Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror (4 page)

I was also determined to keep my word. I’d first learned about the Navy’s Sea, Air, and Land teams—better known as the SEALs—during my short time at the Naval Academy. During my exit interview in Annapolis, I told the registrar I’d one day become a SEAL—without the academy’s help. He scoffed. I just nodded. So I applied to Officer Candidate School (OCS), the necessary first step for my reentry into the Navy, before graduating from Hillsdale. “We’ll only do the Navy thing for a few years, okay?” Joan said.

There were eight operational SEAL teams in the United States, each comprising six platoons. Within the platoons there were sixteen SEALs—two officers, one chief, and thirteen enlisted men. Once accepted to OCS, I threw myself into training: swimming hours a day, ramping up the pull-ups and the dips. In the SEALs, it’s not about how much you can lift, but how well you can move your weight on land and over water. Every SEAL has to be an expert at combat swimming, high-altitude parachuting, navigation, demolitions, and a host of other skills.

I packed up our house as soon as I handed in my last college exam—I didn’t even attend graduation—and reported immediately to OCS in Newport, Rhode Island. Sixteen weeks later, Joan and I relocated again to Coronado, California, for my BUD/S—or Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL—training at the Naval Special Warfare Center.

In total, BUD/S lasts six months, but it’s the initial “Basic Conditioning” phase that’s the stuff of legend: timed two-mile swims; four-, six-, or fourteen-mile runs in soft sand; and far worse. It’s the most awful workout of your life, every day for seven weeks. As the Navy describes it: “
Because of its particularly challenging requirements
, many candidates begin questioning their decision to come to BUD/S.” Once, a teammate and I were punished for goofing around—while freezing in the surf, he decided to start a class-wide conga line as a show of solidarity—and the instructors made us go “beached whale.” We had to lie facedown in the sand as the waves crashed over our heads, then spit out the water before the next wave crashed. Breathing became a question of timing. Sand ended up in the unholiest of places. It was pure misery.

Our sixth week of training was called “Hell Week”: 132 straight hours of mud, cold, and pain. We candidates ran more than two hundred miles and suffered through physical training for twenty-two hours a day. We got some four hours of sleep total in five and a half days. Consuming seven thousand calories a day didn’t stave off weight loss; by the end of it, “running” wasn’t really running so much as a furious stumble on pulled muscles and buckling knees.

And our class had it even worse than many. Traditionally, Hell Week is held on and around Naval Amphibious Base Coronado. But six weeks of above-average rain before our early February test meant that San Diego Bay and the surrounding ocean were full of sewage runoff, medical waste, and whatever in God’s name washed up from Tijuana, ten miles south. Instead, instructors took us to Naval Auxiliary Landing Field San Clemente Island—a chilly little Channel Island sixty miles west of San Diego that could most charitably be called “rustic.” Mostly I remember it because on San Clemente the low crawls went through a cactus patch. I might have preferred the sewage back at Coronado.

For days, trainers taunted the candidates to fold, to end the misery by ringing an ever present brass bell that hung in the camp. In our class, nearly 100 of the 120 candidates did. Many of those sailors
went on to do great things in the Navy—but they would never be SEALs. The ones who somehow fought through will never quit anything in their lives.

When I got home from Hell Week, my parents sent me an extraordinary gift: a bronze statue of a cowboy. The artist had inscribed, “In the unwritten laws of the range, the work ethic still exists. When you sign for an outfit, you ride for their brand. True commitment takes no easy way out.” It was an ethos I was proud to embrace: the months away from home, if need be, at the mercy of the elements, constantly under threats seen and unseen. The cowboy survived thanks to his courage and his wits. He protected those in his charge. Having survived that week, I knew my brand would be the Navy SEALs. It would be one of the greatest honors of my life.

We stayed in Coronado for only a few more weeks after my training. Joan wrapped up her time teaching at a local elementary school. Because I was a married officer, we’d been living off base; our place in town had become known to the other trainees as “Hotel Tango.” During those last weeks, Joan followed her mother’s Italian tradition and cooked staggering amounts of lasagna for the SEALs in my class. She was the extrovert in the household—she could, and did, make friends with anyone. She brought nuns and officers and fellow teachers over for dinner, and carried on late into the night about everything from fashion to philosophy. Exhausted as I was after days in the mud, I loved shining my boots at home, watching her captivate the room until I could no longer keep my eyes open.

