Licensed to Kill (18 page)

As the very public lynching of the contractors forced a heated debate over issues surrounding the military's reliance on independent contractors, four families were very privately grieving the death of husbands, fathers, or sons, and the men's fellow contractors were mourning the loss of their friends and colleagues. T-Boy was told to gather up the murdered contractors' possessions to ship home. “It was me alone that had to go into their room after they died and pack all of their personal belongings. I cried for the first thirty minutes in their room before I could even get started. Just seeing letters and pictures from their families took its toll on me. Mike and Jerry's muscle magazines and Wes's Hawaiian shirts. I was a mess that day for sure.”

Blackwater had sent company representatives to inform the families of their loved ones' deaths, and returned their personal effects, but that was the extent of their legal responsibility to the families. The contractors' next of kin would receive $64,000 paid out by the Defense Base Act insurance, and a belated letter of condolence from Paul Bremer. The surviving family members chose to channel their suffering into a lawsuit and publicity campaign that highlighted the men's deaths as a direct result of the rush to get the ESS contract in place and Blackwater's alleged thirst for profit.

In January of 2005, the families of Mike Teague, Wesley Batalona, Scott Helvenston, and Jerry Zovko filed suit against Blackwater in North Carolina courts. The lawsuit also specifically names Tom Powell and Justin “Shrek” McQuown, and charges that decisions made by these two individuals and, by consequence of liability, Blackwater Security, constitute a gross negligence that led to the deaths of the four men. As the lawsuit states, “Blackwater, Justin McQuown, and Tom Powell intentionally, deliberately and with reckless disregard for their health and safety, sent Helvenston, Teague, Zovko and Batalona, and each of them, into the very high-risk area of Fallujah without the required six (6) man team, without a minimum of two (2) armored vehicles, without a rear-runner, without heavy automatic machine guns, without 24 hours notice prior to the security mission, without having conducted a Risk Assessment to determine the threat level of the mission, without the opportunity to review the travel routes, gather intelligence regarding the mission, perform a pre-trip inspection of the route, determine the proper logistics or even review a map of the area, and without permitting them to test and sight the weapons they were actually given.”

The lawsuit alleges that all these requirements were stated in the men's contracts and that Blackwater's misrepresentation of the actual conditions under which the men would be expected to work constitutes fraud. Further, they claimed that “when the Defendants sent Helvenston, Teague, Zovko and Batalona out on this security mission in this condition, without the proper protections, tools and information, they knew that they were sending them into the center of Fallujah with very little chance that they would come out alive…. As a proximate result of the Defendants' intentional conduct, willful and wanton conduct, and/or negligence, as alleged herein above, Helvenston, Teague, Zovko and Batalona, and each of them, were killed March 31, 2004.”

Blackwater moved to have the case heard in U.S. District Court, arguing that the Defense Base Act grants the federal government sole authority in deciding matters related to the death or injury of contractors working in support of U.S. military operations. Blackwater then attempted to have the case dismissed from federal court, arguing that the Defense Base Act provided comprehensive coverage for the men's deaths and that each contractor had signed a release accepting that dangerous working conditions could result in his untimely demise. In an interim victory for the families, the federal court ruled against the dismissal request, and in August 2005 sent the case back to North Carolina state courts. At the time of this writing, no decision has yet been rendered in the case. Erik Prince, owner of Blackwater, cannot settle because it would forever change the precedent for civilian contractor deaths. Blackwater as of fall 2006 has nine lawsuits against it.

The lawsuit sets no dollar amount for damages, leaving that instead to the discretion of the jury, but the families assert that the case is not about the money. As Danica Zovko said in an interview with Raleigh-Durham's
News and Observer,
“I don't intend to receive a penny of that blood money…. I am doing this so they do not mistreat others like they did my son and the other men.” The insured are collecting regular payments under the DBA.

Blackwater worked diligently to get its operational procedures in line immediately after the attack in Fallujah, but death was still to stalk the ESS contract. On June 2, a Blackwater Suburban was driving at high speeds along a highway near Basra when it hit a pothole created by a mortar. The heavy weight of the vehicle threw it out of control, and the truck flipped and began to tumble, ejecting one of the contractors, who died of his injuries. One of the men who survived that accident would die just three days later, along with three other contractors, when they suffered an ambush on the road to Baghdad International Airport. In all, nine men had died out of thirty slots on the ESS contract, which would equal an extraordinary mortality rate even if it had been from a combat unit in Iraq. None of the other deaths on the ESS contract, however, would provoke the kind of public, political, and military response as those of Helvenston, Teague, Batalona, and Zovko.

