Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror (9 page)

We paid each member of Bremer’s security detail $600 per day. The security plan also included a special addition from our special operations days: helicopters. Three of them, in fact, to grant us air cover for ground convoys, high-speed reconnaissance capabilities, and, if necessary, medevac options.

In April 2003, just as Blackwater first expanded into Iraq, we’d purchased Melbourne, Florida–based Aviation Worldwide Services, which added aircraft to the training and logistical assistance we could offer clients. For the Bremer detail, Blackwater bought three McDonnell Douglas 530s, whippy little black and silver helicopters developed during the Vietnam War for Army scouting operations, which were later adapted for special operations forces. Their size and maneuverability meant they could land on rooftops and in city streets that larger military choppers couldn’t access. Decades ago, special ops personnel nicknamed the teardrop-shaped four-man aircraft “Little Birds.”

In addition to the millions of dollars we poured into hardware, having a helicopter fleet meant that we were providing not only bodyguards and professionally trained defensive drivers, but suddenly helicopter pilots, door gunners, and mechanics. That raised Blackwater’s investment considerably. And the
Pentagon contract gave us a scant
thirty days to buy the Little Birds, outfit them with the necessary gear, assemble and train their crews, and deliver it all to Charleston, South Carolina, to have it all shipped over to Iraq. Doing so over our internal financial estimates would cost us money, but delivering late meant Blackwater could be debarred, the giant governmental black mark that rescinds a company’s eligibility for contracts for a period of time.

Richard Pere, our newly appointed aviation chief, understood the pressure, and even managed to deliver the helicopters early. Not just to Charleston, mind you—he
packed the Little Birds into the cargo hold
of a military C5A aircraft, then flew with me on the plane from Charleston to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, then to Spain for a stopover before delivering them personally at Baghdad International
Airport at three a.m. on Day 28. This was our first big chance to serve in Iraq, and we weren’t about to start by being late.

•   •   •

T
here really was no prior design for the sort of protection Bremer required. When the ambassador walked out of a building, he was often surrounded by ten of my men in khakis and polo shirts, wearing beige vests packed with extra ammunition, their M4 carbines at the ready. When Bremer traveled through the city, there might be three dozen men, helicopter support, surveillance, and counterassault teams involved.

His motorcade had grown to include two armored Humvees at the front of the pack, three lead-armored Chevy Suburbans—the middle one carrying Bremer, the other two carrying Blackwater “shooters”—in the center of the line, and then another pair of Humvees at the rear. The Little Birds above provided extra shooters and emergency evacuation capabilities, but, just as important, they provided navigational guidance for uncertain traffic conditions, cutting valuable minutes off Bremer’s trips across town.

American civilians watching Baghdad on their televisions might have thought the precautions were excessive, but threats appeared in even the most secure of places. Contingency plans had to be drawn up in case Bremer’s villa was struck by one of the mortar rounds routinely fired indiscriminately into the coalition’s fortified Green Zone while he slept. Meanwhile, he had been moved into that villa—as opposed to living in Hussein’s converted Republican Palace with other CPA officials—only because intelligence reports kept reaffirming that he was at the top of insurgents’ hit lists. “And, among the hundreds of Iraqis working in the palace in jobs ranging from janitor to high-level liaisons with our ministry teams, there was
lots of room for an assassin
,” Bremer wrote in his memoirs. “One report Blackwater took seriously suggested that one of the Iraqi barbers in the palace had been hired to kill me when I got a haircut.” On the fly, Gallagher and his Blackwater team adapted to these threats—including that
December 2003 ambush attempt on the Highway of Death—and created the protection schemes the U.S. government would later adopt for protecting its highest-risk personnel.

The ambassador’s security detail proved so impenetrable that, by mid-2004, Osama bin Laden himself was seemingly growing impatient. “
We in the al-Qaeda organization will guarantee
, God willing, ten thousand grams of gold to whoever kills the occupier Bremer,” an audiotape from the terrorist leader declared. At the time, those twenty-two pounds of gold would have been worth more than $130,000. Even
those close to Bremer found bounties on their heads
, as insurgents reportedly offered $30,000 for the body of a Blackwater guard. Yet Gallagher’s planning and the skill of Blackwater’s men not only kept Bremer safe; no one on his security detail was injured over the eleven-month assignment, either.

