Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror (16 page)

Outside the front gates, al-Sadr’s crowd continued to demand freedom for al-Yaqubi. Then, around eleven twenty-five a.m., a very different sound rang out from the road: Bursts of AK-47 fire echoed though the complex as bullets rattled off the concrete buildings. The protest was no longer peaceful—and instantly everyone was on the move.

Blackwater’s team rushed the CPA personnel out of the cafeteria and into their fortified section of the complex. The guards grabbed their body armor, whatever ammunition they could carry, and their government-issued weapons. Mostly that meant M4 carbines, a descendant of the famous M16 assault rifle with a short barrel that makes it easy to handle on security details. But it’s not something you’d choose to defend a compound with: Beyond about a thousand feet, accuracy becomes a problem for the M4, especially with moving targets—and a thousand feet doesn’t feel like nearly enough space between you and an angry militia. A few of the carbines had attached M203s, single-shot 40-mm grenade launchers that would scatter the crowd—but they weren’t especially practical at longer ranges, either.

As they gathered their gear, my men noticed Acquaviva had brought with him an M249 squad automatic weapon (SAW)—a belt-fed, bipod-mounted light machine gun that can rip off eight hundred rounds per minute.
The Guardsmen heard reports of potential unrest
in the area, Acquaviva said; just in case, he’d packed a weapon perfect for long-range suppressive fire. It was strongly recommended the Guardsmen come along, and the growing security team raced around the corner in a Humvee to the two-story CPA building, picking up a few Salvadoran soldiers along the way.
They headed for the
roof; soon Young, who’d been jarred awake by sounds of gunfire, was roaring up the steps behind them, his own SAW in hand.

Eight Blackwater men and the handful of coalition troops spread out around the satellite dishes and ventilation systems on the CPA roof until they had a 360-degree view of the city. That roof was actually made up of two adjoining rooftops that met at a central, reinforced tower that encased the stairwell. A short sand-colored wall ran along the perimeter, offering a protected vantage point to monitor the gathering crowd. But there was no cover from above. The men remained vulnerable to surveillance from the hospital tower beyond, and as the Mahdi Army overtook government installations in its march across the city that morning, Blackwater’s men would soon learn they had also overrun the health care facility, turning a 450-bed hospital into a sniper’s nest.

Suddenly, more unrest in the street—and the sickening sound of an explosion. Four Salvadoran soldiers rushing back into the compound were mobbed outside the front gate. The men were ripped from their truck, beaten by the crowd—and then
members of al-Sadr’s army reportedly
forced a grenade into the mouth of one of the young Salvadoran soldiers and pulled the pin. Less than fifteen hundred feet from the coalition position, the protest had deteriorated into frenzy.

Through his gun aperture, Young watched men spill out from a Mahdi truck, then run to shooting locations on the street below. They were clad in white robes, customary Iraqi burial dress. They had come to fight to the death. “
One of the Iraqis quickly dropped
down into a prone position and fired several rounds at us,” Young would later recount in a local newspaper interview. “I started yelling that I had [a target] in my sights and asking if I could engage. ‘
With your permission, sir, I have acquired a target!
’” He yelled again, “
With your permission, sir, I have acquired a target!
”

But there was no commanding officer to answer his call.

The twenty-five-year-old communications specialist would later say that as the only American in uniform on his part of the rooftop,
his first inclination upon bursting from the stairwell was to call out orders to the contractors around him. “But I realized real quick that these guys knew what they were doing,” he said. “
I was up there within thirty seconds
of the first incoming [shots], and Blackwater was already there—binoculars out, weapons locked on, picking out targets. So instead of telling them what to do, I started working with them.”

It was a smart decision: Half the Blackwater men atop the CPA building that day were former Navy SEALs. The rest were veterans of other military and police special operations units. They formed by far the most highly trained team—civilian or military, of any nationality—in Najaf. It also marked the first time in memory that private contractors commanded active U.S. military personnel—in the midst of a firefight, no less.

•   •   •

B
lackwater’s men gave Young permission to commence firing. The Marine leveled his sights on the shooter in white, who was now sprinting for cover. He fired a short burst of 5.56-mm rounds, then watched the man fall to the pavement. “
I stopped for a second
,” Young remembered, “and raised my head from my gun to watch the man lay in the street motionless.”