The day after the four contractors' deaths, Paul Bremer issued a statement: “Their deaths will not go unpunished.” Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of coalition operations, also threatened, “It will be at a time and a place of our choosing. We will hunt down the criminals. We will kill them or we will capture them, and we will pacify Fallujah.” While the four men may have “only” been contractors, the fighting men on the ground in Iraq obviously viewed it as a loss of four of their own, and the graphic and inhumane desecration of the bodies seemed to deserve severe punishment. A brutal vengeance would be meted out, and the soldiers were just waiting for the signal to go.

Media pressure and moral outrage galvanized the president, and a horrified public demanded swift action. The marine commander, Lieutenant General James T. Conway, urged caution and said the military should resist calls for revenge. Fallujah was not only the most dangerous city in Iraq, but it also had the potential to become another Stalingrad or Grozny—a bloody urban battleground. Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez overruled Conway, and five days after the murders, U.S. marines rolled into Fallujah. Seven dead and a hundred wounded marines later, Operation Vigilant Resolve ground to a halt after less than a week of fighting. The marines had temporarily pacified Fallujah and transferred control to the Fallujah Brigades, an extemporaneous militia cobbled together from a thousand former Iraqi soldiers based in Fallujah. The Fallujah Brigades, rather than keeping the city free of insurgent activities, ended up either assisting them or joining them. All the equipment and weaponry that the U.S. military handed out to the Fallujah Brigades ended up in the hands of the insurgency, and members of the security force were implicated in attacks and kidnappings. Then in November, the hammer dropped. Operation Phantom Fury coordinated the full force of U.S. weaponry and manpower, leaving Fallujah a destroyed city. In Arab countries, stories about the heroic defense and ultimate sacrifice of insurgents in Fallujah vaulted the industrial city into legend. Even in Mogadishu, Somalia, gunmen wear T-shirts that simply read
FALLUJAH
.

On March 31, 2005, the first anniversary of attack, the marines then in control of the area around Fallujah invited Blackwater to a memorial service for their fallen comrades. Mike Rush, Blackwater's director of operations, and a small group of contractors went to Camp Bahariah, east of Fallujah, where the commanding officer provided a complete briefing on how the marines had taken over the city. Everyone present agreed that the Fallujans deserved it after what they had done en masse to the four contractors. Then, even though Fallujah was considered neutralized, a company of marines set out in advance to secure the area around what they had renamed Blackwater Bridge. The Blackwater convoy rolled into the city, passing rows of abandoned-looking houses still marked with
X
s and
O
s to signify a good-guy or bad-guy residence. They all piled out at Blackwater Bridge for a brief, solemn ceremony above the swirling murky waters of the Euphrates.

Mike Rush made a short speech on behalf of Erik Prince and thanked the marines for what they had done to Fallujah. The Mamba team took pictures, handed out Blackwater T-shirts, and talked to the marines about confirmed kills and the urban combat in the battle of Fallujah. The marine commanding officer told Blackwater that his men were still chomping at the bit to “get it on”—their near-destruction of Fallujah having apparently not sated their appetite for the complete decimation of the city.

T-Boy says he loves the marines for what they did to Fallujah, and evinces pride that he once served as one. But even the most rigidly professional soldiers are not automatons, and the furrow crossing T-Boy's brow and the tremor straining his voice testify to a difficult struggle in controlling his emotions when he recalls the day of the memorial. “I was the last one to reach the bridge after we had pulled up. I was feeling very sluggish and emotional…. As I walked up to that fucking green bridge, I couldn't control my tears anymore. I had not cried like that since the day I packed their belongings. There I was in full combat gear and helmet crying like a baby. I spent several minutes just looking at it—looking up at the spot where my fellow Blackwater operators had once hung mutilated. It was very emotional for me. I was very angry, too. I wanted so bad to run out into that town and start killing people with no remorse. I didn't care who I killed; I wanted some payback of my own. There was no doubt in my mind that some of those people that day were in fact a thousand meters away down the street. A lot of the news coverage showed the vehicles being looted and bodies being mutilated by local townspeople—some were teenagers and others old men. I was very angry at the thought that some of these people were just a stone's throw away.”

