Carnivore (35 page)

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“Four Terrorists Killed in Separate Incidents,”
Stars and Stripes
, January 4, 2006.

T
here was a real need for private contractors in Iraq thanks to a number of different factors.

The first was just the size of our peacetime military. Compared to how many troops we'd had in the field during World War II, Vietnam, even during the Cold War, we were small. Fighting battles is one thing, but policing a country filled with insurgents, with more of them flooding in from half the countries in the Middle East every day, takes a lot of bodies.

The second reason the U.S. government liked contractors was that we operated under what are known in the trade as Big Boy Rules. What's that? The U.S. military, in all its wisdom, hardly trusts its soldiers with loaded weapons except when they're on the front line. Americans died at the consulate in Libya because the Marines there weren't allowed to carry any live ammo in their weapons. That wasn't the first time that had happened, and unfortunately it probably won't be the last. If a convoy is attacked or a helicopter goes down, and 90 percent of your weapons are secured in the armory, it's going to take you a lot of time to get geared up and on-site. Private contractors didn't have those same restrictions. We were all vets and were deemed adult enough to be responsible for our own weapons. We were all armed, and since we were on call 24/7, all of our guns were loaded. If a helicopter went down our reaction time out of the gate was one-tenth what the military's was, so we went out and secured the scene until the Army or Marines showed up with the armor and heavy weapons. We were professional soldiers working for the U.S. government; we just had a middleman. Even though we would have had no problem getting alcohol shipped in, we had a dry facility. Supervising a bunch of A-type personalities with guns was tough enough—the last thing I needed was alcohol thrown into the mix.

One of the reasons the Blackwater name is so well known is because of the incident where some of its contractors shot some civilians who had shot at them first. Oh, you didn't hear that part on the news, about the “civilians” shooting at our guys first? Didn't think so. That incident, ultimately, was what cost Blackwater its Iraq contract with the State Department. The PSD (Protection Security Detail) team involved in that incident was Raven 23, and afterward the management at Blackwater made me the shift leader of the team to make sure there weren't any more problems. There weren't, but it was too late for the company, although it took some time for the giant to fall. When Blackwater left, all of their contracts transferred to another company, and I and everybody else went right back to work for them, doing the same job for 50 dollars more a day. At one point I was supervising 128 people, but I was still going out beyond the fence, because I've always believed in leading from the front. Not only was I in charge of all the teams, I led a team. I never asked anybody to do anything I wasn't willing to do.

Except for the occasional screw-ups (and they're the only things that seem to make the news back home), the people I supervised were professionals and acted like it. We weren't running our own war or running wild, we were doing a job. Any time we fired a shot we had to write up an incident report, and that report was reviewed by an agent of the State Department. We couldn't go back out until he'd cleared us.

While we operated under fewer inane rules than the U.S. military, we still had them. Not too long into my contracting life, we were told by the powers that be that the guys working on PSDs couldn't have any optics on their weapons with higher than a 1.5x magnification. Whoever made this decision apparently concluded that anything higher than 1.5x was an “offensive” sight, and we were only supposed to be operating defensively. The inexperience and ignorance, if not outright stupidity, of this decision was the kind of thing we dealt with every day

It just so happens that my favorite optic that I used while contracting in Iraq was a 1.5x Trijicon mini-ACOG, so the optics restriction didn't excessively piss me off. The extra little bit of magnification over a nonmagnified red-dot sight was sometimes just what I needed to get the job done. I beat the snot out of that thing and it never let me down. In fact, I still have it.

Contracting isn't easy—that's why it pays so well. You're risking your life every day in a high-stress environment. Standard rotation was three months in-country, one month home, and I did that for five years. Most of the time I was in Iraq, but I spent a little time contracting in Afghanistan, too. Even if nothing happened, riding around in 100-plus-degree heat for hours on end waiting to get shot at or blown up by an IED is as stressful as hell. Waiting for hours in the trucks was also boring, and the practical jokes we played on each other were brutal.

