Ask HN: Would you go to Iraq for a year and be paid $200k?

1) Afghanistan can still be dangerous. The risk for a trigger puller/door kicker is very high, but for an IT contractor it's about the same as riding a motorcycle 50-100mi/day in Seattle.

2) Iraq is actually safer (on base, for IT contractors) than living in a lot of big but not especially nice cities. The biggest risk is honestly chronic health conditions (like a heart attack) or people having emotional/relationship/etc. issues and self-inflicted injury.

3) Kuwait is INSANE. Specifically, driving off-base is insane. I drive about 2-3h/day between US bases, and see one obviously-fatal motor vehicle accident on the highways every day. The only time in my life I've ever done CPR and treated arterial bleeding (I'm an IT guy, not a doctor!) was responding to a Kuwaiti on Kuwaiti vehicle accident a couple years ago. I'd say the risk is about the same as riding 50-100 miles/day on a motorcycle, drunk, in a not-especially-motorcycle-friendly city.

4) Qatar is like Kuwait only safer.

5) Bahrain is safer than Kuwait and fun, except on Thursday/Friday when lots of drunk Saudi weekend guys show up, turning it into Kuwait-level danger.

There are lots of reasons to do or not do this, but safety is basically not an issue (except if you're driving between bases in Kuwait, which people don't really do)

There were 149 American deaths in Iraq last year, but I think that might mean just soldiers. So about one out of every thousand soldiers. http://www.icasualties.org/Iraq/index.aspx

Also, there were 676 wounded, or about 4 out of every thousand. So 0.5% of the total force was killed or wounded. You could dig around for more exact numbers, but 1 out of 200 is a good first approximation for the injury/death rate of American forces in Iraq.

I'm just a clueless civvie, but it seems to me that the insurgency in Iraq is becoming more indiscriminate and that the risks to all westerners there are largely similar, regardless of what they are there to do. IEDs and mortars don't distinguish between military and civilian targets. The kidnapper actively seek out civilians.

Other posters with far more relevant experience than I seem to think that you won't really have any contact with the locals and spend most of your time doing grunt work, so it doesn't seem to me like there are many intangible benefits beyond being able to say that you've worked in a warzone. If you want a great cultural experience, surely you'd be better off going to places where you don't have to travel in a convoy of armoured cars? Travel is tremendously cheap at the moment and there are plenty of opportunities to work your way around, especially as a young, educated American - half the world is willing to offer you a Working Holiday visa. If you don't fancy teaching English, tending a bar or picking fruit, you could tote a laptop and freelance.

Think about longer-term earning potential. What would you learn in Iraq that would make you attractive to civilian employers? What opportunities would that entry on your CV open up? What would be the value of a year's experience as a junior developer at a bank, for instance?

If you're typical of the average HN reader, you could do far better. I can't begin to estimate the value created by the average startup founder in their first year, but I'm guessing that it's a hell of a lot more than $200k. It's never been cheaper to startup and never easier to reach ramen profitability. There's never been more angel money and never more VCs willing to make small, early-stage investments.

The opportunity you have strikes me as a boring, dangerous dead-end for not very much money. As a recent graduate, I'd be far more concerned about building up long-term equity than about making quick cash. I expect that your student debt must feel like a massive burden, but relative to your career earning potential it's chump change. Think long term, think about what you can build up for yourself.