Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror (17 page)

At that same time, Blackwater’s men were issuing their own urgent call to Baghdad—to the head of Bremer’s security, Frank Gallagher. The CPA compound in Najaf was in danger of being overrun, they told Gallagher. They needed more ammunition and more men—probably extraction capabilities for CPA officials, and evacuation capabilities
for wounded soldiers. The word from the Army was that they’d have to hold tight for a few more
hours
until help arrived. That wasn’t possible.

Gallagher told them he understood—and immediately called Steven “Hacksaw” Chilton.

Blackwater’s top helicopter pilot in Iraq, Chilton was another esteemed veteran of the Night Stalkers—and now a proud “Ass Monkey.” That radio call sign came from Bremer’s Blackwater security team on the ground, who gave their hotshot pilot brethren a good-natured hard time because of all the time those pilots spent sitting around their hangars waiting to scramble. Mounted outside the Ass Monkeys’ trailer at LZ Washington, the landing zone inside Baghdad’s Green Zone that the pilots called home, Chilton had responded with a sign displaying the Ass Monkeys’ unofficial motto: “Fuck you—we already have enough friends.” And Chilton was about to leave no doubt why you didn’t want them as enemies.

Hacksaw coordinated the planning of a route to the stricken city, putting all Blackwater helicopters on standby for the mission. This was a highly unusual development; every bit of paperwork with the State Department stipulated that those Little Birds were in Baghdad for Bremer’s protection detail. Nothing in our contracts said anything about military rescue or resupply operations—though, technically, our men reasoned, nothing explicitly forbade it, either. The horrors of Fallujah were fresh in everyone’s minds—so much so that when Gallagher put out the word that Americans were in trouble in Najaf, more Blackwater personnel volunteered to go than our four-man helicopters could carry. Bremer also didn’t need persuasion to free up the Little Birds. “Gentlemen, I’ve got nothing until eight o’clock tomorrow morning,” he said. “Do what you need to do.”

There was one more person who had to sign off. Since the aircraft weren’t U.S. government property, Bremer’s security detail had to ask permission from their owner. Gallagher called the local air boss, who called Richard Pere, our aviation chief, in Moyock, who called me in Virginia just shy of five a.m. “Our guys in Najaf are in a bad way,” Pere said. “Can we send the Little Birds in to help them?”

“Of course,” I said. “Send everything you’ve got.”

“They’re not insured,” Pere replied.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Send ’em in.”

•   •   •

O
n the CPA rooftop in Najaf, the firefight was well into its second hour when Young felt a tug at his back. It was one of Blackwater’s men, getting Young’s attention to ask about the blood pooling at the young man’s feet.
Together, they unfastened
Young’s body armor, then slashed off half his stained green T-shirt with a Ka-Bar combat knife, exposing the garish wound on his left shoulder. By the time Young made it downstairs to the makeshift infirmary, his head was spinning and his body temperature had spiked. Doctors knew he needed to be evacuated as soon as possible. Luckily, the Little Birds were already inbound, loaded down with food, water, medical supplies, two dozen additional weapons, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “And this is
before we put all the personal weapons
and gear in,” Travis Haley, a Blackwater door gunner who’d previously spent fifteen years in the Marines’ Special Operations Regiment, later recalled. “The pilots were worried we would have trouble getting off the ground.”

By two p.m., General Sanchez alerted Bremer that Army AH64 Apache attack helicopters and Air Force fighter jets had been sent to Najaf to provide air support for the men on the rooftop. For Blackwater’s pilots, that meant flying into a combat zone where massive military airpower was engaging the enemy—which would be particularly harrowing if our civilian airmen couldn’t communicate with those pilots. Our team of Little Birds stopped en route to Najaf at the coalition’s Camp Babylon, situated at the historic archaeological site, to top off their fuel tanks and learn the possible radio frequencies being used by the Apaches. Then, five miles outside of Najaf, Hacksaw made contact with “Attack 6,” an Army gunship that paused its blasting of militia targets long enough to offer cover for Blackwater’s arrival.

Hacksaw set his helicopter down in a dusty parking area behind the CPA facility; the other two Little Birds circled the rooftops—so close their skids nearly scraped the perimeter wall—and dropped their bundles of gear. Then they, too, set down next to Hacksaw’s Little Bird, at which point Haley deplaned with his sniper rifle and sprinted up to the rooftop.

