Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror (2 page)

1969–1996

The sound of a boat exploding is exactly what you’d think it would be.

I was thirteen the first time I heard it, way up in Ontario’s North Channel, where my family was vacationing aboard our forty-three-foot Viking powerboat. My dad had driven my mother, Elsa, one of my three older sisters, and a buddy and me up through Lake Michigan and past the Upper Peninsula. Towed behind us was an aging thirteen-foot Boston Whaler my dad had bought through a newspaper ad, and which I’d subsequently poured my heart into.

Just before six a.m. one morning during that vacation, my friend and I jumped from the Viking into that Whaler and motored out to a nearby fishing spot. We’d barely cast our first lines when suddenly an orange flash on the horizon jerked my head, followed by a baritone thunderclap that rattled across the water. White smoke billowed from the blown-open motor yacht; in the distance I saw debris raining down and the shards of a mast pinwheeling out of the sky.

I could hear screaming. There were no cell phones at the time,
and no radio in my boat to call for help. We cranked the forty-horsepower outboard motor my father and I had recently mounted in the Whaler, crouched low inside that robin’s egg blue hull, and zoomed toward the chaos.

With the water spray whipping against my face, I thought about one of the first boating lessons my father had taught me:
Always ventilate!
Gas engines on board require particular attention, he’d emphasized—it’s different than with car engines. In automobiles, he’d said, the airflow under the vehicle blows away dangerous gas fumes. But there’s little natural ventilation through a bilge compartment, and even during a routine refuel, heavy gas fumes can pool there. If you don’t adequately ventilate those fumes, he said, you’ll literally create a bomb just waiting for a spark. I remembered reading in
Popular Mechanics
a few years earlier that one cup of gasoline had the same explosive power as a dozen sticks of dynamite. And there in the North Channel I figured I was about to see what that actually looked like.

The Whaler cleared the half-mile distance to the accident in one minute flat. The damage to the motor yacht shocked me. The coach roof had been blown off, and there was a sickening hole by the bow. The deck was on fire.

Two people, a woman who appeared to be in her seventies and a middle-aged woman I assumed was her daughter, had been catapulted from the boat. Unbelievably, they were alive, though the burns they had suffered, and the sounds of their pain, were evident before we could even pull alongside them. They struggled to stay afloat.

Together, my friend and I hoisted each of them into the Whaler, laying the women across the wide wooden bench seats my father and I had spent so many hours sanding and revarnishing back in Michigan. To this day, I remember the smell of their burnt hair.

Luckily for the women, as I cranked the Whaler into a U-turn and gunned it for shore, locals back on land who’d also seen the explosion were calling for the emergency personnel. The paramedics arrived
soon after we reached the shore, and we helped load the women into the ambulances on stretchers. I never did learn their names, or what became of them. In fact, the last thing I remember about that morning was puttering back out to the Viking, tying off the Whaler, and climbing back on board with my family. Hardly anyone else was even awake yet.

•   •   •

“P
erseverance and determination,” my father used to say. “Perseverance and determination.” It’s a mantra that defined his life. I hope it defines mine.

As a child, my father accompanied his father, Peter, on his daily delivery route for Tulip City Produce Company around the scenic town of Holland, Michigan. My grandmother, Edith, was a seamstress. There, in the quiet town along the eastern edge of Lake Michigan, my father was taught to be industrious and to chip in with home improvement projects as soon as he could swing a hammer. When Peter died suddenly of a heart attack in 1943, my grandmother sought no government handouts, no charity from the church, not even money from family. Edgar, who had two sisters, was the man of the house now. He would provide for them. He was twelve.

My father’s first job, for a local painter, paid him a few cents an hour to scrape and sand houses. That summer, when the hot water heater at home broke, he measured all the piping connections for the new appliance, walked to the hardware store, and had galvanized pipe cut and threaded. Piece by piece he installed the new water heater, no plumber necessary. There was no money to afford one, anyway.