•   •   •

M
y daughter Sophia was born on December 22, 1994, in Virginia Beach, Virginia, the first of seven beautiful children I’ve been blessed with. Joan and I had moved to town when I joined SEAL Team 8 the year before. At Sophia’s baptism, the priest invited her grandparents to trace the sign of the cross on her forehead. I remember my father, a handsome man of sixty-three, tracing a giant finger along my baby’s face. He had made the trip in from
Michigan and looked as vigorous as ever. But for some reason, when I saw him off, I kept going back to say good-bye. I kissed him. “Dad, I love you,” I said. “I miss you and I can’t wait to see you again.”

Four days later, on March 2, 1995, Edgar Prince left the executive dining room at his company’s headquarters, stepped into the elevator, and suffered a massive heart attack. Employees found him fifteen minutes later; by then, attempts to resuscitate him would prove unsuccessful. My hero was gone.

In the following days, flags in Holland flew at half-staff. At the time, Prince employed some forty-five hundred people. A young female engineer at the company told the local newspaper, “
You felt in a way like you were part
of his family. When I heard he died, I cried, and I didn’t even know him.” More than a thousand people arrived at the Christ Memorial Reformed Church to attend his funeral. “
Ed Prince was not an empire builder
,” Gary Bauer later wrote to members of the Family Research Council. “He was a Kingdom builder.”

At my father’s funeral, I reflected on seeing him at Sophia’s baptism, and how Joan had asked him how he was feeling. “You know,” my father said, “I just don’t feel very well.” I realized that might have been only the second time I heard the eternal optimist say that.

Shortly after the service, Mom called a family meeting to discuss the substantial legacy Dad had left us. I had just finished a few weeks of combat search and rescue training in Fallon, Nevada; I asked my commanding officer for leave time, and two fellow sailors drove me to the airport. It wasn’t a typical drop-off, however. Mom had sent a plane to get me: one of Dad’s planes, a midsize executive jet that landed at Fallon and taxied toward the three of us standing in the small terminal. No one in the SEALs had known about my family background. I liked it that way; I had earned their trust and respect the same as everyone else. I was horrified when my father’s vanity N-number on the tail of that plane came into full view, ending with a giant “EP.” The pilots brought the jet to a stop and stepped out from the cockpit.

“Hey, Erik!” they called.

My buddies were speechless. Finally, one blurted out, “If you weren’t in the Navy, could you just retire?”

I met back up with the SEALs in Virginia a few days later. The two sailors from Fallon had kept my family’s secret. Or maybe they told everyone and no one believed them. Regardless, with SEAL Team 8, I deployed to Haiti in 1994 as part of the package President Bill Clinton sent to oust General Raoul Cédras from power. We were responsible for mapping landing beaches and performing special reconnaissance, though by the time we landed there it had become largely a peacekeeping mission. I remember the ride home to Norfolk almost as well as our time in Haiti: We hit a major nor’easter, my first on a ship, and they had to chain down the tables in the mess decks to keep them from becoming projectiles. We all ate peanut butter and jelly that night because there was no way anyone was going to try cooking.

Then, in late 1995, as Yugoslavia broke apart into warring states, SEAL Team 8 deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina. The shattered buildings and war-torn streets were a far cry from the peaceful communities I’d once seen there with my wife. We SEALs were performing combat search and rescue for downed pilots, or taking direct action against radar sites.

My time abroad was hard for both me and Joan, especially with a newborn daughter at home. Then, in May 1996, while pregnant with our second child, Christian, my wife found a lump in her breast. She was twenty-nine. I finished out the year with the SEALs, but as much as I’d looked forward to the missions that might lie ahead, I knew I would soon have two young children at home with their mother facing a cancer battle. My being gone was suddenly impossible. I requested my discharge from the Navy.

