Posted on: Sunday, April 18, 2004
High pay lures contract workers to Iraq despite risks
By Allen G. Breed
Associated Press
Laid off after 34 years, Al Cayton found himself at retirement age without the means to support himself in his golden years.
So at 60, he left Pensacola, Fla., to drive trucks in Iraq for the Halliburton Co., lured by the promise of up to $120,000 in cash, tax-free.
"He planned to work until he could draw his Social Security," said his wife of 40 years, Karen.
A roadside bomb put an end to that plan.
Cayton is one of about 30 contract workers who have been killed in Iraq, including an Italian security guard executed on videotape Wednesday. More than 20 workers have been taken captive by militants in recent weeks, and 200 or so have been wounded in the year since war supposedly ended and the rebuilding began.
For many of the contract workers and their families, the job has not been the easy money they had hoped for.
Despite all this, there are plenty of people willing to risk a year in Iraq doing mundane jobs for three and four times what they could get at home.
"I know a lot of people like that," said East Texas electrical engineer Jay Cox, who at 50 is considering doing a tour in Iraq. "They're being forced into a Third World hostility situation just to feed their family — and they're grateful for the opportunity to go."
An estimated 15,000 contract workers are helping to rebuild the war-torn country. In recent weeks, they have increasingly become the targets of insurgents trying to end the U.S. occupation.
Tommy Hamill, 43, of Macon, Miss., was reduced to driving a milk truck after hard times forced him to sell the dairy farm that had been in his family for 30 years. With two children at home and a wife in need of open-heart surgery, Hamill felt he could not pass up an offer from Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root for $80,000 base pay to drive a fuel truck in Iraq for a year.
Hamill was eight months into the job when Iraqi militants attacked his convoy April 9. His kidnappers vowed to kill him on Easter if American troops did not leave the city of Fallujah, but that deadline passed with no word about Hamill's fate.
As for Cayton, he had logged more than 3.6 million accident-free miles in 34 years as a trucker with Consolidated Freightways. That safety record earned the West Virginia native a truck with his name on it and an even greater honor — the job of hauling mangled steel from the World Trade Center to California to be turned into a Sept. 11 memorial.
But none of that earned Cayton an easy retirement. When Consolidated went bankrupt in 2002, his pension was not enough to cover his health insurance. Cayton signed on with KBR last June, quickly rising from driver to convoy commander and safety director with 50 truckers beneath him.
On Feb. 23, the Army veteran was traveling in a truck south of Baghdad when a bomb exploded, killing him. The standard KBR life insurance policy: $25,000 and an additional $25,000 for "accidental death."
Escalating violence
The escalating violence has left contract workers and their families back home torn.
About a year ago, the little trucking company that Bill Hetrick started in Hilliard, Ohio, went under as the economy went south. Hetrick hoped the yearlong hitch hauling ice from Kuwait to Baghdad and beyond for KBR "might help catch us up," said his wife of 18 years, Georganne.
But on Monday night, Georganne Hetrick received a frantic call.
"I'm done," said a rattled Bill Hetrick, who had just emerged from a bomb shelter.
"There's too much going on over here."
The next day, however, the 49-year-old Hetrick called his wife back to say some colleagues had talked him into toughing it out.
His wife did not know what to say.
"I don't like to tell him that he has to come home," said Georganne Hetrick, who is working at her family's restaurant while caring for the couple's 10-year-old son, Jack, and 9-year-old twins, Jessica and John. "But I don't want him to think I don't care what happens to him.
"But I think it's time something's done. They need to make it safer or tell them to come home."
Stacy Clark decided not to wait for things to get safer.
Clark, of Cleveland, Texas,
returned home Monday, barely four months into his contract with KBR. His convoy was ambushed last week, and a friend narrowly escaped after his truck was blown out from under him.
"I seen my life flash in front of my eyes in an instant," said Clark, 36.
Companies won't comment
Hetrick told his wife that up to 100 fellow contractors had decided to leave Iraq. Companies doing business there have refused to say whether they are having trouble retaining workers or recruiting new ones.
But a job fair Thursday in Houston — with a call for experienced electricians, heating and air conditioning mechanics, plumbers, laundry workers, carpenters and food-service workers — was an indication there are plenty of jobs to go around.
"If they called me tomorrow, I'd pack my bag and say, 'I'm on my way,"' said Ed Martinez, 51, of Morrison, Colo., a school bus driver who put in an application with KBR months ago. The Army veteran makes $28,000 a year now but thinks he could retire sooner and more comfortably after a stint in Iraq.
