Licensed to Kill (24 page)

“I had one bad day because I brought sixteen years of muscle memory of shooting my way, and two days the way they want. It's not that they are wrong and I am right. One day I froze on the range, not because of a stovepipe—I froze thinking, if I don't get this, I won't have money for my custody battle.

“The common denominator here is that we are all veterans. We want to be involved, but we can't just be Private Snuffy and make no money. One of the kids who got binned today was a Ranger. He just got out of the army as a spec four, so he thinks this is a shit ton of money.

“When I was a Ranger, I was very proud. I felt like I was doing something with my life. There is no pride in what I do now. I might make seven grand in a day moving boxes. I am around all these corporate types. A CFO making a quarter million looks down on me and, dude, he is not entitled to carry my jock. You need to be around people you respect. In five hundred years they are not going to give a fuck about my wife's oil company, but Iraq will matter. We want to do something worthwhile with the time we have left.”

Feel Good Jammie Jammie

Those trainees not flying home today will be sitting in a classroom to learn the finer points of working a personal security detail. For their final exercise, the class members will be put in teams and given as close to a real-life mission as possible. The exercise will revolve around protecting a “principal,” or client, while transporting them to and from a predesignated site. The scenario will create a staged violent incident, and the trainers will evaluate how the men react. No one ever has immunity from being dropped, but the instructors feel confident at this point that all students will do well, and the graduation diplomas have already been printed and personally signed.

The instructor starts the class with a briefing on the basics of the PSD and the peculiar vocabulary of the work: “You have a principal or client. When we are out of the car, we are walking the diamond, one in front, one in back, and two on each side. Some people call him the VIP. He rides in the limo, which can be a truck or a car. There is a lead car and an advance vehicle. There can be a bump truck—a heavy vehicle that moves in around and beside the VIP to push him off the X, or point of contact. There is also a CAT team, counterassault team. This is the firepower in the rear. CAT team members are double-A personality types. They are looking for a fight. In our experience over there, the Iraqis—Sunni or Shia—will not stay and fight. The guys that come over the border will fight. They are like us. The idea is to engage the enemy long enough for the principal to get away. Once that is done, we break contact.

“The CAT vehicle has a load plan for crew served weapons, extra ammo, jack, medical kit, litter…” He uses a dry-erase board and queries the class on what else should go in the CAT vehicle. Hands pop up. “Grenades?” asks one student. “Smoke,” offers another. The list fills out: night-vision or other optics, countersniper gear, gas masks and chem equipment, breaching tools, tow strap, hi-lift jack. The instructor makes a separate list for the gear carried by the rear car in the convoy: “Water, chow, comms, GPS, batteries, spare run flats, armor, and helmets.” The students dutifully take notes on how to pack.

For Sunday's run, they will use car models as code names. For example, if the operation has been compromised, “Corvette” will be announced over the radio. Codes are important, even on scrambled transmissions, since locals can overhear radio conversations and signal attackers.

Before the course ends for the day, the instructor restates one last time that they actually get paid to run away, that their job is not to engage the enemy but to get them off the X. The students will find out the next day how good they are at “running away.”

Sunday arrives. The rain has dissipated and the sun is rising on a beautiful morning as we drive out to the range. Dave, the shooting instructor, speaking in his own special language, says that he set up extra targets on the range for the trainees so they can get some “feel good jammie jammie.” He also mentions that the range will be empty today. “All the zipperheads [cops] won't be on the range when we pay a thousand a day.”

The students crowd into the small portable classroom while Dave goes over the rules of the range. He holds up a target. “The brown side of a silhouette is a shoot target.” He flips it over. “A white side is a no shoot.” They will be using live ammunition and will be graded on their performance. The students don't know if more will be dropped in a final elimination before graduation. I wonder if that ambiguity drives their obvious tension more than the exercise that awaits them.

Outside the men collect their weapons. They are going hot.

The instructors have real-world experience, and they do their best to replicate actual conditions. With a little imagination, West Memphis has become a city in Iraq. The range echoes with the dry mechanical clacks of M4s and Glocks being checked and loading. The students do radio checks using plug-in earphones and wrist mikes. The men sit in their vehicles at a sideways slant so they can shoot out the window. They hold their doors mostly closed so they can throw them open at a moment's notice. Although they worked on thoroughly planning their drop last night, they know some unknown contingency awaits them.

The first exercise simulates a meeting between a local mayor and his group of irate citizens. The principal is a State Department official sent to meet the mayor. The advance man goes in to survey the situation. He jots down some quick notes and radios back with details on the number of people present and the locations of entries and exits. The lead person seems nervous and tramples over an area described by the advance person as a precious flowerbed when they're escorting the principal into the meeting. Suddenly, before the meeting begins, the instructors fan out and fire blanks into the ground around the meeting area to simulate an assassination attempt. The agent in charge (AIC) covers the principal and pushes him into the Suburban while the others provide covering fire and shoot into the brown targets. The team does well but is mildly lectured about the importance of being sociable and not antagonizing the locals by stepping on their flowers.

The last scenario played out on the ramshackle range is more complicated. The team has to walk their principal to a meeting over a hundred yards of soft sand from where the cars must be parked. The rooms and entry are confusing, and this time they will have to protect two principals. There are also groups of men hidden inside the rooms. Some are hostile, but others are simply designated as rabble. A few wrap T-shirts around their heads as turbans. The shooting begins once the PSD is inside the meeting room, and the crowd begins chanting and yelling at the men. The situation becomes confused as one of the two principals dives under a table in mock terror. Distracted by the surging mob, the PSD shoots their way out of the house only to discover they have left one principal behind. The instructors urge the mock group of angry men to take the remaining principal hostage and taunt the men. The team fights their way back to put their one principal in the car, losing a few members of their team as casualties, who then must be dragged, complete with armor and weapons, through the heavy sand. Exhausted and panting, the remaining team members must fight their way back into a far more dangerous and hostile situation. As they work their way slowly back to the house, the team is “gunned down” and the instructor decides that the principal would have already been killed. Now with most of the team killed or wounded and one of their principals dead, it has become a heroic but pointless attempt.

