February 27th, 2010 by WhiteRose
The Other Victims of Battlefield Stress; Defense Contractors’ Mental Health Neglected
by T. Christian Miller, ProPublica – February 26, 2010 1:48 am EST
On the one-year anniversary of her husband’s suicide, Barb Dill breaks down at her husband’s tombstone. Wade Dill, a Marine Corps veteran, took a contractor job in Iraq. Three weeks after he returned home for good, he committed suicide (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times / Redding, CA / July 16, 2007).
REDDING, Calif. — Wade Dill does not figure into the toll of war dead. An exterminator, Dill took a job in Iraq for a company contracted to do pest control on military bases. There, he found himself killing disease-carrying flies and rabid dogs, dodging mortars and huddling in bomb shelters.
Dill, a Marine Corps veteran, was a different man when he came back for visits here, his family said: moody, isolated, morose. He screamed at his wife and daughter. His weight dropped. Dark circles haunted his dark brown eyes.
Three weeks after he returned home for good, Dill booked a room in an anonymous three-story motel alongside Interstate 5. There, on July 16, 2006, he shot himself in the head with a 9 mm handgun. He left a suicide note for his wife and a picture for his daughter, then 16. The caption read: “I did exist and I loved you.”
More than three years later, Dill’s loved ones are still reeling, their pain compounded by a drawn-out battle with an insurance company over death benefits from the suicide. Barb Dill, 47, nearly lost the family’s home to foreclosure. “We’re circling the drain,” she said.
While suicide among soldiers has been a focus of Congress and the public, relatively little attention has been paid to the mental health of tens of thousands of civilian contractors returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. When they make the news at all, contractors are usually in the middle of scandal, depicted as cowboys, wastrels or worse.
No agency tracks how many civilian workers have killed themselves after returning from the war zones. A small study in 2007 found that 24 percent of contract employees from DynCorp, a defense contractor, showed signs of depression or post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, after returning home. The figure is roughly equivalent to those found in studies of returning soldiers.
If the pattern holds true on a broad scale, thousands of such workers may be suffering from mental trauma, said Paul Brand, the CEO of Mission Critical Psychological Services, a firm that provides counseling to war zone civilians. More than 200,000 civilians work in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to the most recent figures.
“There are many people falling through the cracks, and there are few mechanisms in place to support these individuals,” said Brand, who conducted the study while working at DynCorp.”There’s a moral obligation that’s being overlooked. Can the government really send people to a war zone and neglect their responsibility to attend to their emotional needs after the fact?”
The survivors of civilians who have committed suicide have found themselves confused, frustrated and alone in their grief.
“If I was in the military, I’d at least have someone to talk to,” said Melissa Finkenbinder, 42, whose husband, Kert, a mechanic, killed himself after returning from Iraq. “Contractors don’t have anything. Their families don’t have anything.”
Some families of civilian contractors who have committed suicide have tried to battle for help through an outdated government system designed to provide health insurance and death benefits to civilian contractors injured or killed on the job.
Under the system, required by a law known as the Defense Base Act, defense firms must purchase workers’ compensation insurance for their employees in war zones. It is highly specialized and expensive insurance, dominated by the troubled giant AIG and a handful of other companies. The cost of it is paid by taxpayers as part of the contract price.
But the law, which is designed to provide coverage for accidental death and injury, blocks payment of death benefits in the case of almost all suicides. Cases linked to mental incapacity are the lone exception, judges have ruled.
A joint investigation last year by ProPublica, ABC News and the Los Angeles Times revealed that contract workers must frequently battle carriers for basic medical coverage. While Congress has promised reforms, there has been no discussion of changing the law when it comes to suicides involving civilian defense workers.
The military, by contrast, allows survivors to receive benefits in cases in which a soldier’s suicide can be linked to depression caused by battlefield stress.
Hundreds of soldiers have committed suicide since the war in Afghanistan began in 2001, according to studies by the Army and the Department of Veterans Affairs. In response, the Defense Department has become more active in trying to prevent suicide than its hired contractors, military experts said.
The military is “aggressively trying to reach people and do intervention beforehand and set up suicide awareness programs,” said Ian de Planque, a benefits expert at the American Legion, the nation’s largest veterans group. “Awareness of it has increased. I don’t know that it’s transferred over to the civilian sector at this point.”
Birgitt Eysselinck has spent years trying to prove that her husband’s death in Iraq was related to stress from his job with a company specializing in the removal of land mines and explosive ordnance. So far, courts have sided with the insurance firm, Chicago-based CNA, in denying Eysselinck’s claim. (CNA declined to comment, citing privacy reasons.)
Eysselinck, 44, said that neither federal judges nor insurance adjusters understand that civilian contractors face many of the same risks in Iraq and Afghanistan that soldiers do. Her husband, Tim Eysselinck, endured mortar attacks and frequently traveled across Iraq’s dangerous highways, she said.
