The Bremer Detail (14 page)

Ammo in hand, Hacksaw designed a comprehensive program that would enable the door gunners to provide and direct firepower on the designated targets, and not hit the motorcade or shoot down our own helos. It was at this point that my Little Bird education became much better rounded. For instance, Hacksaw explained to me that as the weather went from hot to hotter-than-hell, the lift capability of the helos was hindered. When Hacksaw had asked me to give him door gunners who weighed 180 pounds or less, I thought he had lost his mind. I had been sending guys over who were easily 200 pounds or more. It had never occurred to me that hot air had less density than cooler air, and therefore the helos had to work a lot harder to fly in it. DUH! I apologized, and he just laughed.

The difference between the semiautomatic Bushmaster M-4s Blackwater had provided and these fully automatic SAWs was daunting. If anybody made the mistake of attacking us, our response now would be much more lethal. And with this increase in lethal capability came an increase in potential liability. Hacksaw and I talked in length about why he would now need designated door gunners who would be at his disposal and available for training whenever possible. Fuck me. I knew he was right, but I was still juggling the number of guys I had to cover the villa, the advance team, the detail team, and office watch.

And then, just like in the movies, the skies opened up, the stars aligned, and Blackwater got the contract modification it had requested the previous September. The original contract had not included the security staffing at the villa. I got word that I had fourteen additional men inbound. Twelve were designated as villa only, and the other two were coming to me. A few days later I had a contingent of sixty. Hacksaw and I decided that he would need six guys to complement his operation. Four would fly, and two would be on standby if things got ugly. I asked him who he wanted, and he began reviewing the backgrounds of the guys he was considering. Some of the guys were pissed they were chosen, some were pissed they had not been chosen, and some were just pissed off all the time anyway. Just another day in the sandbox.

Hacksaw chose eight guys to try out and then kept the six he liked best. He was happy, Blackwater was happy, and I was happy that everybody else was happy. The training program was intense. Flying in the Little Birds with former TF-160 pilots for hours at a time is like being strapped to the hood of a Ferrari and driving around a road course at 200 mph. Air sickness was not uncommon. Hacksaw’s only rule was if you barfed, you cleaned it up when you got back. And the ball busting was merciless.

In Hacksaw’s previous life with TF-160 he had been the lead Little Bird pilot instructor and had devised the Little Bird training program and shooting courses that the spec-ops community still uses today. I could not ask for a better Little Bird mentor. He knew what worked and why it worked. And he could teach it. What a lot of people don’t realize is the Little Birds are not armored helos. A round as small as a .22 could easily take one down. The margin for error in the Little Birds was extremely small, and we relied upon them as our first-line quick reaction force (QRF). If something happened, they would hover over the action and make life miserable for whomever was trying to kill us. Hacksaw knew this, and he pushed the door gunners to be perfect in everything that they did. He also had the unenviable task of training the new pilots who came in. Apparently finding qualified Little Bird drivers is not easy, and he often got guys who had never flown Little Birds. Some had been Blackhawk pilots, Apache pilots, Huey pilots, etc. Just because a guy had been a helo pilot did not mean that he could fly the high-performance sports cars that we were using in a combat zone. Hacksaw would give them no more than ten days to get to the level of performance that he demanded, or he would send them home. Many did not make it. Some just could not grasp the fundamentals, some could not fly with the night vision goggles, and some were just scared. We had one guy who arrived, took his first training flight, and experienced his first mortar attack on his day one. He quit on his day two. All within thirty-six hours. It took a special breed of pilot to do what these guys were doing—especially when the realization set in that the support system was just us. No one was on standby if one of the helos went down. They were on their own. The adventure and adrenaline rush quickly dissipated for more than a few. It was hard, scary work—a true test of intestinal fortitude.

February 2004

As the time approached for the assembled American and Iraqi diplomats to write a constitution for the new Iraq, a thousand different forces pulled Ambassador Bremer in a thousand different directions. We had several Red Zone missions every day, winding up with meetings at the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) building until late each night. Exasperation began to show on all the diplomats as the divergent groups of Iraqis argued for all their pet projects, each attempting to sway every law and every decision to favor his own special interests. Each day we visited several different politicians before heading over to the IGC, and each evening we witnessed the politicians apparently forgetting the agreements they had made with the Americans earlier in the day.