T-Boy shelves the anger when on the job, but it's obvious the incident has left him with a deeply wounded psyche. When I first met him while riding along with the Mamba team on the airport run, I thought his moments of solitary “zoning,” as his teammates called it, was just his way of maintaining focus for the dangerous drive ahead. As I got to know him better, it seemed to me that his solitude represented the torture of inner demons more than anything else. In addition to the weight in his heart, T-Boy carries with him a memento of his four dead compatriots—one he anointed on the beams of Blackwater Bridge the day of the memorial. “I had brought an American flag that I had taken from their room. I couldn't tell you which guy it belonged to, but as far as I was concerned, it belonged to all of them and was a part of me, too. I took that small American flag out of my pocket and rubbed it on the bridge a few times, and I thought to myself how glad I was for the payback that the marines had inflicted on Fallujah.”

Recalling the punishment exacted on Fallujah seems to steel T-Boy's nerve, and the vulnerable and tortured young man visually transforms into a venerable and imposing ex-marine. “I still have that flag today, and I have carried it on every mission since.”

CHAPTER 6

         

Under Siege

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for thou art with me.”

—P
SALM
23

I'm plowing through the air in a Blackwater Little Bird, and the earth below looks like the undulating blur of a sepia-toned kaleidoscope. My feet are braced on the side skids as I sit out the open doorway of the helicopter, wishing that the harness securing me to the floor of the bird had come in a full-body variety. Peering down, I see what looks like an ancient city under siege, replete with towers and crenellated fortifications. The modern world begins where a murky brown haze envelops the square-edged squat buildings that make up the rest of Baghdad.

As we're dropping elevation for a better look at the city, massive monuments built by Saddam materialize out of the miasma, towering above the brown maze of featureless houses and shops. While the air feels cool and the sky peaceful at a thousand feet, descending for a low run drives us straight into a settlement of twenty-first-century urban warfare. The occupiers have transformed the ostentatious architecture of Saddam into an ugly utilitarian patchwork labyrinth of sandbagged houses, white trailers, T-walls, dirt berms, tanks, SUVs, and military vehicles. Flying over a residential area, the landscape of rooftops evinces a more pedestrian life amid the war zone. As my eyes flick over the roofs and streets, patterns emerge. I can instantly see traffic jams, military movements, and isolated individuals walking through fields and alleys. The pilots don't run below a hundred feet just for the good view it gives them of the ground, but for safety reasons—moving at a low trajectory shortens the amount of time an insurgent could have to aim and fire an RPG at them. They also fly erratically back and forth, just in case someone gets off a shot at them. “We don't get hit much but we do run into wildlife,” Steve, the pilot, tells me. Steve has painted white outlines of cartoonish bird figures near the window—one for each they have hit. Silver duct tape also covers three gashes from shrapnel.

At a calculated point, the two pilots arc the helicopter upward from the tan landscape into the blue sky, crushing me against the polished aluminum floor. Curving over, all I see is sky and sun and then feel the weightlessness. I mumble a few words of expletive-laced prayerlike gibberish and contemplate puking.

The Little Bird then turns in a steep accelerating dive down toward the turbid mess of the Tigris. I brace myself and consider the sad fate of having my last breath drawn from that liquid putrescence, but the expert pilots make a smooth last-minute adjustment, and when I open my eyes, we are sailing up the river a few feet above the artery of brown swirling goo. The pilot's flat compressed voice comes over the headset, telling me to keep an eye on the water, since this is where they usually get to see pale bloated dead bodies floating down the muddy channel. It must have been a slow night in Baghdad—no corpses today. In the flat, clipped intonation of a surreal tour-guide spiel, the pilot points to one side to indicate from where the mortars that regularly rock the Green Zone are fired, then to the other side so I can see the site of yesterday's suicide bombing. The helo flicks up into another nauseating arc, and we head at high speed along the main road into the Green Zone.

We sweep over the main parade grounds, flanked by the triumphal Hands of Victory—massive hands modeled on Saddam's holding two swords to form an arch and cast from the melted guns of Iraqis who died in the Iran-Iraq war. The Blackwater pilots are renowned for flying under the swords instead of over, but for my sake they restrain themselves. After another gut-wrenching lurch upward, we cross over the dividing line into the world outside the Green Zone. As we head toward Gate 12, the helos swoop close enough to the rooftops that I can see the look of terror that spreads across a man's face as he looks up from doing his laundry to see a chopper bearing down on him. One more twisting ascent tests the tenacity of my stomach; then we float down back inside the massive blast walls that line the palace. Landing as softly as walking in slippers, the ride comes to an end. I welcome the firm feel of mortar-blasted concrete.

