For women in Iraq, the terrorist could be the guy working beside you

Kineston sent a steady stream of e-mails complaining to KBR higher-ups, to little avail. (KBR records show that the guy who drew the sketch was given three days off without pay.) "You know, I enjoy my job, but I don't want to go home because some drunk decided to rape me for a good time," she once wrote to project manager Gerald Warner. "This whole thing has made me more stressed out than I already am."

After Yanik assaulted her, her supervisors promised they would take care of the problem. Yet two days later, Yanik was in line at the water depot, two trucks ahead of her. She panicked and called the military police to arrest him.

Her frayed nerves never fully recovered. "I felt safer on convoy . . . under military rule than I ever did on base," she says.

She grew afraid to walk anywhere alone at night and insisted on parking her truck next to the trailer where she slept. Her supervisor said this was against the rules and punished her with three days unpaid leave.

One morning when she was walking to the gym, some co-workers stopped and offered her a ride. Soon they were laughing and talking together. "I wasn't really thinking that they were gonna do anything," she says. "Once again, I was stupid."

Suddenly, one of the guys — another KBR employee who, she believes, was from Mexico — slid his hand down the front of her gym shorts. He seemed to think this was hilarious. Kineston disagreed.

"What the fuck are you doing?" she said and jumped out.

She went to KBR's site manager and told him she needed her own pickup to drive around the base. She had a truck by that afternoon.

But her co-workers weren't happy. They held a meeting with the camp's HR rep. For a bunch of truck drivers in a war zone, it wasn't the most macho scene. Twenty-one men gathered to complain that they were "suffering from inequities" caused by the two women on the crew, Kineston and Wanda Brewer.

They griped about the women getting their own trucks, being late to meetings, and receiving unapproved time off. "Many feel that Wanda and Mary are undermining those in authority by telling them they do not have to do what they are told to do," company notes from the meeting said.

The guys even said they feared the women "because if things don't go their way, Wanda and Mary will come to HR and report them, and get them in trouble with management."

But if supervisors noticed a sixth-grade tone to the meeting, they never mentioned it. Five weeks later, Kineston received a written reprimand. It included a laundry list of sins: abandoning a water truck for several hours, refusing to park in the correct area, and "insubordination." Months earlier, she had been written up for "failure to follow instructions" and "disregard toward the chain of command" because she talked back when a supervisor ordered her to water some grass. (She says the Army colonel told her not to water it, because Iraqis had been hired to do the job.)

Worst of all, she had recently been seen speeding and passing other vehicles on the base, both of which were against company rules. Though Kineston said she was driving slowly and one of the witness statements was written the day before the alleged speeding occurred, it didn't make any difference. She was fired.

In the months after she returned to the States, women from all over the country began recounting similar horror stories.

Jamie Leigh Jones was a sweet-tongued 20-year-old from Texas when she flew to Camp Hope, in Baghdad's Green Zone, as an administrative assistant for KBR in 2005. Four days after she arrived, she was sitting outside her barracks with some co-workers when one of them offered her a drink. "Don't worry — I saved all my Roofies for Dubai," he told her, according to her congressional testimony. She assumed he was kidding.

But the next morning, she wasn't so sure. She woke up groggy and sore all over. In the bathroom, she discovered she was bleeding, with bruises on her legs and wrists. She returned to her room to find a man she didn't know in her bunk. Had they had sex?, she asked. Yes, came the reply.

KBR security took Jones to the hospital, where the doctor collected various samples with a rape kit. She even took photos and informed Jones that she was "quite torn up down there." It was obvious that Jones had been raped. Later, doctors would deem her breasts so badly damaged from the attack that she required reconstructive surgery.