My guys were dragging ass. The original villa guys rejoined the detail and advance teams after being replaced by the new, designated villa team and were being trained by the advance team leader and shift leaders on how to do their newly assigned jobs. It was like a sports draft where I allowed each team leader to make a selection to fill the holes left by the newly crowned door gunners. Each group had lost damn good guys to the helos. And they were pissed about their degraded operational capacities. Again, being in charge sucked. Hacksaw was happy, but the two guys I relied upon the most—the shift leader and the advance team leader—were pissed off. Some days you just could not win. I just put my head down and went back to work, convincing myself that one out of three really wasn’t that bad. Hell, in baseball I might have made the Hall of Fame.

The selections were finalized, and the train-ups began. Eventually I got to the point where each group had enough bodies to have two squads. I made the decision at this point to split the detail team into two separate entities. Group 1 would work from 0530 to 1500, and Group 2 would replace them at 1500 and take the helm until we took the boss home. We would do a one-week rotation. This way each group got to sleep in every other week. Initially it sounded like a good plan. The problem was the Red Zone runs. My master plan soon evolved into a Red Zone team and a Green Zone team. There was no way I could, nor would I ever, skip a Red Zone move; and after a few Red Zone moves with teams that were not as sound as I felt they should be, I scrapped the original idea of rotations. So I designated a dedicated Red Zone group shortly thereafter. The Red Zone team was made up of my best guys. If we had no Red Zone moves planned, we would split the day.

I also made the decision the drivers were too valuable to rotate. Q and his guys had returned and I needed them to stay as sharp as possible while I was working their asses off. This meant some extremely long days. To try to even the field a bit I took them completely off office watch and told them to sleep whenever they could. When trapped at the IGC, I instructed them to sleep in their cars. I needed Q and his partners as fresh as possible. To operate at the level that Q and his crew did took massive concentration and unmatched skill. No one was running motorcade operations like us. No one. Q, Travis T, and FB created the tactics that are now in large part the SOP for PSD high-threat motorcade operations. When other PSD teams joined our motorcade on a Red Zone move, they could not keep up. They could not match the speed and the precision driving with even just two cars. We were still operating with three level-6 Suburbans plus our MP CAT teams, and it was truly poetry in motion as we moved around the city.

I took the advance team off office watch as well, as they were busting their asses planning and executing multiple security procedures at disparate sites and events. I needed them focused at all times. And with the operational tempo, we were often splitting the advance team up to leapfrog ahead of us as we visited the next venue. The advance guys always had to be there before us, and always stayed behind to cover our departures. It was a hectic time for them.

In the limo we had an electronic countermeasure (ECM) device designed to defeat radio waves, telephone signals, and anything else the bad guys used to remotely detonate IEDs. There was a way to program the thing to block only certain signals, but outside of Geek, none of us really knew how to do it. Geek was an electronics genius. He was also a former Air Force spec-ops guy who had been part of the team that had rescued Jessica Lynch, who had been captured early in the war and taken hostage. Our spec-ops guys conducted a successful rescue operation on an Iraqi hospital where she was being held. Oftentimes while traveling through bad areas we would turn the ECM on, but then lose our own radio and phone capabilities. The pilots would get pissed, as they would see things and not be able to relay the information to us. It was a great tool, but also one we had to use judiciously. The devices used in those days had a radius of about two hundred meters.

Of course, boys being boys, we also realized quickly we could have a bit of fun at other people’s expense when they would try to use their cell phones. Cell-phone service in the Baghdad area sometimes was great, but sometimes extremely poor. Parking in front of the palace waiting for the ambassador to come out provided ample playtime for guys who had evil minds, strange senses of humor, and toys at their disposal. When there was nothing to keep them truly occupied, the idle time became the devil’s time.

I would be in the office waiting for the signal from the ambassador that he was ready to move, and I would hear over the radio: “Stand by. Activate.” Followed by howling laughter. Then, “Tell that moron to get off the phone and go back to work.”

