Death Without Honors

ROSHARON, Texas —  When the regulars at Johnson’s Market Bar and Grill heard that their buddy Allan Smith had been killed in Iraq, they paid tribute by throwing darts and drinking beer, two of Smith’s favorite pastimes.

“Allan would’ve wanted it that way,” said Pat Johnson, the bar owner, who was pleased when the funeral featured a video of Smith wrestling a circus bear -- and pinning him.

In another Houston suburb, Dona Davis had received an e-mail from her husband, Leslie, just hours before she was told he had died in the same suicide bombing that killed Smith on Dec. 21. Then she began planning what she called a “patriotism funeral.”

“My husband loved his country,” Davis said. “One of the last things he told me was: ‘We’re doing good work over here.’ ”

Leslie Wayne Davis and Allan Keith Smith weren’t soldiers. They were civilian contractors, part of an army of mechanics and carpenters and electricians supporting the U.S. military mission in Iraq. Employees of Halliburton Co., they died along with two of their colleagues and 14 soldiers at a military mess hall in Mosul.

America has never fought a war like this one -- where the enemy is nowhere and everywhere, where civilians do the jobs once performed by soldiers, and where middle-aged grandfathers die alongside 19-year-old infantrymen. This is the country’s first outsourced war, where civilians provide the twin military backbones of logistics and supply.

It is a war without a front, where civilians share the risks and burdens of combat. People are killed in the most prosaic of circumstances -- in their sleep, driving to work, eating lunch.

Unlike soldiers and Marines killed in action, contractors killed in Iraq tend to die anonymously, mentioned only in passing. A local newspaper ran a brief story about Davis and Smith, providing basic biographical details.

But their deaths are no less tragic, and the same ripples of grief and pain that flow over military families wash over civilian families.

Unlike the families of service members, the families of contractors have not had years to steel themselves for the possibility of death in combat. Their loved ones don’t carry rifles or fire heavy machine guns. They are civilians going about their jobs, and each sudden, violent death is shocking, no matter how many contractors are killed in the chaos of Iraq.

The Pentagon and media organizations maintain meticulous lists of fallen soldiers and Marines. Local newspapers run detailed stories and obituaries noting their service and valor. The dead receive military funerals with honor guards, 21-gun salutes and flag ceremonies. Their families receive letters from President Bush.

No organization keeps an official list of dead contractors, according to Stan Soloway of the Professional Services Council, a trade group whose members include military contractors. He said the group represents 30,000 contractors in Iraq, with the total number of contractors there two to three times that.

Soloway estimated that 200 to 250 contractors had been killed in Iraq since March 2003. An unofficial tally based on news reports and maintained by the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, a private research group, puts the number at 202, including 72 Americans.

Halliburton, with 40,000 employees and contractors in the Middle East, says 63 of its workers have died in Iraq -- more than any other firm, according to Soloway.

The U.S. military, with 150,000 troops in Iraq, has suffered 1,356 deaths.

The top causes of death for contractors, as listed on the Casualty Count website: 48 killed in convoy attacks or highway ambushes, 29 executed by kidnappers, 18 killed by roadside bombs and 25 by suicide bombers or car bombs, including Smith and Davis.

The Pentagon provides funerals with full military honors in military cemeteries for service members killed in Iraq. The families of contractors make their own funeral arrangements.

After the military flew the remains of Smith and Davis to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, after Halliburton employees escorted the bodies back home to Texas, and after Halliburton counselors sat for hours with the two men’s loved ones, the families were left to do the rest.

Dona Davis took the wedding band from her husband and replaced it with her own, burying it with him. She made sure his service included a video of Leslie speaking at his brother’s recent funeral, where he said his brother had “gone to a better place in heaven.” She believed Leslie was there now, too.

Smith’s friends attached a dartboard to his casket. They laughed at the bear-wrestling video and wept at the playing of Smith’s favorite song, “Silver Wings,” by Merle Haggard. There were sobs over a snapshot of Smith holding his newborn grandson at the hospital.