“There is a huge percentage of contractors who are silently suffering,” Eysselinck said. “That obviously puts them and their families at risk. Communities are bearing the brunt of this, especially the families.”
* * *
Wade Dill was working at a local pest control company when he decided to take a job with KBR in Iraq in late 2004. The money was good – almost $11,000 a month for handling extermination and hazardous material disposal, more than double his normal salary.
“He said this was our opportunity,” Barb Dill said. “He could start a college fund for our daughter, pay off the mortgage and have a nice retirement. He told me at his age, 41, he didn’t know if he had enough years left in him to give us what he wanted.”
Wade started that December, working on bases in central and northern Iraq. Violence was ever present. A base near Mosul was shelled frequently. He told Barb that a mortar landed close enough to temporarily deafen him. Once, he called her sobbing.
“My husband never cried, ever,” she said. “Marines don’t cry. A young man, a soldier, had put a pistol to his head and blown his brains out. And Wade had to go in and clean up after they removed the body – he had to clean up brain matter and blood. It really upset him.”
Barb Dill noticed a change in her husband when he returned home for a visit in December 2005. The couple had been high school sweethearts, married for 15 years. They had troubles, but had always worked them out. Now, he seemed moody and often angry, lashing out at her and their daughter, Sara.
“He would say hateful things to me and our daughter – things he had never said before.” Dill said. “This was a man that loved his little girl and his wife. He always called us his girls.”
When Wade returned for another visit in June 2006, he abruptly quit his job and began acting erratically, Dill said. He ripped the wiring out of appliances, smashed mirrors and poured lighter fluid on their furniture.
After a few weeks, Wade took a room at a local motel. On July 15, he asked Barb to come see him. Their conversation spiraled into a confrontation. Frightened and angry, Barb sped off in her car. The next day, the Shasta County coroner’s office called to tell her that Wade’s body had been found in the room.
“He told me that he was sick and needed help,” Dill said. “I told him to get help and then we would talk. The last time I saw him was in my rearview mirror.”
Dill soon found herself in financial difficulty. Her husband had always taken care of the bills. He had spent lavishly with his higher salary, buying two BMWs during trips home. Now, Dill discovered the couple was $300,000 in debt on their mortgage and car loans.
She plunged into depression, struggling to cope with her daughter’s grief and the sense that she had failed her husband in his time of need. She sold the cars and nearly lost her home after falling behind on mortgage payments.
She suffered mostly by herself. Except for a handful of Web sites, no support groups exist for widows of civilian contractors. The federal government offers no counseling for civilians returning from work in war zones.
Dill said that she felt abandoned by everyone: her husband’s employer, the insurance company and especially the federal government, which oversees the Defense Base Act system through the Labor Department.
“Shouldn’t our government be responsible for the companies they hire?” Dill said. “Shouldn’t our government take care of its own people, who are doing jobs our government, ultimately, wanted them to do?”
* * *
Survivors of civilian contractors whose death is related to their work in Iraq have the right to apply for compensation benefits that pay up to $63,000 a year for life.
Dill applied, asserting that her husband’s PTSD made him an exception to the rule against payments in suicide cases. Her claim was denied by AIG, KBR’s insurance provider.
She protested, sending her claim into a dispute resolution system run by the Labor Department. Her case is still grinding its way through the system, which can take years to produce a final result.
Experts hired by the family and the insurance company differed on what led to Wade Dill’s suicide.
A psychiatrist hired by her attorney found that job stress in Iraq was one of the factors that drove Wade to suicide: “The bottom line is that the combination of physical separation and work-related stress resulted in increasingly emotional distance, greater distortion of the relationship, increasing emotional intensity, and a pattern of increasing erratic behaviors that culminated in suicide,” wrote Charles Seaman, an expert in PTSD.
A Labor Department examiner recommended that AIG pay the claim, but the company refused. AIG and KBR declined comment about the case. In court filings, AIG has argued that the Defense Base Act does not cover suicides.
AIG attorneys also have said that Wade Dill’s actions were related to marital and family problems. A psychiatrist hired by AIG testified at a hearing in San Francisco in January that he had performed a “psychological autopsy” on Wade Dill based on interviews with his family and court documents.
The psychiatrist, Andrew D. Whyman, said his evaluation led him to conclude that Dill suffered from depression and that his suicide was unrelated to the violence he witnessed in Iraq.
“Take out the Iraq experience, (the suicide) would have happened,” Whyman testified. “He had a choice. … He could have chosen not to do that.”
Barb Dill insists her husband came back from Iraq a changed man.
“No matter how strained our relationship could get at times, we always pulled out of it with no problem,” Dill said. “Iraq changed all that.”
