Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror (31 page)

The echoes of anarchy from foreign war zones I’d seen were unmistakable. “
This place is going to look like Little Somalia
,” Brigadier General Gary Jones, commander of the Louisiana National Guard’s Joint Task Force, told the
Army Times
days after Katrina hit. Jones said he was preparing hundreds of armed troops to literally pacify New Orleans. “
We’re going to go out and take this city back
,” he declared. “This will be a combat operation to get this city under control.”

Thankfully, almost none of the stories turned out to be true. History has clarified that the vast majority of those tales were sensationalist speculation. Yet at the time, mere rumors of crime drove the action on the ground. The city was seemingly in ruins. The bodies floating down flooded streets were very real. “
The only difference between here and Iraq
is there are no roadside bombs,” fifty-six-year-old Dan Boelens, who had twice been to Iraq with Blackwater before joining our team in New Orleans, told the
Grand Rapids Press
newspaper. “It’s like a Third World country. You just can’t believe this is America.” Citizens there could be forgiven for believing practically anything—though I wish that hadn’t included the crazy stories about us that would follow.

In the midst of what they believed was a “breakdown in social order,”
CNN hired British security company
AKE Group—the same firm that protects CNN’s reporters in Iraq—to safeguard its teams in New Orleans.
NBC News hired armed guards
for its personnel there; ABC and CBS followed suit. Soon, local businesses, major corporations, even private home owners were reaching out to us as well. Blackwater had an outsize reputation, after all, which some of those people might not have liked—until it was their property that needed protection. And suddenly it wasn’t just volunteer work we were doing in the Gulf Coast. “
The calls came flooding in
,” Chris Taylor, our vice president for strategic initiatives at the time, told the
Washington Post
. “It’s not something that we went down and tried to develop.”

Some of our men worked a security detail for BellSouth, whose workers went neighborhood to neighborhood trying to restore the city’s telecommunications infrastructure. Others guarded banks, industrial sites, power plants, petrochemical facilities—even the brick warehouse outside Baton Rouge where a local Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team had set up a temporary morgue. We protected priceless art at museums, and family heirlooms in private homes. Down in the French Quarter, Blackwater safeguarded the historic Chateau LeMoyne hotel—almost by accident. “
I was scared to death coming back
into the Quarter after the storm,” hotel general manager Kathleen Young said at the time. “And then I got here, and there were two Blackwater guys camped out in my lobby. Nothing was touched. They stayed with me for weeks, and I never saw anyone challenge them.”

We soon had teams assigned to five hotels, including the Sheraton New Orleans, also in the French Quarter. City police were too inundated to protect the Canal Street mainstay—much less the fifteen hundred customers stranded inside, as well as the staff’s movements outside the building—so Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, which owns Sheraton, contacted us. On September 2, the day after Starwood called, we had a team in place at the hotel. “
They treated it
as if that was their job—and they were personable,” Kevin Regan, then Starwood’s regional vice president for the Southeast, said. “They were not guys that you’d think would be like G.I. Joe or something like that.”

Some of Blackwater’s ardent critics—and conspiracy theorists—couldn’t resist the comparison, however. “According to [one account],
mercenaries from Blackwater USA
are rumbling through the New Orleans streets, armed to the teeth and in full battle gear,” read one silly report. “I have been told by contacts in Louisiana that there were
extrajudicial slayings going on
at the hands of the police and/or Blackwater and/or the National Guard in New Orleans,” read another.

Still another, “Blackwater—What If Our Mercenaries Turn On Us?,” was penned by Chris Hedges. Hedges, who spent fifteen years as a foreign correspondent with the
New York Times
and was even part of its 2002 Pulitzer-winning team for terrorism coverage, is a surprising candidate to have devolved so far into conspiracy theory lunacy—yet he has fully embraced his latest turn. “
Communist and fascist movements during the last century
each built rogue paramilitary forces,” he wrote in that post. “The appearance of Blackwater fighters, heavily armed and wearing their trademark black uniforms, patrolling the streets of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, may be a grim taste of the future.”

