Into mouth of hell in search of a quick payday

REDUNDANT after 34 years, Al Cayton found himself at retirement age without the means to support himself.

So at 60, the Florida man went off to drive trucks for US company Halliburton in Iraq, lured by the promise of over €100,000 in cash, tax-free.

"He planned to work until he could draw his Social Security," said his wife of 40 years, Karen.

A roadside bomb put an end to that plan.

Cayton is one of about 30 contract workers who have been killed in Iraq, including an Italian security guard executed by his kidnappers this week.

More than 20 workers have been taken captive by militants in recent weeks, and 200 or more have been wounded in the year since war supposedly ended and the rebuilding began.

For many of the contract workers and their families, the job has not been the easy money they hoped for.

Despite all this, there are plenty of people willing to risk a year in Iraq doing mundane jobs for three and four times what they could get at home.

An estimated 15,000 contract workers are helping to rebuild the war-torn country. In recent weeks, they have increasingly become targets of insurgents trying to end the US occupation.

Tommy Hamill, 43, of Mississippi, was reduced to driving a truck after hard times forced him to sell the dairy farm that had been in the family for 30 years.

With two children at home and a wife in need of heart surgery, Hamill felt he could not pass up an offer of €67,000 basic pay to drive a fuel truck in Iraq for a year.

Hamill was eight months into the job when Iraqi militants attacked his convoy last Friday.

Hamill's kidnappers vowed to kill him over Easter if American troops did not leave the city of Fallujah, but that deadline passed with no word about Hamill's fate.

As for Cayton, he had logged more than 3.6 million accident-free miles in 34 years as a trucker. That safety record earned him a truck with his name on it and an even greater honour the job of hauling mangled steel from the World Trade Centre to California to be turned into a September 11 memorial.

But none of that earned Cayton an easy retirement. When his employer went bankrupt in 2002, Cayton's pension was not enough to cover his health insurance. He went to Iraq last June, quickly rising from driver to convoy commander and safety director with 50 truckers beneath him.

On February 23, the Army veteran was travelling in a truck south of Baghdad when a bomb exploded, killing him. The standard company life insurance policy: €21,000 and an additional €21,000 for "accidental death".

The escalating violence has left contractors and their families back home torn.

About a year ago, the little trucking company Bill Hetrick started in Ohio went under as the economy went south. Hetrick hoped the year-long hitch hauling ice from Kuwait to Baghdad and beyond "might help catch us up", said his wife of 18 years, Georganne.

But on Monday night, Mrs Hetrick received a frantic call.

"I'm done," said a rattled Bill Hetrick, who had just emerged from a bomb shelter. "There's too much going on over here."

The next day, however, the 49-year-old Hetrick called his wife back to say some colleagues had talked him into toughing it out.

Mrs Hetrick did not know what to say.

"I don't like to tell him that he has to come home," said Mrs Hetrick, who is working at her family's restaurant while caring for the couple's three children. "But I don't want him to think I don't care what happens to him.

"But I think it's time something's done. They need to make it safer or tell them to come home."