The Bremer Detail

by Frank Gallagher,John M. Del Vecchio

  I called for a team meeting and I explained the situation. I was as honest as I could be. The truth was our replacements had been promised to us and were not inbound as of yet and from that day forward I told them no one else would be leaving until we got more guys. You could have heard a pin drop. The real men were like—“big fucking deal, we’re getting paid, let’s work.” The guys who had promised their wives and kids that they wouldn’t get killed were less than pleased. It sucked, but my hands were tied.

  We got one new guy in. Now we had twenty-nine. People in the palace were beginning to notice that our numbers were down. When asked, I lied and said we were still fully staffed. Our contracting officer asked me to call for a full formation so he could count heads as he was sure I was full of shit. He was correct. I dodged. I zigged. I zagged. I blamed the operational tempo as the reason I never could hold the formation. I never did.

  We pushed on. The forecasts of our demise kept coming, and the ambassador continued to do what he was doing. We continued to do what were supposed to do. There were no more excuses anymore for missing a day. If a guy was sick, I found something else for him to do.

  One day I got a phone call from Blackwater HQ. I fully expected to hear that guys were inbound. Instead I was told that “someone” had conveyed to them tales of drunken debauchery, visits to whorehouses, fraternizing with females, and that the behavior had to stop. I nearly dropped the phone. Did the guys have a beer at the end of an eighteen-hour day? Absolutely. Were guys getting laid? Absolutely. Was there a whorehouse at the Al Rasheed? Hell no, there never had been, and besides the place had been closed for weeks at this time. I was beyond angry. They had to be kidding me. I was not, nor would I ever become the morality police. The big boy rules were in full effect. And they would stay in place. Not to mention there would have been a full-scale mutiny. The guys needed a way to decompress. It was a typical head shed move—deflect attention from what they were doing wrong and try to make the team play defense. It would never work. I knew how hard the guys were working, and the folks back in the States did not.

  I asked about the replacements and was told they were working it and that I had to be patient. Great! I told them that no one else was leaving until the new guys were on a plane. They were not happy with me. And I was not happy with them. They were in danger of losing the contract and could not fathom it.

  “If you want me to run this thing, let me run it; if not, find somebody else. The guys are busting their asses and risking their lives every day. We’re understaffed. The folks in the palace know it, and you call me with this bullshit? Where are the armored vehicles we were promised? The automatic weapons? My ammo resupply? Don’t waste my time with this fucking nonsense. People are going to get killed.”

  The next phone call was to ask me to stay another thirty days. I said yes. How could I leave when I was making others stay? Leadership from the front means holding yourself to as high or higher a standard than you hold everyone else. Thirty days had now become ninety days. The family was less than pleased, but if your country needs you to do something, you have to do it. Right? It was a crazy time.

  The replacements finally began to arrive and it was like starting almost from scratch again. The stuff they were being taught in the train-up was not what we were doing on the ground. It was not their fault, but the Blackwater trainers had never been here. They were trying to guess how we were doing things. The experienced guys worked with the new guys to get them up to speed. The replacements wanted to test fire their weapons and zero them in. I had no ammo to do it. We had not had an ammo resupply, and any spare ammo that we did have had been used up by the first group when they’d zeroed their weapons. Guys asked about the armored vehicles they had been told they would drive, and I told them that what you see is what we have. They were not happy and some felt that they had been misled. I simply told them that I had never spoken to them before, so I had not misled them.

  The Dirty 30 kept asking if they could use the birds to support some of their missions, so I called Brutus over to the palace one day and proposed a deal. I would let them use the birds if they supplied their own shooters and they gave me a couple of thousand rounds of ammo each time they used them. And they could only use them when the ambassador was going to be in his office for a minimum of three hours. That way, if the boss decided to move I could get the birds back in time to support their real job. I had become a pimp whoring out my flying bitches. Brutus agreed. I had made a deal I hoped and prayed would not bite me in the ass. I needed ammo; they needed air support.

  I met with the pilots and explained what I had done. They were to call me as they took off, give me the grid coordinates of where they were headed, and call me when they returned. And I told them to make sure they counted the ammo before they took off. I also told them that there could be zero records, or any other reports, about what we were doing as the repercussions could sink Blackwater. Everyone agreed. Or so I thought. Apparently honor means nothing to a glory hound. One of the pilots had to thump his chest and write a report that got sent back to me from Blackwater with a WTF question mark.

  Brian McCormick was one of my go-to guys from the ambassador’s office. He had been instrumental in getting the Secret Service involved in the threat assessment for the ambassador and was by extension THE key reason Blackwater was given the contract. Brian had worked for Vice President Cheney, and after watching and working with the Secret Service at the White House and in Washington, D.C., he knew good security. He recognized that the ambassador was in jeopardy and he had started the assessment process by pointing out to his contacts in D.C. that there was the potential for a huge problem if the ambassador’s security was not drastically improved—and improved quickly. Hence the arrival of the Secret Service assessment team in August. He was also honest to a fault. I could always trust him for a no-bullshit answer. And he was extremely bright. He had honestly felt that CID would get the ambassador killed. He had watched them for a few months and seen how they were doing things and compared this to his experience with the Secret Service.