On the morning of June 28, 2004, after a brief ceremony
during which Bremer handed power over to Iraq’s new prime minister, Ayad Allawi, the ambassador’s Blackwater team escorted him to a West Virginia Air National Guard C130 on the tarmac at Baghdad International Airport. They stayed with Bremer as he posed for farewell photographs, then boarded the plane with him. The stairs were drawn up and the cabin door was secured for takeoff. And then they just sat there in the 120-degree heat and didn’t go anywhere.

In the days before the handover, terrorists had been blowing planes out of the sky with surface-to-air missiles, and they knew Bremer always flew in a C130. Rather than risk an attack on the outgoing head of the CPA,
Blackwater’s team waited until the crowds had cleared
, helped him climb over cargo and out the rear of the aircraft, and then escorted him across the airport to a second, smaller jet for the flight to Jordan. It was one final precaution to make sure the job was done right. And with that sort of track record, Blackwater was soon guarding everyone.

We were tasked with protecting British prime minister Tony Blair when he visited Baghdad, and Secretary of State Powell when he met with top Iraqi officials there. Blackwater teams protected the
Iraq Survey Group, the CIA contingent combing the country for proof of weapons of mass destruction. Over U.S. objections, the
UN had largely pulled out
of Iraq after the truck bombing of its headquarters the summer before, dropping its humanitarian presence from some five hundred personnel to a few dozen international aid workers scattered across the northern part of the country. But those remaining workers received protection from our men. Meanwhile, any CPA official, regardless of age or rank, made a viable terrorist target—and the State Department was funneling hundreds of them into Iraq to aid the reconstruction efforts. We guarded them, too.

By mid-2004, Blackwater was filling security and training contracts for the DoD, the State Department, and the CIA, in multiple countries. And as well known as we were becoming within the halls of power in Washington D.C., we were gaining similar cachet on the streets of Baghdad. Suddenly our bear paw logo was everywhere—on T-shirts and baseball caps worn by everyday security guards, Iraqi civilians, and ironically everyone
but
my employees, who hardly ever dressed in branded gear. Even more important, we were earning the respect of the other men and women putting their lives on the line to rebuild Iraq. Owen Powell, a former soldier in Iraq who was originally published under the pen name “Sgt. Roy Batty,” offered
this great description in a piece
for U.S. Cavalry’s
ON Point
blog, titled “Rock Stars of Baghdad”:

There is a low buzz on the horizon, somewhere behind the buildings surrounding the tiny [forward operating base], insectile at first, barely audible, but quickly rising on the morning breeze. . . . The sound fades again for a second—they must be behind another building—and then increases expectantly, louder now, and I feel the anticipation in the noise, like the sound of a huge audience applauding before a show, and WROOOOOOOMMMM!!!, the tiny helicopters burst upon the stage above us, a roar and a black flash of motion fifty feet above our heads, and they’re past, instantly, the sound quickly fading with the sudden Doppler effect of something very loud, moving very fast.

More important than the security they provide for [a] convoy, the Little Birds bring a precious sense of élan, of esprit de corps, of being something elite, to our usual morning grind. You can’t help but feel like you are in a really good action movie every time you see these guys, and how could you lose when you have guys and toys as cool as these on your team? The soldiers around me always say the same thing whenever Blackwater is overhead—“Man, I would do anything to have that job!” Me, too.

•   •   •

I
t was a time of extraordinary triumph for Blackwater—and one of personal tragedy at home. Joan wasn’t responding well to her cancer treatments, and each round of chemotherapy seemed more brutal than the last. She was on Cytoxan, a medication literally derived from the chemical weapon mustard gas, and Adriamycin, which some people refer to as the “red devil” because of its color and ability to burn your skin. Joan called it “the cranberry juice from hell.”

