The Bremer Detail (15 page)

The pace continued unabated. Intelligence reports never got any better. The team was more relaxed now due to the increase in manpower. At least now, when a guy was sick or hurt, he had a chance to rest up before I dragged him kicking and screaming back into the fray. I even began to think that we would survive this thing.

The emotional burden of being in command of the detail defies description. On the one hand there was the mission. I would die before I let something happen to the ambassador. And I was going to do everything in my power to make sure that I cheated, lied, stole, cut every corner, and/or anything else that was necessary to make sure that none of my now sixty guys got hurt. About this time the insurgency elevated both the frequency and level of terror and violence throughout the country. Attacks against U.S. and coalition forces picked up. The attacks against the Green Zone continued. Convoys routinely hit IEDs or received incoming small-arms fire. The assaults affected our supply lines—especially for fuel. It became so bad that Q and his guys had to siphon gas from destroyed vehicles so that we could get the fuel we needed to get the ambassador to his appointments. How they sometimes got gas I will never know—and I don’t think I want to.

I missed both Kelli’s and Katherine’s February birthdays. I talked to them frequently on the phone, and I always tried to sound happy and upbeat. Kim was doing the best she could to cope with my “thirty-day absence,” which had now stretched to almost six months—with no end in sight. The stress beat on me. At the same time I would have guys come to me and unload about their issues at home and ask to get some time off. It was easy to nod and to say that I understood, but the mission came first. If I let one guy go, then others would ask. I had become a cyborg, a machine that was focused on doing what had to be done. There was no room for weakness. I had to lead from the front. By this time I had lost about twenty pounds. My clothes didn’t fit. I had guys bring me stuff when they returned or had Kim mail me various items.

Much thanks to Colonel Sabol—when Bird rotated out, the colonel had allowed me to keep the trailer to myself. It was my sanctuary, my refuge, my alone place. I could punch and kick the walls, and no one would witness it. I was tired. I missed my kids. I needed a break. Still I did my best to keep the team loose and smiling and at the top of their game. It was tough.

A few good things happened this month. The weather got warmer, and a slew of new women arrived at the palace. Nurses, Air Force officers, State Department employees, and civilians. The ratio of men to women dropped to about 35 to 1. Nice. Prior to their arrival the palace pool had been a major sausage festival. Our European male counterparts would lounge out there in their Speedos and rub oil on each other. We would throw up in our mouths whenever we walked by. It was revolting. Now, however, the chance to spot women increased. At lunchtime we began sending a scouting party to the pool to see who was there and to give us a sitrep regarding the ladies. Watching these ladies rub oil on each other sure beat the hell out of watching the guys. And now, with the new rotation schedule, almost half my guys had the evenings off. Our attendance at the parties increased, and so too did the friendships we made with folks who had initially watched us from afar and had decided we were assholes because we had no time to meet and talk with them. People now said hello or waved rather than shaking their heads in disgust or avoiding us altogether. This was a great public relations coup for the team and for Blackwater.

Ayatollah Hussein al-Sadr was one of the leading Shiite clerics in Iraq. He was a good friend and confidant of the ambassador, and we made several visits to his home while we were there. He was also the uncle of Muqtada al-Sadr, the leading anti-American cleric in Iraq. The nephew constantly stirred up his followers and called for death to all Americans. At times he was successful. Trips from the palace to his uncle’s house, usually for dinner, were stressful as hell. They meant taking a long ride, at night, through bad-guy country. The advance team, as always, got there before us and deployed their troops in an order to keep the ambassador as safe as possible.

Hussein al-Sadr had his own security team. As a sign of respect to us, they always let me into his house to see where the ambassador would be during the meeting or meal. And as a sign of respect to them, I always went in and came straight out. They did not have a security presence in the room, and I was damn sure not going to embarrass them by insisting that I stay inside. Their head of security was a nice man who spoke decent English and always provided us with water and fruit drinks. His men, however, kept a wary eye on my men at all times. It was pretty evident they did not like us or trust us. But truth be told, we felt the same way about them. I guess we were even.

One of our first visits there had been with Secretary of State Colin Powell. The Diplomatic Security (DS) agents had accompanied us. It was hot. They were in suits and ties, and they stuck out like sore thumbs. After about two hours, one overweight agent, suffering from the heat, dropped his rifle into the raw sewage that was running down the gutter next to where the motorcades were parked. We laughed about it every time we returned. Al-Sadr’s head man always made a point to ask me if I was really sure that that it had not been one of my guys. It was our inside joke. Another time he pulled me aside and said that he had just received word that “people” were waiting for us on our departure. He hugged me and said, “God be with you.” He then turned and went directly inside before I could ask any questions.

He had never done that before. Was it a cryptic warning of an attack he had heard about? I wanted to rush after him, but the meeting was breaking up and the ambassador was saying his good-byes. We had three minutes to change up our plan.

I grabbed the shift leader and the TC and told them to figure out a route we had never taken before and to brief the Little Bird pilots, the CAT MP commander, and the advance team leader. They did, and we got home without incident. Another evening at Hussein al-Sadr’s home we noted new guys on his security team. I always had an Arabic speaker, usually Jadicus, with us. He never spoke Arabic in the presence of Iraqis. I wanted them to speak freely while thinking that the stupid Americans could not understand them. This particular night we got an earful from these new guys.

“These Americans think they are so tough. We could kill them easily. They think they can fight, we’ll show them how to fight. If I point my rifle at them, I bet they would piss their pants.” And so it went. We just smiled and secretly prayed and hoped that they would do something stupid. They never did. Thank God.

