By Chris Lombardi

On the screen, a young man with elfin eyes half-smiles as he tells the story of his escape from a foreign land where he was held against his will. “I passed around a piece of paper that said, “If You Want to Escape, Write Your Name Here.” That night, he says, he and forty others were led to freedom by an American soldier.

That young man was not some refugee from long ago, from places like Nazi Germany or the Balkans. Ramil Autencio’s location was Iraq, and his captor was a Middle East construction firm, forcing him and his fellow Filipinos to do backbreaking work on a U.S. Army base. After their escape, he and others sued the agency that hired them, and in 2005, a Philippine court ruled in their favor, saying that they had been trafficked in violation of international law. But the employer, a sub-contractor of Halliburton, remains untouched and is now worth $2 billion.

The documentary film “Someone Else’s War,” which tells Autencio’s story and that of the other 100,000-plus Asian laborers in Iraq, was screened last Friday night in a midtown classroom on West 43rd Street, at the City University of New York’s Asian American Research Institute (AARI). The audience of 40–50 people, mostly Asian-American, told filmmaker Lee Wang that they were both shocked and unsurprised by the film, since South and East Asia now supply so much labor for the rest of the world. Wang, who made “Someone Else’s War” after years as a TV journalist, added that the role in Iraq of these third-country nationals (commonly known as TNCs) cuts straight to the heart of profound questions about labor, globalization, corporate accountability and who is paying the true costs of America’s wars.

A slender young woman of 29 who speaks with the calm diction of the television reporter she trained to be, Wang took the podium before the screening began. She said that in 2003-2004, as the Iraq war began, she felt frustrated in the MSNBC newsroom, as newsfeeds and story pitches that showed negative aspects of the war were ignored and tossed aside. For her first documentary, which she completed as part of a master’s degree in journalism from the University of California at Berkeley, she sought and found a gritty story almost completely untold—that of the 30,000 TNCs working for the U.S. military.

Wang told the AARI audience that she learned about these workers almost by accident. As she researched further, she said, “I learned so much else that was so surprising, about the military and privatization.”

According to experts, of the 250,000 or so “boots on the ground” in Iraq, roughly half are civilian contractors. Private companies now perform many of the tasks formerly performed by those in uniform—from supply to support to combat itself. “It’s a new industry, so it’s got everything from startups to big companies,” Peter W. Singer, of the Brookings Institution, recently told Chelsea Now. “These companies are not just supplying the goods of war but the services. They’re within the military, right in there next to the uniforms.”

According to Pratab Chatterjee of the think tank CorpWatch, who appears in Wang’s film, private military firms are evenly divided between mercenaries like Blackwater, a large, well-known firm that provides security and combat expertise, and companies performing more menial labor, such as cooking, hauling and construction. All of these “support and logistics” services are provided, on paper, by Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), a division of Houston oil services firm Halliburton, which for years employed Vice President Dick Cheney as its chief executive officer.

Cheney is the godfather of Wang’s film in more ways than one, according to Wang, who told the audience that when Cheney was secretary of defense in the late 1980s, he commissioned a study on privatizing the U.S. military. The results were put into place afterward, and accelerated by the Clinton administration. “Halliburton’s first big logistics contract was in the Balkans,” said Wang, who added that in the post-September 11 wars, the corporate presence has ballooned.

“In the first Gulf War,” said Wang, “one of every 10 ‘boots on the ground’ was a civilian contractor. Now, it’s closer to a one-to-one ratio.”

As explained by experts and testimonies in “Someone Else’s War,” TNCs normally pay an initial fee of more than $1,000 to contracting agencies in order to get these jobs, while future wages are withheld to cover additional “fees.” They therefore begin their stint in debt to their employers and remain that way for some time. They work hard, often without helmets or body armor, and live in completely separate spaces from the soldiers they serve. In the film, former Halliburton foreman Michael Lamb describes the living conditions of his construction crew. “There are 300 men in a place that’s about half the size of a Wal-Mart parking lot, and they were living in shipping containers. No shower heads, often no shower water—there was often black water coming out of those Blackwater containers.”

Of the 50,000 people working in Iraq under Halliburton, a full 80 percent are TNCs—employed by a maze of companies with names like Prime Projects International, Cerka and Gulf Catering, in addition to First Kuwaiti. On average, the workers earn about $300 a month—a fraction of the $7,500-plus a month paid to American contractor employees, but far more than most could earn in their home countries.

First Kuwaiti had its workers lined up even before the invasion began, according to Ricardo Endaya, the Philippines envoy to Iraq in 2003, who Wang interviewed last year.

