Officer recalls Iraq reconstruction

If you hear an explosion, chances are it didn't kill you. That's one of the many lessons Lt. Col. Norman Grady picked up while stationed in Basrah, Iraq with United States Army Corps of Engineers. "If you hear a rocket attack, it didn't hurt you," Grady told a group of Auburn University engineering students Tuesday. "If you don't hear it, you're not there to worry about it."

As deputy commander of the southern district in Iraq, Grady oversaw $2.3 billion in construction efforts to rebuild a country ravaged by war and decayed by decades of neglect. The work of building schools, restoring power and dodging mortar attacks was both challenging and rewarding, Grady said.

Grady, who now lives in Chicago, Ill., spent eight months in Iraq in 2004. In that time, he says he saw greater efforts to replace foreign national workers with Iraqis in the reconstruction effort. Grady said resistance to involving Iraqis at the onset of the effort helped to develop an "applicant pool for anti-government forces."

The majority of USACE employees are not Iraqi. Iraqis comprise about 24 percent of the employees in the countries three sectors, Grady said. It's likely the USACE ended up employing some of the very Iraqis who had sabotaged USACE projects before, but Grady said investing Iraqis in the process made USACE projects less vulnerable to sabotage. The USACE, a force that is comprised of 97 percent civilians, is just one of many groups engaged in the reconstruction effort. Independent contractors have take on a significant chunk of the projects. The most well known of those contractors is Kellog, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton where Vice President Dick Cheney served as chief executive from 1995 to 2000. KBR came under fire last week when a Pentagon audit questioned more than $100 million in costs for the contractor's fuel delivery project in Iraq, the Washington Post reported.

Despite the criticisms about Halliburton's no-bid contract in Iraq, Grady praised KBR's contributions to the reconstruction effort. "In my particular experience, they were the best," he said. As Grady worked to recruit AU students for future service with the USACE, he described the organization as apolitical. "We engineers are lucky," he said, "because we just build."