Photo by Patrick Michels
Former KBR security contractor Patrick Bedynek
at work at the UT golf clubhouse construction site.

Defense Contracts Make Iraq a "Green Zone” for Texas Companies Big and Small

By Matt Hinton
Patrick Bedynek had been in Iraq once before, as a Calvary scout in Desert Storm in 1991. He’d been out of the Army more than a decade – met a girl, married, had a son, settled down – before he found himself back in Basra in the spring of 2004, no longer a soldier but a security coordinator for engineering and construction goliath KBR, Inc. The money was better, but the desert is the desert. And, he found not much had changed in the way of camaraderie.

“About ninety-nine percent [were former military],” Bedynek guessed of his private colleagues. “It was like a ten-year reunion.”

Bedynek was part of America’s private army in Iraq, one most estimates say matches or exceeds the size of the official one. Just as its contributions to the frontlines have been unmatched, the Lone Star State doubles as the Defense Contractor State. In fact, when the provisional U.S. authority still held formal authority over the country, the joke goes, the walled-off “Green Zone” was basically Odessa dropped in the middle of Baghdad. Texas was home to headquarters of nearly half of the top ten defense contractors last year, according to Washington Technology, a government-industry watchdog group, and to large offices of the other half. Defense revenue for the behemoths, L-3 Communications, EDS Corp. and Fluor Corp. in and around Dallas and KBR, Inc. in Houston, eclipsed $11 billion in 2007. Altogether, State Department expenditures to private security and law enforcement companies quadrupled between 2003 and 2007, according to the New York Times.

With the money comes controversy. For some the economic benefits outweigh any concerns about the growth of the long-feared military-industrial complex. To supporters, private companies provide support for a vital war effort, provide jobs for thousands of Americans and rebuild – or, in some cases, establish – infrastructure to serve war-torn populations. Critics, on the other hand, see endless opportunities for corruption with vast amounts of tax dollars put into the service of private profits. In antiwar circles, KBR and its former parent, Halliburton, are symbols for kickbacks and corruption thanks to their connection to Dick Cheney. Former secretary of defense under President George H.W. Bush from 1989 to 1993, Cheney gave up his job as CEO of Halliburton to serve as George W. Bush’s vice president, and is frequently portrayed as the most vocal supporter of the war in Iraq within the administration. KBR came under fire in 2003 when it was awarded a no-bid contract worth up to $7 billion to put out oil fires in the aftermath of the initial bombing of Baghdad. The magazine Mother Jones reported in its May-June 2008 issue that at least three lawsuits alleging KBR failed to provide adequate security for employees who were killed in Iraq have been thrown out of federal court due to questions over jurisdiction. Still more suits are pending, leading the magazine to opine, “If KBR isn’t subject to American law, then neither is any contractor working alongside American troops.”

And though KBR is headquartered in Virginia, a Texas kid, Paul Slough, was identified by the New York Times last fall as one of the Blackwater security guards accused of killing 24 Iraqi civilians in September. The resulting scandal was only the start of trouble for the company, whose emerging record of alleged violence against civilians led the public and press to further associate the “outsourcing” of the war with feckless politicians, reckless gunslingers and little to no legitimate oversight.

“If we add the number of KBR, DynCorp, Blackwater and Halliburton folks to the troop numbers, we get a much bigger ‘presence’ in Iraq than the public knows,” wrote Geoffrey Warwo, director of the University of North Texas’ Military History Center, summarizing a spate of protest points in an e-mail last week. “This is an insult to citizens and theft from taxpayers,’ argued Warwo. “They are mercenaries, and their influence on Iraqi hearts and minds has been deplorable. They shoot first and ask questions later.”

On the ground, though, the average grunt is more likely to see the job as just that: a job. Incidents like the one that opened a floodgate of criticism and Congressional hearings against Blackwater don’t represent a typical tour, Bedynek says, nor do they reflect a larger “shoot first” mentality. There were no violent encounters during his six-month stay, though it wasn’t for lack of effort on part of insurgents – nighttime mortars were directed at his camp, on occasion – or for lack of opportunity. Often, he said, unskilled Iraqis laid off at the end of a construction job would gather at the work site to complain, sometimes creating a near-riotous situation where mayhem was potentially one misstep away. Thankfully, the crowds were quelled by translators talking rather than bullets flying. The real job is driving: down long, often unfamiliar roads with no markers – “Believe me,” Bedynek says, “after the first two, three, four weeks, it gets really boring. You’re driving twelve or thirteen hours a day, seven days a week” – and the bloodiest incident he saw was a fiery convoy accident on the Kuwaiti border that had nothing to do with insurgents.