I can only hope that twenty years from now the way we treat cancer today—by cutting it out, burning it out, or poisoning it out—will be looked back on as something as barbaric as bloodletting. But those are the best options anyone currently has. As encouragement during her third cycle of treatment, I suggested Joan start planning what we endearingly came to know as the “chemo cruise”: “While you’re sitting there suffering, just think about anywhere in the world you want to go,” I said. “Think about who’ll be there with you and all the amazing things you’ll eat. Just get through this, and we’ll do it. Anywhere.”

I remember the nights spent lying awake in a sleeping bag on the floor of her Hackensack, New Jersey, hospital room thinking over and over,
My wife is dying—and there isn’t a damn thing I can do about it.
For the first time in my life, I felt helpless. I had been raised to believe that with enough resources and creativity—and I had both—any problem had a solution. But money and determination didn’t matter here. I couldn’t stop her cancer.

And Lord, we tried. Joan and I had traveled the world to find the
most innovative doctors with the most aggressive cures. We relied on the advice of brilliant physicians like William Grace, then the chief of medical oncology at St. Vincent’s. When radiation and chemotherapy failed, we turned to stem cell treatments. When those failed, Joan and I funded a clinic in Prague with a $500,000 grant to develop experimental treatments that might not get approved in the States. Nothing in my character, or my SEAL training, gave me the courage my wife had. And through it all, she seemed more concerned about my loss, my impending grief, than her own death. “Remember, Erik, you can live without me,” she would say. “But you can’t live without God.”

We searched for humor where we could find it. No matter how many beautiful wigs Joan had, my wife couldn’t ever seem to find one when the doorbell randomly rang in the middle of the day. “Quick, kids, find Mommy’s hair!” she’d yell. “Winner gets Fruit Roll-Ups for dinner!”

As a goof, I began affectionately calling her
Frau
, German for “Mrs.,” which always made her chuckle, because in our travels Joan had never found Germans particularly warm or fuzzy. “OK, Frau,” I’d say, “I need your thoughts on something.”

And when she made it through that third round of chemotherapy, almost four dozen of her friends and family came together for a weeklong tour of the Caribbean aboard the Cunard yacht
Sea Goddess
, bouncing from St. Thomas and St. Croix in the Virgin Islands, east to St. Barths, then south to St. John, Guadeloupe, and Barbados. I’d never been a huge fan of cruises—I figured I’d had enough of them aboard massive gray ships with five thousand of my closest friends. Yet I’m so glad we went. That “chemo cruise” created lifelong memories.

As her health deteriorated, Joan’s enormous and devoted family descended on McLean, Virginia. I rented them a town house a mile from our home so they could be with her all day, then have a place of their own to return to in the evening. Joan began keeping a personal
voice recorder by the bed, which had but a single message she and her friends put on it: “Note to self: Wake up tomorrow.”

I remember sitting by my wife’s bedside and scooping up her delicate body in my arms when Etta James’s “At Last” came on the radio, and the way we used to dance there in the room together in the middle of the night. And even on the worst of days, suffering with an oxygen mask, she put on a strong show. I didn’t know until I was told about it later, but my wife would apparently pinch her cheeks and pull herself up on the pillows when she heard me come home, just to look cheerful for me.

Not that I deserved it. With the pressures of so many things around us, Joan and I had been become isolated from each other. As Blackwater began to take off, I had been pushing myself at work harder than ever. We had four beautiful little kids at home, but even with help around the house, caring for them was exhausting. Then, with Joan’s family around all the time, I began to feel like a stranger in my own home. By early 2003, my wife and I didn’t have much time alone together to begin with, and those stresses—as well as the effects of cancer and surgery and chemotherapy—eliminated most of the romance or intimacy when we did.

I felt as if it was all I could do to keep things from spinning completely out of control, and I found comfort in the arms of a woman named Joanna Houck, who had worked as our nanny in Michigan. In mid-2002, when we all moved back to Virginia, she was hired to perform administrative functions at our Moyock facilities. She became pregnant before Joan died.

In March 2003, on a ski trip in Vail, Colorado, Joan wrote me a long letter. She left it on the dresser in our vacation home there. My wife understood it would likely be her last time visiting a place we both loved, and that I would find the letter when I returned at Christmastime, nine months later. Without her. It was the most caring, most awful thing I’ve ever read.