The death toll for contractors in Iraq hit a milestone

From TPM:

And 1001 of them had been killed as of the end of June.

I have a feeling most of us know little about the contractors in Iraq. From what I understand, one big job they do is convoying supplies up to the troops.

Here are a couple of questions. How many are doing jobs that in past wars would of been done by soldiers? And if contractors are dying while doing what was traditionally military jobs, shouldn't they, to be fully accurate, be counted in the death toll we hear about daily?

In other words, as of yesterday, we have 3680 soldiers that have died and 1001 contractors who work for the US military that have died for a total of 4681 dead in Iraq.

Again, one could argue whether some of these contractors who died would have been filling traditionally military jobs etc. However, I do know this much. If we hadn't gotten into this godforsaken war in the first place, those 3680 dead soldiers would still be alive. And so would those 1001 dead contractors. Oh and so would the 68747 MINIMUM Iraqi dead (we never hear about them do we)?