Small-town firefighters and police, weary of struggling to make ends meet, accept the risks.
By Faye Fiore
Times Staff Writer
July 11, 2004
CONWAY, S.C. — At 8 o'clock on a recent morning, firefighter Darrin
Grant finished his last shift at Station 18, collected his county
paycheck and walked out to make more money than most people in the
remote Carolina "Low Country" would ever dream possible.
In a few days, he will take up his new post as a firefighter on a U.S.
military base somewhere in Iraq. His current $1,600 monthly take-home
pay will balloon to $9,000. In one year, he and his wife can break free
of the financial pressures that have been dogging them — an endless
struggle to pay too many bills with too little money.
But to do
that, and maybe save enough to buy their first house, Grant had to make
a choice he never thought he'd face — risking his life in a dangerous
but lucrative war zone instead of slowly losing his shirt in a
backwater economy. He lies awake at night wondering how, at 39, his
options came to this.
"My family will make out much better
while I am doing this. In one way, this is a dream come true" said
Grant, a three-year Horry County Fire/Rescue veteran with three
children under the age of eight. "But it is also going to be very hard
for the next 365 days."
In this seemingly tranquil region of
small towns, farms and sandy woodlands that twines around the beach
resorts of the Carolina coast, Darrin Grant is not alone. A wave of
area firefighters and police officers has jumped at the chance for
civilian jobs in Iraq.
The result has been a unique set of
pressures and problems in communities that are not used to facing such
challenges — communities, in fact, that Grant and others sought out
precisely because they seemed so far from the turmoil of the larger
world.
Two other Horry County firefighters resigned in a
single week. The county police force has lost seven members since last
winter. Six more have resigned from agencies in neighboring counties.
For every person who has signed up for Iraq, at least two more are
considering it, those in the department say.
And for most of
them, the reasons are much the same. Outwardly living a modest version
of the American dream — steady jobs, decent housing, food, clothes,
toys for their young kids — they have in fact been locked in a grinding
effort just to stay afloat.
"To be on time with my bills, it's
like a fairy tale," muses Holly Udy, whose firefighter husband, Joe, is
already in Iraq. He had been working two jobs — firefighter and
part-time maintenance worker. It hadn't been enough.
Now, with unimagined dangers suddenly close at hand, these families find themselves isolated and unprepared.
Military families understand from the beginning that death or injury
come with the job. The Armed Forces have established support systems
for families — counseling, child care assistance and financial advice.
None of that is true here. Darrin Grant has arranged to pay $100 a
month so his wife won't have to haul the trash to the dump. Joe Udy
read aloud his freshly penned will before he left so his dyslexic wife
wouldn't have to decipher it alone.
Most of the time, the wives
whose husbands have gone cope with their fear by avoiding the subject.
When they think about the what-ifs, they break down. "Sometimes I
think, if I hadn't gotten sick, would he have had to go?" Holly Udy,
who recently underwent surgery, mused from her mother's living room in
Surfside Beach, a modest community near the ocean. "I cannot imagine
life without Joe."
As she connected with the danger, her eyes
filled up . A moment later she was composed again and pragmatic. "The
sun comes up, the bills come due and you have to do the right thing."
Everyone knows the risks, of course. Since spring of 2003, more than 90
contract workers have been killed and scores more wounded in Iraq by
roadside bombs, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and other attacks by
insurgents.
Now, the approximately 50,000 contract workers
employed by U.S. companies have become targets of choice for kidnappers
who are using made-for-television beheadings as the newest weapon in
their campaign to drive out Americans.
As the Grants and many of the others see it, these risks are something they have to accept.
"The schools are great. It's a great area to raise a family. But to
survive on the money they pay here, it's ridiculous," Grant said.
Here, as in much of the Deep South, wages are among the lowest in the
nation. A firefighter or police officer in Horry County starts at
around $25,000 a year, with raises that come slow and small. Most of
the men moonlight as grass-cutters or Wal-Mart clerks or by parking
cars at the ritzy beach resorts to make ends meet. On his days off,
Grant drove a limousine.
Contract work in Iraq not only pays
wildly more, but as much as $80,000 can be tax free. Fat bonuses are
offered for extending a tour.
Such financial incentives were
what moved Udy, 38. Those, plus the nagging calls from creditors, the
mountain of medical bills, the fact that vacations were possible only
because his mother-in-law paid for them, and the yearning to be a
better provider for his two young sons, one of whom is autistic.
