Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror (3 page)

Dad gave millions to the local Hope College, and Calvin College, my mother’s alma mater, in nearby Grand Rapids. Both were schools built around the Christian Reformed faith, which my father had deeply embraced since his first brush with mortality. In 1988, his support helped Gary Bauer and James Dobson
launch the Family Research Council
, an influential public policy group that promoted conservative values. “We’re blessed,” Dad told us time and again. “We have a responsibility to be a force for good in the world.”

•   •   •

D
ad didn’t let me hold a job during high school; unlike his hardscrabble youth, he wanted me to enjoy those years. I was on the basketball, soccer, track, and wrestling teams at Holland Christian High School; my senior year we won the Class B state soccer championship. I remember Dad flying in from anywhere in the world to sit on those metal bleachers with my mom during that rainy autumn.

I was never the most popular kid in high school. I didn’t drink and I didn’t smoke. Being an athlete gave me a social network, yet I didn’t
have many close friends growing up. My family background was a gift, but also had its disadvantages. I was never sure whether people saw me as my own person, or simply as the son of Holland’s largest employer. I spent endless hours discussing politics with Dad, and thinking about my future. I got involved with the church. I learned to fly, earning my private pilot’s license at nearby Tulip City Airport at the age of seventeen.

I loved studying history—particularly military history. I argued with teachers and classmates who hadn’t seen what I’d seen on those family vacations. Those trips and stark contrasts between communist and free Europe had made an impression.
How can they not demand we oppose communism? Don’t they know the Iron Curtain turns nations into prison camps?
Once in class I challenged a teacher who called then president Ronald Reagan’s Cold War military buildup a waste of taxpayer dollars. I countered by rattling off every Strategic Defense Initiative weapons system we needed to counter various Soviet threats. I’d analyzed Reagan’s “Star Wars” the way my classmates picked apart the University of Michigan’s football roster. I wanted to battle the Soviets myself.

Because I’d been such an early and avid sailor, Dad encouraged my interest in the Navy. His time in the ROTC had helped him develop leadership qualities, he said, and a military academy could do the same for me. After the heart attack, my father was generous with his time—but never with handouts. He didn’t want me relying on the family business. He made clear that I’d been given every advantage in life, and that I had no excuse for not making something of myself. Independently. I would not be working for Prince Corporation after college, he said, and I would receive no trust fund. I had to make it on my own.

On July 1, 1987, I reported to the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. I loved the newfound sense of purpose, and the connection to history. I loved spending a month aboard the World War II–era oiler USS
Caloosahatchee
—even if I did come down with chicken pox and suffer through three weeks of quarantine. But
it wasn’t long before I realized the academy wasn’t the right fit: It was just after
Top Gun
had come out and the environment was an uncomfortable mix of Tailhook-era frat boys on one hand and a nonsensical policing of political correctness on the other. I felt as if I was expected to learn from graduate student instructors who knew little more than the fact that they’d been there longer than I had. I quickly began to wonder whether the academy created great leaders—or if great leaders just enrolled there, endured it, and made it out the other side.

I left the antics of Annapolis after three semesters and looked to get back to a serious academic path. I chose Hillsdale College, a liberal arts school of fourteen hundred students in southern Michigan, about twenty-five miles north of the Ohio border.

The thing that truly appealed to me about Hillsdale was its focus on libertarian, free-market economics. The courses were anchored in the ideologies of the Austrian School of economics, which lionizes long-term laissez-faire policies without government intervention.
President Reagan gave a speech
at Hillsdale in 1977 titled “What Ever Happened to Free Enterprise?” I wish I had been there to see it. I was an economics major and a political science minor, and began to see that I might one day have an impact as a businessman, much like my father.

A staunchly religious institution, Hillsdale was also notable for its approach to federal and state grants: There would be none. The college administration was determined to protect its academic freedom through fierce independence, without need or want of the bureaucratic oversight attached to those grants. And I remember that when the college offered me a full institutional scholarship, we turned it down. “Leave it for someone who needs the money,” Dad said.

