Civilian Contractors

Slow, slow night. We don’t have a flight until 825. What can you do? That is a common them around here, you are basically manning a post being on standby. Just about every job description I have seen has this dilemma. We went from about 150,000 in all of Iraq at the height of the war to probably 40,000. But the military must provide for the needs of its people so there must be manning of these different service categories. For example, the base sexual abuse response coordinator, or SARC, how busy could they possibly be, yet, it still has to be manned. This atrophy doesn’t only mingle on the military side but the civilian as well. I am surprised at the number of contractors fairly young, like mid 20’s, but overall a huge variety of ages, shapes, and colors. None of them have a huge workload, I talked to the fire inspector, probably early 30’s, and he says there hasn’t been one fire in the six months he’s been here, crazy! Why such a large need for contractors? Escorts. A lot of Iraqi citizens are tasked with doing things like cleaning repairing, and landscaping, but they cannot get on the base alone, too much of a security risk. An escort can watch up to 5 people, basically all they do is a little bit of paperwork and drive them around.


Civilian contractors make ridiculous money. I would think 60,000 is the bare minimum, most make 100+ K per year easy, up to 80,000 of it is tax free. I think of the lady that is the flight contract coordinator, she sets up all the flight for contractors, rumor has it she make about 180K and she is at her desk 5 hours tops per day, most of the time she’s watching movies. Some days she doesn’t even come in. Most will do a rotation of working 90 days straight with a 30 day vacation, paid for of course, as well as pay for your flight home. Some have it as good as 60/30 can you believe that? They also eat with us in the D-Fac so I’m pretty sure their food is free. This gig is one of the best kept secrets out there. If any of you are ever interested let me know and I can get some contact info. I would think the number one thing you would need is a clean record, I’m sure they would do a thorough background investigation. A lot of money is spent to keep us running in Iraq, I remember one of my ASU professors telling me in 2005 at the height of the Iraq war it was costing 1/3 billion dollars per day to keep us running here. Didn’t believe it at first but now that I’m over here, unfortunately it was probably true.
I finally get a day off tomorrow. I’m definitely going to sleep, can’t wait, but I have to keep my night schedule so it’ll be weird hanging out at night trying to figure out what to do. Definitely going to try to call people other than my wife and download picture onto the blog. Since we don’t have high speed internet for the MWR computers its very slowwwwwwwwww. I actually have an activity planned but due to OPSEC I cannot put in the blog until after the fact. It should be interesting. Oh I can’t wait to sleep! I was looking at my pay, I will be making twice as much as I do teaching, now if I can just save it (no you can’t borrow it, hahaha) so far I haven’t received any mail and only about three emails, a little bit of a bummer but people have their busy lives. It’s just funny when people say, “I’ll write you all the time.” Ya right. But I was guilty of it when my cousin was over here two times so I do understand not being on it.