Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror (32 page)

Soon, a dozen green Humvees rumbled toward the runway, spreading out to flank both sides of the 2,500-foot strip. Sand crackled against the sides of the trucks. The Malian drivers trained their headlights on the stretch of dirt Dalrymple would be shooting for. One last truck pulled to the far end of the runway, just beyond the rocks; that driver flipped on his flashing red gumball so Dalrymple had a cue when to stop.

The Presidential crew took two passes over the landing area to fully grasp the layout below—one doesn’t often touch down in a nighttime outback snowglobe. But on the third pass, Dalrymple brought the CASA down confidently, and soon rolled to a halt in the aircraft parking area.

Manness, the mechanic, unloaded the jacks and spare tire and went to work on Humphries’s grounded aircraft. Dalrymple confirmed with the Malian commander: Two critical patients and one deceased soldier needed transport back to Ouagadougou. As he stood there, he remembers, the sand was being blown around so hard, “
it felt like needles hitting you
.”

Manness quickly estimated it would take a day to make Humphries’s CASA flyable again. Dalrymple decided to keep those two men in Mali; he then turned to help load the wounded, plus a few extra sets of hands, onto his plane for the return leg back to Ouagadougou. Taking off by Humvee headlight, the site leader counted a first officer, two medics, two critical patients, one walking wounded, and one dead-on-arrival aboard his plane. The whole aircraft smelled like copper from all the blood, Dalrymple told me.

Ninety minutes later, the CASA touched down in Ouagadougou.
The work wasn’t done, though. Hansen, the medic, immediately dialed an Army surgeon at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. One of the critical special ops patients he’d been tending to needed an emergency splenectomy, Hansen said, and the medic needed to be talked through the procedure. Then he needed to find a place to operate. “
That local hospital
 . . .” Dalrymple remembers. “I mean, I can’t describe it. It was as sanitary as they could make it—but in no way was it sanitary at all.”

Furthermore, Hansen realized, that makeshift emergency room had little in the way of drugs. Presidential’s men later told me they pooled whatever cash they had on hand, then literally ran down the street to the local pharmacy to buy Schedule III narcotics while Hansen and the local doctor sliced off the soldier’s shirt and began their work. Hansen assisted the procedure the entire way.

Back in Virginia, I was gratified to hear that both of the patients on that flight survived. So, apparently, was everyone in Ouagadougou, who got a firsthand look at just how far those contractors would go to help someone in need. “We’d only been in the country for four or five days when the rescue happened,” Dalrymple says. “
I think the locals kind of put us up
on a pedestal after that one.” The special forces soldier Hansen operated on made a full recovery—and word of the men’s work traveled fast.

A week later, at a ceremony in Virginia, I ran into William McRaven, then a two-star admiral well on his way to becoming the four-star commander of U.S. Special Operations Command he is today. He threw his arms around me and gave me a bear hug.

“I heard your guys did some sporty flying out in Mali the other day,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Glad to help,” I said. “We’ve got some sporty pilots.”

•   •   •

I
n late 2006, we had decided the time was right to establish training facilities in other parts of the country, to reach military and law
enforcement units that couldn’t travel to the Moyock campus. My team opened an eighty-acre site outside of Mount Carroll, Illinois, in a far northwestern piece of that state known as the Driftless Area. It became Blackwater North. Then our plans for a Blackwater West took us to Southern California and an 824-acre plot of land forty-five miles southeast of San Diego, in a little town called Potrero.

I loved the fact that, with the exception of a few modern conveniences—including its two restaurants and a general store—the 850-person community had changed little since it was first settled in 1868. We saw bobcats and mule deer on our visits to the area, and hawks and golden eagles perched in hundred-year-old oak trees.