Acquaviva took a position along the wall next to the Marine; on the National Guardsman’s other side was an Army captain, Matthew Eddy. Blackwater’s men instructed Acquaviva to cover an arc from eleven to three on the clock dial, corresponding with the road ahead, over to the southwest corner of the hospital building. Below him, Iraqi rebels were trying to crash through the wall of the CPA compound. Rocket-propelled grenades hissed over the rooftop; Blackwater’s contractors were beginning to pick off targets within range. The forty-three-year-old Acquaviva had never been in a firefight before—back at home, just north of Birmingham, the specialist had been a heavy machinery operator on construction sites for the Cullman County Road Department.
This is too surreal
, he thought, as if he’d just stepped into some big-budget war movie.

He spied buses in the distance unloading more Iraqis. Acquaviva could see they were all armed. He focused his machine gun at the reinforcements 650 feet away—and for the first time in his career, was ordered to fire. “When I first had to pull that trigger, it took a moment,” Acquaviva later told a reporter. “
You look at these people and you know
you’re about to take the life of one or several of them. So I hesitated for what seemed like an eternity but was just a split second. But once a bullet whizzed by and I heard it ricochet off the roof, I just fell back on my training and did what I had to do.” The communications technician single-handedly destroyed the busload of Mahdi Army soldiers.
Eliminate the threat
, Acquaviva kept telling himself.
Eliminate the threat
.

He and Young unloaded belt after belt of ammunition at the militia convoys in the distance. As insurgents rushed closer to the gate, they were met by Blackwater’s grenade launchers. Soon, however, the threat also came from above, as a sniper on the fifth floor of the hospital found his range with a Russian-made Dragunov rifle—nearly four feet in length, the slender weapon is deadly from three-quarters of a mile away. With a short scream, Eddy, the Army captain,
suddenly collapsed on the rooftop
between Young and Acquaviva.
The sniper had hit Eddy sideways
through his left arm, chest, and back, a 7.62-mm round knifing in behind his Interceptor body armor. Acquaviva lunged for him—just as another sniper round cracked into a tin air duct where his head had been an instant before.

At the captain’s side, Acquaviva and Young unhooked the buttons and heavy Velcro on the front of Eddy’s vest, then cut a long diagonal hunk off his brown T-shirt underneath. The captain was alive, but blood poured from his arm and back, pooling beneath them on the gray cement tiles.
Young grabbed gauze pads
from the medical kit on his own vest; Acquaviva forced them down onto the wounds to stanch the bleeding.

One of Blackwater’s gunners, Donald Roby, a former Navy SEAL medic who went by the call sign “Doc,” screamed from the edge of the stairwell: Young and Acquaviva had to get the captain off the
rooftop. “
We came up with a plan
,” Young remembered. “[Eddy] said that he could run, so I put his right arm around my neck and called for covering fire. I heard everybody firing their weapons rapidly as we made our run for the door.” The burly Marine hauled the captain down a flight of stairs to the makeshift medical room that had been established on the first floor. From there,
Young dashed across the base
to Blackwater’s ammunition supply room, strapped on 150 pounds of ammunition, and raced back to the action on the rooftop.

Young dropped the supplies for the contractors, but no sooner had he found his familiar position on the wall than the Dragunov in the hospital coughed again and a sharp
crack
buckled Blackwater’s Arabic linguist right beside him.
Blood shot out
from the contractor’s face. Again, Young leaped to a fallen man’s side, but this time, applying pressure to the quarter-size hole in the linguist’s jaw did no good. Blood spilled out between Young’s fingers. “I thought to myself that his carotid artery had to be cut,” Young said. “
Using my index finger
, I reached inside the hole and began to feel around. It took a few seconds to find it, but finally I felt something like a large vein. I wrapped my finger around it and pinched as hard as I could.”

With his free hand, Young grabbed hold of the contractor’s body armor and began dragging him toward the stairwell. Bullets ricocheted off the rooftop around them—and then another
crack
floored the Marine. A round, probably from the gunman in the hospital,
had hit him on his left shoulder just outside
his armored vest, drilled into his back behind his heart, and stopped an inch from his spine.