Now, she said, she is trying to hold her life together. A final decision in her case is not expected for months.
“We’re just slowly sinking,” she said. “It’s hard to be strong.”
Watch a preview of ‘Disposable Army,’ a documentary currently being produced by Mark Crupi, which contains interviews with Barb Dill and T. Christian Miller.
Disposable Army: Read the complete coverage of injured defense contractors and their struggles to receive promised medical care.
Write to T. Christian Miller at T.Christian.Miller@propublica.org.
Posted 5 months ago at 10:01. Add a comment
February 1st, 2010 by WhiteRose
By LINDA A. JOHNSON
Associated Press Writer
Quickly giving morphine to wounded troops cuts in half the chance they will develop post-traumatic stress disorder, according to a provocative study that suggests a new strategy for preventing the psychological fallout of war.
Researchers at the U.S. Naval Health Research Center led the study of about 700 troops injured in Iraq from 2004 through 2006.
“It was surprising how strong the effect of the morphine was,” said study leader Troy Lisa Holbrook, an epidemiologist at the naval center. The findings were published in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine.
Whether the Pentagon will adopt the practice on the battlefield remains to be seen. Dr. Jack Smith, acting deputy assistant secretary of defense for clinical and program policy, said in an e-mail that the “very interesting findings” are “likely to stimulate further research.”
About 53,000 troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have been treated for PTSD, a disorder in which someone who has endured a traumatic event keeps re-experiencing it and the fear it caused. Patients often have trouble with work, relationships, substance abuse and physical ailments.
Researchers have been testing ways to treat it, and the new study looked at whether fast and strong pain relief can help prevent it.
It was unclear whether it was the fast pain treatment or something specific to morphine that made the difference.
But researchers theorize that simply easing pain might reduce the severity of the psychological trauma, or that prompt relief might alter the way the brain remembers the attack or injury – in essence, causing the mind to file away the episode as less traumatic.
Troops in the study initially were treated at military medical facilities in Iraq, mainly for wounds caused by roadside bombs, bullets, grenades or mortar fire. A few dozen had burns or were hurt in crashes or falls. The decision on whether to give morphine was up to the individual doctor, based on the patient’s condition.
Of the 696 troops in the study, 493 – about 70 percent – were given morphine, most within an hour of injury. Two years later, 147 of them had developed PTSD. Of the 203 not given morphine early on, 96 developed PTSD.
That worked out to a 53 percent lower risk of developing PTSD for those treated early with morphine. No other factor, such as the nature or severity of injuries, had much effect on the chances of developing PTSD, Holbrook said.
“These are provocative and thought-provoking findings that should lead scientists to investigate the underlying mechanisms” in future studies, said JoAnn Difede, a PTSD researcher at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center.
Difede and Barbara Rothbaum, who heads the Trauma and Anxiety Recovery Program at Emory University School of Medicine, said that until more research backs up the findings, the study probably won’t lead to many more patients in civilian emergency rooms getting morphine.
“At this point, I don’t see it having a huge impact” for civilians, Rothbaum said.
A second study in the journal found that Army wives were more likely to develop depression or sleep problems the longer, or the more times, their spouses were sent to Iraq or Afghanistan.
That study, by researchers at the University of North Carolina and elsewhere, examined medical records for outpatient care of about 250,000 wives of active-duty soldiers from 2003 through 2006.
Compared with wives whose husbands stayed home, those whose husbands were deployed for up to 11 months were 18 percent more likely to be diagnosed with depression and at least 20 percent more likely to be diagnosed with sleep disorders, anxiety and acute stress.
For wives whose husbands were deployed for more than 11 months, problems were even more common: They were at least 24 percent more likely to be diagnosed with depression or anxiety, and about 40 percent more likely to be diagnosed with acute stress or sleep problems.
The researchers didn’t have data showing whether husbands were deployed or at home when the wives were being treated for mental health problems.
That meant the scientists couldn’t conclude whether those problems were caused by worries about the spouse’s safety and the difficulties of being a single parent, or by stress caused by the returning spouse’s psychological problems or other behavior changes.
“I suspect that if you look at the Reserve and National Guard wives, the toll might be even worse,” because they have less social support than families living in a military community, Rothbaum said.
She said the effects of deployment on children also need to be studied so the military can figure out how to provide more help to families.
—
On the Net: http://www.nejm.org
Posted 5 months, 4 weeks ago at 18:03. Add a comment
January 6th, 2010 by WhiteRose
Once you get past the fact that you have had a sever on the job injury and that you are going to be out of work for a long time, you then have to face dealing with Workman’s Comp. Even if they give you most everything you need medically, the amount of time you spend making sure that you get your weekly checks on time, the prescriptions filled, keep track of your millage and so on can be a bit frustrating.