  Brian Mac now had begun to notice the new faces, and he asked me to explain why there were new people trying to learn a job that had been done well up to this point. I explained the rotation system that Blackwater was using. He was less than pleased and said the ambassador would not be happy. He reminded me that everyone else had signed up for a year and they were not rotating out. I nodded. I knew he was correct. I could not argue his point and said the decision was not mine. The next day he confirmed the ambassador’s dismay at the development.

  I called Blackwater to give them a heads-up about the prevailing thinking regarding the rotations. As usual, I was not taken seriously. They said that was how they were going to do it, end of story. Oh well.

  About this time, the ambassador was summoned back to Washington for a meeting. We took him to the airport around midnight and waited until 0300 for the C-17 to arrive. It was loaded with military guys who had been wounded in action. The war was still raging in parts of Iraq. I had arranged with the ambassador’s staff to try and get three of my guys on the plane to Andrews’s air base if there was room. As luck would have it I was able to get all three on the plane. We got back to the palace around 0500, and everybody went to sleep for the first time in weeks without setting an alarm clock. I slept like a dead man. I woke up to my phone ringing. It was Ken telling that we had guys inbound and they would be here in a couple of hours. We mobilized a team to pick them up, and they arrived in time for evening chow.

  That evening I organized a welcome aboard bash for the new guys, and an unwind-and-relax party for the guys who had been here. There was beer and Jack Daniel’s for the men. About twenty-five of my guys were there, plus many of the British PSD guys, and some South Africans who were working on another detail; and generally anyone else who wanted to attend was welcome to swing by. At one point there had to have been close to a hundred people laughing and soaking in t
he chance to blow off some steam while the boss was away. The break was needed not just by us, but by everyone who was there.

  The threats against the ambassador had escalated to direct threats against the Green Zone itself. There was a very credible threat to the palace area that ten teams of ten men would make a coordinated attack. The decision was made by someone at the Department of Defense back in Washington, D.C., to replace the contracted Gurkha guards with a company of FAST Company Marines. (We often wondered if they were truly Gurkhas. The Gurkhas have a long and storied past as warriors. Some of these guys did not match that history in any way shape or form.) The Marines took control of the palace, placing teams of their men at all access points into the buildings and at all the entrances to the grounds. We welcomed this change of security. The FAST Company guys were no joke and took their orders and responsibilities extremely seriously. The fact that they were commanded by a former Marine Recon guy, Major Ottinger, made it even sweeter to me. They set up heavy-weapons emplacements, fortified fighting positions, and made the place a hell of a lot safer. It made keeping an eye on the ambassador at the palace a little less tense knowing that the Marines would be checking the IDs of all people coming in. It was a good thing. Their armorers even made repairs on a few of our weapons that were jacked up beyond the capability of Ken and our limited supply of weapons tools to fix. Semper Fi.

  Up to this point, attacks on the palace grounds had been rare. The Iraqis had a curious habit of shooting into the air to celebrate almost anything, and the celebratory fire had punched holes in the some of the trailer roofs. A few people had been hit as the bullets eventually came back to Earth. I found more than a dozen bullets on the ground outside my trailer while I was there. I figured if my time was up, then it was up. I’m still not sure if you get into Valhalla if you’re killed by celebratory fire, but we tried not to waste a lot of time or energy thinking about it. Guys on the team took to putting layers of three-quarter-inch plywood and sandbags on top of their trailers to stop the “what goes up, must come down” theory from providing them a late-night surprise.

  On this particular evening things changed dramatically. Around 2100, over the music that was playing, we heard the unmistakable sound of a rocket being fired in our direction. We glanced up and saw it streaking overhead. Then came the tremendous explosion. The rocket had landed in the parking lot across the street from the palace and about 150 yards from the helos and pilots. A few of the pilots were with us. They immediately headed back to their billets for a head count and damage assessment. I had the shift leader and advance team leader account for their guys. No injuries to any of us. The new guys looked at me with a WTF expression. I shrugged and said, “Welcome to Baghdad.” The rocket destroyed about fifty cars and left a pretty good sized hole in the ground where it landed. Fortunately no one was in the vicinity when it landed.

  We thanked God, turned the music back on, and grabbed another drink. The party had dwindled to about fifteen folks at this time as many people, apparently way smarter than us, ran to the bunkers and hunkered down to wait for an all-clear command. We were Blackwater. We knew when our time was up we would not hear the explosion. We’d just get vaporized. So we partied on. The Marines came over and asked us to head inside for a few minutes while they checked on things. We did. Ten minutes later they announced the all clear, and the festivities resumed. Attacks became a part of the job. The type A personalities on the team always remained calm, cool, and collected—or at least pretended to even if we were not. Image is everything.