Meanwhile, there were endless family debates about the future of Dad’s business. Just over a year after my father’s death, my mother, sisters, and I
sold the Prince Automotive unit
to Milwaukee-based Johnson Controls Inc. for $1.35 billion, which was split between a number of Dad’s business partners, employee stockholders, and my mother, sisters, and me. We retained Prince Machine, as well as
Lumir Corp., Dad’s real estate operation, and Wingspan Leasing, which leased airplanes. Johnson Controls renamed the 750,000-square-foot complex Dad had built in Holland the
Edgar D. Prince Technical Campus
.

My father had created an amazing enterprise. I was blessed to inherit a fortune. Now I had to use it wisely.

1996–1998

The concept of Blackwater originated in the ready room of a 1960s-era aircraft carrier sailing across the Mediterranean Sea. It was the summer of 1995;
SEAL Team 8 had just wrapped
a training operation in the Adriatic in preparation for supporting the NATO mission to beat back Serbian forces that had advanced on Srebrenica in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Largely, training was what we did: a few weeks in Nevada here, a few weeks in Puerto Rico there, then in Mississippi, Indiana, West Virginia, North Carolina. . . . Special operations personnel are never
not
training, wherever they can find space. When your life depends on the ability to make snap judgments and execute in an instant, training isn’t something taken lightly.

The Bosnia exercise taught me well about that endless, inefficient predeployment travel schedule—an issue that was growing all too common across the armed forces thanks to dramatic defense spending cuts after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Our SEAL deployments may have lasted six
months, but I’d been on the road for ten of the prior twelve months just for training.

Those spending cuts are a recurring part of American history, harkening all the way back to the Revolutionary War.
Our military complex ramps up
for conflict, then “skeletonizes” after. It’s the “guns or butter” question of priorities—that somewhat simplistic theory suggesting a government can spend money bolstering its defense or it can invest money in civilian goods, but it cannot do both. In October 1993, President Bill Clinton picked up that baton and left no doubt about where the military was headed. That year, the introduction of the Department of Defense’s “Bottom-Up Review,” submitted to Congress, began: “The Cold War is behind us. The
Soviet Union is no longer the threat
that drove our defense decision-making for four and a half decades—that determined our strategy and tactics, our doctrine, the size and shape of our forces, the design of our weapons, and the size of our defense budgets.”

That view wasn’t wrong, and I believe strongly that it is important to rein in unnecessary defense spending. But the focus was on the wrong things, because amid that drawdown traditional conflict was quickly giving way to unconventional attacks. Aboard the USS
America
, we talked about
the peacekeeping failure in Bosnia
that had brought us there: Ratko Mladic, the top commander for the Bosnian Serb army, and wartime political leader Radovan Karadzic had been accused of orchestrating the massacre of eight thousand Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys after the fall of Srebrenica in July 1995.
Both men were accused
by the UN International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, of genocide, along with “unlawful confinement, murder, rape, sexual assault, torture, beating, robbery and inhumane treatment of civilians; the targeting of political leaders, intellectuals and professionals; the unlawful deportation and transfer of civilians; the unlawful shelling of civilians; the unlawful appropriation and plunder of real and personal property; the destruction of homes and businesses; and the destruction of places of worship.” Their trials were ongoing when this book was completed.

The assault on Srebrenica was revenge for the deaths of Serb civilians at the hands of Muslim guerrilla warriors. United Nations peacekeepers had prevented Mladic from overrunning the UN-declared “safe haven” once before, but in July the roughly six-hundred-strong
Dutch UN Protection Force did little
to stop the Serbs, resulting in the worst European atrocity since World War II. In 1999, UN secretary-general
Kofi Annan admitted
, “There was neither the will to use decisive air power against Serb attacks on the safe areas, nor the means on the ground to repulse them.” The whole thing could have been avoided, the rest of the SEALs and I thought, with a modest peacekeeping force of U.S. special ops personnel.

The question was where they’d all train. We SEALs could barely find space. From 1989 to 1997, the
Defense Department’s spending cuts had reduced
total active-duty U.S. military personnel by 32 percent, and personnel employed in “infrastructure” activities like training programs by 28 percent.
More than a hundred military bases
had been closed. Shooting ranges had been cut so drastically that personnel from different services basically stacked themselves on top of one another. Once, in 1995, at the thousand-yard sharpshooting range at the North Carolina National Guard’s Camp Butner, we SEALs practiced from the two-hundred-yard line on the range’s right side while Army Special Forces marksmen shot from the thousand-yard line on the left. That would have failed any range safety policy anywhere—but there simply wasn’t anyplace else to go.