To support their arguments, many online pundits pointed to an August 30, 2005, Reuters news photo that showed a half dozen black-clad men with machine guns and sidearms, some in wraparound sunglasses, making their way through downtown New Orleans. But those critics apparently never even bothered to read the photo’s caption.

The photo of “Blackwater fighters” in their “trademark black uniforms” is actually of a New Orleans police SWAT team on patrol. Our men in the Gulf typically wore beige polo shirts with our logo on the chest, and green pants.

Beyond that, critics who believe that I somehow turned a natural disaster into a grand business opportunity show a grasp of history as faulty as their supposed photographic evidence. Contractor use—across industries—always spikes after a natural disaster. And following Katrina,
private firms from around the world
poured into New Orleans as multiple government agencies geared up to hand out well over $100 billion on relief and rebuilding projects.

The Army Corps of Engineers hired
companies from Florida, California, and Minnesota to remove debris. Then, the
Chicago Tribune
reported,
ambulance crews
from California, mold removal specialists from North Carolina, and disaster consultants from Texas arrived on the scene. Reporters found that
the Navy paid Kellogg Brown & Root
, one of the massive contractors on the ground in Iraq, $16.6 million for damage assessments on naval facilities in New Orleans and power restoration projects at three Mississippi facilities. For emergency housing,
FEMA awarded no-bid contracts
to Bechtel, Fluor, Shaw Group, and CH2M Hill to provide trailers or mobile homes for as many as twenty thousand displaced people. (Those were the same “toxic trailers” Waxman’s committee would later investigate.)

Blackwater found security work in the city—though we were hardly the only ones. Along with the PMCs protecting reporting teams in New Orleans,
the British company ArmorGroup
International sent about fifty employees to the Gulf Coast. Texas firm Instinctive Shooting International stationed guards outside Audubon Place, a gated community of multimillion-dollar homes near Tulane University.

Then, amid the flurry of stability and reconstruction efforts, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) came to us with an urgent and compelling need to safeguard FEMA facilities and personnel. In the face of dramatic hardships and staggering losses, the agency had reason to believe New Orleans residents might vent their frustrations on beleaguered agency staffers. “
We used to go out in T-shirts
with a big ‘
FEMA
’ across the back,” Gary Marratta, an agency security
coordinator, said at the time. “We don’t do that anymore—ever since this one guy told me, ‘You know, that space between the ‘E’ and the ‘M’ makes a pretty good target.’” Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service (FPS) unit offered no help—those men stayed out of the most dangerous areas of New Orleans because they “
deemed the situation unsafe
.”

That Homeland Security contract paid Blackwater
$33.3 million through the end of 2005 for security at FEMA field offices and disaster response centers and for its medical assistance teams throughout Louisiana.
Almost immediately, we funneled
roughly seven hundred contractors into the city; we charged $950 per staff day for them. “
FPS considered this the best value
to the government and believed that Blackwater Security’s past performance under other contracts and current performance under contracts with the Department of State demonstrated its capability to perform under the conditions of this contract,” Matt Jadacki, then the Special Inspector General for Gulf Coast Hurricane Recovery, wrote in a DHS memo. Homeland Security reserved the option to extend that contract indefinitely—and it did.
Within a year, some sixteen hundred
Blackwater contractors had rotated through the Gulf Coast, and DHS had paid us nearly $75 million.

It’s true that based on the dramatic stories coming out of New Orleans, our men initially arrived for security details in body armor, with pistols strapped to their legs and shotguns or M4 carbines in hand. It’s also true that with SWAT teams, Louisiana Department of Natural Resources forces, and fifty thousand heavily armed National Guard troops roaming the city, carrying a weapon hardly made Blackwater personnel stand out. What did make our men stand out was their training to view violence as only a last resort; each of our contractors carried an ID card listing on the back the six escalating steps of permissible force outlined by the Department of Justice—our rules of engagement.

