Licensed to Kill

by Robert Young Pelton

  The next screen shows statistics about the typical security contractor. In Peter’s estimation, the average security contractor working in Iraq is in his early forties and is a disciplined operator with more than twenty years in the military, including multiple overseas tours. He stresses that “just because a man gives up his uniform, does not means he gives up his professional ethics.”

  He covers up the next slide on his computer monitor with a piece of white paper and asks me for my real opinion on contractors. I tell him that the Americans seem to be mainly nice people, mostly ex-marines or small-town cops with a smattering of senior special operations people. He stares at me with incredulity and asks with an exasperated tone, “No, tell me what you really think.” I repeat myself. Angrily, he lifts up the paper to reveal “Overpaid, Out of Control Cowboys.”

  “Look, we are not talking about angels dancing on the head of a pin! You tell me if you have ever seen this phrase before!” he demands in rapid-fire speech as he leans forward and stares intensely into my eyes. I say no quietly, provoking a torrent of vitriol. “I expect YOU to give ME INFORMATION IF I AM GOING TO GIVE YOU INFORMATION!” I begin to silently ponder the tiny Mr. Peter’s grip on reality. Luckily, a U.S. soldier comes in to discuss badge colors and something that sounds like the “MNF-ITAV sash policy procedure.”

  The mundane bureaucratic exchange seems to have a calming effect on Peter, and we return to a more reasonable discussion of the public perception of contractors. Peter blames the media for not understanding the industry and for taking a few isolated examples and portraying them as being representative. “Who are the bad guys? Are they brought in maliciously? Are there unethical lawyers, priests, journalists? Or are all of them perfect?” Peter’s mood has turned to one of divine absolution, seeking pardon for the sins of a few with the sacrifices of many.

  “Contractors are doing it with limited weapons, struggling against overwhelming odds. I welcome Peter Singer [Brookings Institution fellow, author of Corporate Warriors] to come over and spend a month here. The pundits like to chuck javelins in here. We have regulation! CPA Order 17 covers the status of civilians here, and CPA Memo 17 says there is a code of law here!”

  It is obvious as I leave Peter’s cubicle that he doesn’t get out of the Green Zone or mix with the average contractor much. If he did, he wouldn’t be under the false impression that Memo 17—the CPA document that made contractors immune from Iraqi prosecution—ever significantly restrained their behavior.

  One morning I wake up to find the combined mental energy of ten men trying to figure out how to jury-rig their satellite hookup to broadcast on the briefing room’s computer projector. It’s Thanksgiving in the States today and they want to watch football on the big screen. A cooler of steaks is scheduled to arrive on a transport flight from Amman, and the Mamba team doesn’t want to be late, since their only alternative for Thanksgiving dinner would be processed turkey product and questionable gruel dished out at the KBR chow hall in the main palace.

  We head for the airport, and the talk of steak takes away from the constant drudgery of watching for signals of an attack. It turns out to be a fairly uneventful run on Route Irish. As we pull in to the airport, however, we notice that a car that drove in the airport gates after us has pulled up a safe distance behind on the Arrivals level. An Iraqi man gets out of the car and starts shouting at us in Arabic. He waves what we assume to be an airport badge in the air and makes an attempt to appear less menacing by smiling through his anger as he approaches, trying to speak in broken English. He looks irate, and slightly comical, but not dangerous.

  One of the contractors recognizes his car and says, “Hey, he was following too close, so I lit him up.” Since the Iraqi has authorized clearance to work at the airport, where he encounters Americans on a daily basis, he apparently did not understand why he should have to stay back from the convoy. When the warning shot zippered across the road in front of him, the man was actually pulling up closer to the rear Mamba to show the airport badge dangling from his rearview mirror—an innocent mistake that could have easily cost him his life.

  Though it may sound like an example of a private security contractor wantonly endangering yet another Iraqi civilian, the standard rules of engagement did actually work as they should have in this instance. In a situation such as this, when a security convoy notices a car coming too close, State Department guidelines dictate that a contractor is first to give a shout and hand signal. If they keep coming, they get a warning shot across the road in front of them. If they continue, a shot is aimed at the engine or tires of the car. If the contractor has to fire again, they get a lethal burst of bullets to stop them dead. Depending on the speed of the car, it could be a matter of only a few seconds between the hand signal and a bullet to the head.