The guys had favorite targets they abused. Some had taken condescending attitudes toward us. Others had been hostile or made snide remarks about the “mercenaries.” A few just rubbed the guys the wrong way. The guys heard the remarks and saw the sneers, but never retaliated. Not then anyway. In time they would get some payback. The usual sequence went like this:

We’d see someone come out, reach for his phone, start to dial, say hello, then we’d activate the ECM. A second or two later the target would realize he had no service. We’d then hear some expletive, and the guy would stare at the phone, look up into the sky, and walk in circles attempting to reclaim the signal. Deactivate. Signal returns. Dial, say hello … Activate! Lather, rinse, repeat. We found it hysterical. We would do it until the target went back to work. I know we were children, but it was funny. Especially when it happened over and over to certain people who spent more time trying to make a phone call than working in their offices. DOD had managed to get cell phones with New York area codes, and folks were dialing direct to the States. Many abused the privilege——to the tune of phone bills amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars per month.

There is one rule that all life takers and leg breakers should know: Never let the other guys know when something truly bothers you, or you will have that scab picked off at every opportunity. Combine this with the strict set of rules that governs the complex skill of talking over the radio—only essential traffic, only one person talks at a time—and it sets up … well, you’ll see.

By now we knew each other’s voices and call signs like the back of our hands. Only my team had access to our radios, and our frequencies and our conversations were only monitored by us. The guys had really outrageous senses of humor, and when boredom set in there was no telling what might come across the airwaves. It was way better than Comedy Central. Not only did I not try to rein in it in, I joined in. It kept the guys loose, and it was a good way for morale to stay high.

So one night, after a series of twenty-hour days, I remained behind when the team went to the IGC building. I put my designated replacement, the so-called Marine “leadership” guy, in charge of the detail. Security at the IGC was extremely tight because all the important people in Iraq met there regularly, often at the same time. Brutus was back with us after stints with The Dirty 30—I was damn glad to have him—and this evening he was working with the advance team. Matt B, also known as 2-Ts, was there as well.

My designated replacement for the evening decided to take this opportunity to assert his leadership skills and to instill some sense of discipline into the guys. We had a bad habit of blowing into our radios when we got bored. We did it sometimes to see if our radios were working or just to get about a dozen other guys to repeat what we had done. It was harmless to the
n
th degree. 2-Ts blew into his mike, and Brutus responded in kind followed by half a dozen others. My replacement got on his radio and told the guys to stop the “unprofessional” behavior. This was followed by almost every member of the team blowing up the radio frequency with more of the same.

Mr. Leadership got pissed. “Okay, I’ve had it. The next guy that does that will get sent home. I’m telling Frank as soon as we get back.”

Oh dear God. He could not have reacted in a worse fashion. The guys had a field day at his expense.

“I’m in charge. I’m ordering you to stop that right now.”

More blowing ensued. My phone rang while I was trying to sleep. This guy is almost crying in frustration that the men have no respect for him. I explain that respect is earned, not given by nature of a title, and that some of the guys had been here long before him. It was not evident to any of them that he knew their jobs better than they did, or that he was more professional than they were. He said he wanted them all fired. I reminded him of the fact I also blow into the radio, and that by extrapolation he was accusing me of being unprofessional. I said, “We’ll talk in the morning,” and hung up. Needless to say, the unprofessional radio protocol continued all night.

The next day the guys came to me and described Mr. Leadership as a stress monster, saying they would never work under him again. He had destroyed any iota of credibility that he had built to this point. It only takes one bad day to fuck up your reputation in the shark tank. He fucked it up, not under attack but in the Green Zone. Not a good thing. He rotated out a few days later.

Guys rotating out and then back in create new issues. Each day we tweaked our tactics. The changes were seldom dramatic but they were cumulative. Being out of the loop for thirty or sixty days meant the SOPs had changed since a guy had last worked with the detail in the sandbox. What had worked during his last stint may have no longer applied due to intelligence we had received or the equipment we were now using. I was not trying to hurt anybody’s feelings, but I would never replace an existing shift leader, advance team leader, or TC until he rotated out. The returning guys would just have to wait their turn. Most guys were mature about it, but some were babies of the highest order. Apparently the size of their dick was directly proportional to the size of their job. Sorry for your loss, but the ambassador’s safety, and the safety of my team, always came first.