“He said that U.S. officials met with him and representatives of First Kuwaiti in January 2003, and asked for 20,000 workers,” said Wang. At the time, the Kuwait company was valued at $35 million, according to Washington journalist David Phinney; now it’s closer to $2 billion—including $592 million to build a new U.S. embassy in Baghdad, a project for which it is again accused of trafficking TNCs. Company insiders have admitted, to Phinney and other journalists, that they confiscate workers’ passports: “All the passports are kept in our offices,” Phinney quoted one as saying.

The Philippine government of Gloria Arroyo, which had initially trumpeted itself as a key member of the “coalition of the willing,” has placed strict restrictions on its citizens’ ability to work in Iraq, Wang told the AARI audience. “There’s a famous case of a Filipino truck driver who was kidnapped by insurgents, and his face was on Al-Jazzier—and there were massive demonstrations in the Philippines, so they had to.”

Wang’s film uses experts like Pratab Chatterjee, Filipino journalist Howie Severino and the former Halliburton foreman Mike Lamb to explain the dilemmas faced by three workers.

Ailyn Mateo’s sweet face opens the film in a still shot, as her mother, Mara, tells her story in rapid Tagalog, saying that her daughter was determined to go to Iraq: “It was her adventure.” Mateo, 30, has returned to Iraq twice, despite being seriously injured when a suicide bomber, dressed as an Iraqi soldier, pulled all his wires and blew himself up in the Marine Corps dining hall where she worked.

Ramil Autencio signed up with MGM Worldwide Manpower and General Services in December 2003, agreeing to work at the Kuwait Crowne Plaza for $450 a month. But when he got to Kuwait, he was taken by First Kuwaiti to Iraq, on threat of arrest or death. He spent his days moving boulders to fortify the buildings of Camp Anaconda, the U.S. Army’s fortress near Tikrit, until a Filipino-American soldier helped him and 40 other Filipino workers escape in early 2005. The workers then sued MGM and won, but the agency had already fled the country, with First Kuwaiti and Halliburton still untouchable.

Rodrigo Reyes is seen only in still photos in the film, holding his 5-year-old child. A stolid man with a beefy smile, he left his family behind to take a lucrative, if dangerous, job driving trucks for First Kuwaiti in Iraq. “The trucks used to be driven by Americans, but when it started to get really dangerous, they started switching out and hiring TNCs,” said Wang at the AARI event. Army veterans have told the press that they dreaded having to follow and protect the slow TNC convoys, which break down often. Reyes’ truck lacked armor, like most driven by TNC drivers in Iraq, and he ran out of luck on April 28, 2004, when his convoy was ambushed while delivering supplies to Camp Anaconda (the same base Autencio had helped build).

Wang told last week’s audience that as she spent time with Mateo’s, Autencio’s and Reyes’ families, she was struck by how so many Filipinos saw these Iraq jobs as their only way out of deep poverty. “Ailyn, she’s been through the wringer; she’s been through a suicide bombing. [If she’s able to return to Iraq], she’d have to leave her kids,” said Wang. “But she’ll keep trying [to go back].”

Wang then described for the AARI audience some of what she saw in Iraq in January. The workers on three major U.S. bases, she said, live far from the bases’ creature comforts, like swimming pools, broadband and purified water. “Where they live—it’s kind of apart, behind concertina wire.” Wang and her crew tried to covertly interview some of them, “but it was hard.” And the soldiers she met on the bases don’t really see the TNCs, she added. “It’s kind of like some very upscale restaurant, and all the Mexicans in the back no one ever thinks about. Except it’s war.”

The workers are visible enough to be barred from on-base shops and services, she added, with rules that varied at each base along with the ethnicity of the workers. At Anaconda, whose TNCs came from India, Bangladesh and Uganda, only Ugandan workers were allowed in the sole store on the base. At QS, a smaller base near Mosul, most of whose workers came from the Philippines and Nepal, “It was the Turkish workers who were allowed, but no one else,” said Wang.

The response of the group at AARI ranged from shock and anger to a kind of soft resignation. Anger was focused not just on the easier targets of the Bush administration, but also on the seeming complicity of Asian governments in the abuse of their workers.

“My poor, poor country,” said one CUNY employee, native to the Philippines, who told Wang that the Philippine government takes a cut of each remittance before the worker sees a penny. “How will it end, this globalization?” Others asked why there were few Chinese workers among TNCs in Iraq.

“I think it has to do with which companies were already sending workers to the Middle East,” said Wang. “This really is a story about globalization.” Only now, she said, the logic of global markets, seeking low costs and high profits, is being used by the U.S. military.

Wang ended by asking Asian Americans to become informed, and to contact their elected representatives with questions like, “If soldiers had to do what the TNCs are doing, what would the war really cost?” and “When you don’t provide armor, or Kevlar, what are you saying Asian people’s lives are worth?”