Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror (28 page)

“We really have
a remarkably unprecedented experiment
going on in the United States today by having private military contractors,” Waxman said. Except we had literally centuries of evidence that it wasn’t unprecedented.

“
We have to question in this hearing
whether [Blackwater] created a shadow military of mercenary forces that are not accountable to the U.S. government or to anyone else,” said Maryland Democrat Elijah Cummings. Except Blackwater hadn’t done that.

“I am . . .
troubled that taxpayers have been taken for a ride
by paying six times the cost of a U.S. soldier for Blackwater contractors,” said Missouri Democrat William Lacy Clay. Except that hadn’t happened, either.

“What you did was you took away [Andrew Moonen’s] bonuses, July Fourth, completion bonus, Christmas bonus, he paid his own way home, and he couldn’t work for you anymore,” said New Hampshire Democrat Paul Hodes regarding the Christmas Eve shooting. “
Is that your idea, Mr. Prince, of corporate accountability
?” Indeed it was.

(Following the hearing, Stewart Riley, Moonen’s attorney, sent a letter to the committee complaining of the accusatory tone of the lawmakers. “People are assuming that a murder has been committed by someone who hasn’t even been charged,” Riley later told a
Seattle newspaper. “
Where is the presumption of innocence
?” In 2010, the Department of Justice decided not to seek an indictment of Moonen for the Baghdad shooting.)

Repeatedly, lawmakers fumbled through their allotted few minutes of questioning for me. D.C. Democrat Eleanor Holmes Norton asked me about Blackwater’s vacation and retirement plans. Diane Watson, a Democrat from California,
randomly lit into right-wing radio personality
Rush Limbaugh, and anyone else who “called our soldiers, [those] who have been critical of the experience in Iraq, ‘phony’ soldiers.”

“
I am offended
,” she declared, “and you should be offended, too.”

I had no clue how to respond to that.

I should stress my respect for our nation’s lawmakers and the vast array of issues they are called to weigh in on on even a single day. In the weeks before I appeared on Capitol Hill, Waxman’s committee had conducted hearings on everything from CIA leaks to diabetes drugs—so it almost goes without saying that I would know more about the PMC industry than anyone on that panel. But time and again I watched some congressional staffer dart into the room and slide a page of prepared questions in front of a representative who seemed to have no clue what he or she was about to read. What became clear as I corrected repeated misinformation was that not only were some committee members not grasping my answers, they didn’t even understand their own questions.

“The hearing revealed
a fascinating, but also disturbing
, lack of awareness in Congress about the private military industry,” wrote the Brookings Institution’s Peter W. Singer, who attended the session. “[Politicians] on both sides repeatedly struggled with the most basic facts and issues that surround the over 160,000-person contractor force in Iraq: Everything from the number and roles of contractors to their status and accountability, or lack thereof. It was quite clear that this was the first time that many had been forced to think much about the issue.”

•   •   •

T
here were, however, a few charges I was glad to finally respond to—largely involving money, that incessant headline generator. And if the politicians could tie it to tragedy, that only bolstered their grandstanding.

Back on November 27, 2004
, one of Presidential Airways’ CASA C212 airplanes, N960BW—known as “Blackwater 61”—had departed Bagram Airfield, fifty miles north of Kabul, Afghanistan. The plane was headed to Farah, one of the country’s provincial capitals, some 450 miles southwest. This required navigating the giant peaks of the Hindu Kush—a name that translates as “Hindu Killer.”

Coming two months after Presidential won the $34.8 million contract to shuttle troops and supplies across the country, the CASA was
loaded with four hundred pounds
of 81-mm mortar illumination rounds, as well as two Army passengers:
Chief Warrant Officer 2 Travis Grogan and Specialist Harley Miller
. At the last moment, I was told in the days that followed, the
aircraft was flagged down as it taxied
toward Runway 3, at which point Army lieutenant colonel Michael McMahon climbed aboard.

McMahon, the commander of Task Force Saber, which oversaw reconstruction efforts in the western part of Afghanistan, was reportedly racing back to his troops. Just after seven thirty a.m.,
Blackwater 61 flew away from Bagram
and climbed to ten thousand feet above sea level.