The instructor calls them over and asks the team what they think. “That we fucked up?” answers one, dryly. “Shades of Fallujah,” says another. The instructor gives them his own assessment: “You guys did a good job getting in, but when it became complex… you didn't assign a second AIC—usually the shift leader—to watch the second principal.”

Don follows up with a point that elicits a groan. “Now we have to notify his next of kin that he has been killed. We are going to be up all night writing after action reports.”

Despite the screwup, none of them are bumped off the graduation roster. The instructor just gives them one fundamentally important thing to remember from the experience of the third exercise: “The lesson is everyone you take in, you bring out.”

Terrorist Training

A bleak industrial panorama intermingles with the flat yellow grass marshlands of the East Coast on the drive south on I-95 from Washington, DC. Near Williamsburg, we whiz by the exit for Camp Peary, “the Farm” of CIA training fame. Around the mouth of the Potomac, Norfolk Naval Base, the nerve center of the American naval machine, rises out of the landscape in a tangle of towering gray cargo cranes, massive ships, and sprawling storage yards. The East Coast Navy SEAL teams call the nearby Little Creek Naval Base home.

I'm heading down to the Blackwater training facility with Walter Purdy, an ex-marine and former security staffer for the presidential helicopter, to help him teach a week-long training program he runs called Mirror Image. Purdy's literature describes the course as “an intensive, one-week classroom and field training program designed to realistically simulate terrorist recruiting and training techniques, and operational tactics.” About sixty Special Forces, Secret Service, marines, FBI agents, independent contractors, and other hand-picked attendees will spend the next week learning to think and act like terrorists so they can better understand and anticipate their tactics. Purdy has invited me to participate, working under the assumption that I've learned something from my years of traveling and living with rebel terrorist and paramilitary groups. Though the course is operated under the purview of the Terrorism Research Center, Purdy has worked out a deal with Erik Prince so he can take advantage of Blackwater's spacious and well-equipped training compound.

Although Prince has had Navy experience on a non-covert SEAL team, Blackwater's image is culturally rooted in black-ops SEAL Team 6, or DEVGRU, the elite antiterrorism group and navy equivalent of the U.S. Army's Combat Applications Group, better known as Delta. Given the secretive nature of much of their work, and their almost paranoid suspicion of the media, few outsiders earn the privilege of visiting the Blackwater training complex.

It's a three-hour haul from downtown DC, and the back of our rented Ford Expedition is loaded with Glock weapons, ammunition, Simunition, coolers, and protective gear. Crossing the border into North Carolina, the two-lane highway begins passing through a collection of low-slung and haphazardly arranged industrial buildings, churches advertising bingo or a fish fry, and small modular homes set back on neatly manicured lawns. We've been warned that the local cop relishes trapping visitors with the audacity to speed through his jurisdiction, welcoming them to Moyock with a friendly $128 ticket.

Blackwater is the biggest employer around here, with at least two hundred fifty men and women working in the steel target factory and on the ranges. If they have a full slate of classes going on to train security contractors for a Blackwater gig, that number might grow to five hundred. That does not include the contractors or employees working in Afghanistan, Iraq, or other areas. Before 9/11, the bears probably outnumbered the employees on Erik's seven thousand acres of swampland.

The streams that flow through the swamps of Camden and Currituck counties, which run dark from tannins leached from decaying vegetable matter, inspired the name “Blackwater.” The land is flat, pine-covered, and swampy in areas, green rolling fields in others. The large black bears, which gave the company its bear-print logo, can be seen at dawn and dusk, lurking at the edge of the bogs as they forage for berries.

We almost miss the turnoff onto the narrow, potholed Puddin Ridge Road, which dead-ends just a short way down at the gate and the empty guard shack that secures Blackwater from the outside world. Walter punches in the simple four-digit security code, and the gates slowly swing open to allow us entry. Driving into the compound, we pass an ocean of what look like junked cars with grease-stick numbers on the windows. Blackwater's driving range, designed with State Department standards in mind, looks like a racetrack and sounds like a movie set. The contractors use it to learn how to dodge improvised explosive devices and escape attackers, and to practice high-speed close-protection moves. The “Boy's Own” adventure scenario is reinforced by the hulks of old airplanes used for practicing hijacker assaults and by the gray steel ship's superstructure used for teams to practice ship boarding and clearing. The late-afternoon sunlight makes the coarse crushed stone of the shooting range glitter with the brass of spent bullet casings. No one keeps count of how much ammo is shot here, but many recruits and trainees will shoot more rounds in a week than they have in their entire military or police career. Large yellow earthmovers kick up clouds of soft brown dust as they carve out space for more shooting ranges. A 6,000-foot airstrip and a modern headquarters building are two plans in the works for the future. Erik always has plans upon plans for expansion to keep the Blackwater facility state-of-the-art.

If not for the sound of gunfire, the log arch with the bear-paw logo we drive under would remind me of a Boy Scout summer camp. We seem to have entered the kingdom of bang, since the constant sound of gunfire—automatic, single or short burst, small caliber, machine gun, or high-powered—provides a pervasive and inescapable soundtrack to our drive. Even at seven thousand acres, the sound follows us all four miles to Blackwater headquarters in the center of the compound. The headquarters for one of the fastest-growing and aggressive security companies look incongruously picturesque, since the offices inhabit a cabinlike building set on the edge of a large lake and surrounded by dense greenery. A nearby rudimentary building provides a bunkhouse for the students.