AIG was the workman’s comp insurer for F & H Trucking when I fell November 19, 2008. Having been a civilian contractor in Iraq for KBR in 2003/2004, I have seen how this company has treated some of the people I know when they were injured overseas. Some they took care of but many have had the fight of their life to be medically taken care of. My driver, Robert Rowe, on the night on August 21, 2004 was shot in the knee and until earlier this year, has been fighting with AIG to get the medical care he has needed. His fight started with being sent home to heal, going back before he was totally healed for fear of loosing his job, to AIG saying he needed to prove to them that he was shot in Iraq. Still walking around with several pieces of shrapnel in his knee, he has never gotten the physical therapy ordered in his settlement and received only a “few thousand dollars”.
To date, my dealings with workman’s comp and AIG/Chartis has been rather positive. Within the first two weeks of being released from the hospital, I was contacted by Arnissa, my workman’s comp adjuster. We talked about the fact that Dr. Waguespack’s office was 2 1/2 hours away from where I lived and I requested to find a hand specialist closer to home. Arnissa informed me that workman’s comp would rather I stay with the doctor that did my surgery in the hospital and that they would pay me millage for traveling back and forth. She said she would get in touch with Angela, a workman’s comp field nurse for the New Orleans area, for my medical care in the state of Louisiana and Debbie, the field nurse for the Mississippi Gulf Coast, for a doctor to fix my broken nose.
Arnissa asked me about my wages with F & H Trucking. The compensation rate for the state of Mississippi is 2/3 the Average Weekly Wage subject to the minimum and maximum in effect on the date of injury. Two-thirds of my income from F & H Trucking was more than the $398.93 maximum a week allowed for injuries in November 2008 and the millage pay was $0.585 per mile. This was a drastic cut in income for me. Arnissa got my mailing address and said she would send me the forms to keep track and get payment for all my millage.
Angela met me at my first appointment with Dr Waguespack two weeks after my release from the hospital. She sat in on my visit with the doctor, took notes, and told me to let her know if I needed anything. Even though it took me about an hour to bathe myself, I could not wash my hair and I needed help at home with personal hygiene at the very least. She said that she would get in touch with Debbie to get a Home Health Care Nurse in to help me a couple times a week.
It took about 2 weeks for my Workman’s Comp checks to get started. For the most part they have come every week, but once in a while they will be a week late. So far AIG/Chartis has not missed a week, but the inconsistency that the checks arrive can be a bit frustrating. For a few months they arrived at the house on Thursdays, then they started arriving on Tuesdays. Then, in the last few months, they have arrived any where from Tuesday to Friday and a couple of times not until the following Monday.
Getting millage pay is a bit complicated. I run the route on Google Maps or Map Quest to get the millage, they do not pay actual miles. I have to keep up with every time I go to the doctor. The form asks for the date, address of my house and the doctor’s office, what was the purpose of the visit and how many miles it was round trip. In the beginning, keeping track of all that was not a big deal other than I could not write, I had to get my Dad to fill out the form. I don’t sent this off every month, I usually wait till the amount of reimbursement is up around $700 to $800. Once I started Occupational Therapy (OT), it was a lot to keep up with. In stead of trying to write out every day that I went to OT, I would get the rehab center to write out a list of dates of visits and attach that to the millage form from AIG/Chartis. Once I mailed that form I am supposed to get the reimbursement check in 30 days. I have yet to get one in that amount of time, it usually takes about 45 days and I have to call Arnissa and get a bit nasty in the message I leave on her voice mail to get it then.
One of the biggest frustrations I have is getting Arnissa to return my phone calls in a timely manner. Usually it will take 2 or 3 voice messages left before she will call be back. Angela is almost as bad. I send her text messages through my cell phone because it is easier to get her to answer them, than it is to get her on the phone, but it can still take her 24 hours or more to answer those. Debbie is real good about answering my calls or text messages in a timely manner.
Getting prescriptions filled in the beginning was a bit of a pain. The doctor would write the prescription, I would take it to the pharmacy and it would be about 3 days before I could pick it up. It took the pharmacy that long to get approval from AIG/Chartis. This was the process for refills as well. A few months back, without any notice, AIG/Chartis switched to PMSI to handle prescriptions. I received a phone call out of the blue telling me who they were and what they were doing. They mailed my refills and 2 weeks before I was due for another refill, I would get an automated phone call asking me if I wanted to reorder the prescription. This was good. Now I no longer had to drive into town, drop off the prescription, wait 3 days to get approval and drive back into town to get my prescriptions refilled, they would be delivered through the mail to the house.