For Blackwater’s purposes, an old chicken and cattle range in that broad valley we found off State Route 94 was perfect. We envisioned standing up a dozen shooting ranges and laying down a giant driving track and a helipad. It would be within reach for customers all along the West Coast—including twenty thousand sailors at Naval Base San Diego, the SEAL teams at Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, and about fifty-five thousand combined Marines at nearby Camp Pendleton, Air Station Miramar, and Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms. And perhaps even more important for the vision I had for Blackwater’s future, there was the border.

Potrero’s nearest municipal neighbor was Tecate, just an eight-minute drive south into Mexico. And as far back as May 2005, when Gary Jackson had appeared before the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Management, Integration, and Oversight, I had been interested in doing for U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) what Blackwater had done for other agencies.

We knew that the few weeks of training Congress had been authorizing cost more for a single guard than it would have cost one of those representatives to put his or her child through four years at Harvard. So we’d drafted the outline of an eighteen-week course that would enable CBP to add two thousand new agents to its ranks, for a fraction of the cost. “
Just as the private sector has responded
in
moving mail and packages around the world in a more efficient manner, so too can Blackwater respond to the CBP’s emergent and compelling training needs,” Jackson told Congress.

There was no border contract in place when we looked to build in Potrero, but we’d been successful in the past by creating supply before there was demand. It was a niche worth preparing for, and that meant infrastructure.

In December 2006, Potrero’s seven-member planning group—which had little actual authority, as approval would ultimately have to come from San Diego County’s Board of Supervisors—voted unanimously to approve the project. The planning group shared Blackwater’s vision, and saw in our proposed facility an economic wellspring for a town where 25 percent of the population lived in poverty.

The citizens of Potrero saw it very differently.

Within a few months, three hundred residents had signed a petition opposing our expansion there. Green T-shirts and red bumper stickers declaring “Stop Blackwater” were a common sight. Residents of Potrero said at those Blackwater rallies that they feared all the live ammunition in an area predisposed to wildfires. They objected to the potential noise, the possible impact on the local wildlife, and the increased traffic that would stream through the valley.

Reading between the lines, however, I understood that, by that time, voters in Potrero mostly just objected to the Iraq War—and to the cartoonishly evil image that surrounded my company. Soon,
those voters went so far as to recall
five of the planning board’s members, electing in their place staunchly anti-Blackwater candidates to derail our bid for expansion.

It was a humbling experience for all of us. Yet as frustrating as I found their reasons for opposing us, I couldn’t help but respect a community coming together and embracing America’s democratic process. They didn’t want to have anything to do with us. I accepted that message.

And then Southern California caught on fire.

On October 20, 2007,
the first of nearly two dozen blazes
began
raging in Angeles National Forest. Soon, half a million acres were destroyed. Nearly one million residents were forced to flee their homes—the
largest evacuation in California history
. The inferno was visible from space.

The next day, the Harris fire—one of eight in San Diego County alone—began on Harris Ranch Road in Potrero. Ninety thousand acres in and around the quiet mountain town were engulfed.
More than 450 structures were incinerated
; eight people perished. Food, fuel, and other basic necessities dwindled. Power in the town was gone—and with it, water for the many residents who relied on electric pumps for their wells. Bumper stickers be damned, none of us at Blackwater were going to let that community suffer if there was anything we could do to help it.

Many of our contractors were firefighters, or otherwise had experience at disaster sites. We immediately sent a rapid response team to Potrero, and within days they were clearing and flattening ground in nearby Barrett Junction for a massive relief center. Then came ten thousand pounds of gear: sleeping bags, clothing, children’s toys, microwave ovens, and more.

Three beige tents—one for single women, one for single men, one for families, each with lighting and air-conditioning—offered shelter for two hundred displaced residents. A fourth tent was set up with TVs and DVD players. Nearby trailers offered shower and laundry facilities.

As we coordinated the buildup of the relief center, another organization, the Churches of Christ Disaster Response Team, from West Melbourne, Florida, sent personnel to run the site and organize meals. Blackwater donated all the materials and supplies for the tent city for ninety days, helping residents of Potrero get back on their feet. Even the ones who seemed to misread the situation: “They’re
just trying to show a good face
for the community, but it’s all a ploy. It’s all a game,” resident Don Lytle told KBPS, San Diego’s public radio station. “[Blackwater is] just trying to be the community’s heroes.”

