Casualties of war

AT THE BEGINNING OF 2007, EFPs – explosively formed projectiles – were a new and frightening addition to the insurgents' arsenal. They are simple devices, composed of a case, a dish-shaped metal liner or cap and an explosive filler. When the charge is detonated, the force of the explosion sends the copper cap hurtling out at such high speed that it bends into a rough cone that, due to its high velocity, can penetrate armoured vehicles.

In Iraq, they're usually used on stretches of open highway. Typically, the trigger is an infrared beam, broken by the lead vehicle. As a result, the front of a convoy is an unpopular place to be.

In early 2007, Robert Cumming, a former paratrooper from Comrie, was working for the British private security company Erinys on a contract to protect US military engineers as they moved around the country. On 31 March, he was escorting a convoy near Diwaniya, approximately 100 miles from Baghdad, along a highway known as Route Madrid. His armoured Ford Excursion SUV was the lead vehicle, operated by a four-man team: driver Howard Lodge, Christopher Kwesi and Donald Bryant, with Cumming acting as side-gunner, sitting on a specially installed seat. They had dropped off their clients and were on the way back to the Erinys compound – known as Eagle 14 – when an EFP exploded beside them.

Shrapnel burst into the cab, hitting all four men. Cumming and Kwesi took the full force of the impact and died instantly, chunks of metal slicing through Kwesi's face into his skull and cutting deep into Cumming's neck. Scraps of shrapnel severed Lodge's leg and peppered Bryant in his neck, spine, leg and jaw. The damage to Cumming's face and neck was so severe that the undertaker refused to let his sister, Deely, see his body when it arrived at Glasgow Airport on 5 April.

There were nine other contractors' bodies in the hold, the undertaker told her, and two of them were mutilated beyond recognition.

As of June 2007, according to US government figures just over 1,000 contractors had been killed since the start of the war. Against other figures, this seems relatively small-scale. By March 2008, the US Department of Defence had confirmed over 4,000 US, 174 UK and 133 coalition military casualties. According to Iraq Body Count, a website that records civilian deaths reported in the English-language media, over 88,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed by the end of 2007. And yet the contractor estimates are so vague as to be almost opaque.

There were nine bodies on the same flight as Robert Cumming, Emirates flight EK 025 into Glasgow Airport. It's unclear how often contractors' bodies are returned to the UK. It's also unclear whether the men all worked for Erinys or for a number of companies. It's unlikely that Glasgow is the drop-off for the whole of the UK, so it's reasonable to assume these men were all Scottish.

Whichever way you do the sums, however, ten dead seems a very high body count for one part of the UK on just one flight, especially if the official estimate puts the total body count at only 1,000 across four years.

Cumming's death also highlights how the families of dead contractors can suffer at the hands of a private system where the rules change from company to company, contracts are unclear and ex-soldiers, who are used to trusting in their superiors, take it as read that they and their loved ones will be looked after. As a result of Cumming's death, his girlfriend has faced financial difficulties and his family had to battle his employers for funeral expenses that never arrived. Only one Erinys representative turned up at his funeral, while there managing to recruit one of his friends to fill his now vacant position in Iraq.

When I went to meet his sisters in January, Deely, at 46 the youngest of the three, took me to the cemetery in Comrie to see her brother's grave. On the grass lay an empty bottle of San Miguel, which she had emptied there on his 36th birthday the previous week.

She pointed to the poppy wreath sent by the officers and men of the Parachute Regiment and described how his ex-comrades had carried his coffin to the graveside in full military dress. "There were hundreds of them," she said cheerfully, as if it was the story of a successful village fete.

Then she knelt down and picked up a bullet that lay beside the beer bottle. "A guy from 3 Para left him that ..." She wasn't cheerful any more.

Until recently, the Cummings ran the village chip shop out of a converted front room in a stone cottage conveniently situated next to the Ancaster Arms. When Cumming was a baby, his sisters used to wash him in a large plastic bucket in the kitchen, while his mother fried chips. He would sit in his playpen in the shop and smile at all the customers.

Linda, the eldest, met us in the kitchen of her house next door, which is built on land that once formed the chippy's garden. She smiled when I asked her to describe her brother. "He was a wild wee bugger," she said. "Very lively. Not academic, but very sporty and practical. As soon as he could talk, all he wanted to be was a soldier. He was totally obsessed. He had his wee toy soldiers and he used to play out in the garden with them. He'd have armies all over the place."