There were few stories of happy times from my father’s childhood. He never spoke of vacations to the beach, or family celebrations. He played high school football for only one season. He was studious because he was expected to be, and hardworking because he needed to be. At age thirteen, Dad took a job at the local Chrysler-Plymouth dealership that paid him forty cents an hour. He devoured
everything there was to know about cars—how to take them apart, how to diagnose problems, how to sell them. Three years later, he was running the dealership whenever the owner was away.

Dad supported his family, and saved enough money to put himself through college. An engineering major at Michigan Technological University, he earned a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) scholarship and soon served two years as an Air Force photoreconnaissance officer at bases in South Carolina and Colorado. He returned to Holland after his service and took a job as a die caster at the local Buss Machine Works, working his way up to chief engineer. He married a lovely young schoolteacher named Elsa Zweip, whom he’d met while waterskiing on summer break two years earlier. Soon my oldest sister, Elisabeth, was born. Then came Eileen and Emily. I was born in the summer of 1969.

In 1965, Buss was sold. During that transition, Dad gathered two coworkers, remortgaged the house, and borrowed $10,000 from his mother. He was convinced that nearby manufacturers would soon need to perform their own in-house die casting. He had clever ideas about how to answer that call—for which he can thank my mother, and the opera. Dad found their date nights at Opera Grand Rapids so interminably boring, he spent the whole time pondering novel designs for die-casting machines. Amid a forest of competitors, with his finances overextended thanks to a growing family at home and his aging mother’s nest egg at risk,
he struck out to create Prince Manufacturing
.

A staff of six labored around the clock to construct the six-hundred-ton die-casting machines. A few months after its founding, Prince filled its first order for Honeywell International, which needed a pair of the machines to manufacture military ordnance. Soon, Honeywell returned for three more. Then fifteen. Then General Motors started buying them, manufacturing each of its new engine blocks with Prince machines. Everyone at the company saw the hard work paying off. “If my employees are part of the game, if they desire to know what the game plan is, they will be part of its
success,” my father said. “People win games because they have the group working together.”

The size of the machines grew as the orders did: In January 1969 GM demanded a sixteen-hundred-ton die caster to manufacture aluminum transmission cases. Sixteen-hour workdays became eighteen-hour workdays. For my father, filling even the most outlandish order was about more than business. It was about even more than
losing
the business. It was pride. “If you have high expectations for your own life, you have to put those same expectations into your work,” he said. And seven months later, Prince Manufacturing had the die caster in place and operational at GM’s factory.

Soon he was diversifying, and Prince Manufacturing was growing into Prince Corporation. Dad’s company was no longer just manufacturing machines to make machines, but creating products of its own. In 1972, he invented a lighted mirror sun visor for Cadillac—an accent so ubiquitous today, it’s hard to imagine a time when cars didn’t have them. Prince then began designing interior consoles for cars—then dashboard cup holders, movable armrests, a digital compass/thermometer, programmable garage door openers. My father could envision whole new industries to create.
David Swietlik
, then Chrysler’s procurement manager for large cars, once told
Forbes
magazine, “Prince comes in saying, ‘You don’t know you want this yet.’”

The Big Three automakers loved that my father backed his research and development with his own funds; if prototypes failed, he took on all the losses. The approach made him relentless and tactical; every mistake the company made was documented and chronicled in a notebook he stored in his office desk. He called those mistakes “humbling gifts.” It worked:
Seven years after its founding
, Prince Corporation was Holland’s largest employer.

Not that success came without a price. In 1972, a heart attack almost killed my father. He was forty-two. For three weeks, he lay in bed at Holland Hospital reflecting upon how hard he’d been driving himself—and everyone around him. He thought about his own father dying at the age of thirty-six. He thought about how his temper
had been getting the better of him. I remember when my mom and I found him at home before rushing him to the hospital. It was the first time I’d ever seen him lying down in the middle of the day. “
It was then, while he lay
in a hospital bed reflecting on what all his labor had won for him, that he committed himself anew to his faith in Jesus Christ,” family friend Gary L. Bauer would later say. “Ed turned his future and the future of his business over to God.” As a result, Dad soon focused less on work and became a much larger part of my life.

