Thrilling Behind the Scenes Look at "Private Trauma" on AAN
October 25, 2009 - 9:26am

Thanks to the good people at the Association of Alternative Weeklies, I had the chance to get grilled have a lively conversation Friday afternoon about my Texas Observer story on former KBR trucker Preston Wheeler.

I'd already been following their "How I Got That Story" live chat series, so it was great to be able to join in with my old editor Jake Bernstein. "Private Trauma" took AAN's 2008 award for feature writing in under-50,000 circulation papers, and you can check out the archived live chat on AAN's site.

Thanks to Julia Goldberg at AAN for making this happen!

With Big Cuts Coming to Defense Contracts, Evidence that the Army Doctors are Being Discouraged from PTSD Diagnoses
April 9, 2009 - 8:00pm

For the first update in a while, I just want to share a few stories worth noting form the last few weeks.

The biggest story I've seen in a while on PTSD is this Salon investigation into evidence that the Army's doctors are being encouraged to find other, less expensive diagnoses for patients with PTSD symptoms. One of the big questions about the long-term effects of the war has been how the Army will cope with the huge rush of soldiers coming back with PTSD. Based on this story, the answer seems to be, in part, that they'll find some other diagnosis. Plenty of parallels to the difficulty contractors have had with their PTSD claims.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates' surprise announcement that he'd push for drastic cuts in defense contracting has a lot to do with big-budget weapons programs and contracts for new fighter jets. But the headlines, like the Washington Post's "Contracting Boom Could Fizzle Out" show that way down deep, this could be more about pushing back against the private interests that have become so well entrenched in U.S. military operations. It's an interesting signal of the new administration's intentions toward private contractors in the war.

Then there's this piece from the good people at the Medill news service in Washington -- a familiar story about the trouble contractors have had with their medical claims, including a name that will be familiar to fans of the show: Art Faust from Houston.

Obama Says "Blank Check" Days are Over, Suggests More Contracts for Small Businesses
March 8, 2009 - 9:06am

President Obama promised major defense contracting reform and a $40 billion savings in a speech Wednesday morning (the Boston Globe's coverage includes his full remarks.)

Here's one especially meaty cut:

We will stop outsourcing services that should be performed by the government, and open up the contracting process to small businesses. We will end unnecessary no-bid and cost-plus contracts that run up a bill that is paid by the American people. And we will strengthen oversight to maximize transparency and accountability. Altogether, these reforms can save the American people up to $40 billion each year.

Since so much of the early fraud in Iraq came from small operations chasing contracts beyond their means, I wonder what these small businesses are going to look like. Are these American businesses with narrow expertise, or small, local operations employing Iraqis?

It'll be interesting to see how well the government can tighten oversight while opening the contracting process to a new set of small companies.

Obama's About to Discover How Completely Stuck with KBR We Are, Chatterjee Writes
February 23, 2009 - 7:32pm

The latest issue of Mother Jones features a piece by Pratap Chatterjee looking at where things stand between KBR and the U.S. military as President Obama begins his watch.

Obama mentioned contracting reform on the campaign trail, but just how he'll change the way private companies support the military in Iraq and Afghanistan is still a big question mark. As Chatterjee writes, KBR is so deeply entrenched in the way we carry out the war, there may not be much Obama can change.

Chatterjee is the managing editor at CorpWatch and his new book, Halliburton's Army, came out earlier this month. I'm still looking forward to reading it. (Something light for an afternoon out on the beach, maybe.) In interviews I've seen on TV, Chatterjee has promised to be just as critical of Obama's leadership as he was of Bush's. He's said it's inevitable Obama will make some kind of mistake, and based on this story in Mother Jones, he doesn't sound anxious to give the president any free passes.
<!--break-->
Dipping back into the historical record, Chatterjee points out that the Department of Defense spread its contracts across hundreds of companies during the Gulf War in 1991, leading to all kinds of headaches and inconsistencies that Dick Cheney, as Defense Secretary, witnessed firsthand. The solution had to be putting all the business in the hands of a just a few companies, which is how things work today.

Chatterjee takes a look at the White House website, which says President Obama wants to increase the number of troops and reform the contracting officer corps, but...:

"Nowhere, however, does that website suggest that the new administration will work toward ending, or even radically cutting back, the use of contractors on the battlefield, or that those 92,000 new soldiers and Marines are going to fill logistics battalions that have been decimated in the last two decades."

The piece also includes a few helpful stats on KBR's presence in Iraq at this point in history:

  • KBR has 40,000 people working in Iraq.
  • There's one KBR worker in Iraq for every three soldiers. (The total number of U.S. soldiers and contractors is about equal.)
  • Base pay for most of KBR's Indian and Filipino workers in Iraq is $300 a week (compared to the $80,000 starting pay for American truckers)
'Afghanistan is the New Iraq', the CWC is the new Truman Committee, and O.K., ProPublica is the new L.A. Times.
February 17, 2009 - 8:37pm

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."
<!--break-->
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.

Foreign Workers Spent Months in Warehouses
December 10, 2008 - 7:02am

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.
<!--break-->
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.

The Winding Road and Mysterious End of Chris Brown
November 6, 2008 - 10:28pm

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.
<!--break-->
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.

Will the Downturn Mean Cutbacks in War Contracting Jobs?
October 23, 2008 - 5:49pm

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.

The trip begins
August 14, 2008 - 12:43pm

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.

Site building update
August 5, 2008 - 8:41pm

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.