He shone at sports, always winning the trophies on sports day. He joined the cadets at Crieff High School and was accepted into the Junior Paras when he was 16, training at Pirbright, then joining the First Battalion after passing out in June 1989.

Cumming's career in the Paras started well. He served a tour in Belfast, during which a car tried to run a checkpoint he was guarding, but he dealt with the threat within the strict rules of engagement.

He was married in 1997 to a girl called Justine. His wedding speech was brief – "Right, everyone, thanks for coming, let's get p***ed" – and the marriage didn't last long either. The couple moved to Dumfries, where Cumming was in charge of the army recruiting office. He'd taken the job because it brought a temporary promotion to acting sergeant, and he'd been waiting for his third stripe for a while.

Dumfries was also where he met Emma. His marriage to Justine had already hit a rocky patch and the two of them were marking time until the divorce came through. He told Justine about this girl he'd met, and she gave him her blessing – as much as she could. After Dumfries, he returned to his regiment with a new love and hope of securing a full promotion, but the army decided not to make him up to full sergeant just yet.

He applied to Catterick to train recruits, but they didn't like his old-school ways. His regiment was posted down to Dover, where they did nothing but the occasional booze run. Then there was another six-month stint in Ireland, where he stood in a watchtower, bored out of his mind.

In 2002, he told Deely he only had seven years until he could take retirement – his big pay-off, as he called it. But in the end he'd had enough. So many of his friends had come out, and all were going into the private companies, earning big money. One pal, Stewart Kinney, had been in a training programme run by a private company called Phoenix. It used to be run by two SAS guys, until they sold out to Armor Group (AG). Phoenix ran courses training 35 soldiers in close protection for 30 days, then hosted an open day during which the security companies would come and take the men they wanted. As AG owned Phoenix, they'd always get first pick.

In the end, Robert decided to take the Phoenix course. "All the blokes I've come through training with are out there," he explained to his family. "I'll be fine." He left the regiment on 14 February 2006 for a close-protection job with AG in Afghanistan, guarding the British embassy in Kabul, alongside his old mate Kinney.

"The British embassy contract was sweet," Kinney recalls. "Most of the time everyone cuts costs. The AK47 is a great gun, if it's made by the Russians. But it's the most copied gun in the world. If you get a Chinese or Pakistani model, it's going to seize up on you. Likewise with ammunition. And run-flat tyres. You want tyres that will get you out of a contact if you're hit, but they cost upwards of £80 a tyre.

"With the embassy contract, the client stipulated that we had to have the best weapons, the best vehicles and that we slept in the same conditions as the client. They stipulated B6 armour that can fend off almost anything a suicide bomber can do, unless they go right under the engine block. With B6 I've seen a guy pull the cord right next to a vehicle window, and the four guys just got out with ringing in their ears. But that sort of contract is rare."

Cumming shared a billet with John O'Connor, an ex-marine. "When I first met Rob I thought he was just another gobby Para, upstairs playing his music as loud as possible," O'Connor recalls. "He'd come down past my door every morning, bang on it as hard as he could and shout, 'John O'Connor, you are marked for termination.' But I ended up getting on really well with him.

"I would come back to the UK, play with my kids, pick up the clothes that they'd grown out of and take them back to give to Afghan kids. We'd drive into a village, Rob would say, 'Give me that,' take the clothes, march up to people and say, 'Here,' thrusting the clothes out towards them. People's faces – they were petrified. That's what he was like – big and boomy but always meaning well."

In November, AG announced it was changing the contracts. It held a big meeting with all its contractors and started going through endless details, until one man stood up and said: "What are you paying us and what's the rotation?" It turned out AG was cutting salaries by £10,000 a year and making the men work an extra month.

Cumming's problem was that he'd recently bought a house with Emma near RAF Brize Norton and he was paying 75 per cent of the mortgage. The reduced salary meant he'd struggle to meet his payments. He wrote a letter of resignation, saying: "I'm really sorry, I liked working for you guys." Then he began hunting for work, putting his CV out and checking the contractor websites for vacant positions.

Time was pressing, however. Working in Iraq or Afghanistan meant a tax-free salary, but only if he spent no more than 30 days a year in the UK. Towards the end of December, his days were running out and a hefty tax bill was looming. At the end the month, he was offered a job with Erinys.