In the years since that flight, I’ve learned much about the men aboard the aircraft that morning. I’ve been impressed by their backgrounds. The captain, thirty-seven-year-old Noel English, had extensive mountain flying experience. English held an airline transport pilot certificate and more than fifty-seven hundred total flight hours—nearly seven hundred in CASA C212s, largely as a bush pilot for Village Air Cargo in Anchorage, Alaska.

Loren “Butch” Hammer, the thirty-five-year-old copilot, had
more than twenty-two hundred total flight hours, much of it earned through years spent dropping smoke jumpers on wildfires throughout the peaks and valleys of the western United States. He’d been first officer on those flights, also in CASAs, which translated perfectly to the sort of low-altitude maneuvering his teams would be doing for Presidential.

Blackwater flight mechanic Melvin Rowe, forty-three, strapped himself into the cockpit jump seat for that flight to Farah. He wasn’t required crew, but he’d been in Afghanistan the longest of the three, and an extra set of eyes for navigation guidance never hurt in the Hindu Kush.

Both English and Hammer had been hired within about a week of our signing the Pentagon contract. English had arrived in the country on November 14, earning just over thirty flight hours in his two weeks there; Hammer had arrived the same day, and had only three fewer flight hours in theater.

As they considered their route through the mountains to Farah, the most traditional path would have taken the aircraft thirty nautical miles southwest through the Kabul valley, then west.

Shortly after takeoff, Blackwater 61 didn’t turn to the south, instead banking northwest, then ducking down into a gouge in the mountains, the Bamiyan valley. The weather that morning was pristine: clear blue skies and some thirty-nine degrees Fahrenheit on the ground back in Bagram. It would be visual flight rules all the way—no tricky instrument navigation necessary. If the men were going to choose a day to pick out a new route, that was it.

“
I hope I’m goin’ in the right valley
,” English said, according to the plane’s cockpit voice recorder.

“That one or this one?” Hammer replied.

“I’m just gonna go up this one.”

“Well, we’ve never—or at least I’ve never—done this Farah [trip],” Hammer said.

“We’ll just see where this leads.”

Where that valley led was
a box canyon
eighty miles west of
Bagram Airfield, with fourteen-thousand-foot peaks on both sides of the plane, and soon, in front of the plane as well. Not that that was necessarily cause for concern. “
OK, we’re comin’ up to a box here
,” English said. “I think this valley might peter out right up here.”

The aircraft had left Bagram’s radar service area—and presumably, the men had dropped down to skirt the countryside as we did on all those low-altitude flights, hoping not to attract attention from insurgents. English appears to have had every confidence that, even in a worst-case scenario, the canyon was wide enough for the CASA C212 to simply swing a 180-degree turn and retrace its path back out.

“
Yeah, [the map] shows us
, uh, you got about twelve—I don’t know, thirty?—miles of higher altitude [over the peaks], then there’s another valley in the general direction that we’re going,” Hammer said. English understood: “
It was good while it lasted
,” he said.

English clearly figured that, at some point, he would climb to clear those peaks. For the time being, though, the thirty-seven-year-old seems to have let his mind wander to other things, with the voice recorder revealing the pilots chatted about rock music. He was enjoying himself. “
I swear to God
,” English blurted out, “they wouldn’t pay me if they knew how much fun this was!”

Whether the pilots lost track of their exact location, or didn’t pay enough attention to the CASA’s maximum climb rate with that much cargo, or simply got wrapped up in the excitement of the flight, I can’t say. Before long, however, I do know their conversation took on a very different tone as mountains rose in front of the plane—and the CASA wasn’t climbing fast enough to clear them.

“
OK—yeah, you’re
 . . .” Rowe said. “Uh . . .”

“Yeah,” Hammer said, “let’s turn around.”

“Yeah, drop a quarter flaps,” English said.

But the mountain continued rising to meet them.

“Yeah, you need to, uh, make a decision,” Rowe said. The sound of heavy breathing began filling the cockpit voice recorder.

“God—[
expletive
]!” English said.

The CASA was climbing as fast as possible; English
simultaneously craned it into a fierce left turn in hopes of turning around. The plane’s stall warning system screamed out in the background; the plane was pitched back at too steep an angle and the wings were threatening to stop generating lift. There, stalling would likely mean tumbling into a mountainside. Pitching the nose back down could have ended the stall threat—but also would have cut into the crucial climb rate.

