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.