That was great till I messed up on reordering once or had a new prescription. There is no option to delay reordering the medication. You either reorder, or you cancel. A few months agoI still had plenty of the Vicodin and didn’t need to reorder so I choose to cancel the order at that time. The next time I saw Dr Waguespack, she gave me a new prescription for Celebrex along with a few samples of the drug to tide me over till I got my prescription filled. When I got home I called PMSI, punched buttons till I got a real person and told her I had a new prescription, and asked how do I get it filled. I was told to “put it in the mail”! When I told her that I needed the medication sooner than that, she told me to have the doctor cancel the written prescription, and fax them a new one, ordering the Celebrex. I asked if they could call Dr Waguespack’s office and get it, I was told “no, they could not”. This frustrated me and I hung up the phone. I sent Angela a text message telling her the problem with getting the prescription filled. The next day I got a text from her saying she would get a copy of it from Dr Waguespack and send it to PMSI for me. It was two weeks before I got the first bottle of Celebrex. Celeberex is a medication that you have to take for 2 weeks before it has any effect. So the samples Dr Waguespack had given me and that I had used up a week before I received the prescription in the mail, were of no use.
At that last doctor appointment I still had some of the Vicodin and didn’t get a new prescription for it. A month later when I did need to reorder, I jumped through the hoops of the automated system but I could not figure out to reorder them. Again, I sent Angela a text message. When she didn’t text me back within 24 hours, I called Dr Waguespack’s office, told them what I needed and asked if they could help. They told me to get Angela to come get the prescription for me and fax it in. I sent Angela another text message and tried to call her. No answer. I needed the pain medication so I called PMSI again. I went through the automated system again till I got a live person. I explained the situation. She told me I was talking to the wrong department, but that she would help me anyway. She got Dr Waguespack’s phone number from me and said that they would have the medication to me in about 2 weeks. Angela finally sent me a text message back that afternoon saying she would talk to the doctor’s office. I text her back informing her that I had gotten it taken care of myself.
Now, when PMSI’s automated system calls saying it is time to reorder my medication, I just reorder it weather I really need it yet or not. Since I try not to take the Vicodin unless the pain in my wrists get to the point that I just can’t stand it any more, I am building a rather nice stockpile of Vicodin. Since medication will keep for an extended amount of time, I guess this will be less I have to pay for out of my own pocket, later on, when they cut me off.
In my last post about dealing with Workman’s Comp, two weeks after seeing Dr George, I was still waiting for Arnissa to approve the work hardening therapy. Again, I took matters into my own hands and called Arnissa and left a rather tart message. Amazingly, she called me back that same day. She told me that she had just gotten the orders a few days before and had approved them. I thanked her for calling me back so quick this time and called the Rehab Center to set up my first session.
At the date of writing this story, I have been to 7 sessions, a little over 2 weeks , of the ordered 8 weeks and will not be going to any more. The mission of work hardening is to work a patient up from 2 hours of therapy, 3 times a week to 8 hours of therapy each visit. They take a description of what your job physically requires and your therapy is based on that. Even though 3 doctors have told me that with the injuries I sustained to both my wrists I will never pull a flatbed and never drive a truck again, my therapist has to go by that guideline and try to get me to where I can do the job I was doing when I was injured. I have had pain with every therapy session. Some of the pain was muscle pain from a year of non-use, but some was injury pain. My last therapy session was to be for 4 hours. I was sent home after just 1 hour due to the pain in my wrists. The head of the therapy department told me to call my doctor and see what she wanted to do, either not be so aggressive, or stop the therapy. Dr Waguespack’s assistant called me that afternoon and told me that therapy should not hurt like that and I should stop. I have now exhausted every means to get more use out of my wrists.
I have an appointment with Dr Waguespack on January 18, 2010. At that time I will give her the letter from the Rehab Center. It states that I could only lift 10lbs instead of the 20lbs that we thought I could do before and all other limitations they have seen though the work hardening therapy. At that time Dr Waguespack should give me a disability rating with my limitations and we will move to the settlement phase. With this milestone comes a whole other set of problems. AIG/Chartis could cut off my weekly checks, no longer send me medication, and refuse to pay for the doctor visits I will need for future pain management.
The Mississippi Workers’ Compensation Commission has a web site that gives all the information a person could need about the laws and regulations for the state. After spending hours and hours reading the laws governing Workman’s Comp for the state of Mississippi, I have hired a Workman’s Comp Attorney. I know I have had a much easier time dealing with Workman’s Comp and AIG/Chartis than many others have had, but the laws are very hard to decode and understand without some legal knowledge. In the next installment I will try to decode the law a little so you can understand what I am facing in trying to get a settlement out of AIG/Chartis on my Workman’s Comp case. It is very possible that even with the very low limitations on the use of my wrists, I could get less than $50,000. That settlement would include future medical visits due to this injury, future medications, and a lifetime compensation for the disability.
