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Authors: Frank Gallagher,John M. Del Vecchio

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BOOK: The Bremer Detail
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Being proper British military they continued to dress as protocol dictated. It sucked to be them. We laughed like hell. They were some of the best guys and gals I had ever met—men and women who were extremely professional, hard, and very funny—top-shelf operators and world-class ballbusters. In the austere environment of high-threat protection, emotions run high. These emotions can eat you alive if you let them. Only professionals with a great sense of humor tend to thrive. Anyone who has ever worked or visited the United Kingdom can appreciate the British sense of humor. For those who have not, let’s just say it is not quite the same as American humor.

Our British counterparts, the security detail protecting Ambassador Greenstock, was composed of active-duty military from the British army. They were a lively bunch of real professionals, and my men quickly grew to become good friends with them. We spent a lot of time together, and I’m still in contact with many of them. True to their word, the Brits had offered any and all support we might require. Being British military, they had far more assets than we did.

For example, after the first IED attack on the palace area in early November 2003, one of our guys we called Geek (former Air Force Special Operations) was able to secure a Mini Me, or what we know as the M249 squad automatic weapon, from the Brits, which he carried on the advance team. The Brits let him borrow it for his entire stay in Iraq. To be honest I never asked him about it because I didn’t want to know how exactly he obtained that weapon system. He got it, I was glad. It was better for me not to know.

Among their various forms of entertainment the Brits played “the whaah game.” It went something like this. You ask someone a blatantly obvious question, such as “Are those blue jeans you are wearing?” The person replies with a look that questions your intelligence and says something to the effect of, “Yes, I am.” The person playing the game yells as loud and as annoyingly as possible: “WWWWWHHHHHAAAAAAH!!!!” They found great joy in “whaaing” us as often as possible. The Brits were killing us with it.

Take a bunch of overachievers—guys who hate to lose—doing one of the most dangerous jobs on the planet, add a game that the majority of the Americans have never heard of, let alone played before, and it spells a recipe for a good time. Let the games begin. Before very long, the majority of the detail was having a blast. It got to the point where guys were afraid to answer any questions from anybody. Especially any questions coming from our British counterparts. They were the masters of the game and they abused us.

In a few short weeks, all the detail members were now up to speed and playing with any unwitting person they encountered in or around the CPA headquarters. No one was immune. This thing went viral over the course of weeks. In typical American fashion, the team took things to another level.

“Wow. Is that your M-4 you are carrying?”

“Yes.”

“WHAAAAAH!”

To a guy standing outside the ambassador’s office: “Are you waiting for the boss?”

“Yes.”

“WHAAAAAH!”

To a guy in his gym clothes: “Nice shorts. Are you headed to the gym?”

“Yes.”

“WHAAAAAH!”

It got annoying as hell.

The Brits may have shared the game with us, but things got out of control quickly. Fast-forward a few weeks and much of the detail was invited to the British ambassador’s villa to have a few pints and rub elbows with a number of high-ranking British staff officials, including Ambassador Greenstock and the commanding general of all the British forces currently deployed in Iraq under the coalition banner. It was quite a party.

So as my guys are hanging out, the commanding general decides to address the assembled group. He started out with something to the effect of thanks for coming … blah, blah, blah … and then says: “We even have some of the Americans playing the ‘whaah game.’ We must stop this game immediately, as it’s not proper manners. Are there any questions?”

Apparently the general did not realize that there were about twenty Americans in the crowd. Quickly a hand shoots up in the back of the crowed and Jadicus (former SEAL medic), one of my best smart-asses, says in his best British accent: “Sir, so what you are saying is there will be no more playing of the ‘whaah game’?”

British general: “Why, yes, that is exactly what I’m saying …”

Before he could even finish his sentence, there was a loud and thunderous:

“Wwwwwwhhhhhhaaaaaaah!”

Needless to say the entire group, including the general, had a good chuckle. As I said, no one was immune.

Intel reports can be a great thing as evidenced above, but they can also drive you crazy. I had four separate entities bringing me valuable intelligence each day. Trying to decide what was actionable and should be shared with the team and what was pure rumor and not substantiated was a tough call. And, of course, getting to meet with these folks when they called was always difficult. They had full-time jobs and many others to brief. Including me daily was a pain in their ass. We rarely met in an office-type setting. The meetings would take place behind the palace, on the walkway to the gym, in the parking lot, outside my trailer, in the smoking area, or someplace else that could easily explain our “chance” meeting. And getting them to talk over the phone was nearly impossible. But without them, there is no telling how things might have turned out.

From the beginning I never wore body armor or carried a rifle when we were working in the Red Zone. As AIC I thought that I should present a more professional image and give the impression that extreme measures were not needed. But as the situation became more ominous and the intel reports more threatening, I began to occasionally wear my body armor and carry a rifle. When I did, my guys tensed up and wanted to know what I was not telling them. They clearly inferred I knew something that they did not. And they were correct. But as the leader of these guys my job was to keep them focused on their jobs and not overload them with maybes, might-bes, or could-bes. They had to do their jobs each and every day regardless of the threats that were being made against the ambassador. We had a sign posted in the office that stated:
the bad guys only have to win once; we have to win every day.
That was our mind-set and focus. If we did our jobs properly each day, we would prevail and everyone would get home safely. End of story.