At the makeshift infirmary, Blackwater’s men from Baghdad tried to coordinate an Army evacuation for Young. But the military contended the fighting was too fierce to send in one of its medevac teams—unfortunately, the wounded men, the Army said, were on their own. So Hacksaw took charge, in a surreal scene for everyone involved. As the former Night Stalker fired up his Little Bird, the woozy Marine was helped out of the infirmary, surely wondering what was going on. He found no heavily armored military chopper waiting for him; rather, he saw Blackwater’s trio of unarmored, open-doored navy-and-silver helicopters. Hacksaw ordered him into the passenger seat. “
I felt very nervous
as we took off from the ground,” Young later remembered. “I didn’t have any body armor at all, nor did I have a weapon. I looked all around the base and saw that everybody was firing their weapons. I felt almost helpless sitting there.”

From the CPA rooftop, Acquaviva laid down yet another blanket of suppressive fire as Hacksaw lifted away from the compound. The restocked defensive team on the roof followed suit—and in the process, Haley, the Blackwater marksman, found himself the star of a video that would soon spread across the Internet and make him famous on military fan sites and message boards.

In the footage
, Haley crouches in a corner, shaded on his right by the roof’s central tower. His orange earplugs stand out amid the beige of the building, his beige T-shirt, and his beige backward baseball cap. Extra ammunition sits on the wall within arm’s reach. He’s peering through the scope mounted atop his rifle, which is steadied on the sunbaked perimeter wall. “Guy on the wall runnin’?” Haley asks his spotter.

“Yup.”

Haley’s gloved trigger finger twitches.
Boom! Boom! Boom!

Silence.

Haley ejects the empty magazine and grabs a fresh one off the wall. Back to the scope. “We got a big group comin’,” he says. “On the wall, squeezin’ off.”
Boom! Boom!
He shifts his aim slightly.
Boom!

“Wow,” the spotter says. “You got a whole group of ’em.”

More shots. A calm exhale from the Blackwater sniper. It almost sounds like a casual whistle.

When the attack began,
insurgents “were just coming straight on
at first, and as they got suppressed they would get smart and stay out of range,” Haley later recalled. “Then I hopped on the [special purpose rifle] and took that advantage away from them.”
In the video
, the spotter can be heard coordinating with the other Blackwater men in the area as Haley clears militia hiding spots half a mile away: “We’ve got a bunch of bad guys at twelve o’clock, eight hundred meters from Building Two,” the spotter says into his radio. “We’ve got about fifteen of ’em on the run up here.”

Quickly, insurgents abandoned their earlier positions and attempted flanking maneuvers around the camp’s perimeter. Shooters in flowing robes darted out from behind trees and walls, fired wildly for a moment, then sprinted off again. “
You could sit there
and watch them run out and spray-and-pray,” Haley said. Which isn’t to say they couldn’t get lucky: “We did have mortar fire on the CPA, [and] one of the rounds hit right behind us [about fifteen feet away]—but was a dud,” Blackwater’s sniper said. “You should have seen the looks on our faces after that one.”

Soon the men on the rooftop identified reinforcements in the distance. In the video, Haley can be heard asking, “The guy with the green flag?” There’s a surge of adrenaline across the rooftop. “
That’s Mahdi Army
! Green flag is Mahdi Army!” says the spotter. “They’re to be engaged at any opportunity.”

Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!

To Haley’s left, a volley of shots erupts from Blackwater M4s, flinging empty shell casings through the air. “They’re taking cover,”
says the spotter. “OK, there’s one—looks like he’s got an RPG. You see him?”

“Yeah, I got him,” Haley says.

Boom!
Then a crackle in the distance.

“That’s return fire coming back at us,” the spotter points out.

“Yeah,” Haley says, “
they’re shootin’ back
.” He barely seems to have a care in the world.

•   •   •

B
y four p.m., the worst of it was over.