Posted 6 months, 3 weeks ago at 08:28. 2 comments
December 22nd, 2009 by WhiteRose
I worked for 3 different companies when I was driving in Kuwait and Iraq. I enjoied working for all three. But I have to say that out of the 3, the one that treated me the best was IAP. With PWC (Agility) being tossed out on their tails due to their overcharging and misconduct on contracts in Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan, IAP is looking for 35 drivers to run the mail mission in Kuwait and lower Iraq. I have been wanting to go back overseas to drive ever since I cam home in 2006 to do the book promotion. Due to the shattering of both of my wrists last year, that is a desire that will not be fulfilled. So since I get asked the question, “Who is hiring over there?” all the time, I am passing this information along. They are going to be looking for this to happen real quick. Even though they are looking for drivers that have already “been there and done that”, it would not hurt to those that have not to go ahead and apply. You never know what could happen.
Here is the listing and job description on the IAP web site.
Truck Driver, Heavy Lift
Requisition ID: 9820
Full / Part Time: Full-time
Employment Type: Regular
# of Openings: 35
Purpose: Provide Heavy Lift transportation for U.S. Mail as well as Logistical support for Middle East AOR (Kuwait / Iraq)
Description: Semi-Trailer TRUCK DRIVERs are required for providing U.S. military mail delivery services in Kuwait and Southern Iraq. Driver may load and unload truck, make minor mechanical repairs, and keep truck in good working order. Drivers may travel distances that will not allow them to return to the departure point in the same workday. Must be able to drive standard shift or semi-automatic shift vehicles. Must be physically capable of working 14 hour days in extreme heat conditions. Drivers are required to enter a probable hostile environment on a regular basis and must be fully aware and prepared to undertake these mission tasks upon employment hire.
Duties Will Include:
1. Punctual delivery of U.S. military mail to their respective locations
2. Collection of military mail from airhead
3. Completion of all official U.S. military mail documentation
4. Completion of IAPWS company documentation
5. Vehicle distribution Centre duties
6. Vehicle recovery and replacement duties
7. Conforming to military and IAPWS HSE policies
8. Undertaking vehicle mission readiness pre-vehicle checks and trailer checks
9. Conveyance of vehicles and trailers for service or repair
10. Undertake all operational duties in relation to the U.S. military mail mission
Knowledge: Considerable knowledge of the job. Complete acquaintance with and understanding of the general and detailed aspects of the job, and their practical applications to problems and situations ordinarily encountered.
Minimum Education and Experience: High School Diploma; 10 years minimum driving experience.
Requirements:
Minimum:
1. Must be U.S. Citizen
2. Must have valid U.S. Passport (with at least one year remaining before expiration)
3. Must have current and valid Class A Commercial Drivers License
4. Must provide proof of current DOT compliant Physical Examination (within last 6 months).
Desired:
1. Previous overseas Heavy lift trucking experience
2. Active security clearance
3. Vehicle maintenance experience
Posted 7 months, 1 week ago at 11:18. 4 comments
December 15th, 2009 by WhiteRose
As much time as I spent over there, I hate to think about how many times I drove through the smoke from so many burn pits. But as of today, I believe that I was one of the lucky ones and have not contracted any illness from it. My prayers to all those suffering from this.
Open burning has since been banned but many may face long-term effects.
By Matthew D. LaPlante
The Salt Lake Tribune
Salt Lake Tribune
Updated:12/15/2009 12:41:38 AM MST
Backing away from steadfast official denial, the U.S. military’s senior health protection official said Monday that some service m embers might suffer long-term medical problems as a direct result of exposure to smoke and fumes from open-air burn pits scattered throughout Iraq and Afghanistan.
Physician Craig Postlewaite, director of Force Health Protection and Readiness Programs, said that while scientific evidence has yet to prove the link, the personal stories of veterans coming forward to report long-term health problems have convinced him of the connection.
“We feel at this point in time that it’s quite plausible — in fact likely — that there are a small number of people that have been affected with longer-term health problems,” Postlewaite said Monday in an interview with The Salt Lake Tribune.
As recently as last month, Postlewaite had maintained the Defense Department’s years-old position on the issue, telling Stars and Stripes that “only minor, temporary effects have been identified with the burn pit smoke.” In July he told the Military Times that an assessment of the burn pit at the largest U.S. facility in Iraq, Joint Air
Base Balad, found “no indication of any long-term health risks in personnel.”
It was the sight and smell of the Balad pit that led an environmental engineer from Hill Air Force Base to write a memo calling the acres-large inferno “an acute health hazard.”
In the memo, Air Force officer Darrin Curtis warned that dozens of toxins, including arsenic, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide, were going up in smoke at the Balad pit. U.S. service members and contractors were burning hundreds of tons of weapons, chemicals, plastics — and even amputated limbs from the nearby theater hospital — each week.