Battling pain like he’d never felt before and a left eye suddenly swollen shut by shrapnel, Young forced himself off the ground and looked around. “
I knew that I heard the unmistakable
smack
, but no one appeared to be shot,” he said. With adrenaline surging, the Marine grabbed the wounded contractor and finished dragging him to safety behind a concrete air duct. Blackwater’s “Doc” came sliding in from the other side, pouring coagulant powder on the translator’s gaping jaw wound. Then, once more, Young hauled the wounded man downstairs to the medical area; again he lugged ammunition
back to the rooftop, where round after round was fired by the contractors in a deafening haze.

The team needed to take out the sniper. One of Blackwater’s men, Eric Saxon, a former Navy SEAL who went by the call sign “Pyro,” pointed at the hospital and yelled for a Salvadoran soldier to fire a grenade. But the shooter above was ready, and as the Salvadoran took aim, a round from the sniper’s Dragunov caught him in the face. One of Blackwater’s men swept in and pulled the wounded soldier to safety; Pyro picked up the gun and finished the job: With a hollow
thoonk
from the grenade launcher, followed moments later by an orange flash and a debris cloud from the hospital’s fifth floor, the sniper fell silent.

For that moment, everyone exhaled. Looking at the blood smeared across the rooftop and the innumerable shell casings collecting at the defense’s feet, Acquaviva couldn’t help but do the math: “Here [we] just got three people shot in two minutes,” he remembered thinking. “
And if three people got shot
in two minutes, then in less than fifteen minutes all of us could be gone.”

Those SAWs were chewing through so much ammunition, Acquaviva and Young had to take breaks every few minutes to make sure they didn’t melt their gun barrels. Yet for every Iraqi who fell outside the gate, nearly a dozen more seemed to climb over the bodies. Another sniper would be perched in the hospital soon enough. The men atop the CPA took count of their remaining ammunition and looked at each other: one magazine each.

As the National Guardsman turned his SAW back toward the militia below,
the question began to pound
in his mind:
Are you going home?

•   •   •

I
t was lunchtime in Baghdad’s Green Zone when word of the demonstrations across southern Iraq reached Bremer and our Blackwater managers. The ambassador had been reading a report about the apprehension of al-Yaqubi, al-Sadr’s lieutenant, when an urgent call
came in from Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq. “
All hell is breaking loose
with Muqtada,” Sanchez told Bremer. “We’re getting reports from a lot of different sectors. . . . Demonstrators flooding the streets. A lot of them carrying AKs and RPGs.” Soon, a second call from Sanchez: “
Muqtada’s people are really swarming
around our bases, especially in Sadr City and down in Najaf. They seem to think they can get the Spanish to cave in.”

The Mahdi Army had reason to believe it: The Spanish in Najaf hadn’t agreed with the coalition move to arrest al-Yaqubi—and, apparently under political direction from Madrid, the Spaniards tried to distance themselves from the confrontation. As Bremer later wrote in his daily journal, “This morning, the
Spanish put out an idiotic statement
about the Yaqubi arrest, saying that the Spanish did not conduct the operation, that it was done by ‘the Coalition from Baghdad,’ and that it was for Yaqubi’s part in the killing of an American soldier. I’ve instructed [CPA spokesman] Dan Senor to have the Ministry of Interior put out a statement that Yaqubi was arrested on an Iraqi arrest warrant for the murder of Ayatollah Khoei. The Spanish statement should be disavowed root and branch.”

By twelve forty-five p.m., the word reaching Baghdad was far more threatening than mere demonstrations. Hundreds of militants were attacking the CPA compound in Najaf, Bremer was told, and CPA region chief Kosnett needed Army gunships and reinforcements on the ground.
The ambassador became livid
that the Spanish army was, as he put it, “refusing to fight.” He wrote in his memoirs, “I got Sanchez’s deputy Maj. Gen. Joe Weber down here and asked what they are doing to reinforce the CPA in Najaf. I said I thought CJTF [Combined Joint Task Force] should relieve the Spanish commander forthwith. I called the Spanish ambassador and gave him unshirted hell.”