Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror (5 page)

Blackwater
, we agreed, was a name.

Meanwhile, within days of being installed, the Southern pine poles had been slashed by massive black bears marking their territory, as the animals had done there since long before the Europeans settled the New World. We were part of this land now, and from that heritage we took our original logo: a bear paw surrounded by the stylized crosshairs of a rifle scope.

•   •   •

T
he final piece of the puzzle was Gary Jackson. Had two sailors not gotten their ears bitten off in a fight with a SEAL, I might never have met him. In 1993 I was an ensign with the Navy, an O1, at the bottom of the officers’ pay scale. Like most junior SEAL officers, I was assigned “collateral duties”—that’s the Navy’s term for what is largely administrative grunt work. Many of my collateral duties were helping out with Judge Advocate General investigations, and when I met Jackson I’d been tasked with looking into a fight at the Naval Air Station in Brunswick, Maine. A group of sailors had been there for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape school, which teaches personnel what to do when they’re lost behind enemy lines
or being interrogated as prisoners of war. It clearly didn’t teach those two not to pick a fight with a SEAL outside the enlisted men’s club, however—and now all three were subject to disciplinary action. Jackson was the chief warrant officer overseeing the facility where the SEAL was now assigned.

A British-born naturalized American ten years my senior, Jackson had spent two decades as a SEAL. I remember him telling me once that he actually hadn’t joined the Navy in the early 1970s by choice, but rather because he’d gotten into some mischief as a high schooler back in Tennessee. When his civil infraction case came before the judge, he said, the judge told him, “I can’t put you in jail for a full year—but I can certainly put you there for eleven months and twenty-nine days. Or you can go talk to that recruiter in the blue uniform in the back of the room. Your call.”

I also knew that Jackson was good with computers, which was still a novel skill in the 1990s. I don’t know how much of an impression I made during our meeting in Brunswick, but Jackson remembered my name more than a decade later when Viera suggested he come check out the joint being built in Moyock. After twenty-three years with the Navy, Jackson was nearing retirement. And intrigued by our business plan, he hammered out a rudimentary Blackwater Web site on his trunk-size laptop. It arrived in the mail on a 3.5-inch floppy disk. By today’s standards, that first site would be a Model T in an F150 world—the sort of thing we look back on and laugh about. But we were impressed by the effort, and in 1998, as soon as he submitted his retirement papers, Jackson came to work for us.

As we cleared that swampland, our ambitions grew—and by the time the Blackwater Lodge and Training Center officially opened on May 15, 1998, it was the largest shooting facility in the United States. We had the only twelve-hundred-yard shooting range on the East Coast. We had created an entirely new kind of shoot house, a heavy steel building with movable interior doors and walls where we could constantly change layouts and scenarios, complete with an observation deck above to instruct and grade trainees. We even dug a
twenty-acre lake to practice maritime special operations, allowing personnel to practice boarding ships from portside, by helicopter, and from underwater. The property had practically doubled in size, to six thousand acres—nearly half the size of Manhattan. I’d invested more than $6 million of my own money into all of it . . . and then, early on, no one came, for days at a time.

There was one small contract right at the start: training SEAL Team 1, ironically from California, in a deal worth $25,000. The Navy paid with a credit card—and thank God, because that 1.5 percent credit card fee was well worth it for the cash flow. We couldn’t afford to wait thirty days—or sometimes ninety days—for the government to cut us a check, because we were already sending hourly workers home early. Jackson would try to drum up business at gun shows—and then get booted because we couldn’t afford a proper booth. His wife chipped in at the headquarters, helping us manage the books.

Understand, Blackwater didn’t have some unlimited cash spigot to drink from. I was able to make a significant investment to launch the company, but part of my initial deal with Joan was that, no matter what happened with it, I wouldn’t gamble our children’s college funds. Managers in Moyock had budgets to stick to, and they understood that I expected them to accomplish three things for the cost of two. Jackson, thankfully, knew how to squeeze the buffalo dime until it squealed.

We offered firearms safety courses to local hunters, just to bring in
something
. Blackwater saw about $400,000 in revenue that first year, mostly through training nearby law enforcement and FBI SWAT teams.

