I sat down last night with the idea I'd crank out a new set of photos for the flimstrip on the front page of this site -- a couple hours buried in Aperture, and I'd be all set.
That was the plan, anyway. Like packing for a move, though, the portfolio editing process is fraught with chances at sentimental time-wasting, and wading through the shots from my two years in Alaska made for especially slow going.
That photo above is one shot I'd just as soon forget.
As the Commission on Wartime Contracting began its two-year investigation into the various ways contracting might, just maybe, be handled better than it was in the Iraq war's early days, ProPublica's T. Christian Miller writes that Afghanistan clearly looms large as members look to the future.
Other stories have pointed out the increase in contracts in Afghanistan as business draws down in Iraq, but Miller puts it in stark terms: "Afghanistan is the new Iraq – the U.S. is dumping money into the country as the Obama administration prepares to up troops by 30,000 by this spring."
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To hear Miller tell it, there were basic questions of oversight and accountability for how the money's being spent in Afghanistan -- the kind of thing you'd think we'd know to watch out for by now. "While the Inspector General for Iraq presented his hundreds of pages of learned lessons," Miller writes, "his newly appointed counterpart for Afghanistan, the retired Marine Corp Major General Arnold Fields, wasn’t even invited to the hearing."
It's an important reminder that this commission isn't just about clearing up the recent history. Whatever lessons they can come up with, someone needs to actually apply them to the decisions being made right now, and in the near future.
As a side note, Miller is one of just a few reporters who've spent years covering the money and the people caught up in Iraq war contracting. When I met a contractor injured in the war, half the time I'd hear about how Miller had just been in town weeks before, or that I should be watching the L.A. Times for his latest. The guy wrote the book on wasteful contracting in Iraq, and as I met with injured contractors across the country, I had to fight back the feeling I was just chasing his shadow.
The money, policy and oversight questions run so deep, though, I do feel like there's plenty of room for the high-level government coverage as well as the more personal stories of the people who've been hurt by this troubled system. Reporters like Miller and Steve Fainaru of the Washington Post have done amazing work uncovering how the system works. I hope what I'm doing here can draw out the strange ways people get caught up in it.
I've posted photos from the China trip on the site -- more about them here soon.
For now, though, you can check out the China gallery, and a second gallery of photos from Xinjiang.
Four days into the new year, I'd rather not think of how obvious the following resolutions are. I'd prefer to think of them as classics, like this fine looking El Camino parked on the shores of Dallas' White Rock Lake yesterday. (Part of a New Year's idea to bring along my camera, Eli Reed/Kaplan-style, whenever I go out. No, I don't expect that one to last long at all.)
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From the beginning of its design, this site was an experiment in combining platforms for writing and photography, since my goal here is a freelance career doing both. It's not clear yet how successful this setup is, but there's no way to tell until I get more of each actually published on the site.
I was able to get the site built in 2008, and took reporting trips around China, and across the U.S. for my civilian contractors project, but have so far done a lousy job getting those online here.
The goal for 2009, then, is more photography online -- more of last year's work, to begin with, and hopefully a new photo project from here in Dallas. When I do travel (less this year, probably, than in the past, as long as I can hold onto the new day job), I'll be more diligent about photographing and more willing to stop and shoot. I'll edit photos for this site with my own style in mind, and work on developing just what that means (As eloquently put by Tim Gruber, a great Dallas-based photographer I've been glad to meet here: the goal is to rise above the place where "any douche with a camera" can operate.) I think this is also the year I make the move from Nikon to Canon, and move more seriously into video, with a 5D Mark II.
It's tough to get the site design right without plenty of photos up here to work with. In the coming months, with more visual content on here, I want this site to be a constant work in progress, with new features and improved design each week.
I'll post portraits and profiles from my injured civilian contractor project, now that all the Master's degree work is done. My goal is a new profile every week or two, with continued reporting as I see the story develop. Ultimately, I'd like to pull the whole thing together into a book or a series of published pieces—but it may not need to end up in print at all.
So those are the goals for this site in 2009: More of my photos, improved site design, and finished pieces from my contractors series. Lots to do on this, um, bridge to the next decade. Lousy segue, I know. But here's another shot from yesterday at the lake, of an actual bridge.
News broke last week about 1,000 workers from India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka who've spent three months in limbo, stuck in windowless warehouses in Baghdad, because, apparently, the contracts they were brought over to fulfill never materialized.
This piece from McClatchy's Adam Ashton is a detailed look, with photos, of how these folks have been living, and how they ended up there.
It's the largest story I've seen yet about the mistreatment of foreign workers in Iraq, and raises a lot of questions about equal pay, confiscated passports, and middle-men recruiters that have surfaced in past coverage.
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A few days later, Deborah Haynes wrote in the Times of London that her earlier reports had gotten the attention of the International Organization for Migration, and that the workers were getting help. The contractor they'd been brought over with, Najlaa International Catering Services, said they've been "Trying to help them the whole time."
Still, these workers say their passports were confiscated once they came to Iraq -- something common to a lot of the stories about mistreatment or trafficking in third-country national workers.