Back in 1986, I’d seen one of my favorite actors, Clint Eastwood, in the film
Heartbreak Ridge
. In it, Eastwood’s Marine gunnery sergeant character mutters, “You can rob me, you can starve me, and you can beat me and you can kill me. Just don’t bore me.” To this day I love that line—I’ve never been one to sit still for long. I had long had
a childhood dream of becoming a fireman, for instance, so I soon became the first student ever to sign up for Hillsdale’s city fire department.

Now, most Hillsdale students came from money. The butchers, painters, and slaughterhouse workers who volunteered or worked at the firehouse initially figured me for a snot-nosed college kid. But I showed up at the firehouse early to change the blades on the K12 rescue saws, and I stayed late to clean the pumps. I handled the heavy canvas hoses and carried the ladders. After a call, when the other volunteers sat back and cracked open a drink, I rolled the hoses. Gradually I earned their respect—and seven dollars an hour—and I began branching out.

Having gotten scuba certified in Annapolis, I took up rescue diving with the sheriff’s department, helping recover drowning victims and their vehicles that had plunged into the nearby lakes. I remember using a chain saw in the winters to cut holes in the ice that formed there, then dumping a few repurposed orange juice bottles full of hot water into my wet suit before striding in, all in an attempt to not freeze down there.

I had never before felt the focus or the adrenaline rush that came from descending into black water with no sound at all but my breath through the regulator, or clinging to a fire truck with its sirens raging. And I loved it. Everything had to be done fast. Lives depended upon our being prepared and executing our mission. That was more important than any class I was taking. I wore my fire department radio during exams. I was ready to move at the sound of the alarm.

Meanwhile, there was a girl: Joan. I first laid eyes on her in a picture on a fellow midshipman’s wall back in Bancroft Hall, in Annapolis. She had long blond hair and blue eyes that shone across the room. I thought it must be Jimmy Keating’s girlfriend—and then I thought about stealing Jimmy’s girlfriend. It was worse: Joan Nicole Keating was his sister. “I won’t let any midshipmen near her,” he warned. Then he smiled. “They can’t handle the heartbreak.”

I finally met Joan in January 1989, when an old friend at the
academy called with extra tickets to the youth inaugural ball for incoming president George H. W. Bush. It was one of eight inaugural balls Bush would hold, this one at a Marriott. My friend’s daughter wanted to go with Jimmy—so I promptly refused him a ticket until he agreed to bring his sister. I flew in from Michigan to meet her.

Joan completely captivated me that night. She was from upstate New York, near Saratoga, and was studying at Penn State University. She could speak at length about anything and sound good doing it. Joan knew nothing about my family or my background—virtually no one at the Navy did—I was simply an ex-midshipman two years her junior. She wore a ruffled navy blue taffeta dress that she’d bought for the occasion—even though the occasion didn’t seem to impress her all that much. The floor-length dress brought out the color in her eyes, but did nothing to complement her figure. Truth be told, that’s probably why I never really cared for it. But I’ll never forget the first moment I saw Joan wearing it. I’d have been happy spending the entire night just standing there with her in the security line.

•   •   •

I
n 1990, after my junior year at Hillsdale, I applied to be an intern in George H. W. Bush’s White House. Hillsdale had strong relationships with the Reagan and Bush administrations, and they were campaigns I believed in. A few months earlier, I’d made the first political donation of my life: $15,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee, which came from investment income from stocks my parents had long ago bought for me.

At the same time, Joan had graduated from Penn State and was also working in Washington D.C., at a nonprofit foundation and a law office. We spent all our free time together, and as quickly as I fell in love with her, I fell out of love with national politics. I went to the nation’s capital expecting a bastion of selfless service to one’s country. Where I came from, the Reagan administration had been hailed as a triumph of vision and dedication. It was evidence that government could be a force for good in the world—through policies that
supported innovation and entrepreneurship at home, and ones that would tear down communist walls abroad. But in Washington I found career politicians and bureaucrat straphangers who existed purely to serve their own best interests—including those politicians at the highest levels of government.

