In this town where poverty resides, war's peace hurts

When soldiers need rations, Bennettsville gets jobs. But as hot meals replace MREs, workers hunger.

	[Photo: Keith Jacobs]
	Eddie Jones Jr. and Bobby Joe Smith sit around at Eddie Junior's and discuss everything from politics to local gossip. Jones can tell when SoPakCo is operating at full capacity, because of the increase in business. Go to photo gallery

BENNETTSVILLE, S.C. - Last spring, when the war in Iraq was hottest and most uncertain, life for Lori Davis was better than ever.

She was drawing a regular paycheck, plus overtime, at a job she liked near her home. Her family had health insurance. She could buy her teenage son some of the trendy clothes he wanted. Occasionally they could eat at McDonald's.

But as summer ended and more U.S. forces moved into semipermanent camps with hot chow, SoPakCo Inc. filled its orders for military rations, and few orders followed. Davis' job ended, too.

Neither President Bush nor the war in Iraq is popular in the poor, mostly African-American neighborhoods where SoPakCo gets many of its employees. They worry the war was a costly mistake.

But it had an upside, too. For hundreds of families here, feeding the war machine provided a break from grinding poverty and high unemployment, and they long for the jobs that have disappeared as Iraq becomes more stable.

Davis, like many of her neighbors, now draws food stamps. She looks for work and tries to cover her bills with unemployment checks.

"It's tough. Ain't no jobs," Davis, 33, said as a chow-mix puppy played at her feet. "Every time you go somewhere, they say they got nothing available, they're not hiring. You can't pay (the bills) on time. ... We don't buy no clothes, or nothing."

War has always been good for business, and the companies that prosper aren't only megafirms like Bechtel and Halliburton. Smaller hometown businesses benefit, too, companies like Alliant Lake City Small Caliber Ammunition Co. of Independence, Mo.; the Belleview, Ill., Shoe Manufacturing Co., a supplier of combat boots; and SoPakCo, which makes field rations in a former dog food factory on Broad Street in Bennettsville.

SoPakCo is the only industry within the Bennettsville city limits, and the only one within walking distance for thousands of unemployed people. It churns out heavy brown plastic pouches of meatloaf and gravy, cheese tortellini, chicken cavatelli and other entrees that are the staple of U.S. soldiers at wartime.

From early last year until about August, employment more than doubled to nearly 500 workers, making it one of Marlboro County's largest employers. Even now, with orders drastically lower, it provides about 130 full-time jobs, and the plant has been an important corporate citizen for nearly 60 years.

It also pays more than $22,000 in city taxes annually, and pays $20,000 to the city-owned utility system each month.

Bob Vail, Marlboro County's executive director of economic development, knows the company president's phone number by heart.

"In economic good times and bad times it's always been there, it's always produced, and it's always employed our people," he said.

These are the bad times. Unemployment in Marlboro County is at 16.4 percent, nearly three times the state and national averages. Even in good times, the unemployment rate far exceeds the state's.

Last year, when SoPakCo was busiest, unemployment dropped several points, Vail said. "The biggest thing is when they're up and running, it makes the people feel good about themselves, that they are productive. That our people are employed."

White Bennettsville seems to know little about the people who work at SoPakCo. Among the black community, however, everyone seems to know someone there, or who recently worked there. Business hops when the plant is cooking.

At Eddie Jones Jr.'s corner store, a short walk from the plant, there's a lunch rush for sodas, snacks and cigarettes. Workers buy potato wedges and fried chicken at the Texaco Foodmart on the U.S. 15-401 By-Pass. They purchase life and renter's insurance from William Grooms, door-to-door insurance salesman, then cancel it as soon as they're laid off again.

"We're usually the first thing to go," Grooms said.

Early last year, during the buildup for the invasion, the military was like an infantryman with a bottomless stomach. SoPakCo won a $35-million contract to produce 809,000 cases of MREs on top of an earlier three-year contract worth $143-million.

"Money was everywhere around here," Jones said from his spot behind the cash register, under a window with bullet hole patched with duct tape. "Having 30 people coming in here (at lunch) spending five, six, seven, eight dollars, that'll help you out."

The company began adding jobs at its processing plant in Bennettsville and its packaging plant in nearby Mullins to meet demand. Most were hired through a local staffing company for minimum wage of $5.15 an hour, with hopes of being "turned over" to SoPakCo.

When that happens, wages typically jump to $7.15, and the company pays health insurance.

Teresa Smith, 32, spent several months last year working at SoPakCo for minimum wage, inspecting the heavy pouches of beef with noodles and fruit cocktail for leaks. It was her first full-time job.

"Any work is good work if I can get it. I paid some bills, I bought my children what they wanted, clothes and shoes. I gave them money to play (video) games," said Smith, whose aunt and cousin also worked there.

Like others, she said she never tried an MRE, but she heard the soldiers liked the chili-mac.

"It smelled good cooking," she said.

Despite frequent attacks on U.S. troops and civilians, Iraq is more stable. For the most part, hot chow has replaced MREs for soldiers, as contractors like Kellogg Brown & Root erect mess halls serving three meals a day. MREs generally are eaten on patrol.

With SoPakCo quiet, residents now have few job options, especially those with little education.

The economy used to thrive on cotton, the crop that bought Bennettsville's stately Greek Revival mansions and built its pretty Queen Anne-style homes, all porches and peaks and gingerbread trim.

Vail said nearby Clio once had more millionaires per capita than any place else in South Carolina. McColl had three textile mills.

"They used to say the land was so rich in Marlboro County they ought to sell it by the pound instead of the acre," said William Light Kinney Jr., editor and publisher of the Marlboro Herald-Advocate.

