Re: Families Wait for Word on Missing

Date: April 16, 2004

"Families wait for word on missing

By Simon Romero The New York Times

HOUSTON - The families of six Halliburton employees who have been missing since an ambush last week in Iraq have been waiting in seclusion, with company representatives by their sides.

Unlike another Halliburton employee, Thomas Hamill, whose hometown of Macon, Miss., was emblazoned with yellow ribbons after his capture was videotaped and broadcast worldwide over the weekend, the employees and their families in Texas remain unidentified. No pictures of the missing workers have surfaced.

"This is a grueling and difficult development, and we are working diligently to assist the families and the military any way we can," Wendy Hall, a spokeswoman for Halliburton, said in a statement Monday.

She would not disclose any details of those missing, who were part of a transportation convoy on a routine mission for the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, or Logcap, which provides services such as collecting trash and supplying food and water for the U.S. Army Materiel Command. They are just a few of the 24,000 employees that Halliburton and its contractors have in the Iraq-Kuwait region to support military operations. In the past year, 30 Halliburton employees and contractors have died. Nine were full-time employees, Hall said.

The hazards faced by those and other employees were vividly described Monday by returning Halliburton employees whose convoys were ambushed in a separate incident Thursday.

"I had to jump out of the truck while it was exploding, and they were chasing us with rocks and sticks, guns," Stephen Heering said at a televised news conference upon arriving at Houston's George Bush Intercontinental Airport. Heering, 33, a truck driver from Magnolia, said he decided to leave Iraq four months into a one-year contract after encountering waves of violence.

Even for the families of those Halliburton employees who were military veterans themselves, the chaotic evolution of the war's aftermath has brought the conflict closer to home. Steve Daniel, a truck driver from Weatherford who is working in Iraq, knows Hamill. Little could prepare Daniel's family for what they have seen on television in recent days and what they have heard in his phone calls.

"In the past few days, he's been crying because he doesn't know whether he'll make it out alive," said Daniel's daughter, Leighann Daniel, 19. "He never cries. He told us the airport had been bombed, so we were home all Sunday waiting to hear from him, so it was a pretty bad Easter."

ONLINE: Halliburton, www.halliburton.com"