•   •   •

I
t was important for my father to show me my grandparents’ European heritage. The old country. The Dutch-German roots were not subtle: I grew up in
a town named Holland
, settled in 1847 by Dutch immigrants fleeing religious persecution in their homeland. We were surrounded by tulip festivals and traditional architecture from the Netherlands—even an imported ancient windmill from the old country. There were wooden shoes everywhere. The Dutch Christian Reformed Church was a cornerstone of our town, and my mother a devoted member.

I was fascinated by my family’s history, and world history in general—particularly its association with the military. The first group of soldiers I ever assembled was made of solid lead—two inches high, standing in neat rows on my bedroom windowsill. There were hundreds of them, painted to match their real-life British, French, and Continental Army counterparts. I created them from molds I got on trips abroad and forty pounds of lead Dad and I melted down in a cast-iron plumber’s pot. I was only seven, but I’d heard amazing stories about the military from my father, and his uncles, who’d also served.

A sense of duty to family was also important. Mom was strict but gentle, especially with me. Dad was six feet tall, with an average build and giant hands that had grown thick through endless hours at the milling machine. He traveled often for business, and I saw
myself becoming the man of the house, as my father had been. Family was intertwined with business, and I got a feel for the business when Dad designated my mom, my sisters, and me as major shareholders of the ever expanding Prince Corporation. He led family meetings so everyone could be involved with company decisions. On Saturdays, he’d walk me through the various plants and offices at the company, teaching me about manufacturing and pointing out inefficiencies in production. The whole place smelled like hydraulic fluid. He never let me miss shaking even one person’s hand, from machinist to executive, to acknowledge their contributions. Even when I was just seven.

In the years following the heart attack, Dad truly changed. Family and health became more important. In addition to the road trips across foreign continents, we saw places like Dachau and Normandy. He became obsessed with his physical fitness—there were no more doughnuts around the house—and that obsession caused him to worry about the health of his fifteen hundred employees.

Three afternoons a week, Prince Corporation executives met at the nearby Holland Tennis Club, which Dad had purchased when it threatened to go bankrupt. In the era of three-martini lunches elsewhere, the Prince top brass came together over double faults and backhand winners. Then, in 1987, Prince Corporation opened a massive new company complex complete with basketball and volleyball courts. Dad also offered his employees regular screenings for life-threatening illnesses.

To him, business wasn’t just about making money. It was about relationships. My father’s employees were loyal to him, and so, he felt, he was responsible for their welfare. He delighted in seeing them prosper with the company’s success, from the hardworking machinist who could send his kids to college to the engineer who could afford the best care for a child with special needs. He sent planes from the company fleet to pick up salespeople at distant meetings so they’d be home in time for family dinners. The office stayed closed on Sundays.

His success made giving back important. Outside of work, Dad gave away at least 10 percent of his income every year. The fourth point on the Prince Corporation’s mission statement said, “Make maximum charitable contributions,” and my parents did so with devotion.
In the 1980s their aid helped revitalize
downtown Holland—including a donation of more than a million dollars to build one of the first dedicated senior centers in the country, Evergreen Commons. (Then vice president
George H. W. Bush toured the center
in December 1985.) Their contributions also enabled the restoration of the grand sandstone Tower Clock, which had stood downtown since 1892 and had become a beloved local landmark. The appreciation was mutual. Today a series of bronze footsteps in the sidewalk in downtown Alpenrose Park leads to statues of musicians and children singing; a plaque there memorializes my father. “We will always hear your footsteps,” it reads. “The people of Downtown Holland honor your extraordinary vision and generosity.”