a proper environment.” Paul Cerjan, retired Army lieutenant general, currently vice president of
Kellogg Brown & Root Worldwide Military Affairs, April 13, 2005.
“The reason we have contractors is that they take the place of soldiers. And it doesn’t matter
whether they’re guarding a facility or a convoy or cooking meals.” Secretary of Defense Robert
Gates, October 3, 2007
In the 2005 Frontline film, Private Warriors—a documentary about outsourcing military
services in Iraq—non-military men from South and Southeast Asian countries are an undeniably
ubiquitous presence (Gaviria and Smith 2005). In one scene, a South Asian man donning a
“Pizza Hut Iraq” baseball cap serves pizza to soldiers in the food court of Camp Victory in
Baghdad. Another scene takes place forty miles north of Baghdad in Camp Anaconda, a vast
base housing 28,000 soldiers and 8,000 contractors. Here, we see a Southeast Asian man pushing
a laundry cart past countless aisles of washing machines and dryers. In several other scenes shot
in Camp Anaconda, a South Asian man serves a cheeseburger to an African American male
soldier and another South Asian man scoops ice cream for a young white male soldier. And
finally, in another scene, yet another South Asian man is filmed moving in and out of individual
portable latrines, cleaning each, while two white soldiers sit by. The filmmakers never explicitly
discuss these South Asian men and the work that they do, but the film visually illustrates the
significance of their presence in the kitchens, laundry rooms, and barracks of the military bases
across Iraq. While there has been little to no data gathered as to the presence of migrant workers
in service occupations, the data that does exist along with anecdotal evidence gathered by
journalists suggests that the division of reproductive labor on twenty-first century U.S. military
3
Convention