Around this time Scotty H came to my trailer one evening for a cold Heineken, and he told me that he had some bad news. He had been offered and had accepted a full-time gig with a government agency, and he was hoping to leave as soon as possible. FUCK. Scotty, by this time, had become my closest confidant and my most reliable asset, as well as being a damn good advance team leader. We talked about his replacement, and he said he thought that Sax was the best man for the job. A former SEAL with extensive spec-op experience, Sax was one of the smartest guys on the team. I asked Scotty to work with Sax so the transition would be as seamless as possible. He told me he already had started. That was Scotty—always a chess move ahead of everybody else. He left five days later.

My original thirty-six-man PSD team was again a thirty-four-man PSD team. Between the advance team, the detail team, the villa team, and now the door gunners, I was sweating each and every day. Who was sick, who was hurt, whose wife had just left him, whose kids were sick? Oh yeah, and did I mention the bad guys were going to kill us today? I had become the AIC, psychiatrist, scheduler, mother hen, and, according to some, the biggest asshole in Baghdad. I was juggling all the balls as fast I could. I had no patience for the weak, sick, lame, or lazy. I knew that Blackwater’s reputation was on the line (as well as mine), and I damn sure was not going to let either of us take a hit. I set a stern example and hoped the “real men” would follow suit. They did.

Of the thirty-four guys from the original rotation, about half were on sixty-day contracts and half on ninety-day contracts. This way, when the first group left and was replaced, they would have thirty days to learn the ropes from the ninety-day group, before the next group would arrive. It seemed like a good idea when it was first explained to me. The biggest problem was there was no real template on what we were doing and how we were doing it. Each day we changed some things around to make them better. Throwing in the helos with no training program for the pilots, the door gunners, or the tactical commander added another twist.

At no time did we ever have a quick reaction force (QRF) on standby to help us if we were attacked. Nor did we have the communications ability to call an SOS to other units in the Green Zone. Our radio base station at our own command post worked occasionally—if we were lucky. We did have cell phones, but there was no one there standing by ready to help us. Each day we went out it was just us and us alone. If we were attacked, the plan was for us to defend the ambassador and transfer him as quickly as possible to one of the helos and fly him out of the danger zone. The advance team would attempt to fight their way back to us, and hopefully everyone would survive. Not a great plan, but we had no other options. The MP CAT teams did have comms back to their unit, and we gave them one of our radios for each mission, but depending upon where we were and how long it would take them to get to us, it could be a while. The point is that there was nobody standing by if something horrific happened. It was just Frank and his merry band of Blackwater guys. The reality of this situation began to sink in with some of them. While everyone is brave and an ass-kicking machine when there is no real threat, the reality of pending death on every mission began to take a toll on some of the less-experienced guys. My Rangers, SEALs, Marines, Special Forces, and combat arms guys relished each mission. Some of the others? Yeah, not so much. I could see the stress mounting in a few of them. Despite the manpower issues, when a guy was not doing well, I tried to make sure he got a day off to decompress. Of course, he was then labeled as a weak link and I knew he would not be returning. Given the choice I would never knowingly allow a guy to come back if he had proven to me or the other leadership elements that he was a potential liability in any way, shape, or form. Big boy rules.

November 2003

As rotation time got closer I had a few guys come to me and ask if they could leave earlier than scheduled. I could see the stress and despair on their faces and listened to their stories of woe and distress back home. I knew some of them were not having fun. I learned later that some of them used these stories to break their contracts with Blackwater and jump ship to another company that was paying more. Other guys were in hog heaven and asked to extend and stay. Ken began the process of getting flights scheduled, and we waited for word on the incoming replacements we had been promised. Ken requested résumés and background information on each man so we could place them where we felt they would best fit as soon as they arrived. The résumés never came. We were often operating in a vacuum. Guys had contracts and wanted to leave on schedule. We did our best to process them. We had been promised that as each guy left, he would be replaced that day. It wasn’t that smooth. While I was out with the ambassador, Ken kept working the arrival and departure flights, room assignments, gear, radios, and weapons inventories. He scrounged ammo and equipment and did all the paperwork to get the guys home and make sure they got paid. It was not easy.

Three guys got flights: thirty-four became thirty-one. Three more left and thirty-one became twenty-eight. We were still doing four or five missions every day. I cut back on the advance team and could only put a single shooter in each helo. We were severely shorthanded. As the AIC I took the brunt of the criticism from the team. Only Ken knew the true level of my frustration. I was so frustrated with the lack of support coming from Blackwater HQ back in Moyock that I had Ken regularly look at and edit my e-mails for a sanity check so I wouldn’t come across as the complete fuming angry bastard I was.

“Ken, take a look at this e-mail. What do you think?”

“Frank, maybe ‘you motherfuckers’ isn’t a good choice of words if you want them to actually answer you back and give you what we need.”

“Yeah, you might be right.”

We’d just laugh, and then Ken would rewrite it for me.

I put on the stern happy face and made sure everyone was focused on keeping the ambassador alive, but inside I was mad as hell. The hours were brutal. The villa team had been cut to four guys, and they were working twelve-hour shifts and then flying in the birds for four or five hours each day. I moved Shrek to the villa to run that side of the house. He was also flying and doing twelve-hour shifts. Single shifts at the office for an hour became multiple shifts every day. Everybody was pulling more than their weight, and I could see the stress was mounting. They knew as well as I did that we were not operating as efficiently as we should be. One thing about type A personalities is that you can’t bullshit them, ever. And I did not try.

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 the 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.

BOOK: The Bremer Detail
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