Happily, none of our contractors had to reference that training. Our men never fired a single shot in New Orleans. And upon
assessing the reality of the threats, or lack thereof, we gladly toned down the daunting silhouette. “
This is not the occupation of Louisiana
,” Andy Veal, one of our Katrina zone supervisors, said at the time. “This is Americans helping fellow Americans.”

•   •   •

O
ne of my favorite stories about my company’s men helping their fellow Americans came nearly a year after Hurricane Katrina—in a West African country most people can’t find on a map, outside a city whose name many Americans can’t even pronounce. In July 2006, nearly six thousand miles away from New Orleans, a Presidential Airways medevac flight lifted off from Burkina Faso’s capital of Ouagadougou—which we all just called “Waga”—and picked its way through the storm clouds gathering north, across the border in Mali.

A year earlier, the U.S. government had launched its
Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership
, a State Department–led initiative designed to thwart extremist organizations across West and North Africa. The goal was to train units from seven Saharan nations—Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, and Senegal—in critical counterterrorism tactics. Those trainers,
sent in by the Defense Department’s U.S. Africa Command
, were American special ops personnel. Presidential’s airmen were also in Burkina Faso thanks to that DoD command, on a competitively won contract to provide fixed-wing airlift support for those trainers. Presidential’s pilots flew our telltale CASA C212s.

The flights out there on the edge of the desert were pretty straightforward, our site manager, David Dalrymple, told me—except for some of the landings. “
On one early mission in Mali
to support folks working up there, I had to land on a homemade desert runway to deliver the supplies,” he remembers today. “I had the coordinates for where the runway was supposed to be, but when I got there, it was just a dirt strip with dirt on either side of it. I could barely see it until I got right on top of it.” Once he set down, Dalrymple made sure to walk that sandy strip and take GPS readings for both ends—he told
me they’d simply been labeled with a handful of rocks—and jotted them down for future use.

That information became crucial only a few days later, when a late afternoon distress call rang out from fellow Presidential pilot Eric Humphries. Humphries and a small company team had flown the same resupply route into Mali for the special ops trainers, but while on the ground they got drilled by one of the semiregular squalls that tear through Mali during the rainy season. “
Those squall lines are preceded
by hundred-mile-per-hour winds,” Dalrymple says. “They just eat up everything in their path.”

As the July storm churned through the Malian outpost, it pushed Humphries’s CASA some fifty feet sideways across the runway ramp, blowing out a tire and causing the whole plane to lurch so violently it cracked a wingtip against the ground. Humphries was grounded.

Meanwhile, the rural training camp bore the true brunt of the storm. Tents were ripped from the ground and flung downwind; temporary structures were obliterated. When the storm subsided, Humphries could see that one person had been killed. Other men, including American soldiers, were trapped beneath the collapsed structures; it was clear to him that many had sustained severe injuries. He radioed back to Dalrymple: These men needed a medevac
now
.

The site manager in Ouagadougou climbed into the pilot’s seat of a CASA outfitted with litters and trauma equipment.
With him was first officer
Jessie Laraux, combat medic Eric Hansen, and crew chief and mechanic Robert Manness. It was a ninety-minute flight to the Malian outpost, the men knew, and likely to be lengthened by weaving around storm cells on the way. The team also figured they had only ninety minutes of sunlight left. Finding that dirt runway in the fading light would only get harder with every passing minute. Presidential’s men got off the ground and charged north.

Twenty minutes outside the Malian camp, the crew in the air got a call from Humphries on the ground. “
The wind is picking up again
,” he warned them. “The sand is really whipping around. I can hardly
see anything.” Darkness was settling across the region, and something like a sandstorm was about to kneecap the visibility of the plane’s landing lights.
It was hard enough finding this thing in the daylight
, Dalrymple thought.

Humphries sprang into action. He sprinted away from the landing area to find the commander of the Malian unit being trained at the outpost. “We need lights!” he shouted.