by Scott McEwen
Fallujah had not been brutalized in the occupation. Indeed, it had not seen any air strikes during the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, but it got itself into the war by ambushing coalition forces in April 2003. That first battle raged for only a fraction of an hour, but it lingered in the minds of American military commanders. Any real battle for control of the city, they knew, would be a bloodbath. Locals were well stocked with belt-fed machine guns and rocket launchers. Meanwhile American commanders faced intense political pressure to keep American casualties to an absolute minimum. These two realities combined in the minds of U.S. military commanders, and patrols became shorter, quicker, and, soon enough, rarer.
Meanwhile, large numbers of foreign fighters, including al Qaeda elements, flooded into the city to become either murderers or martyrs, as Allah decided.
They were impatient to realize their destiny.
Everyone knew that a blood-drenched house-to-house Armageddon was coming. It was a grim task that few Americans looked forward to. They knew the body count on both sides would be high. The insurgents had months to dig in and booby-trap the city. Once they had fortified their positions in the city itself, they were able to export their activities throughout the area by setting IEDs and staging other attacks on the coalition forces. The coalition forces knew that the city would have to be taken and cleaned out in order to bring peace to Iraq.
As the city and the soldiers waited for the final showdown, four Blackwater employees, including a former SEAL named Scott Helvenston, were sent into Fallujah to retrieve some kitchen equipment left behind by another contractor on March 31, 2004. It was a routine mission that quickly became international news.
It sparked one of the bloodiest battles in a generation of American war fighting and, years later, inspired one of the strangest secret missions of the U.S. Navy SEALs.
* * *
Scott Helvenston, born on June 21, 1965, was the youngest U.S. Navy SEAL in history. After graduating from BUD/S at the age of seventeen, Helvenston deployed with SEAL Team Four and served for two years. Then he was transferred to Coronado, California, where he deployed with SEAL Team One. An outstanding athlete, even among SEALs, he became an instructor at BUD/S, leading physical training every day for four years.
During a routine parachute jump in 1994, his main chute failed and his backup chute only partially inflated. He landed hard. He injured his back, wrist, and ankles, and after months of treatment, he was discharged from the Navy for medical reasons. That hurt more than his injuries.
It was a turning point in his life. He was disappointed and disillusioned. He didn’t know what to do with himself. He had never imagined a life outside of the active-duty SEALs. His SEAL buddies would still share a beer with him. But it wasn’t the same.
Still, he couldn’t allow himself to wallow in despair and regret. He bounced back in 1997 and formed a fitness company, Amphibian Athletics, with the goal of teaching civilians the outdoor fitness skills he once taught SEALs. He was climbing up a cliff of despair by renewing his SEAL-like focus with daily achievements and dogged determination. His SEAL training camps were successful, drawing people from across Southern California, eventually including Hollywood stars. Through his new friends, and an old SEAL buddy, he was hired to coach Demi Moore in the film G.I. Jane.
Then he reinvented himself again, becoming an actor in his own right, appearing in reality shows such as Combat Missions and Man vs. Beast. In Man vs. Beast he raced a chimpanzee on an obstacle course and is said to be the only human to have bested the animal.
Then the Hollywood work petered out and the call of war sounded. He reinvented himself again, as a military contractor. He joined Blackwater, an outfit formed by a former SEAL to train SWAT teams and military units in a special facility in the swamplands on the Virginia–North Carolina state line. The company was originally named Blackwater because of the dark mud in its remote training facility, where government teams could rehearse storming buildings in its fake, purpose-built town using live ammunition. As the company grew, it opened more training facilities and soon became one of the best and the largest private training operations in the world. When the September 11 attacks dragged America into war, Blackwater diversified into supplying guards and trainers to U.S. military operations overseas. Contractors were paid higher salaries than soldiers, but cost Uncle Sam less overall, due to lower training, housing, and supply costs. More important, Blackwater’s network among SEALs and other former commandos brought in skilled personnel who didn’t want to work for the government—but didn’t mind going to war. It didn’t take long for word to reach Helvenston that Blackwater was looking for former operators like him.