Erinys was founded in the UK in 2002 by Sean Cleary, a former apartheid-era intelligence officer in the South African military. He left the company in 2003 to become a political adviser to Jonas Savimbi, leader of the UNITA rebel forces in Angola, and was replaced by former SAS officer Alastair Morrison, who'd spent the 1990s running Defence Systems Limited. Under Morrison, Erinys secured a 40 million contract in August 2003 to supply and train 6,500 armed guards charged with protecting 140 Iraqi oil wells, 7,000 km of pipelines and dozens of refineries, as well as power plants and the water supply for the Iraqi Ministry of Oil. The Coalition Provisional Authority later increased that contract to provide air surveillance and boost the close protection force.

At the start of 2008, Erinys had roughly 14,000 personnel in Iraq, a larger force than the British army at its peak. A significant number of its guards have been recruited from the ranks of the Free Iraqi Forces, an Iraqi paramilitary group formed by Iraqi exile and CIA informer Ahmed Chalabi.

Chalabi's private army wasn't the only source of recruits. In May 2004, a suicide bomber parked in a disguised ambulance outside the Shaheen Hotel in Baghdad detonated his charges, killing four people and wounding scores of others. Among the dead and wounded were a number of Erinys employees, and when their identities were made public it sent shockwaves through the South African media. One of the dead was Frans Strydom, a former member of the Koevoet – Afrikaans for "crowbar" – a counter-insurgency arm of the South African military of dubious legality that fought in Namibia to prevent it achieving independence and whose members were paid a bounty for the bodies of SWAPO activists.

Among the wounded was Deon Gouws, a member of the notorious Vlakplaas death squad, who told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission he had firebombed the homes of "between 40 and 60 anti-apartheid activists", killing at least 14 people.

Robert Cumming didn't know any of this when he took up the company's offer of employment. He was in a hurry. "I will be able to deploy by January 13, although I'd like to come out sooner if possible due to running short on days in the UK," he e-mailed Erinys' travel manager Andy Weir on 27 December 2006.

Tax on the previous year's money would have taken a significant chunk of the nest egg he was building for his retirement. He planned to move to New Zealand with Emma and get involved in the extreme sports industry, ideally as an instructor. He loved parachuting, but he was also an accomplished skier, runner and kick-boxer, winning bronze for Scotland in the 2003 Muay Thai World Championships.

The offer of employment finally arrived: a one-page document signed by Andy Shwenn, human resources manager for Erinys Iraq. It offered 10,000 a month on a three-month rolling contract, 30 days' leave for every 90 days worked and "non-contributory insurance provided under the US Defense Base Act". Cumming told Emma this meant his insurance was just the same as he'd had with AG. On 12 January, he flew out to Iraq.

Linda got the phone call from Shindi Poona, the Erinys Iraq country manager, just before 4pm on 1 April. "He told me and my heart just went. Then he said, 'We'll be in touch with you.' I called Emma's house, but she wasn't there, so I rang the others. As soon as they got in the gate, Mum said, 'It's Robert ...' "

They spent the next few days in a state of shock. Andy Shwenn e-mailed an account of the attack and the details of the flight Cumming's body would be on. He asked for information about the funeral so someone from the company could pay their respects. He said he would make sure they felt part of the Erinys family over the coming months.

Over the next few days, the sisters contacted Cumming's old friends and started organising the funeral, while Emma's father made a few inquiries about the insurance policy. On the day, the whole village stopped. Hundreds of neighbours turned out and all his friends from the Paras flew in, filling the B&Bs and camping out in the garden.

Shindi Poona arrived and started a conversation with one of Cumming's old comrades, Phil "Smudger" Smith, that led to Smith taking Cumming's old job.

Over the next few months, Emma's debts mounted and her father pushed insurers CNA for the money due to her from Cumming's policy. CNA refused to pay on the grounds that Emma was his girlfriend, and the policy only paid out to wives or parents. In February this year the couple's house was repossessed.

Many returning contractors or their families find similar problems in securing compensation for injury or death. There is little media sympathy for their cause. The fact that these men took big money has effectively removed them from public sympathy or, indeed, the public eye. The extent of the contractors' presence in Iraq was almost entirely unknown, despite the Blackwater Fallujah incident (in which a convoy was attacked in 2004 and four contractors from US security firm Blackwater were killed, their mutilated bodies hung from a bridge). The one event that finally alerted the world to what was going on in the country had a certain grim irony in that it also involved Blackwater, but this time the company employees were delivering death rather than receiving it...

War plc by Stephen Armstrong is published by Faber & Faber, priced £14.99.