  This Thanksgiving we would be thankful for the successful warning shot, but not for a delicious steak dinner. After all that hassle, it turned out the steaks somehow never made it, and we had to make the deadly run home without our precious cargo.

  Some of the contractors, too dejected by the delayed steaks to think about eating, head to the gym to unwind after the run. The others, hungry enough for the bad cafeteria food provided by Kellogg, Brown and Root, head to the KBR chow hall in the main palace. The Iraqi women who cook breakfast and lunch must be home by curfew, so the guys have to take care of themselves for dinner. The army and contractors would probably live in squalor and nearly starve if they didn’t have other contractors taking care of mundane tasks like cooking, laundry, and cleaning the toilets.

  Baz, Guy, Rick, and I jump into one of the tiny armored Nissans to make our way to the cafeteria. At night, the Green Zone takes on an overwhelmingly eerie feel. Thick dust turns headlights into solid beams, and the growl of tanks and trucks seems always just on the edge of where the light falters. The ever-present guttural rumbling of heavy machinery is haunting, though it is impossible to actually see the military vehicles unless they turn on their blazing spotlights. We drive past the traffic circles and pull into a massive parking lot filled with an ocean of SUVs. It takes a quick wave of ID to get past the ever-smiling Global Security–contracted Gurkhas. Guy waves to the rows of filthy dusty vehicles and tells me that the insurgents have learned to identify Americans because their cars are never washed. “Iraqis don’t drive dirty cars,” Guy says.

  Along the broken sidewalk and concertina wire, a steady stream of soldiers and military contractors intermingles with an army of helmeted and armored aging civilian contractors dragging their briefcases. These days, civilian contractors must wear armor and helmets inside the Green Zone because of the mortar attacks. They are not issued guns. Even so, watching them slog slump-shouldered through the dark, I think of how they are Baghdad’s tired mercenary army of Samsonite-bearing bureaucrats.

  Just outside the palace entrance, contractors and bureaucrats stand around and smoke just as they would outside any other office building where smoking is banned. The Green Zone seems, in effect, a miniaturized quasi-America with U.S. rules imposed on a secured island in the midst of chaos. Or perhaps more accurately, the exaggerated architecture of Saddam suggests an Iraq pavilion at EPCOT, if Disney would duplicate the background soundtrack of mortar fire and bomb blasts.

  The surreal effect continues once inside the palace. A massive central hall with an impressively high arching ceiling dominates the entryway, designed by Saddam to intimidate by invoking the type of scale and drama found at the Vatican and other famous public buildings. Down below on the marble floors, lines of drably uniformed soldiers, young volunteers, and paunchy bureaucrats line up for a cafeteria-style dinner. Signing in on the contractor clipboard means the meal will be billed back to Blackwater at $27 per person. A row of smiling Filipinos, all workers subcontracted to KBR, serve the lukewarm food. Much of the food is flown in from the States, with all the familiar brands and logos found half a world away. The Green Zone even has an American telephone area code.

  The main chow hall bri
ngs together a spectacular gathering of khakis and bad haircuts. Long-haired civilians, young Republicans, contractors with T-shirts and sunglasses, Americans of every shape and size have all come to Iraq for their own reasons—some out of patriotism or a sense of duty. Most civilians, if not all, have come because they can make more money working in Iraq than they ever could back home.

  In the crowded field of cheap banquet furniture, we find a big round table left over from Saddam’s days. Guy waves at other contractors wearing armor plates and carrying weapons along with their food trays. Those in civilian dress stand out. A young man of about twenty-five with long hair, sunglasses, and a loud shirt—an out-of-place hip dude with a big camera—comes over to join us at our table. He is one of many Republican congressional aides recruited and sent over to work for the CPA. He starts chattering immediately and gives an introductory self-description: “I was a congressional aide in Miami making up numbers to get money. I signed on for this and came over for a job that didn’t exist. I have done all kinds of jobs I know nothing about. Now I am doing accounting. I hate accounting. I hate numbers.”