  Soon the party numbers swelled back to well over a hundred. After the rocket attack it seemed like everyone needed a drink, and we always welcomed the company, especially the female company. By this time a Blackwater mystique had taken firm hold. We were the rock stars of the palace. And it certainly didn’t hurt that the majority of the guys were built like professional athletes. The testosterone and strength oozed from their pores and they knew how to play the game. We were the superheroes keeping all the women safe. Or, at least, that’s what we told anybody who would listen. The other guys rarely had a chance when it came to getting and keeping a female’s notice. It was truly comical. Women got all the attention they could have imagined; they met guys who they would never have met back in the States; they had their choice of studs. What could be better? It was a good deal for all involved. The guys kept their stress levels reduced, and the women lived their fantasies. Everybody was happy.

  These women were, by and large, extremely bright, professional career women—and aggressive. Most were college graduates with postgraduate degrees. Some were in politics, some were military, some were nurses and doctors, and some were career diplomats. They were smart as hell and knew what they wanted. I had great admiration for all of them. They were in the sandbox because they had volunteered to be there. They were driven to succeed to a degree rarely seen by most of us. And they endured the same discomfort and risks we did—the heat, the water outages, the power outages, the rocket and mortar attacks—and yet they showed up for work every day and they supported the mission to the best of their abilities. There was no crying in Baghdad. Some of them were tougher than some of my guys. They were truly a breath of fresh air. And they smiled and smelled a lot better than did my guys.

  The new guys were quickly brought onto the teams in positions that I thought best met their backgrounds and skill set. It was a trying process. Without any résumés to review, placing guys was difficult. Ken had to get a quick feel for them, and then we hoped the new guys had not misled us about their past. Some did. The reaction to the new members of the team by the experienced members was always difficult to manage. The margin for error was nonexistent by this point. We were running 100 mph each and every day. The new guys were expected to pull their weight immediately, and the guys who had been here for a while were very quick to point out any and all mistakes. Several times each day, someone would come to me and tell me how this guy or that guy was not going to make it. The experienced guys knew what the risks were, the new guys did not. I urged each complainer to work with the new man, and told him to try to remember that only a few short weeks ago he himself did not know his ass from a hole in the ground. Tempers were short.

  More than once guys had to be separated after exchanging words. New guys did not know what they did not yet know. Guys who had been there knew what the risks were and knew why we did things certain ways. The good-idea fairy is a dangerous thing in a war zone. I begged the new guys to learn our way for at least thirty days before they came up with suggestions we had already tried and likely eliminated weeks or months earlier. We did what worked, not what we thought might work. We were writing the book, not reading it.

  The story that the new guys were being told back in Moyock and the promises they were being given by Blackwater HQ during the train-up created frustration and disenchantment when these guys realized immediately they were not being issued the gear and not being assigned to the team leader slot that someone back home had promised. OOOPs! Not my problem. My only promise was that once they got to the sandbox we would work them to death. Maybe not in the spot they wanted, but the spot we thought they could best fill.

  Another intel report came in stating that a raid had uncovered videotape and photos of the detail at various locations we had been to with the ambassador. We always assumed the bad guys had been doing surveillance on us, but it had never been confirmed until this point. Surveillance is always an important part of the bad guys’ arsenal. They wanted and needed to know how we were operating, our tactics and techniques, so they could attack us in a way that would maximize their chances of success. Everywhere we went there were photographers, press, and others milling about taking pictures. Who were the bad guys? Hell, we had no idea. This information caused me to pause and reflect on how we were doing our job. Should we change anything? If so, what and how? With new guys arriving it went without saying that many times people were out of position, and the synergy of fill and
flow was not what it had been with the guys who had been working together for weeks.

  The press is the bane of any protection operation’s existence. They were difficult to work with at best. Al Jazeera had a bad habit of being on the scene minutes before spectacular attacks took place against coalition forces and personnel, and was thus able to record and broadcast the mayhem. Was the press doing research for the bad guys? I went to our press team to see if we could somehow limit or restrain the press at certain events. It was then I learned that from a public figure’s point of view, if an event is not recorded and broadcast, it never took place. It was a sobering realization that everything we did was going to be recorded, and that the press would be an integral aspect of anything that happened. We had a job to do and so did they. We had to work together.

  I met with Sax and we decided the press would have to get to the locations at least an hour before the boss did so that we could check their equipment for explosives, weapons, etc. Then we would confiscate their cell phones so they could not call anyone to let them know exactly when the ambassador would be arriving. We kept them sequestered in a holding area and assigned a guy from the advance team to keep an eye on them. Individuals found videotaping outside the location had their cameras taken from them and held until after the detail team had departed. This was not met with any enthusiasm from the press corps, but we had to do what we had to do, while they were doing what they had to do. It was a compromise that neither side was happy with.

  As the new guys settled in, the remaining members of the first group began to make noises about their pending departures. I was faced with the realization that in a few short weeks I would have an entirely new crew working with me. The prospect of that did not make me happy. It seemed that every time things were going smoothly, a new problem popped up. Unfortunately for me, Ken was also scheduled to depart. This meant that his sidekick would have to make all the arrangements for the guys leaving and the guys coming in. I asked Ken to take his partner under his wing and make sure that he had a full and solid grasp of how to make these things happen.