BAGHDAD, Iraq – The route from the airport to central Baghdad is littered with the remnants of war. Bomb-scarred concrete. Twisted car frames. Sun-baked bloodstains. People drive it only when they have to.

A bomb hidden along the road killed Samuel E. Parlin Jr. on Jan. 16 as he headed to a job-promotion interview with his employer, DynCorp International, a military services contractor whose operational hub is in Irving.

Colleagues say the former Georgia police officer could be alive today if his boss had chosen a safer alternative, such as doing the interview by phone.

But flawed decisions by DynCorp managers repeatedly have put employees at lethal risk, former and current employees say. A U.S. Army general ordered the company to temporarily halt operations this year because too many people were being killed.

Spokesman Gregory Lagana conceded that some of DynCorp's war zone managers showed lack of concern for employees' welfare, despite the priority given to employee safety. DynCorp's chief executive officer, Herbert Lanese, responding to companywide complaints and information brought to senior executives' attention during a Dallas Morning News investigation, flew to Baghdad and Afghanistan in November along with a DynCorp president.

"They were not happy with the management in Iraq, and the CEO made the decision on the spot to change it," he said. "He was specifically unhappy with the management's [lack of] concern" for DynCorp's police trainers. At least two managers were told their contracts would not be renewed.

"We should've known about it earlier," Mr. Lagana added, but employees failed to use a company complaint hotline. "There is a strong recognition that comes from the top that these [employees] are the people we support. These are the people who are out there doing the hard work of the company."

Some DynCorp employees and executives say careless managers are still on the job, and concerns persist about battlefield safety as the company rotates hundreds of retired American police officers and military personnel into Iraq and Afghanistan on its police-training contracts for the U.S. government.

Among their concerns: that Dyncorp sent employees into war zones without adequate weapons and protective equipment. Some were so under-equipped in Iraq that they acquired untested weapons from local traders or from seized arms stockpiled by the U.S. military. A DynCorp employee from North Texas was killed when one such weapon misfired.

In another case, a manager took his unit's only armored vehicle for personal errands, leaving his employees to drive in hostile areas with "soft-sided" passenger cars. Another ordered his staffers to drive along one of Iraq's most attack-prone routes to purchase liquor for his personal consumption.

A wrongful-death lawsuit, filed against the company in New York by the survivors of two DynCorp workers killed in Afghanistan, says lax management and cost-cutting measures allowed a suicide bomber to attack DynCorp's headquarters in Kabul in 2004. Three employees were among the 11 people killed.

Mr. Lagana said the company has instituted changes, including a strict no-alcohol rule in Iraq and Afghanistan. It tightened efforts to weed out potentially bad managers, and is constantly working to improve security. He said the company is contesting the wrongful-death lawsuit.

Questions about the company's management practices were so serious that U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Joseph Peterson, who commanded all police training in Iraq until October, said he felt compelled to intervene shortly after Mr. Parlin's death.

"DynCorp had put into place a lot of administrative requirements that I thought were unnecessary," Gen. Peterson said in an interview in Baghdad.

He cited cases in which police trainers in outlying areas "had to come all the way to Baghdad to pick up their pay. Well, from my perspective, that was unnecessary travel. All in all, that was causing them to become overexposed. I was losing a lot of policemen" as a result.

He said 19 police trainers had been killed in a 14-month period because of various factors – not all having to do with management decisions. But he wanted to see whether casualties were linked to unnecessary deployments. "So I stood down the organization for a day," he said, to review DynCorp's administrative structure.

He found that employees traveled by road to comply with guidelines imposed by accountants and managers – some at the company's logistical headquarters in Irving and others isolated behind thick blast walls inside DynCorp's central Baghdad compound – who seemed not to recognize the dangers their decisions created.

And Mr. Parlin, 63, was the type of disciplined employee who would follow orders from his boss, regardless of the risk, said his wife, Cynthia Parlin, of Garden City, Ga.