By this time Blackwater’s presence in-country had grown rapidly and dramatically. Hundreds of guys were now working on multiple contracts throughout Iraq. There were guys that I wanted back—Shrek, Tony T, Dorian A, James C, and others—who were instead sent to other locations to do other jobs. Some, I was glad to lose. Others, I fought tooth and nail to keep. Nsync and G-Money came to me one day and said they were being sent to different gigs. I told them I wanted them to stay. They weren’t sure what to do as they had been told they were going. I explained that the dangers in Iraq were getting­ worse each day and that to go to a start-up operation was foolish­ and dangerous. Besides, The Bremer Detail was Black­water’s identity: Did they really want to protect food convoys­ or work for lesser-ranking Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) diplomats­? I lobbied Blackwater on their behalf, and they stayed. I was pleased.

The first team leader at the villa, Sergeant Major P, was a former Army Ranger quite famous for his tenure as the lead instructor at the Army Ranger School. He had been highly decorated in Vietnam, had served over thirty years in the Rangers, had been on the Desert One rescue mission, and was in the Ranger Hall of Fame and one of the first and original members of Delta Force. He ran the villa like an infantry company. He would even have show-of-force drills where all his guys would march around the villa with all their gear, so if the bad guys were watching they could see what they were up against. His guys did not get much time off. He would even hop in a truck and do recon runs through the Red Zone to see what the locals were doing. The sergeant major was a good man, and he was hard. I knew I would never have to worry about the villa as long as he was there. He had spent his entire adult life in the army at the tip of the spear. He truly lived for the action.

The hours at the IGC exhausted us. Ambassador Bremer averaged three hours of sleep each night, yet marched on. He was amazing. The meetings were brutal to witness. Talk, more talk, bargain, and then a thirty-minute break while each different group ran out to call someone and ask how they should vote. They were the future leaders, yet none of them could make a damn decision. The ambassador huddled with his staff, waited for the Iraqis to return, then they all rehashed the same ground. And the process would repeat—talk, bargain, retreat to call someone for instructions.

By this time my guys had the ECM device down to a science. The Iraqis were given exactly five minutes to talk; then mysteriously all cell phones would die. They would wander in circles for a few minutes hunting for a signal before heading back inside. The breaks became much shorter. We like to think that we had a hand in hastening the writing of the legal code. It almost bit us in the ass one evening, however, when they had called for a break and the ambassador was meeting with his staff. I heard the “Stand by. Activate.” command and the laughter. Just then the ambassador turned to Brian and said, “Get Condoleezza (Rice) on the phone.”

I almost died.

“Cease fire. Deactivate now,” I barked. Fortunately the guys were able to kill it before it hampered the ambassador’s call. I breathed deeply when Brian handed the ambassador the phone, and he said hello to the secretary of state.

Bagdad’s electricity was supplied primarily by generator. The IGC building was no exception. One day the ambassador told me he wanted to see one of his Iraqi counterparts who had an office on the seventh floor. There was an elevator, but we were always hesitant to use it as power outages were quite common. I asked the ambassador if he wanted to walk the seven flights or take the elevator. The stairwells were not air-conditioned, nor were they clean. There were always mounds of trash that we would have to climb over. He opted to use the elevator. The elevator had enough room for me, Sax, and the boss. As we entered the cage I heard Drew tell some of his guys to form security on the ground floor and tell Jadicus and another man to head to the seventh floor. As the elevator doors opened on seven I saw Jadicus and G-Money standing there waiting for us stone-faced and playing it cool after sprinting up seven flights of stairs in 115-degree heat. The ambassador smiled at them knowing that they had busted their asses to beat him up there. They had their body armor on, weapons, radios, etc. As I escorted the ambassador to his meeting I caught Jadicus and G-Money out of the corner of my eye as they doubled over and tried to catch their breath. Their beating us up to the seventh floor wasn’t a miracle—it was a testament to their level of fitness.