"And unfortunately, the cotton heritage is part of the unemployment problem."

Raising cotton used to take a lot of labor, especially to pluck the snowy bolls at harvest time. African slaves did the work before the Civil War. They did it afterward, too, but as sharecroppers and tenant farmers.

By the 1950s, however, mechanical harvesters were widespread, and growers needed fewer hands. Farm jobs that had sustained generations of African-American families disappeared.

Some of them moved to northern industrial centers. Others moved to local towns in search of work. In Bennettsville, six of 10 people are black, as is 55 percent of Marlboro County.

Most of Bennettsville's black residents live within an easy walk of SoPakCo, in neighborhoods that are a hodgepodge of small, well-kept frame-and-brick homes, ancient mobile homes, and wooden shanties separated by vegetable gardens that are not simply grown for hobby.

Downtown Bennettsville is quaint but pocked with shuttered storefronts. Aside from the law offices around the stately brick courthouse, most open stores are beauty salons or loan and check-cashing shops.

Smith pays $200 a month for the rusting mobile home behind Jones' market. She has five children and no job, and pays her bills with a government check she collects for one disabled son and the Social Security check her eldest daughter receives for her late father. She also draws unemployment.

Recently, Smith's car sat outside her home with a flat rear tire and a busted alternator belt. The weeds outside the circle of dirt that passes for a yard were choked with trash - milk jugs, beer bottles, paper bags. Piles of rubbish lay everywhere in her neighborhood, but it's rare to see beer or soda cans. They're quickly picked up, and exchanged for cash.

Soldiers who curse the bland dryness of some MREs will appreciate the irony: The SoPakCo plant used to make Big Time Dog Food.

Back then it was Marnat Packaging Co., which was founded shortly after World War II in Bennettsville, a friendly, historic town dating to the 1700s that now has a population of 9,400. The area had a surplus of mules, the dog food's main ingredient.

Marnat eventually traded dog kibble for military rations, canning staples like ham and eggs, chicken and beef in flat tins known as C-rations. By the 1970s, the Army was seeking soft pouches that would be lighter and easier to pack, and Marnat developed the system that is still basically used today.

Food is pumped into thick, foil-like pouches, then boiled to kill bacteria, and shipped to SoPakCo's packaging division in nearby Mullins.

An MRE will last for years, even in the desert. Each meal typically includes an entree, bread or crackers, diced fruit, drink mixes and a dessert. It provides about 1,800 calories.

About 1980, the company was sold to Southern Packaging & Storage Co. of Greeneville, Tenn., which had made rations since World War II. The company, now a division of UNAKA Corp., put SoPakCo headquarters in Mullins, and the Bennettsville plant grew.

Bennettsville nearly lost the plant a decade ago, after the Department of Defense sought to trim its rations suppliers from a half-dozen to three. The company called the local congressman, U.S. Rep. John Spratt, D-S.C., the second-ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee for 20 years.

Spratt challenged the Defense Department's decision to cut SoPakCo, and helped SoPakCo better sell itself to the government. SoPakCo eventually was chosen as one of three MRE suppliers, along with firms in Texas and Illinois.

For the Defense Department's $400-billion budget, this is "a blip on the radar," but it's crucial to Marlboro County, he said. Nearly 800 textile jobs have left in recent years.

Although the company relies on taxpayer dollars, SoPakCo shuns publicity, and president Lonnie Thompson did not return repeated phone calls.

Local officials say the Bennettsville plant currently employs about 137 people, while its packaging facility in nearby Mullins has more than 100.

One of them, Claudia Moody, lives in a small white frame house with ship-lap siding near the plant in Mullins. The paint is peeling, plastic sheeting covers the windows, and there's a bed in almost every room to accommodate six people. An old kerosene heater chugs against the chill.

"I'm just glad to be out there working," Moody, 52, said.

She has worked at SoPakCo for three years and takes home about $200 per week, plus insurance. From February through April, she worked seven days a week and often brought home twice that, allowing a rare chance to outpace her bills.

"I loved that," she said. "Since things slowed down, we're just working four days. Sometimes we work on Friday, sometimes we don't."

The Rev. Sara T. Mobley hates that it has to be this way. Lots of area young people join the service, including her son, and 90 men from the Army National Guard artillery unit in Bennettsville deployed to Iraq last week. A young soldier from Bennettsville was killed during the buildup in Kuwait. She cringes at news of every death in Iraq.

"Everytime it happens, somebody's heart is hurting. You may not know them, but you're told to pray for them," said Mobley, whose church is across the street from SoPakCo in Mullins.

Several parishioners work there, and when the war started, "Things were good, but they're hurting now. People are really hurting. Some people are going to lose their homes."

Bennettsville Mayor Benjy Rogers said Thompson recently told him SoPakCo would be moving some of its operations from Mullins to his city.

"I hate it for Mullins, but we're glad to see that," he said. "Even though he said it won't be that many jobs, it means stability."

Meanwhile, Lori Davis and others in the neighborhoods near SoPakCo say they've heard SoPakCo may be calling some former employees back to work.

She had started there at $5.15 an hour as a temporary worker, then was turned over to the company after a couple of months. She got a $2-an-hour raise and benefits.

She was laid off in August, and now she draws food stamps and $183 per week from unemployment. It barely pays the light bill and her monthly rent of $275. She has no phone, but her sister does, and they live just a few blocks apart. She has given SoPackCo the number, in case the company needs her.

Times staff writer Wes Allison is traveling around the country to report stories about the Iraq war's impact on life in America. To read the first installment, or to sign a guestbook, go to www.sptimes.com/homefront

World and national headlines

© 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times 490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111 Contact the Times | Privacy Policy Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright