Families, critics fight for disclosure of Iraq contract workers

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 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.

"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. That's because he 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 massive war effort in Iraq.

More than 770 civilian contractors working for U.S. companies have died in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion began on March 20, 2003, according to an obscure office inside the Department of Labor, which loosely tracks the figures.

Now the family members of some of those American workers killed and injured in Iraq are raising their voices. 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.

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.

"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. "When you don't even count [the contractor deaths], you mask the cost in life of this war."

The most common estimate 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.

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.

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. But company officials insist that they provide repeated and explicit warnings about the dangers in Iraq to every job applicant.

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

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.

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.

"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."

Contractor, soldier die

in Green Zone rocket blast

BAGHDAD — Two Americans, a contractor and a soldier, were killed in a rocket attack on the heavy guarded Green Zone on Tuesday, according to the U.S. Embassy and the military.

Five other people were wounded, one contractor who was seriously hurt and three with slight wounds. A second soldier also was wounded in the attack, but the military did not give a condition.

As of Tuesday, at least 3,242 members of the U.S. military have died in the Iraq war.

Insurgents and militia fighters routinely fire rockets and mortars into the Green Zone, but attacks seldom cause casualties or damage because they are poorly aimed and the zone contains much open space.

The last known U.S. death in the Green Zone was in February when an American contractor was killed in a checkpoint shooting in the Green Zone.

— The Associated Press