Meanwhile, life at home offered different struggles. Soon after I left the Navy in 1996, Joan began her long battle with cancer—and won, for a time. In 1997, we moved our growing family back to Michigan to be closer to our relatives. There, I took over as chairman at Prince Machine, and regularly flew my single-engine bush plane back to North Carolina to oversee Blackwater’s development. But
that same year, as Joan was expecting our third child, doctors gave us an ominous prognosis. They talked about the elevated estrogen levels women have during pregnancy, and how that heightened the risk for more serious tumors to come. They recommended the extreme solution.

“Joan,” one doctor told her, “we have to interrupt your pregnancy.”

“When will it be resumed?” she shot back. Joan wouldn’t abort our child under any circumstances—and our second daughter, Isabella, was born in September 1997.

Five months later, the breast cancer returned. Joan suffered through cancer surgery, then chemotherapy and radiation. We were told her long blond hair—which I had come to know in photos, even before I’d actually met her—wouldn’t make it through the treatments. Joan and I visited a salon in Beverly Hills, where it was cut short. She cried. The stylist cried.

By the morning of May 10, 1998, the predictions were coming true. Joan’s hair was falling out in handfuls. I’d flown back from Blackwater to spend the weekend in Michigan with her and the kids, and that Sunday morning, she asked me to shave off the rest of it. I can’t forget that date: It was Mother’s Day. That was the day I cried.

1999–2001

When he came on board, Gary Jackson calculated that, at maximum capacity, Blackwater could bring in as much as $1.7 million a year in revenues. That was multiple times my original estimate; we really had no idea of what the numbers could become. But early on, we were all too aware of what the numbers actually were. Our small team clawed through eighteen-hour workdays, seven days a week, just as my father had done, trying to build the business. I found an odd comfort in following in my father’s footsteps and in the distraction from Joan’s illness—though Blackwater at the time was an environment rife for what we’ll call “philosophical differences.”

The staff we’d put in place was long on special operations know-how, but much shorter on business background. With all the skills they have, elite military personnel don’t necessarily have any experience at all with increasing business productivity, or managing costs down, or grinding out supply chain inefficiencies. We saw that same problem eat away at other major contracting companies that employed scores of generals and colonels just for their name
recognition. But at a startup like Blackwater, I knew that the question of whether we could quickly transition from operators to businessmen was going to decide the fate of the company.

Viera and Jackson, for example, were able to make that jump, and I tip my hat to them. Some others, such as Clark, had less success finding a comfortable role and a set of responsibilities on the team, and ultimately left during those challenging times.

Those who stayed understood one thing very clearly: We had to figure out how to start making money. Dehart started with shooting range targets.

The courses he designed for Blackwater tested shooters’ reflexes, with moving targets that could represent an enemy combatant or an innocent civilian. Trainees had to determine which one to put, or not put, a bullet through in less than a heartbeat. It helped them master precision in high-adrenaline situations and sharpened their judgment—and absolutely shredded the equipment. Chains, tracks, hinges, and pivots—all made of heavy steel—controlled the moving targets. We pushed clients so hard, even the highest-end, $12,000 commercial Action Targets were reduced to bullet-riddled junk within months. And manufacturers don’t exactly offer warranties against assault by special forces. “Train hard or don’t train at all” was our motto, but it was also becoming a legitimate budgetary problem.

Thankfully, Dehart had a solution. He machined a new kind of target system, named the BEAR, from Hardox 500 steel, the same alloy used in things like excavator buckets and armored personnel carriers. The BEAR featured a dozen spinning targets that were controlled either by specially designed computer software or by remote control.

Then he created a modified dueling tree, featuring six steel targets that swung from one side of a central column to the other when shot. A pair of trainees would fire simultaneously at the targets; the first person to knock all the targets to the other side won. It was like Blackwater tetherball.

Dehart’s targets drew such rave reviews, trainees in Moyock all
wanted to take them home with them. So soon enough, a metal building sprung up on our grounds beside the bunkhouse, full of men cutting and welding Blackwater-branded systems—everything from self-contained ranges inside shipping containers to pneumatic pop-up targets. That equipment brought in 50 percent of our revenue in the early days. Dehart’s designs—not the training we’d originally intended to provide—kept Blackwater out of the red.