Meanwhile, we grumbled, the SEALs got dumped in places like Camp Butner only because we didn’t have a dedicated training area of our own. We had no outdoor ranges, indoor shoot houses, or ship simulators. We flew to the Army’s Fort Pickett in Virginia for land warfare training, then to naval facilities in Puerto Rico for diving and submarine operations, then to an Army National Guard camp in Indiana for sniper training, and then to wherever we could go for airborne training. And once we arrived at those places, we could still lose our training slot if a range safety officer didn’t show up, or an ambulance wasn’t available to have on hand, or if base support couldn’t
tell us what radio frequencies to use. And then some endangered species of bird would fly through, and everything would come to a standstill. There were times Army officers didn’t show up to training activities because it was
raining
. “I didn’t figure you boys wanted to get wet,” they’d say.

All the travel was a waste of taxpayer dollars—and it was miserable for a young family like mine. On those training stints I constantly thought about Joan and little Sophia, and about that second child on the way, and about our future. My time with the SEALs had changed my life, but by late 1996 I was considering what might come next. I’d been poring over
Entrepreneurs Are Made Not Born
, Lloyd Shefsky’s book of business advice from pioneers such as Bill Gates and the guys behind Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. It glorified risk taking and defying conventional wisdom. There on the USS
America
, I told my teammates I wanted to build a world-class training facility once I left the service, a one-stop shop near our base in Norfolk where special operations personnel could get the best of everything they needed.

Largely I was tailoring my sales pitch, because I knew the real challenge would be convincing my wife. I often wrote Joan letters from the road, and she had excellent common sense. “In reading that book, my confidence in starting a business was bolstered,” I wrote to her in November 1995. “The book encourages readers to make a dream sheet of all the businesses they might want to start someday. But the only one that keeps coming to my mind is a training facility.”

A center just west of Williamsburg, Virginia, I said, could draw SEALs, Virginia State Police, Marine snipers from Quantico, as well as CIA officers and SWAT teams. I could find a retired officer to run the place, so I wouldn’t have to be there nine to five. The military drawdown meant the government was practically begging to outsource those training functions to the private sector—especially exotic niches like special operations, in which the entire premise is to equip the man as the weapon, instead of treating the man as the technician who operates the weapons, as conventional units do. The SEALs had long been too targeted for most strategic planners to
worry about, and too low budget to interest politicians who wanted to funnel money toward megawarships and billion-dollar airplanes. But it only made sense that in an era of dramatic defense spending cuts, those niche groups might see greater action, and that their training would become an even higher priority.

I’m the first to admit, it wasn’t exactly reinventing the wheel: If you want to run a marathon, there are clubs that will train you. Want to become a pilot? You go to flight school. If you want all manner of elite military training, it’s only logical to have a place for that. Some people told me the idea was so straightforward, the only reason they hadn’t already done it was because they didn’t have the capital.

I was fortunate. As part of my parents’ emphasis on stewardship and hard work, Dad’s original will had stipulated that I wouldn’t have access to any hypothetical inheritance until I turned thirty. He changed that once I became a SEAL, though—from then on, he said, there wouldn’t ever be a reason to question my work ethic. So even at the age of twenty-six, the finances weren’t a problem for me. “I think the whole thing could get done for less than a million,” I told Joan. “If we rented the place for forty weeks a year, we might gross $200,000 annually.”

She agreed that it sounded reasonable, though I’m also not convinced she fully understood the concept. Joan didn’t care about firearms and hadn’t ever been to a facility like the ones I described. But she knew I had the passion, the skills, and a clear vision for what I wanted to accomplish.

Turned out, I didn’t have a clue what I was getting into, either.

•   •   •

A
s my father had done with Prince Manufacturing, I knew that launching my own business would require a tight team of skilled personnel—people who not only were subject matter experts, but also understood determination and persistence in a way that most people don’t. I recalled my SEAL training and the way Team 8 had spent hour after hour at shooting ranges—squeezing off rounds
until our fingers blistered and bled in the pursuit of excellence. I was prepared for building a business to be the same way, and my team had to understand that. The first people I brought on were Al, Jim, and Ken.