In the same way, the numbers bandied about by the headline-grabbing mega-corps probably don’t mean much to contractees until they trickle down to their paychecks. At that point, it’s clear why ex-soldiers who discover their experience is in high demand trade a government boss for a corporate one, and stay on to drive, guard and build.

“One of the youngest kids… was just back from a tour in Afghanistan,” Bedynek said. “He went from a job in the military making $18,000 to making $180,000 a year in a matter of months.” Bedynek is currently living in Austin, working as a superintendent for Harvey Cleary construction.

Because they’re in the same place, facing many of the same dangers, the private army in the war zone shares a culture with their official counterparts, one most of the contractees remember from their own tours. The military instincts are the same, Bedynek said, mostly out of necessity. Almost one in four Americans killed in Iraq is a private contractor, according to the site iCasualties.org, which keeps a daily count of the dead and injured (total American casualties stood at 4,062 as of May 2). The details of their deaths can be especially grisly: mutilations, beheadings, and public displays of corpses. Four members of a Blackwater security detail were ambushed in Fallujah in March 2004, their bodies burned and hung from a bridge above the Euphrates River. Photos of the attack made headlines worldwide and brought on the largest American offensive since the initial siege of Baghdad. (The men’s families are still battling Blackwater in court over the security provided by the company and its foreknowledge of a possible attack in the area, and facing a $10 million countersuit by the company on the grounds that the wrongful death suit is a breach of the guards’ contracts).

In a war zone, to a casual observer, said Specialist Justin Cliburn of the Oklahoma National Guard, it usually looked like the Americans were all part of the same team. Our contractors were as much a part of our squad as I was,” Cliburn wrote in an e-mail. “They carried weapons, thought of us as ‘their guys,’ and represented the U.S. and the U.S. military when they went to police stations throughout Baghdad... It was understood that, if something drastic were to occur, all that would be thrown out the window and they would become regular GIs like us.”

Under less tense conditions, though, solidarity was often less certain. Cliburn is careful to note that the contractors his squad associated with largely relied on the soldiers for their safety. Contractors who ran their own security details, he said, were “much more flippant” toward soldiers and military sovereignty, flying past convoys on highways and occasionally disregarding military orders. Others saw equal work for highly unequal pay.

“The private security firms seemed like they were in a different world than us,” said Summer Spikerman, who was deployed in 2003 as a sergeant in the Army Reserves and is now a member of the Austin chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War. “They had the best of everything while we were driving around in soft-shelled Hummers and living in tents. From my position in Iraq, I can say that there was no real sense of solidarity between soldiers and contractors. I was on a security detail while I was there and my team and I held a bit of animosity towards the private security because they were better equipped and they got paid a lot more and we all did the same job.”

The lingering question is how much longer that job will be viable. Like many critics, Geoffrey Warwo notes that contracting companies “have no incentive to leave, and are lobbying in D.C. for a continuing role.” But others have already begun to point to the next front in the military-industrial complex, one much closer to home for Texans: the U.S.-Mexico border. According to reports by the New York Times and PBS’s Frontline, a $2.5 billion “virtual fence” to be built in Arizona by Boeing could be only the start of a sustained effort to increase technology, security and detention centers. In 2006, KBR was awarded a $385 million contract by the Army Corps of Engineers to build temporary immigrant detention and processing centers in as-yet unspecified locations should the need arise. In March, Frontline reported that Blackwater has begun manufacturing “surveillance blimps” aimed at patrolling the border and recently dropped plans to build an 824-acre training facility near the border in California amid strong community opposition. If the industry’s profits are increasingly tied to defense contracts, the end of the war – whenever it comes – is the end of a cash cow.

In such an environment, the controversy over the role of America’s defense contractors isn’t likely to fade anytime soon. “The contractors are getting fat from this war,” Warwo writes. “That impulse is understandable, but by no means acceptable. The moral/ethical questions raised by contractors are not even weighed.”