Curtis’ memo set off widespread speculation that smoke from the Balad pit, and possibly others, was to blame for myriad health problems faced by returning veterans. But Curtis, who has since separated from the Air Force, told The Tribune he didn’t intend to be a whistleblower — he only wanted to help loosen the bureaucratic purse strings holding back money for a long-promised incinerator.
“It wasn’t one of those ‘God and country’ things,” Curtis said. “I wasn’t trying to sacrifice myself. It was 2006. We’d gotten there in 2003. It had been forever and these things weren’t getting fixed. My understanding was that there were different allowances for money depending on whether something was a health issue or wasn’t a health issue, and I wrote the memo just so that everyone would know it was a health issue.”
READ THE REST HERE
Posted 7 months, 2 weeks ago at 09:14. Add a comment
December 9th, 2009 by WhiteRose
I have know T. Christian Miller for several years now and worked with him on several stories back in 2006/2007. I am happy to see that he has not given up on the civilian contractors that are forgotten. The following is a story if his that came out last month. Thank you Mr. Miller, it means a lot to all of us that you are still making sure that the American public is aware that there are civilians serving their country as well.
Honoring Veterans of the Disposable Army
by T. Christian Miller, ProPublica – November 11, 2009 4:14 pm EST
Today we honor the veterans who have served in the country’s armed forces. Nobody seriously questions whether they deserve such recognition. The men and women who defended this country and fought its wars made immeasurable sacrifices.
I have spent much of the last year writing about another group of people who suffered losses on behalf of U.S. interests abroad: the civilian contractors injured or killed while doing their jobs in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They are not, of course, soldiers. They could quit their jobs and go home any time they wanted. Many were paid far higher wages than their military counterparts. They knew they were signing up to take a specific job in a dangerous part of the world.
And yet, neither are the contractors working in Afghanistan and Iraq ordinary laborers. Civilians compose half the manpower in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have seen and experienced the full horror of war. More than a thousand have been killed. Thousands more have suffereddebilitating physical and mental injuries. And yet, the Pentagon does not even know how many have died, nor how many are actually working (PDF).
I have come to see the civilian contractors as a new kind of class in the demography of war. They are quasi-veterans: civilians who have experienced war much as soldiers do. There are tens of thousands of them. And while it’s hard to argue that they deserve ticker tape parades and Medals of Honor, it’s also hard to believe that they should be sent home with little more than a pay stub and a patchy health care system that doesn’t even address basic medical needs.
I received a letter from a former KBR contractor which crystallized the strange position of those who work in a war zone. D.A. Corson, who worked at a variety of companies in Iraq until 2008, wrote the following, which I thought worth sharing:
READ THE REST HERE
Posted 7 months, 3 weeks ago at 17:15. Add a comment
January 21st, 2006 by WhiteRose
I have to say, that sometimes I wonder about this world and the people in it. Working for the company that I work for now, I live on the economy. Which means that I see the country as it really is. With KBR, they kept us hidden away, secluded form the general public. That doesn’t happen now. I am living like I was in the states. I have a flat and a car that I make the rental payments on and I have no restrictions on my off hours. In that, I see a lot more than I did before and being a woman, I experience some of it first hand. Let me give you a few examples.
A little over a week ago, I complained about the truck they were going to put me in for that days mission. We all have been complaining about the trucks not being clean, but this day, I not only had a truck that was filthy, but it smelled bad and only ran 75kmp, (about 45mph). Now if it were just any one of these things, I could have dealt with it, for that day, as long as the problem was taken care of. But when I refused to driver the truck, they guys in the office, called the big boss man. I was not the only one that was refusing to driver their truck that day, we all were. Anyway. The project manager told us that he would get the problem fixed, but that we would have to deal with it for the day. That sort of satisfied me, but I still didn’t want to spend the day running around Kuwait in a slow truck that smelled bad. It being slow meant I had to spend MORE time in it. I was not happy. But I relented and took the truck. To the project managers credit, the next day, we had trucks that were assigned to just us. They were not clean to what we would call clean, but we could fix that ourselves. These guys think that sweeping out a truck and clearing out the trash make for a clean truck. Go figure!!
We all took our cleaning supplies to work and while waiting to get our guys loaded, we clean and sanitized our trucks. We were doing good. Things went well for a few days, then yesterday, I came in after being off for a few days because I was sick and got a filthy truck. I again was not happy. I explained to the guys in the office, that the uncleanliness of these trucks could be the reason I had gotten sick in the first place. It is possible, but I did what I had to, to make my point. Besides, where were the trucks that we were assigned? This sure was not one of them! I will give them credit, this morning when I came in, 3 of our assigned trucks were there. The one I usually driver was not clean, but at least it was not filthy. So again, I dug my cleaning supplies out of the truck of my car and cleaned my truck. I am on stand-by tomorrow and off the next couple of days. So I have no idea what it is going to look like when I get back, but I am counting on have to start all over again. But my question is, what is so hard about giving us clean sanitary trucks to drive?
