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<FONT face=Tahoma size=2><B>From:</B> hckiely [mailto:hckiely@comcast.net]
<BR><B>Sent:</B> Monday, March 26, 2007 4:42 PM<BR><B>To:</B>
Undisclosed-Recipient:;<BR><B>Subject:</B> America's Hidden War
Dead<BR></FONT><BR></DIV>
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<P> <A
href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0703260081mar26,1,5984421.story?coll=chi-news-hed"
target=_blank>Go to Original</A></P>
<P> <B>America's Hidden War
Dead</B><BR> By Howard
Witt<BR> The Chicago Tribune</P>
<P> Monday 26 March 2007</P>
<BLOCKQUOTE><I><B>More than 770 civilians working for US firms have lost
their lives supporting the military in Iraq, and some families are now
speaking out.</B></I></BLOCKQUOTE>
<P> 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.</P>
<P> 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.</P>
<P> "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."</P>
<P> 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.</P>
<P> 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.</P>
<P> 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.</P>
<P> "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."</P>
<P> 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.</P>
<P> "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."</P>
<P> 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.</P>
<P> <B>Casualties Understated?</B></P>
<P> 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.</P>
<P> 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.</P>
<P> 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.</P>
<P> 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.</P>
<P> When employees are injured or killed in Iraq,
officials at Halliburton headquarters say they are committed to helping
the workers and their families.</P>
<P> "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."</P>
<P> 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.</P>
<P> "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."</P>
<P> 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.</P>
<P> <B>Nightmares, Flashbacks</B></P>
<P> 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.</P>
<P> "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."</P>
<P> 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.</P>
<P> 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.</P>
<P> "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."</P>
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