I worked at the Office of Public Liaison in what was then called the Old Executive Office Building, an ornate Second Empire palace that houses most of the White House staff. The office served as the primary avenue through which the general public offered feedback to the White House—and I had some opinions about the administration myself. Before long, I came to feel that President Bush was bargaining with people who wanted to weaken the sanctity of marriage, raise taxes with budget compromises, and push environmental policies that meant undue expenses for major national employers. I know I could be a bit headstrong, and that outspokenness earned me my one visit to the West Wing. Deputy Chief of Staff Andrew Card had heard about my frustration with the administration. He wanted to chew me out.

That sole encounter with a top administration official lasted about five minutes, and my White House internship quickly wrapped up after just five months. But as luck would have it, one night while bowling with friends I ran into Congressman Dana Rohrabacher.

Today, Rohrabacher is serving his thirteenth term
as representative from Southern California, currently its 48th District. Prior to his first election in 1988, Rohrabacher served as special assistant to President Reagan and for seven years was one of his senior speechwriters. At the White House, Rohrabacher played a key role in formulating the president’s “Economic Bill of Rights,” which championed free markets with little government interference.
He also helped create the Reagan Doctrine
, an aggressive military policy that publicly supported anticommunist insurgencies. “
Freedom is not the sole prerogative
of a chosen few,” Reagan said during his 1985 State of the Union address; “it is the universal right of all God’s children.” Those words had inspired me. When Rohrabacher offered me an internship,
I jumped at the chance to learn from him. And it would be another Rohrabacher staffer, Paul Behrends, who led me to my next adventures.

Behrends, then a Marine reserve major
—he would retire as a lieutenant colonel in 2005—conducted fact-finding missions for the House International Relations Committee. He was big into foreign policy and national security, and we had no trouble finding things to talk about. Also, I noticed that he ducked out of the office every day at lunchtime and never discussed where he was going. Only later did I learn he was going to mass. Behrends ultimately became influential in my exploration of becoming a Catholic.

In March 1991 I visited Zagreb with him to meet with Croatian leaders as they discussed plans to break away from Serb-dominated communist Yugoslavia. I remember visiting a major hospital in the city and seeing the rows and rows of wounded Croats.

The next month I accompanied Behrends to Nicaragua to investigate reports of mass graves in the countryside. The
Nicaraguan Association for Human Rights believed
that Daniel Ortega, a Marxist who’d come to power when his militant group, Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional, overthrew the Nicaraguan government in 1979, had been murdering civilian dissenters. In Managua, we had to shake a surveillance tail from a Sandinista in a Soviet-made Lada. Ninety minutes north of town, farmers led us to a secluded rolling hillside—and grim evidence of the atrocities. We found the remains of dozens of peasants who’d been bound at the wrist, shot in the head, and thrown into pits. I remember the shattered bones, the piles of broken skulls that stared up at me from the earth.

•   •   •

E
ight days after I returned from Nicaragua, Joan and I stood at the altar of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Alexandria, Virginia. I was twenty-one; she was twenty-three. All of our friends and family were there. And as frustrated as she might have been about my
conveniently being out of the country during the peak of our wedding planning, we were thrilled to be married on April 27, 1991.

When my congressional internship ended soon after, Joan and I took our honeymoon. We started with what we called our “Baltic liberation tour”—through Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. From there, we added stops in Belgrade, Sarajevo, and Mostar, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. We marveled at the medieval stone fortresses of Split and Dubrovnik. We even looped across North Africa before returning to Michigan, where I finished my senior year at Hillsdale. I remained a volunteer fireman—and still loved diving, and flying, and hunting—but I needed to fulfill a deeper mission.