Feral Jundi

   I wanted to post this as a reminder to all of us, just what happens when you get injured in this kind of work.  There are no ‘how to’ manuals on this stuff, nor is your care guaranteed to be complete or even good.  The one thing you can do is prepare yourself mentally for the possible outcomes when injured.  And if you read through Jeff’s story, as well as the many other stories printed about the subject, you will find that it is no easy fight. Companies like AIG will fight tooth and nail to pay as little as possible to cover your injury.  One thing is for sure, either spend the money on a good insurance policy that covers war zones or get a good lawyer, or get both if you can afford it.  Also get a good CPA, because you will need it for all the financial headaches involved with this stuff. –Matt

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Severely injured as a truck driver in Iraq, Jeff Haysom fights to rebuild his life

by LEAH BETH WARD

Yakima Herald-Republic

SARA GETTYS/Yakima Herald-Republic

Jeff Haysom sits with one of his family’s goats, Gizmo, at his home in Gleed. While he was working as a civilian contractor in Iraq, Haysom was injured by shrapnel from a bomb that tore into his shoulder and also left him with a traumatic brain injury. Haysom is still active around his home, but tires easily and has trouble remembering things — disabilities that have made it impossible for him to keep a job. Instead, he works around his home caring for his animals including turkeys, chickens and goats. Although he and his wife are still fighting for workers compensation benefits, he says that his injury has forced him to slow down. He says that although it might take him twice as long to complete a task as it did before his injury, he’s grateful for every day and the opportunity to spend time with his family and at his home.

YAKIMA, Wash. — Jeff Haysom was a little anxious as he eased his fuel tanker out behind the lead truck in a convoy headed north from a U.S. military camp southeast of Baghdad.

He noted the sun was setting, providing shadowy cover for the enemy. Plus, he thought, it’s never good to be at the front of a convoy. Talk about a sitting duck.

As an unarmed, civilian truck driver in Iraq, Haysom took some comfort in the protective escort provided by the U.S. Army.

But moments later, Haysom heard a big explosion. A large, fiery glow temporarily blinded him. A second blast blew a hole in his windshield. He felt his teeth floating in his mouth.

The last thing Haysom remembers is kicking out the door of the truck. “I didn’t want to be burned alive,” he recalls.

It was late July 2005 and the Yakima resident was working for KBR Inc., then a subsidiary of Halliburton and a leading military contractor.

Medical personnel reached Haysom in a relatively quick 19 minutes. He was stabilized at a hospital in Baghdad and then flown to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. There, doctors found the right carotid artery in his neck severed by shrapnel and his jaw pulverized into tiny fragments.

An X-ray revealed his teeth in his stomach. He had also injured his shoulder and cracked a bone on the side of his head. After multiple surgeries in Germany and at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, Haysom suffered a stroke.

Today, Haysom, 52, is one of more than 31,000 civilians injured in Iraq or Afghanistan, where they are paid by private military contractors to support the U.S. military presence. More than 1,400 have died.

Attracted by the good pay — Haysom stood to make $100,000 tax free in a year — these civilians deliver fuel, prepare meals, work as guards or provide translation, playing a crucial role in the war.

But after they are injured, civilian military workers have no Veterans Administration to advocate for them or their families back home.

Instead, a large number have found themselves in need of a lawyer to fight for workers’ compensation benefits from the for-profit companies like American International Group (AIG), that insured their employers in Iraq.

Reports by ABC News, the Los Angeles Times and ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative organization based in New York, prompted a congressional hearing last month on whether AIG and others have routinely blocked medical care for civilian contractors while charging excessive premiums to the U.S. government.

“We have heard story after story of injured workers coming home minus a limb or traumatized by war zone experiences seared into their psyche, only to face the fight of their lives with their companies’ insurance carrier,” Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, chairman of the Domestic Policy Subcommittee of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said at the hearing.

In a statement, AIG said it pays the overwhelming majority of claims from civilian contractors “without dispute.”

AIG has been paying Haysom temporary benefits of about $900 a week for three years, but is resisting his claim for total permanent disability, which would mean payments for life with an annual cost- of-living adjustment.

Haysom’s lawyer, Gary Pitts of Houston, argued before a U.S. Department of Labor administrative law judge at a hearing in Seattle last week that he is unable to work because of a permanent injury to the right side of his brain. The Labor Department handles the workers’ compensation claims of civilian contractors.

Doctors say the injury is widespread and interferes with his ability to follow instructions that require sequencing — the performance of consecutive tasks from memory. Despite two surgeries on his right rotator cuff, he’s can’t lift his arm above his shoulder.

Haysom said he also tires easily. “I seem to do everything in slow motion,” Haysom explained in an earlier interview.

His wife of 28 years, Valerie, said her husband’s frustration with his physical and mental limitations occasionally causes him to act impulsively — he shoved his brother-in-law on one occasion and grabbed a relative at a family reunion on another. He has been diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder.

“This was not the Jeff before the accident,” Valerie Haysom testified. “Jeff could get mad before but it was controlled.”

But AIG’s lawyer argued that Haysom is well enough to work at least part time because he can drive, works around the home and often baby-sits his grandchildren.

