserved no special sympathy.

    That attitude offends Steven Schooner, a law professor at George
Washington University and a former military officer who is an expert on
Pentagon procurement and the use of private contractors to support U.S.
military operations.

    "People think of the contractors, alive or dead, as profiteers,
adventurers, mercenaries or the like, whereas anyone in uniform who dies is
a patriot and a hero," Schooner said. "That's appalling. These are workers
who are there to enable the U.S. military to do its job. And when the going
got tough, they didn't go home."

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://paa-tx.org/pipermail/discuss_paa-tx.org/attachments/20070519/167fcee8/attachment.htm>