An article in the Chicago Tribune reveals that more than 770 civilian contractors working for American companies have died in Iraq since the start of the war. The figures are loosely tracked by an obscure office inside the U.S. Department of Labor and include contractors hired as truck drivers, cooks, laundry workers security guards among others. The U.S. war dead increases by 25% when adding these deaths to the more widely publicized military toll.
Many family members of those killed have been complaining the contracting firms attempt to sweep the deaths of their loved ones under the carpet. Hollie Hulett (featured in Iraq for Sale), 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 stated:
"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."
The article continues with the story of Walter Zbryski, a KBR truck driver killed in Iraq:
...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 ... [KBR] 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.
Zbryski's death -- and many others like him -- are not counted in the official tally of American military personnel killed in Iraq. More on the story.
1 comment:
No they don't want people to know all the deaths, of soldiers who died from war injuries once they return, contractors & the like, or even all the civilians and insurgents, it would blow people away to reality, and there are too many people not living in the real world that's how this WH continues to do what it has been doing.
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