NEXT EXAMPLE
Today, I only had to load one truck out of 5 I had to take to Arifjan. That is a good thing. Since the camp I was going to was up near the border and was a long drive, the fewer trucks, the less time I would have to be in this camp. It is a dust bowl. The slightest wind and they have a major sand storm to deal with. With the wind blowing and sand flying everywhere, I thought I would be smart and go up the back way. There is a Kuwaiti check point on this route. Most of the time I have no problems going through this check point. They see that it is an American leading the convoy and they let us on through. Well, today, there was an older Kuwaiti manning the check point and I have had problems with him before. I knew as soon as I saw him there we were going to have trouble. He motioned for me to stop, so I did. (We usually don’t have to), and he asked me for my ID. I showed him my DOD badge and he was OK. Then he asked if the driver I was escorting, had ID. Of course, I said he did. They have to have a Kuwaiti ID or a red striped DOD badge to get into the camps. I pulled up and let this guys check my driver. Then I saw that he was motioning for us to pull to the side. The driver I was escorting is Filipino, a TCN, (third country national). I got out of the truck and asked what the problem was. He all of the sudden acted like he didn’t speak English. That pissed me off. I know they do and he did, because he had talked to me already. He keeps saying something about ID. MY driver opens his wallet and I see the red striped DOD badge. I tell him that that badge should be all he needs. This Kuwaiti guard guys snatches the badge out of the drivers hand and then takes his Kuwaiti ID out of his wallet. He kind of says that we have to come back this way on our way out because he is going to hold this drivers ID. Well, that pissed me off even more. The Kuwaiti’s treat these people like they are sub-human. I wont go into all that I know about that, but needles to say, I got even madder at this. I told him I as not leaving without this drivers ID. He still would not speak English to me. I told him that we would just turn around and go in the other way then. He gives me this blank look. I told my driver to get I his truck, we were going to do a u-turn. After we did that, and were sitting in the other side of the check point, this guard brings ME the drivers ID. I set my break, got out of my truck and walked the ID back to the driver while blocking the check point. How dare he treat this driver like this! Thing is, I see this all the time. The guys that go through this check point never have a problem. I usually don’t either, only when this one guys it there. I don’t think he likes the idea that a WOMAN is leading the pack and driving a truck. I know he doesn’t like the TCN’s and treats them like dirt. This angers me to no end. And the TCN’s are so afraid fo being kicked out of the country, that they just take it. And they say this is better than where they come from. I just can’t even imagine.
Well, I have let off enough steam for today. I will stop now. Be grateful that you live in the United States. We have a great country that this kind of thing should not happen.
Posted 4 years, 6 months ago at 20:05. Add a comment
January 15th, 2006 by WhiteRose
I am sure that all of ya’ll are wondering what is going on with the job changes. Well at first it was a little hectic. They were giving us trucks that the TCN’s had been using and they were dirty and smelled bad. They smelled so bad that I had a problem holding down my breakfast. All of us complained about the condition of the trucks. Then a couple of us were giving truck that not only were filthy and smelled, but they only ran 75 kph. Can you imagine riding in a truck in the condition that these were in and then it only running 40mph?!! OH, no! I wasn’t going to drive it and neither were the other guys. The had a big blow out that morning over it. The office even called the project manager about it all. He told us that they would have the problem taken care of the next day, but we were going to have to deal with it for that day. One guy said he wasn’t going to deal with it, he wasn’t going to driver the truck. He was told to deal with it today or find another job. That didn’t sit well with me either. We had been told several times by the office personal that the problem w0uld be taken care of and it never was. The project manager said we could trust that when we can in the next morning, that we would have clean trucks that didn’t stink. So, we relented and dealt with it for that day. The next day, everything was as the project manager said it would. The trucks were not “clean”, they were dirty, but not filthy. We could deal with that. AND, they had pulled 5 trucks that would be kept to the side and no one would driver them but us. OK, now we were getting some where.
As far as the job goes now, it is going OK. Things have settled down and are staring to fall into place. As with anything that is new, there is a breaking in period. I hope that we are just about done with ours. Escorting TCN’s around Kuwait is not a hard job other than dealing with guys that want to try to make you think that they don’t understand. I can understand the language barrier, but most of these guys can understand and speak English. Some of these guys are really cool, while others I wish had decided to play hooky for the day. But we are getting there. I think in the not to far off future, it will finally falling into place and everything will, for the most part run smooth. Until them, we are all leaning on each other to help on those days that are just bad days and we should have stayed in bed.
Posted 4 years, 6 months ago at 16:40. Add a comment
