Constantine Rodrigues had just fetched chilli peppers and was going out to get some onions when he heard the siren for an incoming rocket.
All he remembers was a door blasting open and a loud
explosion.
A quiet man from the former Portuguese colony of Goa in
southwestern India, Rodrigues was working at a Pizza Hut restaurant
at Taji, one of the main US air bases in Iraq, when he was caught
up in an attack.
He is lucky to be alive, said Lieutenant-Colonel Matthew Martin,
the surgeon who treated him earlier this month at the 28th Combat
Support Hospital in Baghdad.
Shrapnel took out an eye, pulverised one of his legs and damaged his torso.
He lost a lot of blood, but surgeons were able to save
him.
As he lay recovering in hospital, all he could think of was the new
wife he had left in India when he went to Iraq last year, and the 7
1/2-month-old baby he had never met.
"I had gotten the capsicum. And I was going to get onions,"
Rodriguez said from his hospital bed.
"I heard the siren...What happened after I don't know.
I don't blame anybody. Just take care of me and my family. One leg.
One eye. What can I do with my family now?"
The Kuwaiti firm that employed Rodrigues, Al Homaizi, operates 11
Pizza Huts, 13 Burger Kings and five Taco Bells on American bases
in Iraq, said Joe Petrusich, who runs the firm's Iraq
restaurants.
It employs about 300 workers, recruited in Kuwait but nearly all
from poor countries in Asia: India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal
and the Philippines.
They are a small part of the vast army behind the army - the tens
of thousands of "TCNs" - "third-country nationals" - hired to feed
US troops, wash their laundry, build their compounds and clean
their toilets, for salaries of at most several hundred dollars a
month.
The US military says that by contracting out tasks like cooking and
cleaning, it can provide its soldiers with a better environment at
a lower cost.
Controversy back home
For poor countries, allowing their citizens to work in Iraq has
been controversial and often politically sensitive.
India has told its citizens not to work in Iraq since 2004, when
three Indian contractors were kidnapped and demonstrators took to
the streets at home complaining the government did too little to
protect them.
But there is little a country can do to prevent its citizens taking
work that pays much better than jobs at home.
The Philippines now puts stamps in new passports saying they are
not valid for travel to Iraq.
Petrusich said the firm still employed Filipino workers in Iraq, as
long as they have old passports without the stamps.
Al Homaizi is Pizza Hut's franchise in Kuwait, with 45 restaurants
in that oil-rich Gulf state, where nearly all workers are recruited
from poor Asian countries.
The firm offers staff at its Kuwait restaurants double pay if
they go to Iraq.
For Rodrigues, that was the equivalent of about $450 a month,
enough finally to find a wife and start a family back in India
after 10 years of working in Kuwait.
The average per capita income in Goa is about $1,100 a
year.
Petrusich said Rodrigues would receive free medical care in Kuwait,
including physiotherapy and a prosthetic leg, and one-off payments
totalling 18,333 Kuwaiti dinars, about $55,000, if he is finally
deemed permanently disabled.
"I'm very close to these guys. I've known all of them. I know we do
everything we can," he said.
"It's just an unfortunate situation that has happened."