  He calls himself a New Yorker, which catches the attention of a Blackwater contractor, a former cop from New York, who says, “Hey, stop telling people you’re from New York. Just tell them you’re from wherever you live. You make New Yorkers look bad.” The contractor with the Brooklyn accent then apologizes and explains his crankiness by telling of the difficulties he has had repatriating the bodies of dead Blackwater contractors. The experience has made him sick of the bureaucracy in the Green Zone. “We’re trying to send an American citizen home with his brother on the same flight, and they’re making us jump through hoops. When a government employee dies, he is a ‘special agent’; when one of us dies, we’re ‘security guards.’”

  There are no “heroes” in the private security world, just dead employees adding to a company’s tragic attrition statistic. Mike says that Blackwater tries to take care of its own, but that can make for a delicate balance since each contractor does sign on fully aware of the risks and without any promise of postmortem benefits other than basic DBA insurance. Perhaps this offers the coldest and clearest sign that the business end of warfare requires a mercenary attitude. Private security has no ideology, no homeland, no flag. There is no God and country. There is only the paycheck. If a contractor dies in the defense of his paycheck, his employer sends his family a final one, often calculated to the hour of his death, along with a cardboard box containing his personal effects. Beyond that, neither the contractor’s employer nor the U.S. government has any legal responsibility to the surviving family members.

  A contractor’s death does not dictate any formality other than repatriation of the remains and the filing of forms for insurance purposes, though Mike Rush personally flew to Hawaii to inform Wes Batalona’s wife of his death. “We think of these people as our family, and we do what we can.”

  Dinner wraps up on a fairly somber note and we head home. At the final U.S. military checkpoint before the house, a massive spotlight blasting into our SUV turns the dirty windshield into a glow of brilliant white. We are supposed to wait until waved forward, but it’s impossible to see the marine at the gate. “You would think they would buy these guys flashlights,” Guy says.

  He rolls down the window as we pull up, taking time to talk to the soldiers manning the checkpoint as he shows his ID on his arm band. “How you guys doing tonight?”

  The young marine asks, “You guys Blackwater?” with a sense of awe palpable in his voice.

  “Everything all right?” Guy asks again in his best cool-guy voice.

  The soldier hunches his shoulders against the cold, his breath making small white clouds. “Fine, sir.”

  In the cold night, the marines guarding the gate appear just scared, tired, pimply kids. The contractors of Blackwater are the war’s rock stars to them, and one asks, “Hey, can we come by your compound and get a hat?”

  Guy answers, “No problem.”

  As we drive off, Guy says, “Those guys are the front line. I always take the time to ask them how they’re doing. When there are suicide attacks, they go against this gate.”

  Despite the considerable drawbacks of the job, American military contractors are the top of the food chain in the war on Iraq, though they’d never admit it. They get the most pay, and even though insurgents may target them during their daily routine, they don’t have to go down dark alleys, kick in doors, or spend a whole year away from their family. One of the scared, tired, pimply faced marines guarding the gate that night will be shot in the neck and killed by a sniper tomorrow. Others will go home in a few months to broken marriages, high debt, and nothing in the bank. The contractors know they can change jobs, change their minds, or just go home at any time. Unlike the marines shivering at Gate 12 and counting the minutes until daylight, the experienced know war is too ugly and dangerous to fight for too cheap. As Rick tells me on the drive home, “some people are making a thousand dollars a day; some make two-fifty doing static. Everybody is making money here, except the soldiers fighting the war.” In addition to their day rate, Blackwater contractors also get to cash checks for $650 a week, just to have a little spending money in-country. Gecko recently purchased a $1,300 MP5 submachine gun. T-Boy bought a used BMW 7 series for $5,000. Some have never had this much money. But considering our earlier death-related discussion, the possible trade-off just doesn’t seem worth it to me. I soon realize, however, that each contractor I meet uses his own personally unique calculus to weigh the risks and rewards of the job.

