Ex-supervisor on Kaho'olawe killed in Iraq

By Timothy Hurley
Advertiser Maui County Bureau

Ordnance removal workers on Kaho'olawe are mourning the loss of a former project supervisor who was killed Sunday in Iraq when an explosion hit a convoy.

Roy Buckmaster, 47, worked for the Parsons-UXB job for four years but recently was lured away by the offer of a dangerous but high-paying job as a civilian contractor disposing of unexploded ordnance and munitions for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

"It was a sad day for us," said George DeMetropolis, the project's range control officer. "Roy was a superb guy."

Buckmaster was one of a dozen or so experts on unexploded ordnance who left the Kaho'olawe project recently to earn $200,000 or so a year in Iraq, DeMetropolis said, and now at least three of those people want to come back.

He said Buckmaster dreamed of making what he called "big bucks." He wanted to spend a year in Iraq and then go home to retire in the Philippines, his wife's native country.

"It was a shock," DeMetropolis said of Buckmaster's death. "It really brought people to reality."

"Roy was a fantastic person," said Gordon Valentine, who inspects range scrap for explosives on Kaho'olawe. "We were really sad."

Buckmaster spent 24 years in the Air Force, having enlisted while in high school in Oregon. He retired as a chief master sergeant.

In Iraq, he worked for EOD Technology, a Tennessee-based company that was being supervised by Parsons Inc. for the Army. He was working with captured Iraqi ammunition, destroying 100 tons of ordnance a day.

Buckmaster was killed near Fallujah after his convoy was diverted while returning to a base camp near Baghdad. Buckmaster was sitting in the same vehicle with another former Kaho'olawe worker, Frank Johnson, but Johnson suffered only minor injuries.