We would make MRE bombs with hot sauce—you take the chemical heater from the meal, fill it up with hot sauce, add water, seal it, and drop it down inside a vehicle, then block the doors so the guys inside couldn't get out. The vehicle would fill up with improvised OC gas—pepper spray. Or you could drop it inside a water bottle and leave it there until it exploded. Guys would like to see who was quicker with knives, as well, so the medics would always be stitching them up in the back of the trucks.

I spent a lot of time in the TSTs (tactical support teams). One of the guys I supervised was named Oatridge, but we didn't call him that for very long. The daughter of one of the other guys on the team, Jackson, had sent him a five-pound bag of frosted animal crackers. Jackson had it in the vehicle with us when we were on standby at a checkpoint one day.

“Jackson, can I have some of your cookies?” Oatridge asked.

“Sure, dude.” Oatridge stayed in the vehicle while Jackson and I were nearby. After two hours it was time to get back in the vehicle and head out.

“Lemme have the cookies,” Jackson said to Oatridge. Oatridge handed over the box, and Jackson reached inside. There was one cookie left.

“Motherfucker, are you kidding me? I said you could have some of the cookies, not all of them! My daughter sent me those.”

“There's some left,” Oatridge said defensively.

“There's
one
left!” Jackson roared.

“You ate five pounds of cookies?” I said in disbelief.

After that, Oatridge was forever known as Cookie.

I did my best to keep in shape, both for self-preservation and to burn off stress, and ran regularly on the treadmill we had in our compound. At one point I was running five miles in half an hour, which was close to an 800-calorie workout—and I was still chunky. What the hell, distance running breeds cowardice anyway, right? If you can't run far, you have to stay and fight.

W
hile contracting I wrote several more articles for
Soldier of Fortune
detailing Crazy Horse's second tour in Iraq. The editors actually chose one of the photos I submitted for the cover of the August 2006 issue, inside of which was my write-up of my brief adventure in the freshwater navy.
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It was a group “hero” shot of some of the troop, including Lieutenant Dejesus, Sergeants Cochran, Sowby, and Williams, and me, posing with our weapons.

After five years of contracting, I'd had enough. Forty-eight was still too young to retire, though, so in addition to getting to spend time with my wife and sons I started doing firearms training at a facility called the Big 3 Training Center outside of Daytona Beach, Florida. After the war it seemed like everybody who'd ever worn a uniform or heard a shot fired in combat started up a training school. Some of them were good, some of them not so much, but after a quarter of a century as a professional soldier I've learned a couple of things.

When I went to Iraq the first time, in 1991, I shouldered my rifle like a lot of old-school trap and skeet shooters—with my right elbow way up and out there. However, on that first visit to Iraq I took a round in the elbow. It went through the sleeve of my shirt and took a little piece of skin off the underside of my elbow when it was up in the air, but that was enough to teach me—tuck your wings in. This was long before trainers started teaching people to tuck in their elbows during CBQ (close-quarters battle). The fact that keeping your arms tucked in while house clearing prevents you from banging your elbows against doorframes is a bonus.

I
have been reading about how unreliable the M16 is for years. Stoppages are a big problem, you have to keep it spotless for it to work, blah, blah, blah. In 20 years of active duty and 5 years of contracting I had only three—yes, three—issues with M16s and M4s. One was with an old M16A1 that had had tons of rounds fired through it, so it was due for a new ejection spring anyway. The second was when the M4 I was using at As Samawah was disabled by the airburst mortar round. (Hell, before it was disabled, I emptied 14 magazines through that M4 on three-round burst as fast as I could load them. That was after 238 miles of desert sand and cold rain.) The third was when I stuffed elephant grass into the mag well of my M4, late in my second tour.

Once, while contracting, we headed out to secure the crash site of a downed helicopter. Our M249 SAW (a light belt-fed machine gun) was out of operation, so I grabbed an M4 and a five-gallon bucket full of 30-round magazines. I took a position on a rooftop overlooking the crash site and almost immediately had to deal with a number of insurgents on the roof of an apartment building opposite me. They were slightly above me and protected by a wall, and it was my job to keep them from shooting at the wreck until the cavalry arrived. I put 500 rounds of ammo through that M4 on full auto as fast as I could fire and reload. The barrel turned orange from the heat, but the rifle never stopped working.