The Blackwater Aviation pilots live at the airfield next to the palace in the Green Zone. The landing zone is a large empty paved lot bordered by high blast walls. It sits right next to the main palace area—a favorite target of mortar attacks. With the splatterlike impact damage or spawl marks from mortar hits etched into the surrounding concrete, the area resembles a grotesque modern sculpture garden.

Inside the hangar, which houses three of the teardrop-shaped helicopters, country-western music blasts from the boombox. Two Little Birds glisten with fresh black and gray paint, while mechanics tinker on the third, which has been gutted for service. The Hughes 500 Little Bird (now made by Boeing as the MD-550) first flew in 1960, and the tiny helicopter quickly set a list of records that included fastest speed, fastest climb rate, and highest sustained altitude. They are quick and mobile—the sports car of helicopters. The back would normally seat two passengers, but Blackwater has modified the platform for two snipers/gunners, who use heavy drum-fed squad automatic weapons, or SAWs, which hang from the top of the door frame. These helicopters have no doors, so the gunners sit in the open door frame, held in by restraints and locking their feet on the skids. Special Ops use Little Birds to insert Delta operators via plank, cable, or fast rope. Blackwater uses them to do reconnaissance and to provide backup and surgical firepower for their contractors.

One of five divisions of Blackwater, Blackwater Aviation not only provides air support with the Little Birds, but also transportation and logistics in Iraq and Afghanistan using the twin-engine CASA 212 aircraft. Blackwater Little Bird pilots provided air cover for both the Bremer and Negroponte details, and now mostly provide backup for convoy runs by the Mamba team. Whenever Mamba gets in a jam, the Little Birds appear like guardian angels, swooping in like an aerial cavalry to fly just a few feet above the convoy—making an impressive show of force to deter attackers and lay down fire if required by circumstance.

Flying
would probably be the wrong word to describe what they do, since these former 160th Airborne pilots are the lowest, fastest, most aggressive pilots in Iraq. “They get on us about flying low and erratic, saying we are going to crash,” Steve explains, “but around here that's the safest way to fly. The lower you are, the less time they have to spot you and the more cover that is provided by the buildings, trees, and overhead. We go out and run the routes, and if we see something that is out of place or wasn't there before, we mark them and see if they have changed. Or if they look like IEDs, we shoot 'em up.”

Walking back to their air-conditioned trailer, we pass a crudely lettered sign:
CAMP ASSMONKEY
—
FUCK YOU WE ALREADY HAVE ENOUGH FRIENDS
. The term “Ass Monkey” came about when the Blackwater Bremer detail gave it as a radio call sign to the hotshot pilots providing air support, referring to the amount of time they spent sitting on their butts waiting to scramble. Steve thought of the sign. “When we first got here, everybody had a camp with a name on it, so we figured we needed a sign, too,” he tells me with his dry Texas humor.

The long wall inside the trailer displays a large satellite map of Baghdad and a collection of binders and smaller maps. The pilots spend their time either in the air, sleeping, or sitting in this simple ten-by-thirty structure waiting to scramble. The bitter smell of cooked coffee and pungent helo exhaust fill the confined space. The pilots, conditioned to be cautious about operational security, sit across from me and just stare at first. Only when silence doesn't work do they answer in clipped tones. The gunners spit Skoal and say nothing. They are visibly uncomfortable.

Steve shows me where a bullet went in through the sole of his tan desert boots and then out the top. He was shot in the foot a few days ago while flying at his usual hundred-foot-high altitude over Baghdad. Steve has the accent, lean looks, and squint of a Texan and wears a bandana covering his shaved head. He uses his finger to trace the bullet's trajectory through his ankle. The other pilots just shake their head. One says, “He's just showing off.” They all laugh.

Steve took the bullet in the foot during an ordinary run on an ordinary day. Amazingly, during the most dangerous runs of his time in Iraq—as he ferried supplies and wounded to and from a battle in Najaf—he escaped completely unscathed.