Al Clark was a senior weapons SEAL instructor in Virginia Beach in the early 1990s—one of the best I’ve ever known—and shared my vision for what the facility could become. He had long wanted to create his own firearms training center, but lacked the financial resources to launch it. Al was a great person to spearhead our training programs.

We then convinced Jim Dehart, a man who’d spent fifteen years designing shooting ranges for the military, to create shoot houses for us. He understood drafting and schematics, electrical engineering, even plumbing. I joked that when the zombie apocalypse came, he’d be the first guy I’d grab to keep the lights on and the fences up. Jim had phenomenal ideas and, just as important, could figure out how to make them into reality for twenty cents on the dollar.

Ken Viera, a former SEAL who’d led numerous missions worldwide and had been my training officer with Team 8, agreed to be the general manager. I got along well with the lanky long-distance runner because of his discipline and focus, and his intensity. He’s not a relaxed kind of guy. Neither am I. But he was a terrific businessman and also a terrific competitor for the lunchtime physical training sessions that we would organize at Blackwater. He was regularly out there with us dragging tires, or pushing cars, or bombing through the swamp on mountain bikes, building camaraderie with any employee who wanted to show up, much as my father had done in Holland.

Our founding team selected, we chose the location of our facility with a map and a compass, marking off circles with a radius of four hours’ driving distance from key surrounding military bases. The first was Naval Amphibious Base Little Creek, in Virginia Beach, home to Navy SEAL Teams 2, 4, 8, and 10.

Other foci were a pair of North Carolina bases. The Marines’
Camp Lejeune, south of Jacksonville, is home to the II Marine Expeditionary Force, 2nd Marine Division, 2nd Marine Logistics Group, and other combat-ready units. Meanwhile, the Army’s Fort Bragg, outside Fayetteville, houses its Special Operations Command and the 82nd Airborne Division.

It was important that we have easy access to Virginia and the CIA’s clandestine services training center there, often referred to as “the Farm.” And finally, there was Washington D.C., the nerve center of the federal military and law enforcement agencies.

Connecting all those dots would put Blackwater in
the midst of the largest military-industrial complex
in the world. The circles overlapped just across the North Carolina border outside a ten-thousand-person town called Moyock, on the eastern edge of the Great Dismal Swamp.

Our team’s vision for the facility was a cross between a shooting range and a country club for special forces personnel. Clients would be able to schedule all manner of training courses in advance, and the gear and support personnel would be waiting when they arrived. There’d be seven shooting ranges with high gravel berms to cut down noise and absorb bullets, and we’d carve a grass airstrip, and have a special driving track to practice high-speed chases and real “defensive driving”—the stuff that happens when your convoy is ambushed. There would be a bunkhouse to sleep seventy. And nearby, the main headquarters would have the feel of a hunting lodge, with timber framing and high stone walls, with a large central fireplace where people could gather after a day on the ranges. This was the community I enjoyed; we never intended to send anyone oversees. This chunk of the Tar Heel State was my “Field of Dreams.”

I bought thirty-one hundred acres—roughly five square miles of land, plenty of territory to catch even the most wayward bullets—for $900,000. We broke ground in June 1997, and immediately began learning about do-it-yourself entrepreneurship. That land was ugly: Logging the previous year had left a moonscape of tree stumps and tangled roots lorded over by mosquitoes and poisonous creatures. I
killed a snake the first twelve times I went to the property. The heat was miserable.

While a local construction company carved the shooting ranges and the lake, our small team installed the culverts and forged new roads and planted the Southern pine utility poles to support the electrical wiring. The basic site work was done in about ninety days—and then we had to figure out what to call the place. The leading contender, “Hampton Roads Tactical Shooting Center,” was professional, but pretty uptight. “Tidewater Institute for Tactical Shooting” had legs, but the acronym wouldn’t have helped us much. But then, as we slogged across the property and excavated ditches, an incessant charcoal mud covered our boots and machinery, and we watched as each new hole was swallowed by that relentless peat-stained black water.