And gradually, with the targets keeping us afloat, Jackson’s salesmanship began to pay off. At the end of his naval career, Jackson had headed a counterdrug platoon in the Caribbean, and the connections he’d made down there came in handy in 1999. People he’d known at the Coast Guard asked if Blackwater could train marksmen for its new Helicopter Interdiction Tactical Squadron. HITRON, as it’s known, is based out of Jacksonville, Florida, and was
the country’s first law enforcement
unit authorized to employ airborne use of force. At the time, the
Coast Guard estimated it was stopping less
than 10 percent of the drugs being smuggled into the country over the water, and in Stingray helicopters that could cruise at 140 knots, the agency found a solution. But disabling those arrow-shaped go-fast boats—which would allow cops to seize shipments and apprehend smugglers—is far more nuanced than simply blowing them out of the water. The Coast Guard wanted us to adapt SEAL techniques to train their shooters to destroy outboard engines with massive .50-caliber rifles.

It was, at the time, our first classified contract—and a real step forward for a small company searching for some traction. Very quickly, we found that the one thing we could do better than anyone else was to learn from current events and find creative solutions for real-world problems. And unfortunately, in 1999 and 2000, two events shone spotlights on problems that needed to be solved.

•   •   •

J
ust after eleven a.m. on Tuesday, April 20
, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold carried an arsenal of shotguns, semiautomatic weapons, and homemade pipe bombs into Columbine High School,
just south of Denver.
In one of the worst school shootings
in U.S. history, the teenagers spent forty-nine minutes patrolling the building, murdering thirteen people before ultimately turning the guns on themselves. Following the massacre,
the public fixated on potential causes
—antidepressant use in teens, goth culture, or listening to shock rock, for instance—many of which have since been proven to be unfounded speculation. The Blackwater team, however, saw something very different.

We noticed that more than seventy-five police
officers had surrounded the school by the time the shooters committed suicide, yet it would be three hours before anyone entered the building and found the two of them. We heard that
a reported one thousand personnel
from forty-seven different agencies had arrived at the scene throughout the day, and most were never given an assignment from commanders there. We lamented
the passing of teacher Dave Sanders
, the final of the fifteen casualties that day, who’d been shot at 11:26 a.m. yet who bled to death in a classroom before paramedics reached him nearly four hours later. It was clear that SWAT teams needed better training for a situation like this. Established policies that had patrol officers securing a perimeter and waiting for the cavalry—instead of charging inside to get the shooter—clearly didn’t work when the gunmen weren’t taking hostages.

Blackwater already had a fifteen-thousand-square-foot range on its property that looked like a small town, complete with paved streets and buildings outfitted with video cameras, allowing trainees to simulate urban environments. We conferred with
the National Tactical Officers Association
(NTOA), a nonprofit founded back in 1983 to oversees training programs for police patrol officers and special operations units around the country. Within six weeks of the Columbine shootings, Blackwater was home to a sixteen-room steel building that allowed for live gunfire inside, and even explosions outside for practice with “dynamic entry.” There was a sound track of alarms, and people screaming.
We called the massive structure
“R U Ready High School.”

The NTOA committed $50,000 to start the construction—but never delivered the funds. So we forged ahead and funded the project ourselves, hoping that if we built it, tactical teams would come to update their training. It was another leap of faith.

In September 1999, the NTOA sent
a class of four hundred SWAT team members to Moyock. We had actors playing students, covered in blood and pleading for help. Backpacks contained mock bombs; “shooters” hid among the “students” to lie in wait for police. It was a grisly scene, intentionally so—the sort of thing critics point to when they call us callous for using tragedy to grow the company. They don’t get it.
As a reporter once described our work
: “Somebody has to be in the business of worst-case scenarios.”

Those mock injuries—the “moulage,” as it’s known in medical and military circles—were a key part of instilling in the officers a profound sense of the morality and necessity of their mission. Tying in that psychological component created something we called “full competency.” It was sometimes horrifying training that most of the participants—police officers at local and state levels—had never encountered before. Larry Glick, the NTOA’s executive director, later described his team’s first visit to Blackwater: “
There was no back-slapping
or celebration at the end of the simulation,” he said. “Several officers told us they never believed in their worst nightmares that such an event could take place, let alone that they would have to train for it.” It was the sort of thing they needed to see to be able to respond to a real-life event of that magnitude.

Soon, the NTOA was sending officers from all fifty states, plus Canada, Haiti, Belgium, and England, to our facility. One year after the Columbine shooting, we’d trained a thousand of its men. Other police officers were so eager to take the course, they paid for the program out of their own pockets if their departments wouldn’t cover the expense. Trainees were battering and blowing open so many doors that we had a standing monthly order at the local Home Depot for truckloads of new ones.