With all that, the prospect of bombs and kidnappings, 130-degree desert
heat and spiders the size of your hand seemed no more daunting to Udy
than responding to a burning low-rise or a sticky South Carolina day
spent in full firefighter gear.
In fact, Udy was so eager to
go, he sought out the recruiters before they found him, searching
websites for information about this $99,000-a-year opportunity he kept
hearing of. Finally, Florida-based Wackenhut Corp. sent a flier to the
station and Udy sent in a resume.
Twenty-eight days later he was on a plane for a week's training in Houston, then straight on to Baghdad.
Some people thought he was crazy. Not long before, four contract
workers from North Carolina-based Blackwater USA were ambushed by an
Iraqi mob that mutilated their remains and hung two charred corpses
from a bridge over the Euphrates River. Then businessman Nicholas Berg
and South Korean interpreter Kim Sun Il were beheaded in Iraq, as was
American engineer Paul M. Johnson Jr. in Saudi Arabia.
But for
Udy, the hard part was leaving Holly, his 29-year-old wife of two
years, to whom he is so close that he used to purposely leave things at
home so she'd have to bring them to the fire station.
Then
there were his boys — Josh, 10 and Benjamin, 8 — from a previous
marriage. When it came time to pack up the house — Holly moved back
with her mother and the children went home to Florida — Holly took care
of the boys' room; Joe couldn't.
Beyond the effect on personal
lives, the lure of contract work in Iraq has posed a new problem for
local public safety agencies that had already lost highly skilled
people to the call-up of military reserves. Horry County and
communities in nearby Georgetown County now face economic competition
from the outside world.
"Police officers are not paid well in
South Carolina," said Chief Dan Furr of the Georgetown City Police,
which has lost three of its 36 sworn officers, one of them the SWAT
team leader, to contract work.
In Horry County, the
resignations started last year in the police department — 25% of the
SWAT team left — then moved on to the firehouses. "I can't compete with
the salaries being offered, there is just no way," said Paul Whitten,
Horry County's public safety director.
"But I think we are seeing some of it plateau now. We haven't lost one from the police department in awhile," he said.
Yet just down the hall from Whitten's office in county headquarters,
Lucas Green, 31, is sitting on an offer from Blackwater: $100,000 for
six months of security work in Iraq.
The medical benefits alone are a dream-come-true for a man with children 8, 6 and 2.
His
wife is on board. He is "99% sure" he will go, once he knows that his
father's health will remain stable for at least the next six months.
"I want my parents to enjoy their golden years," said Green, a criminal
detective for eight years. "I want to be able to retire in 30 years not
owing a mortgage or student loans. I mean no disrespect to the
department, but I cannot do that on county pay." As for his fate, Green
acknowledges he is worried. "You would have to be a fool to say you are
not scared," he says.
But he calls upon the words of the
still-beloved Confederate general Stonewall Jackson: "God has fixed the
time for my death. I do not concern myself about that."
That
approach doesn't work for Nancy Parker, who lives just a few miles down
the road. Her eldest son, Daniel, 56, a Vietnam veteran who went to
Iraq as a contract worker, was killed May 7 when his convoy hit a
roadside bomb near the Baghdad airport.
She doesn't know
Grant, the firefighter, or any of the others who have signed up for
jobs in Iraq. And none of them knows about her son's death, since he
lived in Summerville, an hour away.
If they would listen, she
says she would tell them don't go. Money isn't everything. Her son went
to Iraq more for the mission than the money, but the grief still
consumes her. The living room of her little townhouse is filled with
reminders — from the pictures her son hung on the walls to the computer
he set up so they could e-mail each other, the screen dark now.
"I don't care a thing about it," she says, starting to cry. As a U.S.
Border Patrol agent two years from retiring, Daniel Parker pulled in a
healthy federal government salary — only about $2 an hour less than he
earned overseas from KBR, a Halliburton subsidiary and one of the
largest contractors in Iraq
As an officer in Vietnam, Parker had been asked to help destroy a country; now he felt he had the chance to help rebuild one.
"He always put actions behind words. He wanted to do something that had
meaning," said Jacquie Parker, his wife of more than 30 years.
When he was killed, his body was sent to northern Virginia to await burial at Arlington National Cemetery.
His wife arranged for a viewing so people could see her husband had not
been blown to pieces. She made sure he was in his full-dress Border
Patrol uniform. The goatee he had grown overseas did not comport with
the dress code he honored, so she carefully shaved it off.
Then he was cremated.
There is a long wait for ceremonies at Arlington. Parker's burial is
scheduled for Wednesday, two days after Darrin Grant leaves for Iraq.