Medically retired soldier concludes: “We are pawns” in Iraq

Cindy Rodriguez

At what price would you take a job that included scraping human flesh off ambushed Humvees?

What if it also meant working 16 to 20 hours nearly every day in 120-degree temperatures?

As an enlisted soldier, Army Staff Sgt. Jeffrey Peskoff of Fountain took on such a job, overseeing 29 soldiers at a military installation in Mosul, Iraq.

Of course, he didn’t know what he was getting himself into.

Taking into account the number of hours he worked each week, his $43,000 salary during his year in Iraq came out to less than $7 an hour.

Meanwhile, the soldiers in his unit had to transport and protect workers of U.S. corporations who earned salaries three to five times higher working on engineering projects, such as building (and rebuilding) oil pipelines.

For the first seven months of the year he was there, starting in April 2003, they had no armor for their vehicles.

“If you don’t think about being security for these massive corporations making big bucks being there, you’re OK, but if you do, then you realize the entire military is being used and abused,” Peskoff, a married 33-year-old father of two girls, told me.

“This is not a Michael Moore conspiracy. It’s not just Halliburton. Many U.S. companies are there to get the oil that’s there.”

(Halliburton, a U.S. corporation that Vice President Dick Cheney once led, has the majority of contracts to build oil pumps and pipelines in Iraq. It also exports crude oil at top dollar.)

As debates swirl over the outsourcing of white-collar jobs, how U.S. corporations abuse workers in developing countries and whether Congress should raise the federal minimum wage, it’s perplexing why, during a time of war, we aren’t talking more about the exploitation of our soldiers.

Considering the conditions most of them work under, the pay and benefits of our military are woefully low. New recruits can earn less than $20,000 a year, according to statistics provided by the U.S. Army.

And that is not factoring an untold cost: the psychological toll it has taken on soldiers, especially those who have done two or three tours in a war that seems to know no end.

After 10 years of service, Peskoff became medically retired after he was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder.
He scrubs everything in sight and washes his hands repeatedly. He has nightmares when he sleeps. To avoid the painful dreams, he stays up all night, hoping he’ll be too exhausted to wake up during a nightmare.

Still, he has them, about four times a week - just like a countless number of Iraq war veterans. And the dreams they are vivid.

“I am always in a Humvee, always driving down a busy road; we’re getting attacked by Iraqis hiding in the hills, firing RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) and shooting (AK-47s). I see bodies get ripped in half … I don’t even like talking about it,” he said, his voice trailing off.

“I came back a totally different person. You may call us mentally weak, but there are a lot of us out there.”

Peskoff speaks at a rapid-fire pace. Ask him one question, and he’ll go in different directions, but he always comes back to this: He is now an irritable man, not the upbeat person he used to be.

His wife, Lisa, feels the change. Peskoff tries to hide it from his daughters, 6-year-old Hannah and 4-year-old Lillian.

He’s angry that the CIA last year closed a unit whose mission was to hunt for Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants. He wonders if the average American has any clue about what’s really going on in Iraq.

“The politicians, not just the Republicans but the Democrats, too, could care less about spreading democracy,” he said. “We are pawns. The soldiers are being used.”

Cindy Rodríguez’s column appears Tuesdays in Scene and Sundays in Style. Contact her at 303-820-1211 or crodriguez@denverpost.com.