"If you said, 'Go and do it,' he would do it and not ask questions because you were the person in authority," she said.

She tried repeatedly to find out how and why her husband died, but said DynCorp was not forthcoming. "I called those folks in Texas. I called and I called. I left voicemails. But nobody would do anything. I got no accident report, no nothing," Mrs. Parlin said.

No letter of condolence arrived from the company, she said. But a DynCorp employee forwarded her a U.S. Embassy statement describing what Mr. Parlin might have seen along his route. After possibly passing "a group or two of children walking to school, perhaps [he] noticed some flowers that had been placed in planters on a roof," it said. She described the statement as irksome and unbelievable.

Mr. Lagana said company records indicate that she did receive the payment, as well as a letter of condolence from the firm. Mrs. Parlin says she remains unaware of having received either.

At the company's heavily guarded headquarters in the Baghdad Hotel, Walter Merrick, DynCorp's deputy program manager and the man who the company says ordered Mr. Parlin to come into central Baghdad from his airport base, said the company had been looking at ways to reduce its casualty rate even before Gen. Peterson halted operations.

Mr. Merrick said an internal review confirmed the need to better monitor his trainers' movements. "We virtually lose visibility over our men in the field," he said. "We have virtually no control over them unless it's a disciplinary issue or an administrative issue."

But he had no explanation for why Gen. Peterson still felt compelled to intervene.

Louis Cobarruviaz, who was a senior manager for DynCorp in Baghdad until November, described a peak period of casualties in which "we lost 12 people, and there were at least 12 others we sent home without any arms or legs." After Gen. Peterson's review, he said, casualties dropped almost to zero.

The general's changes included halting all rural movement of DynCorp personnel unless they traveled inside U.S. military convoys. Mr. Merrick said he had preferred to send personnel in low-profile private convoys protected by DynCorp's guard units, known as Shark Teams.

DynCorp said it did not renew Mr. Merrick's or Mr. Cobarruviaz's contracts in November. Mr. Merrick could not be reached for comment after his departure from the company.

David Carlton, a former DynCorp explosives-detection specialist from North Carolina and friend of Mr. Parlin, said that even before Mr. Merrick took over, orders arriving from Baghdad were deemed so questionable that DynCorp field managers began rebelling.

"There was one supervisor that was asked to go home because he refused [a senior manager's order] to send somebody out," Mr. Carlton said. "Let's face it, DynCorp's there to make money. They were cutting back and stuff, and we were the ones that were losing out on the deal."

Mr. Lagana said he doubted the manager was acting to protect company profits. "It was just a question of bad leadership," he said.

In another example, this time in Fallujah, a DynCorp commander repeatedly sent staffers by road to Baghdad – along a longer and more perilous route than the one Mr. Parlin took – to purchase black-market liquor for his personal consumption, said two employees who worked with the commander.

The man's drinking was well known among administrators in Iraq, as was the prohibition on bringing alcohol onto U.S. military compounds. But he dispatched staffers for liquor anyway, apparently disregarding the danger he was exposing them to. In August, the company sent him home.

"You're bringing almost 1,000 people into the country. We do have a strong system for weeding out people who are not fit for it psychologically or temperamentally," Mr. Lagana said. "But if you're wrong on 1 percent of 1,000 people, that's 10 people who can cause problems."

On more than one occasion, DynCorp managers in Irving decided to deploy personnel to Iraq despite severe weapons shortages. Employees said they obtained armaments from outside sources – weapons of suspect origin and questionable reliability.

Mike Tatar, a DynCorp police trainer from the North Texas town of Denison, died in November 2004 when one such untested weapon, an AK-47 assault rifle, misfired.

A 96-page report on the company's investigation of his death noted that the AK-47 was not among the standard-issue weapons in DynCorp's arsenal and that it had never been cleaned or test-fired. Another employee jostled it inside the vehicle Mr. Tatar was driving, apparently causing the weapon to fire without the trigger having been pulled, according to the report.

