Don’t hire civilians to do jobs armed forces should do

Here’s something I would like to hear from the mouth of our Commander-in-Chief: “We are not about to send a bunch of civilians six or seven thousand miles away from home to do what our American armed forces can do for themselves.”

In Iraq the single most bitter lesson I learned about the shameful act of the U.S. government hiring unmotivated, lazy civilians to do the jobs of our highly motivated, highly trained armed forces came from a sort of junkyard in the desert near the Euphrates River.

These junkyards are actually bombed-out ammunition supply points for Saddam’s once very-well-equipped army. The one we were in charge of guarding (a seriously undermanned and sometimes futile effort) was called ASP Dulab, about 50 miles downriver from Haditha and a kilometer west of the Euphrates, an area devoid of vegetation with rolling hills covered with hard-pan clay and gravel.

The lesson began a few days into my platoon’s two-week rotation guarding Dulab, when a magnificent-looking South African bomb-proof military vehicle rolled up, packed with a few scruffy old American civilians with training in bomb-disposal (known as EOD — explosive ordnance disposal), and an entourage of "contractors" — some American, many South African and a few from God knows where — carrying an array of carbines and pistols and light machine guns, under the premise of working to destroy the many thousands of artillery warheads, rocket-propelled grenades, ammunition, black powder and other goodies that kept the insurgency in business when the latest supply from Iran was late or whatever. The artillery warheads, particularly the 155-milimeter jobs, provide the key component for improvised explosive devices, and there were a few thousand lying around ASP Dulab, from what I could tell.

These scruffy EOD guys were being paid a quarter-of-a-million dollars a year each to do their jobs, but the problem was they rarely did their jobs! They simply didn’t show up many days, and when they did t was to work for three hours or so and then leave because they were hungry. Every once in a while one of the mercenaries (I mean "contractors") would bring a few of us sandwiches and bags of Doritos from the KBR cafeteria at the big, safe airbase at Al-Asad, but when these guys didn’t want to show, they simply didn’t show. If they were attacked, which I saw happen once, with a small, harmless IED that blew out a tire on the rolling vault in which they shuttled about, they would just take a week off. Ah, the luxury!

Before the EOD civilians showed up, Marine Corps combat engineers worked Marine Corps combat work-weeks (16-hour-plus-days), gathering, stacking and blowing up bad-guy ammunition before the softy civilians showed up to work nine and 12 hours a week. The combat engineers from Seventh Marines could have had Dulab cleaned up probably somewhere near three months at a good brisk clip, but they were needed elsewhere.

While I am not about to question that they were needed where they were sent, it seemed that cleaning up Dulab should have been a priority, particularly given the fact that so many Marines in the unit that replaced us were killed by suicide bombers with trucks packed with 155 mm rounds, which our intelligence told us were coming from Dulab. One platoon at a time was tasked with guarding an explosives junkyard that was six kilometers around its perimeter with no wire, and we were not allowed to put land mines around it, so we were unable to stop the illicit theft of ordnance by the bad guys in the dark of night, no matter how hard we tried.

In February 2005, during the two-week Operation River Blitz, our platoon in Charlie Company, Task Force 1-23 located and subsequently destroyed at least 18 155 mm warheads that had been set up as IEDs in the city of Hit, which our intelligence personnel told us had come mostly from Dulab.

The "contractors," like their counterparts in the EOD field, were also paid around a quarter-of-a-million dollars a year, and there were 10 contractors in ASP Dulab alone, and Dulab itself was only one of many, many ASPs in Iraq, so you get the idea of how many people were running around being paid $20,000 a month to work when they felt like it. I still don’t know who these people were accountable to.

We were accountable to Staff Sgt. Avendano and Lt. McKinley, who in turn were accountable to Major Rodriguez, who in turn was accountable to the battalion commander, and all the way up, but these civilians were basically "on their own program," as they say in the military.

Disclaimer: I was only a grunt, and we were given only the information we needed to accomplish the missions we were assigned, so I don’t have the whole picture. However, I can safely say that American warriors are competing more and more with private "contractors" doing the jobs of combat engineers and common grunts, and their work ethic is vastly different from the work ethic of our Armed Services. I would not normally have a problem with KBR setting up fancy-shmancy cafeterias at all the major bases, except that the grunts at many of the forward operating bases get regular Marine Corps canned chow twice a day if they’re back at base, and if they are afield they eat the packaged Meal, Ready-to-Eat. I think that if it’s good enough for the grunts it ought to be good enough for the air wing. The KBR cafeterias themselves are reminiscent of the Romans, with many serving steak and lobster every Friday evening meal! Imagine: steak, lobster and corn on the cob while just 30 kilometers away we grunts were eating stale and moldy sliced bread with canned lasagna and thanking God we had at least that.

The money that taxpayers dish out for KBR and DynCorp and Blackwater and other war profiteers just kills me, and I am a patriotic red-blooded American who is entitled to express displeasure with these kinds of disgraceful shenanigans. If corporate America has outsourced American labor, that’s because the system is driven by the bottom line and I have nothing to say about that. However, when the federal government outsources grunt work and supply and logistics and the tasks of combat engineers to exorbitantly paid civilians, we all foot the bill and an unhealthy precedent is set.

Ben Christensen served as a Marine rifleman in the al-Anbar Province of Iraq. He can be reached at oltexan76@yahoo.com.