Once our three months of relief work in Barrett Junction was done, my company left for good.
We withdrew our proposal for a campus
there, saying at the time it was a matter of decibel levels at the shooting ranges and fearing those might not fit within county regulations. But everyone understood the additional reality. Potrero’s residents didn’t want us there. So Blackwater West found a home in a different part of San Diego County.

Still, I look back on Potrero as a success story for my company. I’ve always been proud that ours were some of the first boots on the ground to help those men and women in a time of crisis—at a time when expansion plans and business prospects didn’t have anything to do with it. No one delivering children’s toys to a scorched valley cared about some hypothetical contract we might one day sign with Border Patrol. “
I’m going to continue
[this relief work] even through that kind of ridicule because it is the right thing to do,” Brian Bonfiglio, Blackwater West’s vice president, said from Barrett Junction as fires raged in the hills surrounding the town. “This is
something we’ve always done
. This is what we do.”

•   •   •

I
’ve always felt those months we spent in Potrero offered just a glimpse of what a Blackwater humanitarian mission could have looked like. Because it’s also true the people in my company had skill sets far beyond any sort of typical aid worker—and one of my favorite company stories comes from a place far more distant than Southern California.

Three months after the Harris fire, I got a call from Michigan about a situation unfolding eight thousand miles away.
Three college students from Grand Rapids
, I was told, had been sent to far western Kenya as part of an international aid team from Set Free Ministries.
The students
—sisters Brittanie and Aubrie Vander Mey, then twenty-one and nineteen, respectively, and their friend Jamie Cook, then twenty—had planned to spend two months in Kimilili, 180 miles west of Nairobi, caring for orphans with HIV and AIDS at the Omwabini medical center.

I knew that foreign aid workers were a common sight in the East African nation. Kenya has long had strong social and cultural bonds with the West and—particularly when compared to neighbors Uganda, Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia—had to that point been a relative model of stability in the region.

But that all changed on December 30, 2007. Three days after a hotly contested presidential election, Party of National Unity incumbent Mwai Kibaki was declared the winner amid reports of major vote tampering.
He was promptly sworn in
that very evening, and the country immediately descended into violent rebellion, with members of Kibaki’s dominant Kikuyu ethnic group battling protesting Luos, who supported presidential rival Raila Odinga.

Within weeks, more than 1,150 people were dead.
Some 350,000 across the country
were driven from their homes. According to intelligence reports we were getting, crimes against humanity were ghastly.
Men, women, and girls
were being forcibly circumcised and raped by the warring factions. And on January 1, 2008, a few miles outside Kimilili,
rebels set upon a church
in which Kikuyu citizens were seeking refuge. The angry mob doused the refugees’ blankets and mattresses with gasoline, stacked them in front of the doors to the church, and burned the building to the ground.
As many as fifty women and children
were killed.

By the time I heard about the situation, those three college girls—too blond to blend in—were hiding out in the Set Free Ministries’ orphanage, praying the warring factions didn’t enter their compound. Escape was far too risky; the few roads out of nearby Kimilili were blocked by heavily armed militias. A handful of Masai warriors guarded the orphanage, but had violence come to that doorstep, the results could have been unthinkable.

Dean Vander Mey, Brittanie and Aubrie’s father and the ministry’s executive director, was beside himself. He had looked into chartering a helicopter to grab the girls, I was told, but had no luck. He had pleaded to his local officials, international aid organizations, and members of Congress for help. He got nowhere. “They said, ‘
Stay
safe; don’t move,’” Vander Mey recalled. “That’s what they were telling us [to tell our daughters]: ‘You’re in harm’s way, but don’t move.’” Phone calls with his children got more wrenching with each passing news report. “They were scared, and I said, ‘Honey, I don’t know what to do.’”