Contractors Killed in Iraq

Daniel Parker Kellogg Brown & Root

Last June, two days after 56-year-old Daniel Parker retired from a two-decade career with the U.S. Border Patrol, he was on his way to Iraq.

Jacquie Parker, his wife of 31 years, said he went for two reasons: to earn money for his children's college tuition and weddings bills and to do some good. Parker had served two tours in Vietnam and left the military as a first lieutenant.

"He said he blew apart South Vietnam and now he had a chance to rebuild" something instead, his wife said.

Parker was working as a teacher at the Border Patrol Academy when friends told him Halliburton Co.'s Kellogg Brown & Root subsidiary was recruiting personnel for Iraq. KBR hired him to go to Iraq as a security coordinator. In the 325 e-mails Parker sent his wife during his time in Iraq, he told tales of poverty and dust and fearful people.

Jacquie Parker sat at her computer every night waiting for his regular e-mail. On May 7, it didn't come. Daniel Parker called home, saying not to worry -- the computers were down. Then, 97 minutes later, she said, an explosive device detonated near the convoy he was protecting outside Baghdad International Airport. A piece of shrapnel severed his spinal cord and killed him.

-- Ellen McCarthy

Michael Rene Pouliot Tapestry Solutions

Michael Rene Pouliot was driving near Camp Doha in Kuwait in January 2003 when a sniper emerged from the bushes and fired 22 bullets into his sport-utility vehicle, killing him and wounding a co-worker.

The 46-year-old was the executive vice president of Tapestry Solutions, a San Diego company he co-founded in 1993 after working as an aerospace engineer at General Dynamics Corp. The firm's software was used to coordinate military operations. He had a small team of employees stationed with the Army in Kuwait.

Pouliot had gone to check on his team there, his second trip to the Middle East in two months. "Mike was never afraid of anything," said Carol Pouliot, his wife of nearly 25 years. "He was so proud. For him to be a non-military guy and yet contributing so much was just fulfilling beyond words."

Her daughters, Tessa, 14, and Megan, 13, often wish it had been someone else hit that day, said his wife. But she said she's comfortable with the decisions he made. "Anyone who can stand up and face dangers . . . anyone who follows their convictions is a gold mine," she said.

-- Ellen McCarthy