Licensed to Kill

by Robert Young Pelton

  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 wi
th 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.

  Young recounted to the Virginian-Pilot that he remembers it being shortly before noon when he heard the sound of incoming AK-47 gunfire. While the occasional smattering of an AK burst is not unusual anywhere in Iraq, hearing a volley of return fire usually meant something serious. Young pulled on his gear and helmet, grabbed an M249 SAW, and headed upstairs to the roof of the CPA headquarters, where he joined the Blackwater contractors already positioned and returning fire. Young settled in behind the cement wall where he watched in horror as armed men outside the gates unloaded from trucks and took aim at the building. His military training made him shout out, “With your permission, sir, I have acquired a target.” But there were no other soldiers on the roof, and Young yelled his request over and over until one of the Blackwater contractors shouted back to commence firing. So at this point, not only had the contractors been pushed by circumstance into engaging in combat, but they had also de facto assumed a command position over a U.S. marine. Eventually, a handful of U.S. military police and another marine would make it up to the roof to join the fight.

  While the roof of the CPA headquarters offered a prime high-ground position for shooting down on those gathering on the ground outside the gates, a nearby multistory hospital, a high-rise apartment building, and other recently half-assembled construction made the entire compound vulnerable to snipers. For what seemed like hours, the men put controlled bursts into the crowd below while Blackwater snipers targeted gunmen shooting from windows a few hundred yards away. Estimates of how many insurgents were attacking the compound vary, though most have reported numbers in the hundreds. Years hunting around his small town in Kentucky had given Young the ability to acquire a target, fire, and aquire and fire again, and he did this over and over as bearded men in long robes kept charging toward the front gate. At one point, a couple of American Apaches circled overhead but didn’t lay down any fire and left without landing in the compound.

  Then a young captain let out a scream and yelled for a medic. They had no medic on the roof, so Corporal Young rushed over to see what he could do. Young removed the captain’s gear and carefully cut away his clothing to expose wounds in the arm and back. Bullets pinged into a tin air duct and ricocheted off the cinderblocks above their heads as Young applied compresses from his first-aid kit. Young yelled for the contractors to lay down cover fire and helped walk the bleeding man down the four flights of stairs to the ground floor, where an impromptu emergency room was established.

  The marine corporal loaded up on magazines and carried roughly one hundred fifty pounds of Blackwater’s ammo up four stories to the roof. Young had time to resupply the Blackwater contractors, but no time to return to the fight himself. Blackwater’s Arabic linguist was hit in the face—blood sprayed over the floor from a quarter-sized hole in his jaw. Young reached in with his finger and fished around in the gore until he found the man’s carotid artery and pinched it hard to close it. With his free hand, he dragged the translator by his vest toward the stairwell. Then an incoming bullet smacked into Young, knocking him to the floor. A bullet had smashed into his left shoulder, coming to rest an inch from his spine. A piece of shrapnel had also lodged in his left eye, partially blinding him. Under fire and too amped up on adrenaline to pause for the searing pain in his back, Young grabbed the linguist again and dragged him behind the air-conditioning duct. He put his fingers back into the hole in his jaw and pinched again to stop the bleeding, and a Blackwater medic applied a hasty compress. Young then picked up the linguist and carried him down the four flights for further emergency treatment before returning to the roof to continue the fight. Dripping with sweat and blood, Young kept hammering away. He didn’t realize that he had been shot until someone yelled at him to get off the roof and get some medical attention. Once down below, he faded and almost passed out.

  When they heard the sound of helicopters outside, the medic told Young he needed to catch a ride to the Baghdad hospital. Young stumbled outside to see three helicopters with rotors buzzing, but they were black, not green. Under fire and running low on ammo, Blackwater had called upon its own helicopters after the U.S. military had failed to respond to requests for backup. The three Blackwater Little Birds had flown in from Baghdad with reinforcements and a fresh supply of ammunition, and picked up the wounded to fly them out for medical attention.

  With a new stock of ammo, the contractors continued to lay down fire and beat back the insurgents. Two Spanish soldiers in full combat gear sat joking behind the thick concrete wall. The Spanish contingent was supposed to be functioning in a strictly peacekeeping role and had been ordered not to return fire. They just sat and watched the action without taking part. Lionel, Blackwater’s armored car rep from Texas Armor, was pressed into service as a spotter for Cread, a skilled shot with a sniper rifle. Cread saw an insurgent sniper shooting from a window in the hospital building near the compound and carefully tried to pick him off. Every time he shot, Lionel winced and looked for the puff of dust as the bullet hit around the window. “A little to the left.” BOOM! Wince. “A little to the right.” Boom! Wince. “More.” Boom! Wince.

  While varying accounts by witnesses portray a compound under heavy attack, the incoming fire was not heavy enough to prevent the contractors from filming their own videos and taking pictures during the battle. Most of the video captures a steady stream of outgoing fire, with an occasional burst of incoming. One video has Blackwater IC “Mookie Spicoli” yelling, “Jesus Christ, it’s like a fucking turkey shoot!”—suggesting a plethora of slow-moving easy targets and a contractor methodically picking them off.

  A Blackwater contractor remembers that Sunday: “When Blackwater was hit in Najaf, in April, it wasn’t a big secret. They even taped it. Clive was t
aping, Cread had the other camera. The military was out there, but they weren’t prepared. The Blackwater guys were getting it on. Even the sales rep for the armored cars was running up and down the stairs carrying ammo. We were shooting M4s, and there was a marine on a SAW. The bad guys got hung up in the hospital. They just picked them off one by one until the Apaches showed up. The Apaches never fired a shot. They just hovered. We found out later they had orders not to engage. About twenty or thirty bad guys got into the compound. It was close.”

  The U.S. military apparently had larger worries than what was going on in Najaf that day. In an apparent uprising in defense of Moqtada al-Sadr, armed attacks had popped up all over the country. Fighting had also commenced in Fallujah. When the Apaches flew over assessing the situation, they must have determined that the tiny force inside the compound could handle the resistance they faced. A Navy helicopter did come by in the early evening to lay down some fire, but the heaviest of the battle had ceased by then.

  “They fought all day and all night. When you read the press reports, it sounds like the military was there and Blackwater just happened to be there, but it was a Blackwater PSD in the shit—even the civilians pitched in. There were eight people defending that compound…. eight,” the contractor emphasized.

  “The army wouldn’t help,” Steve, the Little Bird pilot, remembers, “so we got busy.” Steve had been back at the Blackwater Aviation headquarters in Baghdad when the call came in reporting that his fellow contractors were under siege in Najaf and that one marine had been wounded. The contractors started loading up three Little Birds with supplies, and Steve went to see a marine commanding officer he knew to ask permission to medevac a wounded marine back to the Baghdad hospital. Even though the CO had assented, Steve’s actions still got him in trouble with the State Department. “The boy lived, but there were some folks who weren’t happy and told me that they would make sure I wouldn’t get paid. I told them to go right ahead and take it out of my paycheck,” he says angrily. Steve was supposed to be a civilian pilot flying support for the Bremer security detail, but when his comrades needed help, he felt he had no choice but respond—even if it meant bending the rules.