He signed up as a security specialist and shipped out to Iraq. He was sent to the hottest part of the “Red Zone,” Fallujah. He was looking forward to it.
Helvenston met three other Blackwater contractors: Jerry “Jerko” Zovko, Wesley Batalona, and Michael Teague on March 31, 2004. It was their first day together and their last.
* * *
Helvenston and others left the staging area outside Fallujah at approximately 10:00 a.m.
The operation was flawed from the start. None of the members of the team had ever worked together before. The four men were driving in two nonarmored SUVs, with only two men per car: one driver and one navigator. The SUVs with foreign nationals stuck out; in fact, they were known as “bullet magnets” because they were easily identified as American. Iraqis rarely, if ever, drive American-made SUVs, preferring their Mercedes or Toyota equivalents.
Both the State Department and the CIA strongly recommended that teams going into Fallujah be no fewer than six men per unit. Because there were only four men and two SUVs, there was only one man to drive and another to navigate Fallujah’s winding and unmarked streets. There was no one to ride shotgun and defend the vehicles if they were attacked. And if the navigator was forced to fight, it was easy to become lost and trapped in a maze of Fallujah’s medieval streets. In a gunfight, shooting and map reading are tough to do simultaneously.
There were other operational shortcomings. Since the operation was apparently organized at the last minute, the routine preoperation intelligence assessment to review the threat level along the travel route was not made available to Helvenston or his ill-fated comrades.
Finally, and in an apparent direct violation of the terms of the Eurest Support Services contract signed by both Blackwater and its partner, Regency Hotel and Hospital, the contractors were supposed to operate only armored vehicles… and the men were not given any such vehicles. None of the vehicles they were riding in were even fitted with bulletproof glass, let alone armored with reinforced steel plates.
This was, apparently, a policy designed to save money. “The original contract between Blackwater/Regency and ESS [Eurest Support Services], signed March 8, 2004, recognized that ‘the current threat in the Iraqi theater of operations’ would remain ‘consistent and dangerous,’ and called for a minimum of three men in each vehicle on security missions ‘with a minimum of two armored vehicles to support ESS movements.’… But on March 12, 2004, Blackwater and Regency signed a subcontract that specified security provisions identical to the original except for one word: ‘armored.’ It was deleted from the contract, allegedly saving Blackwater $1.5 million,” according to a noted Blackwater critic, Jeremy Scahill in his book “Blackwater: the Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.”1 (Blackwater has disputed some of the claims in his work and with good reason.) In addition, the contract wasn’t followed regarding the number of men per vehicle. Only two men per vehicle were available on the day Helvenston was sent into Fallujah.
Helvenston and his colleagues would have to take their chances.
* * *
About a half hour later, on a narrow street, masked gunmen jumped in front of the vehicles and sprayed them with automatic fire. All four men, including Helvenston, were killed almost instantly. They never had time to return fire.2
The windows of the u
narmored vehicles were smashed and then doused with gasoline. Then, a burning rag set them ablaze while a group of men with scarves covering their faces, hurled bricks into the blazing vehicles. They danced and sang with joy as the column of black smoke climbed into the sky.
When the fire died, the jihadis ripped the burnt bodies from the vehicles, hooked them on chains, and dragged them through the streets of Fallujah. Ultimately hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Fallujah residents gathered, chanting, “Fallujah is the graveyard of Americans.”
They hung some of the charred bodies from a city bridge over a dirty tributary to the Euphrates. Tipped off by the insurgents, news crews arrived to videotape the tragedy. Their lenses feasted on the atrocity.
American soldiers saw the smoke rising from the city and did not know what had taken place. Yet, like cavalry soldiers in the stockades of the Old West, they knew that a pillar of smoke on the horizon meant that something evil was heading their way.
* * *
As the images of the American bodies dangling from a Fallujah bridge made their way around the world, the coalition’s top civilian leader, Paul “Jerry” Bremer, consulted with senior officials in the White House and military officers in Centcom over a secure video-conference link. The options were debated.
