Licensed to Kill

by Robert Young Pelton

  “We will continue to fight the jihad.”

  The marines at Camp Fallujah learned of the attack from Fox News. Hours later, the marines still did not dare enter Fallujah, but instead contacted the Iraqi police to cut down the bodies from the bridge. The Iraqi police also hesitated to get near the scene, so it was ten hours later before the marines and the Iraqi police went together to retrieve the bodies so they could be shipped to Dover Air Force Base for autopsies. Though rumors circulated that the men had been pulled from the SUVs and burned alive, the autopsies proved conclusively that they had been killed first by the barrage of bullets. Another rumor circulated, charging that two of the bodies had been chopped up and fed to dogs, but that, too, proved false.

  After video snippets of the violent deaths and celebratory desecration hit the news, Americans could have believed any depths of depravity by the crazed Fallujans. To the Iraqis involved, this had been a traditional lynching and a great victory against the infidel invader. To Americans, it represented a grave offense against any standards of human decency—in wartime or otherwise—and looked like a new cast of players reenacting the 1993 Somali tragedy. One has to wonder if the Fallujans performed for the cameras with the Blackhawk Down episode in mind, since that incident has been lauded on insurgent and Islamist websites as proof that, as bin Laden phrases it, “the United States is a paper tiger.” After video of dead Army Rangers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu hit the evening news, a public outcry of shock and revulsion had pushed Clinton to call for the withdrawal of all American troops from Somalia. The Fallujans may have thought they could achieve the same with a very public display of the same brutality. There is little proof that the event was anything other than a murderous lynch mob taking out frustration on what they thought were CIA paramilitaries, but the visual connection to Somalia was clear to an American public squeamish at the sight of death.

  By Wednesday evening, riveted and horrified, unable to watch but unable to look away, the American public was transfixed by edited clips of the jubilant aftermath of the contractors’ deaths as they played over and over on the cable and network channels. After the initial shock of the footage wore off, the media moved on to its typical phase two—the self-obsessed introspective debate about whether they were broadcasting scenes too gruesome for public consumption, giving too much coverage to the story, or lending aid and comfort to the enemy by showing video that had been filmed for the primary purpose of propaganda. Whatever the conclusion of these debates, two things became clear: The footage made for good ratings, and the viewing public was demanding more information. People wanted to know what function armed civilians were serving in the Iraqi theater of war. Though the U.S. government had been relying on independent contractors for some time, the issue seemed a new one to the American public. They demanded to know why men described as “civilian” contractors would be escorting trucks through a hostile war zone without the protection of the military.

  So ingrained in the American psyche are the tenets of the 1949 Geneva Conventions that accidental deaths of civilians in war are abhorred, and intentional murder of civilians is condemned absolutely. But these contractors appeared to occupy a shady zone between civilian and military. While not active members of the military per se, they were armed and ready to shoot if necessary, were providing critical support for the U.S. military’s core mission, and their paychecks—once the multiple levels of subcontracting is stripped away—were ultimately financed by the Pentagon. Even though those facts tilt the assessment essentially in a military, though nontraditional, direction, some analysts continued to argue that the contractors were essentially playing a civilian role because they were not engaging in combat operations. However, if Teague, Batalona, Helvenston, and Zovko had been given even a moment to respond to incoming fire, they would have been deeply engaged in combat.

  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 sai
d 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 Xs and Os 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.”

  —PSALM 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.