In a largely invisible cost of the war in Iraq, nearly 800 civilians working under contract to the Pentagon have been killed and more than 3,300 hurt doing jobs normally handled by the US military, according to figures gathered by The Associated Press.
Exactly how many of these employees doing the Pentagon's work are US citizens is uncertain. But the casualty figures make it clear that the Defense Department's count of more than 3,100 US military dead does not tell the whole story.
"It's another unseen expense of the war," said Thomas Houle, a retired Air Force reservist whose brother-in-law died while driving a truck in Iraq.
Employees of contractors such as Halliburton, Blackwater and Wackenhut cook meals, do laundry, repair infrastructure, translate documents, analyze intelligence, guard prisoners, protect military convoys, deliver water in the heavily fortified Green Zone and stand sentry at buildings -- often highly dangerous duties almost identical to those performed by many US troops.
The US has outsourced so many war and reconstruction duties that there are almost as many contractors -- 120,000 -- as US troops -- 135,000 -- in the war zone.
But contractor casualties are are off the books, in a sense.
While the Defense Department issues a press release whenever a soldier or Marine dies, reporters had to file a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain figures on many of the civilian deaths and injuries from the Labor Department, which tracks workers' compensation claims.
Although contractors were widely used in Vietnam for support and reconstruction tasks, they have never before represented such a large portion of the US presence in a war zone or accounted for so many security and military-like jobs, experts say.
The contractors are paid handsomely for the risks they take, with some making US$100,000 per year, mostly tax-free -- six times more than a new US Army private.
If the contractor deaths were added to the Pentagon's count of US military casualties, the number of war dead would climb about 25 percent, from about 3,000 as of the end of last year to nearly 3,800.
Contractor deaths are less costly politically, said Deborah Avant, a political science professor at George Washington University.
"Every time there's a new thing that the US government wants the military to do and there's not enough military to do it, contractors are hired," she said. "When we see the 3,000 service member deaths, there's probably an additional 1,000 deaths we don't see."
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