Virginia contractor; contractors revisited

One of the many things I love about Yankeedoodle’s blog is the state-by-state listing he gives of U.S. fatalities. On today’s post he has this link to a story about the shooting death Friday of Virginia Beach contract worker Steven Scott Fisher, 43.
According to that story, Fisher “was transporting oil between Fallujah and Bahgdad for Halliburton subsidiary KBR- Kellogg, Brown and Root.”
Why are private contractors hauling oil for the U.S. military? I reflected on the general phenom of the military’s massive use of contractors in this April 1 post. In that one, I pointed out that these contractors are not under any military discipline– basically, they often have carte blanche to act as they please. Who’s going to haul them into court?
The whole, disastrous Fallujah crisis was sparked off, remember, after some contractors drove through the city and got caught in an ambush.
There are other clear dangers from the use of contractors, too…

In today’s WaPo (I’ll try to find the link, later), there was a short piece in a longer story about a military convoy that got ambushed as they were driving, I think, south toward Najaf. Four people were wounded. A medevac chopper was called in. The convoy was readying to leave when they noticed that one of their drivers– a contract employee— was missing. The officer in command didn’t want to leave without him. So the whole unit stayed there a further two hours as they looked for him. Finally they found him hidden cowering and shitless in a dark corner of the chopper.
So for that failure of the guy’s will, all the soldiers had to stay stationary in a very dangerous zone for two hours?
But of course, the military can’t discipline him. They have no way to work to build his cohesion in the unit, etc etc. He’s just a private individual!
So the regular soldiers get screwed by the army’s reliance on contract labor to carry out very basic functions.
And the contractors get screwed, too. Most of them thought they were just going there to earn some quick money… Like poor Steven Scott Fisher, I bet.
Of course, there’s a whole other side to the story, too. Many of the functions that highly-paid foreign contractors are doing could and should have been done by Iraqis. The whole idea of having so many privately-employed foreigners carrying out important functions inside a war zone is a sick, sick, fantasy of Dick Cheney and his colleagues in the get-rich-quick sector.