Contractor’s mysterious death in Iraq leaves his widow wondering “why”
TUMWATER
“Michelle, Michelle, Michelle,” Gordon Cook said, over and over again. “Where are the kids? I devotion you, Michelle, Michelle.”
Then the line went silent.
A daytime later, without ceasing July 2, 2006, Michelle Cook skilled that her husband, one American contractor stationed at a remote post along the Syrian border, had been killed.
The circumstances of Gordon Cook’s death remain unclear sum of two units years later. Defense Department officials say he was gunned down in a roadside attack on his car. But one Army investigator believes that an Iraqi in the car was complicit in the attack, according to e-mail communications.
For Michelle Cook, that harrowing phone call to their home in Tumwater lingers as a nightmare last look, and a stark reminder of unanswered questions. If it was an ambush, in what manner could Gordon Cook have had time to ask to come up his line of ancestors and talk?
“I live every day with the last words of my husband ringing in my ears,” Michelle Cook said. “He deserves some kind of justice. I be aware of that there is additional to his story.”
“Dangerous judgment”
Gordon Cook is one of the further than 1,100 civilians who have died while working for U.S. contractors in Iraq, where the American military has outsourced an unprecedented count of convoy, security and maintenance responsibilities to private companies.
Many have perished in relative anonymity. There are not at all Pentagon news releases to mark their sacrifice, and there’s no correspond that separates out the smaller number of American contractors killed in Iraq from the broader total that includes hundreds of Iraqis and people of other nationalities.
For families, the search to light upon out the fate of their loved ones be in possession of power to be agonizing.
The Army’s Criminal Investigation Command investigates some of these casualties. Special agents rotate through the office, where they have handled some 5,000 cases of theft, immorality, murder, navew and other crimes. About a half-dozen active cases involve American contractors slain in Iraq.