I have been asked about M16 barrel failures, but I have never seen one; they are sort of like Bigfoot to me. I just don't think an M4 barrel will fail without sticking it full of mud. Did we use some sort of secret, high-tech lube on our M4s? Nope. I used 15W40 motor oil for lube during both tours in Iraq with Crazy Horse. Ask the insurgents how it worked.

Another common complaint about the M16 is the caliber. It is a small-caliber (.22) round, albeit a high-velocity one. Lots of people have referred to the rifle as a “poodle shooter” because the bullet is so small, and that was before the Army started issuing the SS109 green-tip armor-piercing ammunition that doesn't expand and rarely tumbles. How well did SS109 ammo work for me? It worked just fine—it kills bad guys dead. However, I don't belong to the same school of thought as the “magic bullet” people, always looking for the rifle or cartridge that will give them the mythic “one-shot stop.” I shot people until they were dead. How many rounds that took depended on what I was using. The most effective weapon I ever utilized was a B-1B bomber.

The Beretta M9, on the other hand, I fucking hated. I can't even remember how many times it tried to kill me. Several times during the battle at As Samawah it jammed on me, but I can't really lay all the blame for that on the pistol—politics are to blame as well. In 1994 Congress passed a bill banning the sale to civilians of magazines that hold more than 10 rounds. The only new full-capacity magazines being manufactured in any bulk after that time were going to fulfill military contracts, where I suspect the manufacturers thought oversight was pretty much nil. So they put out magazines that seemed to only meet the bare minimum requirements, maybe. If the magazines we were issued sucked and we had the inclination to buy some of our own, we couldn't afford any because the prices went through the roof on those few pre-ban magazines still for sale. I wasn't the only soldier having problems with substandard Beretta magazines, either; I heard it was quite a widespread problem.

That magazine ban expired in 2004, and since then our soldiers have been able to get what they need, thank God, even if they had to buy it themselves, with their own money.

The problem, however, wasn't just the magazines. I shot several Iraqis half a dozen times with the Beretta, and the 9 mm full-metal-jacket ammo just didn't put them down. On my second tour in Iraq, as soon as I had the opportunity, I ditched my Beretta for a Browning Hi-Power. It was still a 9 mm, but at least I didn't have to worry about it jamming on me. You want to know how much I hated the Beretta? I can tell you exactly when and where I replaced it with the Hi-Power: March 23, 2005, in Salawa, Iraq.

There seems to be a bit of an argument within the “sniping community” as to whether the traditional bolt-action sniper rifle is outdated. Yes, bolt-action rifles are inherently more accurate than semiautos such as the M14 and Barrett, but having to physically work the bolt doesn't allow for quick follow-up shots. In Iraq, quite frequently we had more than one person to shoot at when the time came to pull the trigger.

How many of the 121 confirmed kills I had as a sniper were taken with a bolt-action rifle? None. That should pretty much make my opinion on the subject clear. After leaving the Army I often used an AR-10 pattern rifle when working overwatch. The AR-10 is an upsized AR-15 chambered for the larger .308 round, the same round that the M14 fires. AR-10s tend to be more finicky about ammunition but are also (generally) more accurate.

T
his is not just a book about me. It is about young men who deserve your respect, and because I was there I can write about them. They fought for their country and their friends, and will forever be changed.

Where is everyone now? To be honest, I've lost track of too many of them. Broadhead was a career man and was still in the Army the last time I checked. Sergeant Major Brahain just recently retired. Soprano got out of the Army and went back to school. Sully stayed in Crazy Horse for a while, but we lost touch. Jason Sperry, my driver, got out of the Army after 2003 and headed for parts unknown. He did all that was asked of him, but now he wants the past to be the past. I stayed friends with Captain Burgoyne, who is still in the Army and is now a Major. Captain Bair is now a Major as well. Captain McCoy received the Silver Star for his actions in and around An Najaf and got promoted out of the field. Lieutenant David Dejesus was well on his way to becoming a fine officer but was tragically killed in a non-service-related accident after his return to the States.