According to the McClatchy story, KBR officials had even toured the warehouse recently (Najlaa was recruiting for KBR). It's amazing that so many workers were brought so far for jobs that weren't even secured yet.
A footnote to that story also mentions a camp of workers with work problems -- about 50 hopeful workers who'd paid middle men to bring them over for jobs that, it turns out, probably never existed in the first place.
ProPublica, one of the places that's been covering these stories better than anyone else in the U.S., mentioned the warehouses as part of a more general rundown of KBR's latest hits in the news -- also worth a look as more of these stories, each of them a little shocking, continue to break.
There are a number of pretty amazing hooks to the story of Chris Brown, the former all-star San Francisco Giants third-baseman who quit baseball after a few seasons amid a string of dubious injuries, did three tours in Iraq driving a truck for Halliburton and died the day after Christmas 2006, from burns received in a mysterious fire in an abandoned Houston home.
Got all that?
His story, as S.F. Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius points out, really demonstrates how silly it is to think any life can be summed up in a single story. Even boiling his life down to its newsiest elements, there's still much to wade through.
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Nevius' piece also nicely sums up one of the great ironies in his story: as a player, Brown was notoriously injury-prone -- but not in an Aaron Rowand "I ran through five walls before I got out of bed this morning" kind of way. Brown missed games with a "bruised tooth," or once because he said he slept on his eye wrong.
This is the same guy who dodged bullets hauling for Halliburton, and even drove in the notorious 2004 attack in which XXX was kidnapped.
After working three contracts with Halliburton, Brown returned home for good, but the few stories on his later life imply things weren't quite right when he returned; he split with his longtime wife after coming back from the war.
It does sound like someone returning from war, struggling to cope with PTSD. Answers, though, would be hard to come by, after his tragic death in a strange fire in an abandoned house. Houston police haven't been able to determine whether the fire was arson or accidental, and there are questions about why Brown was in the house in the first place.
Like many of the stories I've come across in reporting this contractors project, there are a handful of fascinating threads to unravel, even though it's not clear any of them lead to a clear conclusion.
As I wrap up my thesis on civilian contractors, it's been a minor kind of shock realizing that these stories I've been hearing -- truckers leaving small Texas towns for dangerous jobs in Iraq -- might not, in fact, be a growing trend after all. Could be, this glut of contracting jobs has just been a flash in the pan.
For a while, the buzz was all about the ramp-up taking place in Afghanistan as the U.S. prepared to shrink its operations in Iraq. But with the economy going all to hell in the last month or so, the latest coverage suggests defense spending will be different from here on out.
Chatting up defense contractors at an industry convention, the Washington Post's Dana Hedgpeth suggests that the private sector realizes the well of defense spending may be drying up, and fast.
It's an interesting question -- if we scale back the use of private contractors in war, is the system really broken, after all? Neither presidential candidate has given much clue, so far, as to their attitude toward the use of private contractors. But by the time they reach office, the point could be moot. The shrinking budget could make the decision for them.
I've been on the road five days now, and have gotten to meet with contractors in Las Vegas and Albuquerque so far. The two of them, former prison warden Darrin Hays, 40, and truck mechanic Fred Gaus, 58, have dramatically different stories that, taken together, say a lot about what I'm after on this trip.
More detailed posts on each will follow (once I slow down enough to go back over the interviews and photos), but generally speaking, one is still plagued by a host of injuries four years after a pair of accidents in Iraq. The other, injured just two months ago, is steadily recovering from an IED blast and hopes to return to work in Iraq soon. Needless to say, they have two very different outlooks.
I'll be posting reports from each stop I make, and soon I'll also post work the work from Texas over the last year that led up to this trip.
I'm headed to Houston tomorrow morning, to sit in on a trial to decide how much earning capacity one former contractor has lost due to his injury abroad. It's a process most of the folks I've talked to are still waiting to go through, (another whose trial I was hoping to catch just learned his was pushed back until the new year), without knowing quite what to expect.
The site construction is moving ahead here, with the front page looking something like its finished form and more photography and stories posted. First up, of course, was "The Big Kahuna," my giant burger movie that's apparently a big hit with the Germans.
For the next few weeks, most of my time will be spent reporting for my master's thesis, which is on injured civilian contractors who've returned from work in war zones. It's a story with a lot of interesting angles, and part of the challenge is going to be figuring just how narrowa focus I need.
The plan is to use the blog as a notebook while I gather material, and post updates on my trip as I visit contractors around the country in the next month or so. I'll be cross-posting these entries on my main blog, as well as on a page here for my contractor-specific work.
Welcome to the new patrickmichels.com, redesigned to include my writing and multimedia along with my photojournalism work. This is a Drupal-based site now, so navigating through my work will be simpler and I can keep my blog right here, too. I'll be using Slideshow Pro to handle photo and video display.
This redesign is an ongoing effort, so feel free to leave a comment or drop me a line at patrick[at]patrickmichels.com. Thanks for reading.