Hacksaw returned to Najaf after his medevac run, his Little Bird again heavy with extra ammunition. Thankfully, enough had already been spent. By midafternoon, al-Sadr had instructed his supporters to cease demonstrations throughout southern Iraq, calling them futile—and instead issuing a new order: “
Terrorize your enemy
,” he said. “Allah will reward you well for what pleases him.” As the message reached Najaf, the crowd dispersed and Blackwater’s men began cautiously leaving the rooftop. At least one sniper remained in the hospital tower, but he was soon ferreted out by El Salvadoran soldiers. The U.S. Special Forces were en route to supplement the defensive power at the compound and ward off any return by the Mahdi Army.

Soon Lieutenant General Sanchez himself arrived aboard a Blackhawk, along with Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, to survey the scene. Sanchez was escorted to the roof, where empty intravenous bottles and a pool of blood greeted him as he stepped through the doorway.

The general would later recount that he saw an unnamed private and a sergeant—perhaps the National Guardsmen—huddled behind the roof’s perimeter wall, shielded from the sniper in the hospital. In his 2008 memoir,
Wiser in Battle: A Soldier’s Story
,
Sanchez says he raced
across the rooftop and dropped down next to the sergeant, who appeared rather stunned that a three-star general had suddenly plopped down beside him. The sergeant told the general that they
had been unsuccessful in getting the sniper, but that another unit was inside the medical building to outflank him. The mob that had been outside, the sergeant added, was now gone. Sanchez directed the soldiers to cover him by firing at the hospital tower, and he disappeared down the stairs. “During the time General Sanchez was departing the building, he noticed me as I was headed for the roof and thanked us for quickly responding and supporting his troops,” Hacksaw recorded in his after-action report. “His comment, while shaking his head, was, ‘Blackwater, I should have known. Good job.’”

But that wasn’t the version that would be told to the world. Less than twenty-four hours later, Kimmitt detailed for reporters in Baghdad some of the events that had unfolded in Najaf. The
Washington Post
reported, “
Without commenting at a news conference
yesterday on the role of the Blackwater guards, Kimmitt described what he saw after the fighting ended. ‘I know on a rooftop yesterday in Najaf, with a small group of American soldiers and coalition soldiers . . . who had just been through about three and a half hours of combat, I looked in their eyes, there was no crisis. They knew what they were here for. They’d lost three wounded. We were sitting there among the bullet shells—the bullet casings—and, frankly, the blood of their comrades, and they were absolutely confident.’” No credit for or mention of Blackwater.

Accompanying the article, above the fold on page one, the
Post
ran a dramatic photo of our men on the rooftop, alongside the young Marine. In the photo, Chris White, Blackwater’s team leader in Najaf, was wearing a polo shirt and sunglasses—but no body armor. I phoned him immediately: “Chris, I just saw your picture in the paper,” I said. “Where the hell was your body armor?”

“Boss, we were eating when the shooting started,” he said. “I threw my armor on Kosnett and told him to get downstairs and wait till it was over.” Blackwater’s team leader had gone through a four-hour battle unprotected.

In the years since the Najaf firefight, swipes from Pentagon brass against the men who saved their own soldiers would continue.
Lieutenant General Sanchez, in particular, has begun telling a confounding version of the events since his retirement from the Army.
In his book, the general writes
that he initially sent air support to Najaf in response to frantic radio reports from a Marine major who said that he and his men were under heavy attack and had been abandoned by Spanish forces. But Sanchez claims that when that air support flew over the area, they saw no enemies at all. The general writes that he radioed the major back for confirmation, and again was told, “
Fighting everywhere
. This may be the last radio call we can make before we get overrun. Send help.” That inconsistency, Sanchez says, is what prompted him to visit in person.

The general then writes that while on the ground in Najaf, the Spanish commander dismissed the Marine’s version of events. “
Those Blackwater and CPA guys
wanted us to put all of our troops back and surround their building,” Sanchez says he was told. “But we didn’t need to do that, because there was never any threat of being overrun.” Sanchez writes that he then assured the Marine major in person that the compound had not, in fact, been under attack by a violent mob, that the Spanish had not folded in the face of conflict, and that they were never in any real danger. “
Those [Blackwater] civilians were not providing
you with accurate information,” Sanchez told him. Upon returning to Baghdad’s Green Zone, the general says, he briefed Bremer. “
Although the Ambassador didn’t want to believe
it,” Sanchez writes, “what had really happened was that the CPA personnel had panicked [at the sound of gunfire] and the Blackwater civilians were aggravating the situation by having the young major relay bogus information.”