Art Faust

“I figured, I’m retired now. I can afford to go over there.”

Art Faust, 62
Trucker, KBR
Worked in Iraq April 2005-January 2006
Convoy attacked; PTSD

After years of working for ungrateful bosses, repeatedly getting passed over for promotions and waiting for pay raises that never came, Art Faust had had enough.

Faust spent decades hauling groceries for the Kroger food chain. He’d driven in hurricanes and floods, and endured long stretches away from home in far north suburban Houston. He’d seen that union politics was the only way to really get ahead in the job, and he wasn’t interested in playing that game. Figuring he’d spend just a couple more years working before retiring, Faust wanted to make a bold move for once: he’d follow his son to Iraq.

Art Jr. had just enlisted in the Army and shipped off soon after. Faust had never been in the military—he tried to enlist during the Vietnam War, he says, but was turned down for being underweight. Driving a truck for KBR, hauling supplies to the troops, would be his chance to support his country and his son, plus—as he sold the plan to his wife, Georgia—the extra cash would help set them up in retirement.
In his early sixties now, Faust is still a slight man, though his face and belly have filled in with the look of a man who’s spent his life in a sedentary job. His fingers are curled from rheumatoid arthritis that set in years ago—well before one could blame it on old age. It makes Faust’s presence even less imposing, and when friends relate how Faust’s KBR bosses pushed him around, it’s easy to believe.

As soon as he landed in Baghdad, while individual assignments were being worked out, Faust began lobbying for a post near Art Jr. We’ll see what we can do, his bosses told him, repeatedly. “They were jerking him around about his son the entire time he was there,” says a friend who worked with Faust in Iraq, but asked not to be identified because he’s still working for KBR.

Faust was assigned to Camp Anaconda, hours away from his son, and the two met only once there, when Art Jr. took a few days off to visit his father at Anaconda.

Faust was in the tenth spot in the convoy attacked in Ad Duluiyah in September 2005, a few trucks behind Preston Wheeler. In Wheeler’s recording, Faust’s voice comes over the radio briefly after a handful of drivers report where they’ve been hit with rocks—“KBR just took two rocks, left side,” one calls out, following protocol. “It’s raining rocks,” Faust says.

When he recounts the day of the attack, Faust always mentions how the convoy commander laid into “whoever that was” that made the remark about it raining rocks, how it wasn’t the kind of thing drivers should clutter the radio channel with. Just one more layer of company crap, Faust thought, even right there during an attack.

During the worst of it, when drivers at the head of the convoy were being pulled from their trucks and executed, Faust near the back of the convoy, where the Virginia National Guard security detail was fending off shooters. Faust himself was never shot, but the experience scared him more than anything ever had before. He was pretty sure it was only a matter of time before a bullet found him, and that left him deeply shaken.

Faust actually got back behind the wheel of a truck after a few weeks, but by January 2006, he was back at home and discovering that the attack, and much of the rest of his time in Iraq, had left a lingering impact.

Within months of his return, he showed signs of PTSD. Georgia, and Faust’s daughter Melissa agree it was clear early on that he was more distant than he’d been before leaving. He joked around less. Faust spent whole days on the couch watching cable news. Though he’d always been a light sleeper, he was regularly waking up at 2 or 3 a.m. now. The only thing he seemed really interested in talking about was Iraq. In a sense, it’s tough to blame him—dodging bullets in the desert war was a far cry from the quiet suburban life he returned to. But Melissa recalls one point in late 2007 when she just had to cut her father off, the time he started telling an Iraq story—one she’d heard before anyway—while the two danced on her wedding day.

Searching for answers on the Internet, Georgia found stories about post-traumatic stress, and thought the symptoms sounded awfully familiar. “You need to go get help,” Georgia finally told him. Faust spent a long time making phone calls, trying to figure out what sort of psychiatric support he was entitled to. He went to a few appointments, but never thought they did any good. Faust felt patronized, he says, and PTSD never came up.

In the midst of her Internet searches, Georgia says she was surprised how little information was out there for civilian contractors. By far the best resource was a site called americancontractorsiniraq.com, which listed signs of PTSD along with legal tips to help workers get the benefits they were entitled to. The group was having a conference in Tennessee in mid-2006, and Art and Georgia decided to go.

In the group, Art found the support network he knew he’d been missing since his return. He learned about the Defense Base Act, and heard stories from workers who felt their insurance and worker’s compensation claims were being unduly held up in court. He came back with a new group of friends who knew just what he was going through, and he hired Gary Pitts, the Houston lawyer who represented so many injured contractors, to help with his DBA claim.

At Wal-Mart one day, he ran into David Boiles, a trucker he recognized from Camp Anaconda, but who he didn’t realize lived so close to him. Boiles came home from Iraq with back problems after his truck went off a road. Now, doctors were telling him he needed three separate surgeries, but AIG was only agreeing to cover one. Faust told Boiles all he’d learned about the DBA process, and put him in touch with Gary Pitts as well as Jana Crowder, who ran the injured contractors’ Web site.

While Faust worked through his own worker’s comp case with Pitts, he became more and more involved in the informal organization growing around Crowder’s site. He found himself on the phone with injured contractors he’d never met before, talking them down from suicide, or offering whatever legal tips he’d picked up. In October 2007, he hosted a conference for Crowder’s group near his home—a good location since so many KBR workers came from Houston, though many of the 20 former contractors crossed the country to be there.

While Faust thought he’d be going to Iraq to get away from the lousy treatment he felt he’d been getting from his company, KBR, and its insurance carrier AIG, are the companies he’s especially angry at these days. In a parallel sort of irony, after he spent years rebelling against activity in the unions at his old job, he’s found a great sense of purpose now as an organizer of workers who feel KBR and AIG have mistreated them.