The DynCorp investigation found that Mr. Tatar had been issued an American-made rifle but that he and his colleagues preferred to use the AK-47 because it carried a larger magazine than his U.S.-made M-4 rifle.

Russ Shattles, a former military explosives-ordnance technician and a security specialist for DynCorp, said the company deployed his unit outside Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit in 2004 but did not send enough weapons for the men to defend themselves.

"DynCorp gave you an MP-5 [assault rifle] and a busted-up Tariq pistol, and that was it," he said, referring to a recycled, 9 mm sidearm manufactured for Iraqi forces before the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. The unit manager "didn't give a [expletive] about anybody but himself," he said.

The unit possessed only one armored vehicle, which the manager sometimes took for personal errands or "conjugal visits" with a woman friend, Mr. Shattles said. While the manager was gone, employees were left entirely vulnerable with only "soft-sided" passenger cars for transportation.

The Shattles unit had to beg arms from stockpiles of weapons seized by the U.S. military during raids. "Once a week, I'd go over and pick up 200 or 300 weapons and dump them in the office, and we'd go through and pick the best ones."

Richard Cashon, the Irving-based program manager for police training, was the DynCorp executive responsible for ensuring that units in Iraq and Afghanistan had adequate weaponry before they deployed. He said shortages arose because it took longer to purchase arms and obtain export permits than it did to recruit, train and transport new police trainers to their assigned countries.

So there were times, Mr. Cashon said, when "you had people in country that didn't have weapons. It happened in both Afghanistan and Iraq during the buildup."

Mr. Cashon said other equipment shortages occurred because he decided to cut shipping costs for items needed by police trainers and security guards in Afghanistan.

The most urgently needed items were weapons, body armor and armored trucks and SUVs needed in Afghanistan in mid-2005. The vehicles are expensive and heavy because of their blast shielding and bulletproof windows. DynCorp needed dozens of them quickly because of escalating attacks by snipers and suicide bombers.

Mr. Cashon said he knew DynCorp could have shipped the equipment by air freight to Kabul in only a few days. But to save money, he chose a much slower route by sea to the Pakistani port of Karachi.

The shipment sat on a dock waiting for clearance by the notoriously slow Pakistani customs system. Then it was loaded onto trucks and driven to the Afghan border.

"Our rationale on it, in the beginning, was that by sea, it would cost about $5,000 per vehicle. By air, it was about $25,000 a vehicle. So that saved them about $20,000 a vehicle," Mr. Cashon said.

But an outraged DynCorp manager in Afghanistan complained in an interview, "What should have taken only a few days wound up taking three, four, five months."

There is no indication that Mr. Cashon's decision cost lives, but it was serious enough to provoke a sharp rebuke from Alistair Cooke, the State Department's supervisor for Afghan police training and drug enforcement.

"That's the primary example of where they [the State Department] really got soured on us," Mr. Cashon said. He said the contract had not specified a delivery deadline, so it was up to DynCorp to set the shipping timetable.

DynCorp employees, many of them military veterans, say they know that risks are part of the job. But some blamed poor business decisions for adding unnecessarily to the dangers they already faced.

Many employees now air their grievances anonymously in Internet chat rooms, such as www.civpol.org. Some entries describe a managerial lack of compassion or what they describe as a company obsession with profits.

Mrs. Parlin said the company paid for one of her husband's colleagues to accompany his body home and attend the funeral in Georgia. Just after being handed the flag that draped her husband's coffin, she said the colleague leaned over and whispered in her ear: "I've got to go. My flight leaves in an hour."

She said she received a company insurance payment of $250,000. Mr. Parlin would have been eligible for a bonus of about $20,000 if he had fulfilled his one-year contract Feb. 14.

Since he was killed less than a month short of that mark, the company told her Mr. Parlin had failed to complete his contract and would not get the payment, she said.

"This man worked for their company and died for their company," Mrs. Parlin said. "But they don't care. For them, he's just another part in the assembly line."

E-mail trobberson@dallasnews.com