Both Smith, 45, and Davis, 53, were grandfathers. They were more than twice the age of most of the soldiers eating in the mess hall with them the day they died. The typical soldier is single, only a few years out of high school and with few debts or entanglements. The typical contractor is middle-aged, married or divorced, and searching for a big payday.

Smith’s friends say he went to work for Halliburton in Iraq as a labor foreman to earn money to build a better life for his two daughters and 4-month-old grandson and to buy one of his daughters a car. Davis’ family says he went out of a sense of duty, working as a quality control officer, with hopes of landing a permanent job with Halliburton overseas so that he and his wife could travel the world.

Men like Davis and Smith, with a lifetime of acquired skills and expertise, are in demand at a time when a downsized military has turned to civilians for the support jobs once handled by soldiers. Halliburton, an energy services company based in Houston, has been among the leading private contractors in Iraq, mainly through its engineering subsidiary, KBR.

When the opportunity came to work for the company in Iraq, Smith and Davis seized it, despite pleas from family members and friends not to take the risk.

‘I Got It Covered’

Smith was a stocky, moon-faced man with a carefree personality. His life centered on his daughters, Brandy, 21, and Savanah, 18, and his grandson, Koda. He was a regular at Johnson’s bar, a low-slung taproom that hugs a narrow county road across from cattle pastures and oil rigs in Rosharon on the southern cusp of Houston.

Smith eked out a living running a lawn care service. He lived in a trailer less than a mile from Johnson’s and was a partner, with a lifelong friend, in a now-defunct tavern called Hoot N Annie’s.

Miranda Selvera, 29, who worked for Smith as a waitress, said she talked her husband out of going to Iraq but could not talk Smith out of it.

“He just grinned and told me he wanted a better life for himself and his kids,” she said.

“Alabama” Terry Hartley, who threw darts with Smith for a decade, said he told him the night before he left in late October: “Man, you don’t need to go over there.” Hartley said Smith “hugged my neck and said, ‘Buddy, I got it covered.’ ”

Smith’s daughter Brandy Wilkison lives in his trailer, where two Halliburton counselors arrived the afternoon of Dec. 21 to deliver the news of her father’s death.

She said her father had planned to return for a brief visit in the spring to see her sister, Savanah, graduate from high school and for the birth of Savanah’s baby, due in June.

“Then he was going to go back and finish his year there so he could come back home and raise his grandkids right,” Brandy said. He told her his salary there was “well over enough,” and “a lot better than cutting grass.”

She felt bereft now, she said. “He was so courageous. I counted on him for so much, and now he’s gone and I’m feeling kind of lost.”

When he left for Iraq, she said, Smith handed over his lawn-cutting business to Brandy’s boyfriend. “We’re going to keep the same name -- Allan’s Lawn Service,” she said.

Smith worried about mortar attacks at the Mosul base where he lived, said his girlfriend, Ellen Hanley. He told her a mortar had hit a nearby storage building.

“But he wasn’t scared of anything,” Hanley said.

The day before Smith died, Hanley had undergone cancer surgery. “Then, getting the news about Allen, it was more than I could take,” she said.

Smith’s death has left a hole in Rosharon, a tiny community where everyone knows everyone else and most people work in home construction or the oil business. Everybody recognized his beige Dodge pickup truck, which he drove to Johnson’s bar or for regular dinners at a Chili’s restaurant.

Selvera said her 4-year-old son still smiled and waved when he saw Smith’s pickup pass by, driven now by his daughter.

“He’ll holler, ‘Allan’s here!’ ” Selvera said. “And I have to tell him, ‘No, baby, he’s not.’ ”

‘Just as Close to Heaven’

Fifty miles away, in Magnolia, in Houston’s far northern suburbs, Dona Davis had tried to talk her husband out of going to Iraq last June. She kept thinking about the time three decades ago when he served on Navy patrol boats in Vietnam, and how she had dreaded the knock on the door.