That pair of teenagers outside Denver had rocked the nation’s law
enforcement community, and in the process had given Blackwater a chance to grow. Just over a year later, two men half a world away, in Aden, Yemen, would shake the entire U.S. Navy—and alter the course of our company.

•   •   •

T
he USS
Cole
is a billion-dollar warship
—a 505-foot-long Arleigh Burke–class guided-missile destroyer armed with torpedoes, machine guns, Tomahawk missiles, and a vast array of advanced radar equipment.
In August 2000, the destroyer sailed
from Naval Station Norfolk en route to
a deployment with the U.S. 5th Fleet
in the Arabian Gulf.
Two months later, as the ship refueled
in Aden harbor under security posture Threatcon Bravo—the third of the five alert levels the military uses to label impending terrorist threats—two al-Qaeda operatives steered a small fiberglass fishing boat full of C4 plastic explosive to the
Cole
’s port side. Witnesses watched the men stand at attention.
Then the duo set off a blast equivalent
to the detonation of seven hundred pounds of TNT, shaking buildings along the waterfront and opening a forty-foot-by-forty-foot gash in the destroyer’s reinforced steel hull.
Seventeen sailors were killed
instantly or mortally wounded; thirty-nine more were injured. At the time, it was the worst terrorist attack on an American target since the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Yet even more shocking than the attack itself was what the Navy subsequently discovered about its own outdated policies and training procedures. Crew members reported that the sentries’ rules of engagement, set by the ship’s captain following Navy guidelines, would have prevented them from defending the ship, even if they’d detected a threat: They weren’t permitted to fire on an enemy without being fired upon first.
Petty Officer John Washak
told the
Washington Post
that he was manning a gun at the rear of the
Cole
when a second boat approached, but that he was ordered to turn his weapon away unless he was actively shot at. “In the military, it’s like we’re
trained to hesitate now,” Washak said. “If somebody had seen something wrong and shot, he probably would have been court-martialed.”

The Navy’s own Judge Advocate General (JAG) investigation into the bombing carried additional and unsettling weight.
The report concluded that the
Cole
’s
commanding officer had failed to implement roughly half the force protection measures required during the refueling stop. Far more important, a full implementation of those measures still wouldn’t have stopped the carnage.
In his statement to the JAG report
, Vice Admiral Charles W. Moore Jr., commander in chief of United States Naval Forces Central Command and the Navy’s 5th Fleet, noted that “had the
Cole
implemented the Threatcon Bravo measures perfectly, there is total unity among the flag officers who have reviewed this investigation that the ship would not have prevented or deterred this attack.”

One can imagine the reaction at the Pentagon when the commander of the 5th Fleet—which patrols five million square miles, including the Red Sea, the Arabian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, and parts of the Indian Ocean—suggests men aboard his destroyers couldn’t stop bad guys in fishing boats. It led to an “urgent and compelling” training contract—a short-term emergency stopgap measure used when the government doesn’t have months to engage in the traditional, cumbersome open bidding process. Not long after the bombing, we got a phone call from the Navy asking if Blackwater’s personnel could instruct twenty thousand sailors in force protection over the next six months, at facilities in four separate locations.

That call was part of a standard market survey conducted by the DoD to figure out how many providers might be able to satisfy the demands of an upcoming contract. “
With those surveys
,” explained Fred Roitz, Blackwater’s former vice president of contracts and compliance, “the Navy is basically saying, ‘We have to train X number of sailors at X types of ranges, within X miles of Hampton Roads. How many companies can even accomplish that?’” It turned out, travel time was a sticking point. “The Navy wasn’t going to be
putting sailors on planes to go train,” Roitz said—which is exactly what Blackwater’s founders had anticipated when we drew those compass circles that led us to Moyock.

•   •   •

W
e were the only company that checked every box on the Navy’s list. Still, we had to think carefully about whether we would accept that challenge. Blackwater was, at the time, a company with thirty full-time employees. We hadn’t trained three thousand people
total
since opening our doors three years earlier; now the Navy was asking if we could train twenty thousand sailors in six months. We weren’t entirely sure how we would do it, but our company culture was always aggressively proactive, and management never shied away from a challenge. Jackson’s commitment to action was so intense that he had even gone so far as to start keeping a database of business resources with a “T” or a “D” marked next to names: The letters stood for “Talker” and “Doer.”