JARED SOARES The Roanoke Times

Chuck Mills recently retired from the Roanoke City Fire Department and will go to Iraq to fight fires for a year. His family and friends held a cookout for him Saturday evening at Mount Pleasant Park. Below: Mills and his ex-wife Missy Mills check out the going-away cake. They said his pay will help pay off some of their debts.

There's an unmistakable difference between putting out blazes in the United States and putting them out in war zones. The most common causes of fires in Roanoke: smoking or cooking. The most common causes of fires in a military base: blasts from a mortar shell or a rocket.

And yet at the recent going-away cookout for Chuck Mills, a retired Roanoke firefighter who plans to spend the next 12 months in Iraq, there was no talk about that. It was all about the 72 he scored in his round of golf that morning, the 1968 Camaro he had recently restored, and his youngest son's recent high school graduation.

"That's what I'll miss the most ... my family," Mills said. "I've never been away from them this long. I've never been gone for more than a week at a time."

Many jobs allow American civilians to support troops overseas -- telecommunication engineers, cooks -- and one of them is to prevent and fight fires. Mills, 53, will be at least the fourth firefighter from the city and one of about half a dozen from the Roanoke Valley who have worked in Iraq.

He will work for Wackenhut Services Inc., a Department of Defense contractor that, according to its Web site, runs 20 fire stations on military bases in Iraq.

Mills retired May 31 after 18 years of service with the city.

The job in Iraq appealed to him in recent months, he said, because after three divorces he isn't tied to a wife, and his three sons -- Eric, 29; Josh, 22; and Trey, 18 -- are grown.

The way his friends and family describe him, he has for years been one to explore unusual jobs. For example, for a few years during his career, he held jobs restoring antique cars and driving sports teams from Virginia Tech across the state on a bus.

Many people in firefighting circles say what lures contractors to Iraq is the money -- jobs there pay three or four times more than similar work in the United States. Mills wouldn't talk about his pay, but Wackenhut job ads on firehouse.com list a salary range between $90,000 and $138,000.

"Of course the money's an outstanding reason for me to go," Mills said. "I'm doing it for a lot of reasons. I was never in the military, so I thought this would be a good experience. And I was retiring so I figured I'd retire and might as well go work there for more money."

He flew out Monday for a week of training in Houston. Later he'll go to Dubai, then to Iraq, though it wasn't clear yet where in the country he'll work. In fact, a lot of things weren't clear to Mills. He said he only knows he will always be on base.

But Todd Reighley, a Roanoke firefighter who worked in Iraq from January 2007 to January 2008, knows a lot about the experience. He said critical differences between his work in Roanoke and the station where he served in Baghdad were the types of fires he fought, the 30-pound ballistic vest that was part of his uniform and the fact that he worked almost every day of the week, which made life monotonous. "I felt like Bill Murray in 'Groundhog Day,' " he said.

The job was humbling, Reighley said, because he met many firefighters who were also in Iraq -- as soldiers. And soldiers left the safety of the base every day.

"It's not like I was a firefighter who was called to duty and had to go out and do military service in conflict zones," Reighley said. "Those guys had a much tougher job than us."

At the cookout in the Mount Pleasant area Saturday, Mills' friends and relatives said they were initially surprised by his decision. Said high school friend Dave Saunders, "I had no idea you could do this kind of thing without enlisting."

But they couldn't change his mind -- older sister Carolyn Wright: "I tried to influence him when he was little and that was my part" -- and they were hoping for the best.

"You always worry and you pray the Lord will take care of him," his mother, Allene Mills, said.

Mills' ex-wife Missy Mills brought people together for the cookout. She cradled their 10-month-old granddaughter and said they were hoping to pay off debt with what he would make in Iraq. She also said she was incredulous about his new job.

"I still won't believe it until I see him get on the plane," she said.