  The next morning is so cold that the generator has to be jump-started. After fixing the problem, Rick, the logistics manager, stays outside for his first Newport menthol of the day, and I join him for what has become our routine early morning chat. As he takes a drag off the cigarette, Rick absentmindedly rubs the large scar on his neck that marks where he had his lymph nodes removed after a cancer diagnosis a few years back. I half-ass suggest that he might one day think about quitting smoking, which spurs the response: “Hey, you want to hear a sad story?” Rick apparently did stop smoking for a while after his brush with cancer, but started again when he couldn’t handle the stress of estrangement from his daughter. He tells me, “I gave her anything she wanted, but then I had to put my foot down. I said, ‘No more money; you’re on your own.’ She said she hates me. I started smoking again.” The rift obviously weighs heavily on him, but he doesn’t think there is any way to resolve it yet. I ask him if he is worried about getting cancer again. Rick shakes his head and says, “We all have to die sometime.” Rick usually volunteers to drive the slow and unarmored bongo truck.

  Later that afternoon, I’m sitting in the TV room writing when I hear a roar of truck engines that fades into the unmistakable guitar riffs of AC/DC. I walk outside to see a thick cloud of dust floating over the compound walls from streetside. The Blackwater Hillah team has arrived.

  They’ve pulled up outside the Blackwater compound in their convoy of three armored GMC Suburbans and a soft-skin, “trash-armored” hate truck. In official nomenclature, the “hate truck” is the counterassault team, or CAT, since it hangs back so it can rush into an ambush in progress to engage attackers long enough for the VIP to escape. Inside, rusty steel plates have been fitted to the doors, making for a cheap but effective armor. The team keeps the Suburbans immaculate for VIP transport, but it looks like they have swathed the hard welded steel plates of the hate truck in silver duct tape, and road dust coats both the outside and the interior. The well gunner rides with the rear gate open, which sucks dirt into the back end, covering everything with a fine brown powder. The “trunk monkey,” a lanky, blond ex-SEAL, wants to give me a tour of his position to show off his toys. In the back, he rides in a homemade steel box with a selection of weapons hanging from the ceiling: a pump-action shotgun “for up close,” and a SAW machine gun for “serious shit.” Unlike the air-conditioned civility of the armored Suburbans, the hate truck exudes, well,
hate—from the four-inch white plastic skull mounted on the dashboard to the raw, rusty metal edges of the homemade armor to the pounding rock music that blasts from the mutilated vehicle.

  The Hillah-based Blackwater contractors dismount their mechanical steeds and literally strut around the yard, stretching their legs after the long run from Hillah. They’re dirty and tired, and have some time to waste before they have to pick up an incoming crew from the airport. Even though they have time to relax for a while, the Hillah team doesn’t switch off. They don’t even really come into the house, preferring to stand around and keep watch, not straying too far from their war wagons. The Hillah team and the Mamba team are going to roll out to the airport together in one long convoy, though the plan doesn’t sit well with the Hillah guys. “We gotta roll with the Mambas? We are going to get shot to shit!” one bearded man jokes, displaying a kind of interteam suspicion common throughout the security industry.

  The Mamba team is mostly marines; the Hillah team is predominately SEALs. Even though they all do the same thing for the same company, each team within Blackwater represents its own tribe. Sometimes teams are fully stocked with either retired SEALs, marines, or SF, making the group identity even stronger. The only guys who don’t seem to trash-talk the others are the ex-cops. They just don’t have the necessary ego and swagger. Team cohesiveness is so strong, one may hesitate to trust or rely on anyone outside their own tight circle, always suspecting that another team’s methods are somehow less safe than their own.

  I start snapping pictures outside as they get ready to leave. Before he poses with the group, the tail gunner rips off a piece of black tape to hide his eyes. “Hey, don’t they add those later?” one asks jokingly. Another shouts out his suggested caption for the portrait: “Mercenaries in Iraq.” A short, burly ex-marine fully decked out in heavy gear and walking bowlegged like a cowboy lets out a stream of brown tobacco juice as he stops to tell me, “I got twenty years in the Marine Corps. I don’t know what else I could do. Hell, I don’t know what else I am good for!” The contractors load up the convoy, check gear and communications, and disappear in a rolling cloud of dust and a blast of Metallica.