I looked up the salary and came up with 25,000 a month, which fits with "impressive salary for a guy my age" (paraphrase). 300K a year?
Also: "A contract employee working overseas generally makes better money than they could in the U.S. (that was Ms. Khan's motivation -- a base salary of $48,000 a year and the chance to make as much as $80,000 with overtime, much of it tax-free)"
I did similar work out there in 2006 (I was at Abu Ghraib) in a similar role, and I didn't make 25K a month.
I made four, with no OT, and I got a pretty nice contract-ending bonus. For the record, I considered $4K a month to be an impressive salary for someone my age... I was 19.
When I was out there, we had to wear our body-armour at all times, except when in the DEFAC (cafeteria), or asleep.
The note that they only have to wear it in transit makes me think that he's at Camp Victory aka "Camp Cupcake". Or, for the uninitiated, where Saddam used to live. It's probably (a lot) nicer than your hometown.
If it's honestly 25K, the dude must be Cheney's nephew, or that figure is in Rupees. Or I want to go back more than I thought I did.
And (from what I understand) most of the mercenaries get paid (relatively) shit money, because they're wackos from shit countries. Sure, there are some Blackwater execs, and ex-SEALs that make nice money, but most of them are there because they need somebody who's willing to be shot at, and whose almost inevitable death won't contribute much to what's already a shitstorm on the home front.
300k sounds a little high to me. I've read reports of mercenaries in Iraq earning around 250k - 300k in a year (and being happy to do so).
You'd have to expect that a guy whose job is to take a bullet for some foreign dignitary would get paid better than some guy who sits in a bunker and taps on a keyboard.
I'm just going by stuff I've read though, nothing really concrete.
"...I honestly feel safer out here than I did in Vegas... I also never work outside of the camp's secured perimeter. "
In one line he skewers CNN for portraying Iraq as dangerous, and then another he talks about working within a US military secured perimeter. So which is it?
It's safer on the bases than "over the wire", obviously.
If you're hanging out in the slums of Baghdad by yourself, that's another story.
According to
http://www.icasualties.org/oif/Details.aspx
3 of the last 500 American deaths in Iraq have been on a base. None of them were classified as hostile. Those deaths go back over a year, to Aug/07.
Compare that to your hometown (be it Vegas, Silicon Valley, Cambridge, or Boise), and it probably stacks up favourably.
3 deaths per year is a mortality rate of 2 per 100 000. The rate for the US total is ~900 per 100K, for 15-24 year olds is ~90, and for 24-45 year olds it's about 200.
