Contracting the troop death tolls out: Why more US soldiers died in Nam than Iraq
By Jane Stillwater
http://jpstillwater.blogspot.com
On my plane flight back from Iraq, I was cogitating on what I had learned while I was there and, in between the in-flight movie and the rubber chicken, I started remembering what one female Parliamentarian I had interviewed kept saying to me. “The number of American troops that have died over here is much higher than reported because they do not count the contractors.”
Counting contractors’ deaths? Was she talking about including the deaths of mercenary soldiers into the U.S. troop death count? I guess she was. But their deaths, although tragic, wouldn’t have made the troop death toll all that much higher. Or would it?
Then, as my plane was cruising at 35,000 feet somewhere over Greenland, it finally hit me what she was talking about. “Contractors!” She wasn’t talking about the handful of mercenaries out doing battle on the front lines. She was talking about the 130,000 contractors (according to Defense News) doing battle on the chow lines, the truck lines, the supply lines and PX lines in Iraq.
Everywhere you go in the Green Zone and on all the military bases in Iraq, you see “Contractors” doing jobs that were formerly done by soldiers. In Vietnam, the soldiers t
