Michael Price felt driven to perilous security work
Michael Price’s father offered him $100,000 if he would leave Iraq.
His mother begged him to come home.
But the 33-year-old Concord resident told them he was doing what he wanted to — providing security for a company destroying Saddam Hussein’s munitions caches.
Early Friday, his parents’ fears were realized when their son died of injuries suffered earlier in the week in a deadly roadside bombing.
“We tried to persuade him not to go — it’s scary over there,” said Joyce Bakersmith, who is married to Price’s father, Vernon. “We’re going to miss him.”
His father, who was so upset he could barely speak Friday, had planned to leave that day for Germany where his son was to be flown for medical care.
Before leaving for Iraq in January, Price was a weapons instructor for HALO Group Inc. in Concord for two years. The private company trains law enforcement and others in shooting and defensive tactics.
In January he left to work for Cochise Consultancy Inc. out of Florida, one of many private firms providing security for contractors in Iraq. Cochise is protecting USA Environmental of Tampa as it removes explosives under a contract with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The roadside bomb that killed Price also killed two colleagues traveling with him. His family has been told that despite severe shrapnel wounds to his head, he tried to help those men.
In an e-mail to friends and family on April 20, five days before the bombing, he described his job as “trunk monkey” or rear security to the convoy.
“Our job is basically to protect the convoy vehicles, personnel and certain cargos from the little nasties that plague us here. I cannot be specific as to who, what, when, or why, so just roll with it.”
Friends and colleagues describe Price as having little fear of things often terrifying to others.
After attending high school near Los Angeles, he entered the Navy as a medical technician on the USS Midway during the Persian Gulf War. He won a presidential citation for pulling two shipmates out of a burning ammunition storage facility.
He then became an expert rock climber and lived in Yosemite National Park, where he and his friend Mark Peters did searches and rescues off the highest rock formations, which park rangers couldn’t reach. Once, Price found a lost boy alive, “which is quite rare for a search and rescue,” said Peters, who grew up with his friend in Dallas, Texas. Their families both moved from there to outside Los Angeles and later the two friends moved to the Bay Area, where Price has lived since 1995.
Price took up the rare hobby of hunting boars with a spear, although Peters said he never actually killed one. He sailed, was an expert scuba diver and once swam the Carquinez Strait from Crockett to Glen Cove during shipping traffic, just for the heck of it.
“We used to ask him if he had a big read ‘S’ on his chest,” said Kevin McMahon, a friend and HALO spokesman.
When he wanted to go to Iraq with Cochise, it didn’t surprise Peters. Price, he said, was a natural protector, and the money was good. He estimates Price was making $12,000 a month. It was enough, his family said, to pay off his bills and get on a firm financial footing so he could take care of his 11-year-old daughter in Southern California. She was born during a brief marriage while Price was in the Navy.
That’s why Price’s father offered to give him $100,000 to come home.
“He didn’t have to do what he did to do that,” Vernon Price said from his home in Pomona.
Price kept in close e-mail contact with both of his parents while in Iraq. When the four American civilian contractors were killed March 31 in Fallujah and their bodies mutilated, his mother, Alice Smith, e-mailed him and begged him to come home. In a response that he also sent to his father, Price wrote in part:
“You must understand that it’s not just the money that drives me here. … I know and understand your concern; if I was in your shoes, I would feel the same way. I am sorry to put you through this stress, and you know it is not my intention to worry you. I just can’t help who and what I am, and as crazy as it may sound to some, there is no other place in the world I’d rather be at this moment. I will be home soon. I don’t know when, but I promise I will be there. I love you.”
Source: CONTRA COSTA TIMES
Byline: Carrie Sturrock