Four days later, a mixed ground-assault force of Army and Marines arrived. Supported by tanks and close air support, a house-to-house battle raged for days in Fallujah. It would prove to be one of the bloodiest battles of that war.
Fallujah was a magnet for jihadis, the place to make your mark as part of your generation. It was a gathering place that few wanted to miss. They came from every part of the Muslim world, from the mountains of Pakistan, the hills of Chechnya, and the villages of Bosnia to the dry reaches of Libya and the slums of Cairo. They came to kill Americans and to die as “martyrs.”
Among them was Ahmed Hashim Abed, a top al Qaeda leader.
Numerous intelligence reports and interrogation memos pointed to Abed as the ringleader responsible for the massacre of the four Americans. He didn’t come to die; he wanted his paradise on this Earth. He slipped away in the chaos of combat. He remained a ghost, a killer who couldn’t be tracked.
Ahmed Hashim Abed was listed as an HVT (High Value Target), a top priority. The SEALs who had served with Helvenston vowed to capture or kill his murderer. They would hunt that deadly ghost for years.
Five years later, in 2009, they found their man.
* * *
Carl Higbie’s platoon, part of SEAL Team Ten, made finding Abed their highest personal priority.
The SEALs had plenty of motivation. Abed was the leader of the group that they knew had killed, dragged, burned, and hanged the body of former Navy SEAL Scott Helvenston and three other Blackwater employees. None of Higbie’s platoon had served with Helvenston. They had either joined after his departure or were East Coast SEALs while Helvenston was on the West Coast, but the bonds of the brotherhood were strong. In addition, the SEALs knew that killers never struck once. They would kill until captured or killed themselves. Finding Abed was also a military necessity.
Higbie was team leader in charge of SEAL Team Ten. Higbie and his team spent months poring over reports and working with snitches. American intelligence databases are vast. It is easy to miss clues if they are scattered across dozens of reports among millions of files. It takes patience and focus to collect and collate information for a single individual. Painstakingly, the SEALs gathered the files and put together the mosaic. Finally, they found Abed—the killer of Helvenston. Now they wanted to swoop in and get him.
Their own chain of command proved to be the toughest obstacle.
* * *
The officer in charge of Higbie’s platoon turned down the mission. Higbie thought he was a career officer serving a short hitch in the SEALs, who hoped to burnish his résumé and move up the ladder. While ambition makes some men bold, it makes more men cautious. The officer was more career cautious than Higbie thought necessary. But Higbie didn’t argue. In the new, professional SEAL teams, enlisted men were not supposed to challenge officers.
Instead, Higbie made revisions.
He thought that a perfect plan would be impossible to turn down. The officer turned it down again. He denied the mission for various reasons real or contrived, in Higbie’s opinion. Higbie wouldn’t give up. He kept making revisions.
Higbie’s officer preferred goodwill missions to ones in which lives were risked. He ordered SEALs to rebuild school walls in Iraqi cities and instituted a program, called “180 Lunches,” in which each SEAL was supposed to have lunch with a different Iraqi civilian every weekday. The enlisted SEALs silently resented this. It wasn’t what they trained for; it wasn’t why they became SEALs. It was like using a Ferrari to deliver the mail. “They would make us go out during the day and make us engage local Iraqi people just to say ‘Hi, how’s it going? We’re American.’ We helped build a fence in downtown Fallujah during broad daylight in 130-degree heat, out in the street. That was the kind of stuff that they made us do.”
Meanwhile, the officer kept denying his approval for an operation to seize a SEAL killer.
* * *
Then Higbie learned that it was not the faceless higher-ups who were turning down his mission plan, as he had been led to believe. He learned that the officer was not even passing his request to the officers above him. It was just dying on a junior officer’s desk.
The Iraqi SEAL base was less than a quarter-mile long. There were few places to hold secret conversations. One night, Higbie and his teammates met in a dark corner to plot a countermove. One teammate had a high-ranking contact in Washington. They decided to take a chance.
