Desk Jobs in a War Zone

Ruby Pierce was packed in body armor and a Kevlar helmet, ready for the 15-minute drive from the military landing strip to her new posting at Forward Operating Base Courage.

Four blue Ford Expeditions crusted with dirt to the roofline pulled up with her escorts: 14 hard-faced soldiers of fortune in black armor. The convoy, a private security escort hired by the U.S. military, hit the streets of Mosul at 70 mph, lights flashing and a siren screaming.

In the back seat, Pierce bounced and pitched as the SUVs speeded like getaway cars in a gangster film down narrow potholed streets lined by waving children. The convoy made panic stops to negotiate turns, zigzagged through traffic and went airborne over bumps. At last, the SUVs pulled up to their destination.

The wild ride was nothing new to Pierce. The 58-year-old widowed grandmother from Virginia was reporting for her second deployment in Iraq.

Pierce, the new secretary to the commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in the north, is one of approximately 350 American civilians working in Iraq with the corps. In a war zone with no front line, the civilians live on 31 U.S. bases, working, dining, socializing and bunking much as soldiers do, and exposing themselves to many of the same risks.

Like Pierce, many are fiftysomethings who have left spouses, children and grandchildren back home to fight in the war the only way they can.

They are among foreign civilians working in Iraq whose numbers are estimated to be in the thousands. Some are contractors engaged in large construction projects or consulting with the U.S. or Iraqi government. Others, like the 14 men in the convoy that transported Pierce, are employed by private security firms.

An additional 1,000 American civilians and 500 foreign nationals are on the staff of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Hundreds more federal agents and private security contractors are assigned there.

Generally, the civilians undergo field training before arriving to learn how to cope with the dangers of the assignment.

Two State Department employees have been killed in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, along with 14 American and four Iraqi security contractors working for the embassy. Several other embassy workers have been wounded.

Aside from the dangers they face, often the work done by employees of the Army Corps of Engineers is much like what they would do back home. When these secretaries, accountants, analysts, civil engineers and administrators volunteered, most were already working for the corps, overseeing the construction of schools, bridges, police stations, clinics, water tanks and sewage plants.

The northern region headquarters at FOB Courage is in one of the many opulent palaces built by former President Saddam Hussein. It is responsible for hundreds of reconstruction projects in seven Iraqi provinces. About 40 members of its staff of 53 are civilians, said public affairs officer Claude McKinney, a retired Army officer who signed up for this war as a civilian. More than half, including McKinney, are married. Ten are women.

The reasons they volunteered vary from patriotism to extra pay, from curiosity to a taste for adventure. Typically, they sign on for six months and often extend that for a year. Overseas and war zone bonuses boost the base pay by 50% for civilians employed by the corps. Yet few put money ahead of other motivations.

“I’m one of those people that will always throw up my hand and say, ‘I want to volunteer for that,’ ” said Pierce, who had just arrived by what convoy drivers call the steeplechase through the streets of Mosul, among the most dangerous places in Iraq. Pierce has been with the corps for 27 years, working her way up from keypuncher to office manager for a colonel.

She did a four-month tour in Baghdad in 2004 and was back for more.

“It seems like when you volunteer one time, you just have to do that second or third tour,” she said.

A small woman with short brown hair, Pierce has a wholesome smile and a quiet manner. But having tasted action, she likes it.

“There is something that happens to you internally, I don’t know what it is,” Pierce said. “You just have to come back.”

It was hard leaving her daughter, son and three grandchildren back home in Virginia, where she enjoyed weekends watching them play soccer and field hockey, and clog dance. But they supported her, and she said she was sure her husband, if he were alive, would have approved, too.

For many, the work opens a new dimension in life.

Julie Melow, 33, joined the corps’ Walla Walla, Wash., office in 2003 to escape what she considered a boring career in tax accounting.

When the call for volunteers went out, she didn’t hesitate. Now on her third tour, she supervises five analysts who also work in the palace, processing payments to contractors.

Her experiences in Iraq have been fun as well as sobering.

“I got to ride a Black Hawk helicopter and a Stryker,” a gigantic tank-like troop carrier, Melow said. “That was awesome.”

She also has been affected personally by the insurgents in Mosul, who target contractors and shoot rockets and mortar rounds at the base.

“Last year, I lost many friends, Iraqi and American,” Melow said.

