A Mississippi Town Holds Its Breath for a Native Son

Tommy Hamill’s family is trapped by the television set. They are sitting on a flowered couch with the news flickering in front of them. Every time the phone rings, Kellie Hamill’s eyes dart around.

At one point on Wednesday afternoon, a psychotherapist sent by Halliburton Corp. ushered her aunt outside and a frozen look passed over Kellie’s face. But it was not news about Tommy. She exhaled.

Five days have passed since a call came on her cell phone informing her that her husband, a civilian contract worker in Iraq, had been kidnapped: She had to pull off the road to take it.

Since then, the Hamills -- Kellie, 11-year-old Tori and 13-year-old Thomas -- have been in a state of unbearable suspense, waiting for news of the dairy farmer who was swept up in the growing violence between Iraqi insurgents and the United States.

Kellie Hamill is a 911 dispatcher and has a reputation for extreme coolness in crisis situations. But after five days, her voice is hoarse and tears leak out of her eyes.

“I want to be strong for him,” said Hamill, 36. “I really do.”

No news has come since Saturday, when Arab-language television channel Al Jazeera was given a tape showing Hamill with his captors, who threatened to kill him unless U.S. troops withdrew by last Sunday.

Six others who accompanied Hamill on the fuel convoy have not been found, and four mangled bodies found on Tuesday near Fallouja may be the remains of some of the missing. Hamill and the others worked for a subsidiary of Halliburton, which is assisting in the reconstruction of Iraq.

With donated casseroles and all-night prayer vigils, this east Mississippi town is confronting a new and particularly painful type of American casualty. Although the death of soldiers and Marines has become commonplace, the last week has drawn in people like Hamill, a rural Mississippian who balanced the danger of working in a war zone against the economic pain at home.

Hamill, 43, raised his family in a town so close-knit that a child can shop in a drugstore, say, “Charge it to my momma,” and leave without giving a name, said Robin King, a local florist.

Just west of the Alabama line, Macon is 30 minutes from the nearest shopping mall. Squirrel hunting is a popular pastime, and the local newspaper still prints the entire jail docket every week.

Church bells ring in the afternoon, setting off a chorus of howling dogs.

Noxubee County is poor. So poor, said Scott Boyd, who edits the weekly paper, that the nicest cars in town belong to schoolteachers. Its population of around 2,400 is 67% black, and unemployment hovers around 12%, twice the state average. Boyd describes it as “Delta country taken out of the Delta and set down in east Mississippi.”

A tough economy has been particularly hard on people like Hamill, who tried to keep his family farm going as dairies failed all around him. Their number dropped from more than 20 to just seven in the last decade, said Dennis Reginelli, an agronomist with the county.

In recent years, Hamill’s relatives had begun to see the stress grind at him. He owed an increasing debt to the bank -- relatives would not say how much -- and the prospect of paying it off seemed to get farther and farther away.

He worked a second job to keep his family’s dairy going, getting up before dawn to milk the cows. He grew exhausted and distracted, racked with worry. Jerry Britt, a family friend, said Hamill’s friends and relatives “started seeing gray hairs pop up overnight.”

Hamill told his wife he could feel himself getting older.

The thing that tortured him, relatives say, was also one of the things they admired about him. People who knew him knew that declaring bankruptcy was not an option.

“That’s considered the easy way out,” Britt said. “A lot of us here in the South feel that way.”

The offer of a job with KBR, a subsidiary of Halliburton, arrived late last summer like a blessing out of the blue. After another truck driver tipped him off, Hamill filled out an application on the Internet. The company called the next day, his wife said.

KBR pays annual salaries of $80,000 or more tax-free for its overseas staff. Hamill seemed so set on it that the women in his family tried not to show their fears, said his mother, Phyllis Hamill, 63.

“I wasn’t for him going, but that wasn’t my decision to make,” Phyllis said. “He’s not the kind of person who would walk away from debt.”

Although it seems strange now, Tommy Hamill seemed to expand, to relax, during his months in Iraq. A Houston Chronicle photographer captured him there, wearing a cowboy hat at an early morning drivers’ meeting, looking into the distance.

His yearlong stint in Iraq was to end in September and he was considering staying on month to month, his wife told the local paper the week before he was kidnapped.

When he came home to visit two weeks ago, Hamill told his wife stories of bricks thrown through his window and artillery rounds landing a few feet away.

But there was a new calm about him, she said. The burden of financial anxiety had been lifted.

“I saw a big change in the way he was. I can’t explain it,” Kellie said. “He was peaceful.”

“He had the worried look off his face,” Phyllis Hamill said.

Over the last week, as his neighbors tied up yards of yellow ribbon in expectation of his release and return, no one has questioned Hamill’s decision, and few are likely to blame the company that sent him, said King, the florist.

“They admire him for being willing to do that,” Boyd said. “They certainly don’t bemoan the fact that he was at least mostly driven by economics.”

Halliburton employs 25,000 civilian contractors in the Middle East.

Prospective employees are briefed repeatedly on the dangers they may face in Iraq, said Wendy Hall, a spokeswoman for Halliburton, in a statement.

“In fact, during the training process, we spend most of our time giving recruits the reasons they should not accept this job,” she said.

In Macon, people say Tommy Hamill is the kind of man who could survive an ordeal like kidnapping.

Born into a long line of dairymen, he showed a determination, almost from birth, to stand on his own two feet, said an aunt, Coleene Higginbotham.

Hamill was a small kid and had to sit on pillows so he could see out the windshield to take his driver’s test, his mother said.

But he went on the road three years later and spent years as a truck driver. He met Kellie at a truck stop where she worked.

“He came into the fuel desk,” Kellie said with a weak smile, “and that’s all I’m going to say on the subject.”

As an adult, Hamill developed an easy, natural tone of authority.

“If I walked into a bar and someone said, ‘I don’t like the way you look,’ I’d probably turn around and leave,” Boyd said.

“Someone like Tommy Hamill, who is not a fighter, would probably sit down at a bar and drink a beer. If they said it a second time, he might say, ‘Please don’t say that.’ If they said it a third time, they might have trouble on their hands.”

Times researcher Lynn Marshall contributed to this report.