When the knock came on Dec. 21, it was not a military officer at the door but two counselors from Halliburton. “I completely lost it” when they broke the news, Davis said. She became hysterical, sobbing and screaming, she said.

She ultimately found solace in what her husband had told her when she tried to keep him home. “He told me: ‘Dona, I’m just as close to heaven in Iraq as I am in Houston,’ ” she said.

Leslie Davis, known as “Bub,” was a religious man, a former church deacon who taught Sunday school and prayed before every meal. He embraced the U.S. mission in Iraq, his widow said. He handed out candy to Iraqi children until the military, concerned about base security, built a wall that stopped him.

Dona said her husband earned about the same amount of money with Halliburton as he did in previous jobs as an auditor with U.S. oil companies.

“He didn’t talk with me about the danger, and that was deliberate,” she said. “He would joke about having to wear his flak vest to the mess hall. If they’d had a mortar attack, he’d tell me, ‘The boys got rowdy last night.’ ”

Leslie and Dona, married for 35 years, e-mailed each other every night -- Leslie’s were decorated with U.S. and Texas flags -- and they talked by phone almost daily. He spoke often of the fear and anxiety he saw in the eyes of young soldiers. Leslie was 19 in Vietnam, and Dona believes he was reliving his youth in a combat zone far from home.

After a fatal car bombing in Mosul, Dona said, Leslie described encountering a distraught young soldier who had survived.

“He said he wanted to hug that young man but didn’t because he didn’t want to do it in front of other soldiers,” she said. “And then he told me he would rather it be him who died instead of those kids.”

The day he died, the family was planning a pre-Christmas dinner. The boyfriend of the Davises’ daughter, Angie, 35, intended to propose that night. The dinner was canceled.

“You know,” Angie said, wiping away tears that streaked her eye makeup, “the first thing I would have done was e-mail my dad to tell him. He would’ve been so happy.”

Despite the dangers, she said, her father went to Iraq “because that was where he thought God needed him to be.”

For Dona, who began dating Leslie when both were in the ninth grade, his death has been devastating. The couple was hoping to travel the world for Halliburton before retiring to watch their grandchildren grow up. Leslie had planned to take time off in March to meet Dona in Rome.

“It’s just so hard to think of life without him,” she said.

Davis didn’t want to go to lunch that day in Mosul, Dona said, but his fellow contractors talked him into it. One of them, Dennis Barcelona, told Dona that he tried to save Leslie as he lay bleeding from a wound in his thigh near his groin. Barcelona said he used a shirt as a tourniquet but was unable to stop the bleeding.

“Tell my wife I’m going to be OK,” Barcelona recalled Leslie saying to him.

For her birthday in November, Leslie sent Dona a prayer rug he’d had made in Iraq. Sewn into the rug were the names and ages of the couple’s four children and 11 grandchildren.

Dona thought it was typical of her husband to make it harder on himself by trying to remember ages rather than simply listing birth dates. He had to figure everyone’s age, rounding some up and some down. The ages he chose corresponded precisely to the ages of his children and grandchildren on the day he died.

“It’s almost like he had a premonition,” Angie said.

At Leslie’s funeral, hundreds of people flooded the chapel, among them the two Halliburton counselors. TV monitors were set up outside to handle the overflow.

“People were drawn to him. He could charm anybody,” Angie said. “If you worked with my dad for a week, you were his friend for life.”

There was an eagle and an American flag on the casket. Because Davis was a veteran, two Navy sailors were present to salute the casket, play taps and present Dona with a folded American flag.

A few days later, in the living room of their ranch-style home, where the windows overlook several acres of rolling magnolia woods, Dona and Angie did not weep as they remembered their final goodbye.

“That funeral was a celebration of his life,” Dona said.

After all the turbulence of Iraq, Angie said, her father was finally at peace.