“He does have some residual wage earning capacity but has chosen not to take advantage of that,” John Bennett, a San Francisco-based lawyer, said at the hearing.

Civilian contractors, Bennett suggested, knowingly risk their lives for the big bucks in Iraq. “These guys make a large amount of money over there.”

Civilian workers, if they survive, aren’t the only ones who profit. AIG averaged an annual profit rate of nearly 36 percent from its business of insuring military contractors for workers compensation, according to congressional testimony.

An audit by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, found last year that AIG, the dominant insurer, along with other companies in the market, have earned a combined $600 million from premiums since the start of the war.

If he wins, Haysom will get lifetime pay of $1,047 a week plus a 3.5 percent annual cost-of-living adjustment. The judge’s decision is four to seven months away.

And counterintuitively, if Haysom wins, U.S. taxpayers, not AIG, will foot the bill.

The case — and hundreds like it — is just one more example of what lawyers have long known about the workers’ compensation system as it applies to overseas military contractors.

Even though they bear little risk for the outcome, AIG’s lawyers must litigate the case in good faith or they risk not getting reimbursed for their legal expenses under the War Hazards Compensation Act, part of the workers’ compensation system.

Ironically, Pitts explained, AIG will get its legal fees reimbursed plus 15 percent if it loses the case. If it wins, the insurer must eat those costs.

“It’s a defect in the law,” said Pitts, who also offered similar testimony to Congress.

 ‘Does the thought of working behind a desk at a typical 8-to-5 job make you cringe? Do you prefer to spend your days in dynamic environments taking on the challenges that the world has to offer?”

That’s the pitch KBR, a global construction company with U.S. headquarters in Houston, makes to people seeking work in support of U.S. forces abroad.

More than 240,000 civilians work for U.S. military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan — about 40,000 more than the number of troops in the region. KBR is the largest employer.

The role of this civilian wartime workforce has been largely overlooked, according to Pitts, the Houston lawyer representing Haysom who testified at the recent congressional hearing.

“A lot of Americans don’t know who the civil contractors are or what they’ve sacrificed but they’ve been absolutely essential to this war,” Pitts said.

Jeff Haysom was 49 and a big-rig truck driver with ACE Hardware when he caught the bug of working overseas in a combat zone. As he tells it, the enticement was mostly financial but also an attempt to rectify a past mistake.

“After 14 years with ACE, I felt like I was going in circles financially. I wanted to pay off the mortgage,” he said, referring to the Haysoms’ single-story manufactured home on an acre and a quarter off Highway 12 toward Naches.

But there was another draw.

Haysom had dropped out of high school at 17 and joined the Army. But he took an early discharge after a year and a half, which he blames on his immaturity.

“I was young and I didn’t want to be told what to do. It was one of the biggest mistakes in my life.”

As a mature man, the opportunity to serve his country again was appealing. “It seemed like a chance for me to make up for that bad decision,” he said.

Valerie wasn’t so sure. She and Jeff were fully aware of the dangers, she said.

“I was torn. I didn’t want him to go,” she said.

But knowing how he felt about not sticking with his military career in the first place, Valerie found it difficult to object.

With three of their children grown and the youngest in high school, Haysom left for Iraq, expecting to stay about a year and a half.

Civilians have to work at least 11 months before their wages are tax free. Jeff Haysom was injured nine months after he started.

His extensive injuries required a year of physical therapy, including speech therapy. He saw a psychiatrist for depression.

For most of 2007, Haysom attempted to work.

He tried a paper route but couldn’t keep track of all the delivery points.

He tried grading hops for the U.S. Department of Agriculture but when the bales were stacked above his head, he couldn’t reach up to insert the sampling equipment.

As a residential pesticide sprayer, he applied the chemicals outside the wrong homes. Operating a mower at an orchard, he ran into small, vulnerable fruit trees.

Finally, Haysom thought he had a job he could handle as a groundskeeper at a local hospital. But he said he had trouble repeatedly pulling the starter on mowers and weed eaters with his bad right shoulder and was soon fired.

“I’m not quick enough anymore,” he said. “They wanted me to get more done than I did. I never used to have a problem with that.”

Valerie, who works in a local medical office, said getting fired by the hospital was “a big blow” to her husband. She has since concluded that he can’t hold a job because of the fatigue, his difficulty processing information to complete a task and his trouble interacting personally with other people.

“Jeff has always been a worker. He still has the knowledge but it’s been an ongoing thing of learning to accept the limitations,” she said.

If they don’t get the benefits associated with permanent disability, the Haysoms may have trouble holding onto their home, but both say it could have been worse. They’ve read what some other civilians have been through just to get medical expenses covered, which hasn’t been a problem for them.

Jeff, who was awarded the civilian equivalent to the Purple Heart for his service by the Defense Department, knows of workers who have lost limbs or worse.

“We are the lucky ones by comparison,” said Jeff.

* Leah Beth Ward can be reached at 509-577-7626 or lward@yakimaherald.com.

EDITOR’S NOTE — This story has been updated to correct the weekly pay Haysom will get if a judge rules in his favor.

Story here.