“
Call it off—help him out
!” Rowe shouted. “Call off his airspeed for him, Butch!”

“You got ninety-five [knots],” Hammer said. “Ninety-five!”

“Oh, God!” English muttered. The stall warning screamed out again. “Oh, [
expletive
]!”

“We’re goin’ down!” Rowe said.

“God!”

“God!”

About thirty minutes after takeoff, the aircraft likely stalled during its climbing turn.
Investigators found that Blackwater 61 had impacted
the 16,580-foot Mount Baba approximately two thousand feet below its peak. The CASA’s right wing and engine were shorn off; the plane seems to have cartwheeled and skidded for nearly five hundred feet before coming to rest on its left side, the left wing folded beneath the fuselage, which itself was broken forward of the main landing gear.
English and Hammer were thrown
from the plane, their bodies discovered 150 feet in front of the cockpit wreckage.
Rowe’s remains
were found outside the plane’s bulkhead; Grogan’s and McMahon’s bodies were found still strapped in their seats.

Investigators later speculated that Miller could have survived on that mountainside for as long as ten hours after the crash. One hypothesis is that despite a broken rib and significant internal bleeding, the twenty-one-year-old had climbed from the wreckage. A cigarette butt was found nearby, as was a metal ladder leaning against the fuselage, as if someone had climbed on top of the wreckage and looked around. An opened Swiss Army daypack was found on the ground near the fuselage; it’s possible Miller had flipped
through the pilots’ maps.
Two frozen urine stains
were found in the snow nearby.

Inside the fuselage, a rescue team later found that someone had grabbed the water bladder from a CamelBak. An open Meal, Ready-to-Eat was discovered not far away. They found Miller’s remains on an unrolled sleeping bag; he was lying down on his stomach facing the front of the fuselage, with his hands under his head.

It was only when a passenger waiting for the plane’s return flight out of Farah asked about Blackwater 61’s progress—five hours after the plane’s disappearance, at one thirty p.m.—that the military realized there might be a problem. After a number of increasingly frantic phone calls to nearby bases in hopes of locating the aircraft, the Joint Search and Rescue Center (JSRC) was notified of the lost flight around three fifteen p.m. JSRC planes were in the air soon after—some eight hours after Blackwater 61 went down. But rescuers initially searched the more traditional route for a Bagram-Farah flight, finally picking up the downed plane’s emergency locator transmitter twenty-five nautical miles north about twenty-four hours later. I was heartsick as my men in Bagram sent back constant word of severe weather that kept responders at bay for two more days—and of a possible rescue mission that evolved into one of recovery.

Soon, an investigation conducted by the Army’s Collateral Investigation Board (CIB) blamed the accident, in part, on a lack of corporate oversight—a verdict with which we at Blackwater and Presidential vehemently disagreed. Presidential said as much at the time, releasing a statement that the CIB report “
was concluded in only two weeks and contains numerous errors
, misstatements, and unfounded assumptions.”

One significant problem, we pointed out, was
a deep conflict of interest
: One of the two lead investigators appointed by the CIB was Lieutenant Colonel John Lynch, who had previously served under Lieutenant Colonel McMahon for years. In 2003, Lynch had even
succeeded McMahon as executive
officer of the 25th Combat Aviation Brigade at Wheeler Army Airfield in Hawaii. Lynch, who
never visited the crash site himself, was hardly an impartial observer.

Another problem was the inherent difficulty of preserving and studying the wreckage. A Special Forces mountain team and a pararescue team aboard massive CH47 Chinook helicopters finally reached the mountainside debris field some forty-nine hours after Blackwater 61 went down. Those personnel estimated nearly two feet of snow had fallen at the crash site since the accident, so before collecting remains and the cockpit voice recorder, a CH47
hovered over the site for approximately ten minutes
to blow away the snow with its rotor wash. But the rotor wash from a Chinook travels at roughly a hundred miles per hour, meaning the rescue team basically hit the crash site with a hurricane before beginning their operation. Was debris relocated by doing that? Was evidence destroyed? It’s impossible to know what valuable investigative material might have been lost or contaminated.