Her most memorable moment was her wedding ceremony in December in the large reception room in Hussein’s former palace.

When she returned home from her second tour in November 2004, she fell in love with Joe Melow, a wildland firefighter. Then she got a call from the corps in July. Could she return to Iraq in two weeks?

“I love the work here,” Melow said. “The hardest part was leaving Joe behind.”

She chose duty, and Joe remained at home, fighting fires. Then the corps asked her to extend again.

“I wasn’t going to live one more day without Joe, and told them if they found a good fit for him, I would extend,” she said.

Joe sent his resume to the corps and got the assignment he had hoped for. He’s now responsible for keeping up FOB Courage buildings. Melow’s commanding officer gave her away during the Dec. 15 wedding ceremony, and she has extended her tour.

“There will be no Joe or Julie in Iraq without Joe or Julie,” Melow said.

A bookish-looking person with black bangs and spectacles, she doesn’t see herself as a risk-taker, but still expects a letdown when her overseas duty ends.

“Then I’ll go back home to my cubicle in Walla Walla,” Melow said wistfully.

For as long as civilians such as Melow are here, the base in Mosul provides all of life’s essentials in a basic form. They eat with the 2,000 soldiers in a large tented dining facility. They sleep in trailer homes packed into a tight grid about half a mile from the palace.

Each trailer is surrounded by sandbags up to the window sills. The pathways to the trailer entrances, just wide enough for two people to pass, are shaded by camouflage netting. Each trailer has two private rooms, called hooches, each with a TV, a noisy electric heater and a bathroom. Forget about privacy -- the floor transmits every footfall into the neighboring room like a soundboard.

At 5:30 one recent morning, a white flash lighted up windows in the encampment, and then the trailers shook, as if by a quick earthquake. This wasn’t an attack, but an explosion of ordnance on the base, caused by a fire of uncertain origin. Still, it was a reminder of the dangers that both civilians and soldiers accept.

A spirit of forbearance permeates the daily work. Project managers, who are responsible for the work from start to finish, hardly ever see results in person.

“We do not have that kind of luxury,” said Pradip Patel, who has overseen 400 school projects, almost all now completed. “If I want to go out, I need a [security detail] of 14 people.”

He monitors progress via e-mails from his Iraqi contractors and engineers, who send him photos of the work. He tries to get to a school at least once a month, he said, but in some areas, he can never visit.

“Last spring, a school was occupied by insurgents,” he said. “They told our contractor to get lost.”

Patel said he did consulting work in Baghdad when he still lived in his native India in the early 1980s as the Iran-Iraq war was starting. Later he moved to the United States, got a master’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Kansas, married the woman his family in India chose for him, and had two children. He became a citizen and settled in Washington, D.C., where he did engineering work on government projects.

When he saw the corps was hiring, he applied as a civilian project manager, hoping to see how Iraq had changed, he said.

His wife wasn’t pleased.

“It’s been rough riding,” Patel said. But he has no regrets.

Like many engineers in Iraq, Patel expressed satisfaction at being able to work without the red tape he wades through back home.

Not that there haven’t been moments of frustration. In one district, he said, the local education commission wanted to build schools only for boys.

He insisted there must be girls schools too. But he learned later that didn’t happen.

Still, he said he would go home soon with a feeling of accomplishment.

“This was a great opportunity to serve the nation and contribute in the reconstruction program,” Patel said.

As Pierce, the grandmother from Virginia, set up her desk on her first day of work, her predecessor, Elizabeth Vanek, had time to reflect on her six months here.

A tall woman of 50, in denims and a silver-buckled cowboy belt, Vanek collected her thoughts before explaining what had driven her to set aside her life as a suburban horse owner for time in a war zone.

“9/11 affected me in a great way,” Vanek said. “You feel helpless.”

But the corps’ reconstruction work after the invasion of Iraq gave her an opportunity, she said, to put her patriotic feelings into action.

“I don’t like this idea of bumper-sticker patriotism,” Vanek said. “If you say you want to support our troops, well, support our troops.”

It’s not uncommon for the civilian volunteers to describe their work as both a personal adventure and a mission whose value they accept unquestioningly.

“It is quite sobering to realize that people here are just beginning to realize the value of and pride in something we Americans take for granted -- freedom!” said Pierce, whose tour will last through June.

“It would not surprise any member of my family or co-workers back home if I volunteered to remain for an additional tour.”