“Finally, my buddy went around the chain of command and went way higher in order to get approval for it. Basically they put a lot of pressure on our direct command and they approved it,” Higbie said. When the officer was asked about approving the mission, he “didn’t mention that he had denied it like ten times.”
While going over the cautious officer’s head proved to be the right thing to do in getting the operation approved, it also enraged the officer. That officer would ultimately get his revenge.
These kinds of bureaucratic workarounds have become more common as the SEALs were “professionalized” under Admirals Olson and McRaven. Officers who had come up through the ranks (“mustangs”) were seen by many enlisted SEALs as more likely to put missions ahead of their careers and were more comfortable communicating with enlisted men, who usually came from humbler backgrounds and lacked elite educations. The “college men” on career tracks were seen by Higbie and others as more careful and more schooled at bureaucratic infighting. Higbie was about to find this out the hard way.
* * *
Mission planning soon became a passive-aggressive battle of its own.
Since the operation was approved, the argument shifted to equipment, as the officer in charge withheld the helicopters needed for the mission.
As usual, the officer [whose name is withheld because he remains on active duty] did everything he could to deny Higbie’s ability to get the job done: “He would find reasons why; he would say ‘You don’t have enough assets,’ which is why we had three helos instead of two. Normally we have two helos for that body count [the team needed for the mission]. He said we needed two, so we got two, then they said we need three.”
Securing the equipment for the mission was more difficult than Higbie had anticipated. “It was crazy how much of an ass pain it was to coordinate assets. We ended up getting three helos, and it was like we were trying to get it, trying to get it, trying to get it, and they wouldn’t give it to us. Finally, we had to call the Army, to get a Navy asset in the battle space area, because they [the Navy officer in charge] didn’t want to give us assets for it. That was their little back-door thing to try to keep us from accessing assets and hitting the target.”
Ultimately, the transport and the operation were ready. Higbie thought they were finally going t
o get the “go” order.
Then the officer threw him another curveball. They would have to dump one of the SEALs assigned and replace him with a combat camera operator, who was ordered to videotape all operations with the team. The combat camera operator was a middle-aged woman with little combat experience. As Higbie knew from previous missions, the camera operator was not physically fit enough to keep up with the SEALs. “We all liked her, but she smoked two packs a day and couldn’t run and couldn’t shoot.” Her presence meant the loss of a gun, and also a loss in speed and agility on the entire team making the assault. She couldn’t defend herself and, Higbie feared, would likely become a liability if things went badly. If she were wounded, someone would have to carry her. If she were taken hostage, she would be a propaganda prize for the enemy.
And, most worryingly, in a gunfight you want as many guns on your side as possible. She shot videos, not bullets. How could she defend herself in a firefight?
When Higbie was absorbing this blow, his superior landed another right cross. The officer told Higbie to cut other SEALs from the operation so that they could include a number of Iraqi police, the Iraqi SWAT. The SEALs were concerned about them, too: “In a gunfight, these guys will turn around and shoot you. It was so counterproductive to me. These guys were awful. I mean, they had been training with SEALs for five years and they still can’t shoot a fucking paper [target] at ten yards.”
The officer, Higbie said, seemed obsessed with the “right ratio” of Americans to Iraqis. “The whole deployment, you can’t go on this op because you don’t have the right ratio. What is the right ratio [between SEALs and Iraqis]? Well it’s not this, just submit another one and we’ll tell you if it’s right.” He would never give Higbie an exact number; they would have to keep guessing while the officer kept changing his mind. Sometimes it was two Iraqis per SEAL, sometimes it was three. On this mission, it was four.
While ratios may seem unimportant, the importance becomes real very quickly in a gunfight. SEALs who train together can almost read each other’s mind in battle. And they have excellent fire control—they can hit targets without killing friendlies. The Iraqis, by contrast, were notorious for shooting civilians and even coalition forces by accident or design. Many SEALs, including Higbie, were reluctant to take them on fire missions. It was too dangerous.