The argument about security contractors being civilians because they do not engage in combat became completely moot within a week of the March 31 incident in Fallujah, after Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi militia attacked a Blackwater-guarded CPA compound in Najaf. The U.S. military did not send in any backup, so the contractors had no choice but to fight an intense four-hour battle against the insurgents themselves. As the CPA compound ran low on ammunition, Steve flew from Baghdad with a resupply for his buddies, picking up a wounded soldier to medevac him out to a hospital. For his efforts, he received a pointed reprimand. I ask Steve if the reason he got in trouble for the mission was because they are technically supposed to be civilian pilots not involved in combat. Dan, another pilot who had remained silent up until now, interrupts to say, “We are Americans first, contractors second.”

An Najaf

In the postinvasion jostling for political leadership of the Iraqi Shia community, one radical firebrand quickly rose to prominence. Thirty-year-old Moqtada al-Sadr had the lineage of respected religious leadership. Both his father and grandfather had risen to positions of great eminence amongst the Iraqi Shiites. His grandfather had served as prime minister, and Sadr's father had gained the respect of a martyr after Saddam had him assassinated in 1999. Sadr did not possess the reputation, education, or support his father and grandfather had enjoyed, but as defaced photos of Saddam were torn down and replaced by Sadr's father, it became apparent that Moqtada was using the power vacuum to his advantage. He worked to gain support by playing upon historical precedent, religious fervor, decades of persecution by Sunni elements, and an inarguable right of the Shia to gain governing authority in Iraq by sheer virtue of their majority.

Attempts to marginalize Sadr proved unsuccessful, since his radical anti-American message appealed to a community that felt it was suffering under the rule of foreign imperialist aggressors. Moqtada and his black-shirted Mahdi Army began to push back against the foreign occupiers, adding prestige and notoriety to a man who had not previously been accepted as a sage, religious expert, or political leader. In order to advance his position of authority, Sadr organized large rallies, made firebrand speeches, and began a campaign of assassination to remove more moderate rivals.

In an attempt to bring Sadr to bear, a secret warrant was issued for his arrest, and Iraqi and coalition forces started rounding up a select list of his associates, charging them with complicity in the April 2003 assassination of Abdul Majid al-Khoei, a rival cleric. To counter his enemies, Moqtada al-Sadr had been working hard to whip his followers into a frenzy.

The spring of 2004 saw large, angry protests raging across the southern cities and the Shia slums of Baghdad, and violent attacks by Sadr's Mahdi Army and its allies were on a dramatic upsurge. Sadr had impeccable timing, since Sunni resistance was also building in the Sunni Triangle. On March 28, Bremer had ordered the closure of Sadr's newspaper,
al-Hawzah,
charging the publication with incitement of violence. On April 3, one of Sadr's top aides had been arrested for involvement in al-Khoei's assassination. While these two moves had the intent of weakening Sadr, they actually increased his prestige by making clear that the Americans were closing in on him in an effort to shut him down. Sadr capitalized on his own persecution, and thousands of Shiites poured out into the streets of their communities to rally in his support.

Protests had become such a commonplace occurrence that the angry Iraqis gathering outside Camp Golf in Najaf on the morning of April 4 garnered little attention at first. Photos of the protest show a few hundred people gathered outside the gates. Flags in a variety of colors, representing different Shia tribes, fly over the crowd. While the majority of the protesters appear to be tribal representatives, a handful of figures hovering in the background dressed in the black attire of Sadr's Mahdi Army suggest an ominous influence.

At the time, Camp Golf housed an Iraqi police station, a contingency of Spanish and El Salvadoran troops, a handful of American military police, and the CPA's Najaf headquarters. CPA headquarters in the main capitals were fortified and guarded by private security contractors who worked under loose rules of engagement written by Anthony Hunter-Choat—a retired British general and former mercenary in the French Foreign Legion. Despite the rules of engagement allowing contractors to shoot back if attacked, there was no further formal legal guidelines on what contractors should or should not do in combat situations.

Blackwater Security had the contract to protect the CPA operations in Najaf and had eight contractors, mostly former SEALs, stationed there to guard the headquarters. Not even a week had passed since they had seen the violent ambush of their colleagues in Fallujah, so when shots rang out from the crowd of protesters outside the gate, the Blackwater contractors were ready to, as one phrased it, “get it on.”

Twenty-five-year-old marine corporal Lonnie Young, a defense messaging system administrator, had passed the protesters when he had arrived at the compound that morning. He had come to Camp Golf with another marine and a handful of civilian contractors tasked with upgrading the base's communications equipment. What should have been an easy half-day assignment for the communication specialist turned into a harried afternoon of heavy fighting.