In a largely invisible cost of the war in Iraq, nearly 800 civilians working under

contract to the Pentagon have been killed and more than 3,300 hurt doing jobs normally handled by the U.S military, according to figures gathered by the Associated Press.

           Exactly how many of these employees doing the Pentagon’s work are Americans

is uncertain. But the casualty figures make clear that the Defense Department’s count of more than 3,100 U.S. military dead doesn’t tell the whole story.

          “It’s another unseen expense of the war,” said Thomas Houle, a retired Air Force

reservist. His brother-in-law Hector Patino was driving a truck for a Halliburton subsidiary in the Green Zone when he was killed by friendly fire at a checkpoint..

           “It’s almost disrespectful that it doesn’t get the kind of publicity or respect that a

soldier would,” Houle said.

             Patino, a San Antonian who served two tours in Vietnam, thought he was safe,

said his mother, 82-year-old Flora Patino. “ I said, Hector, you’re playing with fire,” she recalled.

              Employees of defense contractors such as Halliburton, Blackwater and Wackenhut cook meals, do laundry, repair infrastructure, translate documents, analyze

Intelligence, guard prisoners, protect military convoys, deliver water in the heavily for-

tified Green Zone and stand sentry at buildings- often-dangerous duties much like those

performed by many U.S. troops.

              The Pentagon has outsourced so many war and reconstruction duties that almost

as many contractors  (120,000)  as U.S troops  (135,000) are in the war zone.

              The insurgents in Iraq make little, if any, distinction between the contractors and U.S troops.

              In January, four contractors for Blackwater were killed when their helicopter was downed by gunfire in Baghdad. In 2004, two Americans and a British engineer were kidnapped and decapitated.

              That same year, a mob of insurgents ambushed a supply convoy escorted by contractors, burning and mutilating the guards’ bodies stringing up two of them from a bridge. But when contractors are killed or wounded, the casualties are off the books, in a sense. The Defense Department issues a news release whenever a soldier or Marine dies.

But the AP needed repeated efforts- including a Freedom of Information Act request- to get figures on many of the civilian deaths and injuries from the Labor Department, which tracks workers’ compensation claims.

                By the end of 2006, the Labor Department had quietly recorded 769 deaths and 3,367 injuries serious enough to require four or more days off the job.

               “It used to be, womb to tomb, the military took care of everything. We had cooks. We had people who ran recreation facilities. But those are not core competencies

you need to run a war,” said Brig. Gen. Neil Dial, deputy director of intelligence for U.S

Central Command. With the all- volunteer force, the military began more stringent recruiting of troops and made greater use of nonmilitary professionals.

              “ It  put  professionals in harm’s way,” Dial conceded. Although contractors were widely used in Vietnam for support and reconstruction tasks, they never have represented such a large portion of the U.S. presence in a war zone or accounted for so

many security type jobs as in Gulf War II,  experts say.

                The contractors are paid handsomely for the risks they take, with some making

$100,000 or more per year, mostly taxfree- at least six times more than a new Army private.The difference in pay can create ill will between the contractors and U.S troops.

             “When they are side by side doing the same job, there is some resentment,” said

Rick Saccon, who was an intelligence contractor in Baghdad. If the contractors deaths were added to the Pentagon’s count of U.S military casualties, the number of war dead would climb about 25 percent, from about 3,000 as of the end of 2006 to nearly 3,800.