Laid off after 34 years, Al Cayton found himself at retirement age without the means to support himself in his golden years. So at 60, the Pensacola, Fla., man went off to drive trucks in Iraq for Halliburton, lured by the promise of up to $120,000 in cash, tax-free.

"He planned to work until he could draw his Social Security," said his wife of 40 years, Karen.

A roadside bomb put an end to that plan.

Cayton is one of about 30 contract workers who have been killed in Iraq. More than 20 workers have been taken captive by militants in recent weeks, and 200 or so have been wounded in the year since war supposedly ended.

For many of the contract workers and their families, the job has not been the easy money they had hoped for.

Despite all this, there are plenty of people willing to risk a year in Iraq doing mundane jobs for three and four times what they could get at home.

An estimated 15,000 contract workers are helping to rebuild the war-torn country. In recent weeks, they have increasingly become the targets of insurgents trying to end the U.S. occupation.

As for Cayton, he had logged more than 3.6 million accident-free miles in 34 years as a trucker with Consolidated Freightways. That safety record earned the West Virginia native a truck with his name on it and an even greater honor - the job of hauling mangled steel from the World Trade Center to California to be turned into a Sept. 11 memorial.

But none of that earned Cayton an easy retirement. When Consolidated went bankrupt in 2002, Cayton's pension was not enough to cover his health insurance. He signed on with KBR last June, quickly rising from driver to convoy commander and safety director with 50 truckers beneath him.

On Feb. 23, the Army veteran was traveling in a truck south of Baghdad when a bomb exploded, killing him. The standard KBR life insurance policy: $25,000 and an additional $25,000 for "accidental death."

The escalating violence has left contractors and their families back home torn.

About a year ago, the little trucking company Bill Hetrick started in Hilliard, Ohio, went under as the economy went south. Hetrick hoped the yearlong hitch hauling ice from Kuwait to Baghdad and beyond for KBR "might help catch us up," said his wife of 18 years, Georganne.

But on Monday night, Mrs. Hetrick received a frantic call.

"I'm done," said a rattled Bill Hetrick, who had just emerged from a bomb shelter. "There's too much going on over here."

The next day, however, the 49-year-old Hetrick called his wife back to say some colleagues had talked him into toughing it out.

Mrs. Hetrick did not know what to say.

"I think it's time something's done. They need to make it safer or tell them to come home."