On another one of our Hussein al-Sadr visits we were attacked on the way home. The detail had departed with the ambassador, and the advance team followed a few minutes behind. The advance team was the first on-site to make sure it was safe for us, and they stayed behind to make sure we got the ambassador into the motorcade and were on our way before they departed. Our advance team ran a motorcade identical to the detail team—three black Suburbans and an MP CAT team. The only difference was the advanced team had an additional vehicle with the dogs. This night, as the advance team approached an intersection a man stepped into the street and tossed a bomb under the middle vehicle. The bomb went off, but thanks to poor timing it exploded between cars, not beneath one. Still, the front tires were shredded. The team did not stop and engage, but quickly
Got off the “X”!
That is, we outran the kill zone. Thank God our vehicles were equipped with run flats. Run-flat tires have a solid core so that in the event they go flat, you can still drive on the solid core. Not very comfortable, but they allowed us to get off the “X” and keep moving. All our men made it home. Brutus called me afterward to tell me that I had promised him he would not be killed on this gig. I told him that I might have lied, but that I hadn’t lied yet.

March 2004

On 8 March, the U.S. delegation and the Iraqi Governing Council finally finished and signed the county’s new administrative law. We were quite pleased. Unfortunately the overall Iraqi population was not. The rate of attack against coalition assets accelerated. Convoys were routinely destroyed. Coalition hostages were being taken and beheaded as the Shia took out decades of grievance on the Sunni, and the Sunni responded in a tit-for-tat cycle of revenge for revenge’s sake. The tension became palpable. Ambassador Bremer drove on as though he had just arrived. We had fuel shortages, food shortages; the BIAP road became a shooting gallery. Each mission felt more dangerous than the previous one.

As the roads got worse the CPA folks tried to move food from BIAP to LZ Washington via helicopter, but that couldn’t keep up with demand due to the number of people now at the CPA. The chow hall began to ration food—one scoop per person. We lived on really bad grilled cheese sandwiches, really bad chicken nuggets, and hard-boiled eggs. My guys could live with a lot of hardships, but food rationing was killing them! The word came down we would soon be served MREs. My guys let out a muted collective groan. It was what it was. Then a convoy made it through. Crisis averted!

The weather got hot. Along with everything else, water became scarce. Then the flies returned. These were the most aggressive species of fly I have ever seen. They were bloodsucking creatures from hell; and fast as lightning. They could land, bite you, and be gone in a tenth of a second. Welts formed even before you rubbed the bite. Flyswatters became a premium item in the trailer parks. If we could have just trained the feral cats to eat them, life would have been better. As soon as the sun went down the flies disappeared, only to reemerge minutes after sunrise. We hated the little bastards.

Around this time, once again with the help of Colonel Sabol, I was able to get ID cards for the team identifying us as DOD employees. Up until now we had nothing that identified us as working on a DOD contract. These common access cards (CAC) allowed us official entry into all the military chow halls, PXs, and other places that had been technically off-limits to us. The CAC assigned each member of the team a government service (GS) rank—anywhere from GS 12 to GS 15. In the military world a rank of GS 15 rates higher than a colonel but below a general. I had gotten a GS 15. The next higher rank is SES 1, reserved for the highest-ranking members of the State Department or other federal agencies. You had to be a very senior member or an ambassador to get that rank. Technically, you were higher ranking than a military general. Somehow the Geek managed to obtain an SES 1 card. I never asked how or why. I was jealous but just laughed knowing that Geek having it might be useful if we ever needed to pull rank on someone. A Blackwater VP came into town and when he found out that Geek had an SES 1 he went nuts as his rating was only GS 14. He wanted me to force Geek to get a card with a lower ranking. Yeah, like that was gonna happened. They worried about the strangest things.

Blackwater’s presence in Iraq grew by the day. It now had teams in Fallujah and standby teams in Kuwait waiting for contracts to be signed. It had also been awarded the PSD jobs for several CPA locations outside Baghdad. But everyone still, everybody, wanted to be on The Bremer Detail. We had a pretty good reputation—not by accident!

My phone and e-mail were blowing up with requests from friends, and friends of friends, and from people I had never met, all wishing to join the coveted Bremer team. At this point nearly 80 percent of my main guys had extended through June. I was content, but we still had a few guys rotating in and out. The newer guys tended to be younger, less experienced, and overly anxious to prove themselves. They had huge shoes to fill. A few were decent, but most were relegated to the Green Zone team not the Red Zone team. I still would not put a guy in a position I deemed might weaken the team. A new guy’s innocent mistake could get the ambassador, a member of the team, or himself killed. I needed the “A” team with the ambassador and me at all times. Yes, I was selfish. More than a few guys on the team referred to me as the biggest dick in Baghdad. (Why, thank you.) They may have passed the Blackwater train-up and been hired, but that got them there in name only. A guy still had to prove to me and the established team what he could do before I took a chance on him. This was Frank’s Rule. Or should I say “Frankwater’s Rule.”

Bill Miller was now the official RSO in Baghdad. Several more RSOs had entered the country to help him. I had served with one, Charlie Light, in the Marine Corps about twenty years earlier. Light had been a legend back at 2d Recon. He had done a couple of tours in Vietnam, gotten out, and then years later came back in. It was good to see him again.

The State Department sent in an assessment team to evaluate what we were doing and how we were doing it. They wanted to talk to me and get a feel for how we were running the operation with an eye toward giving Blackwater the contract to do the PSD work for the next U.S. ambassador after Ambassador Bremer departed. I called Blackwater and asked them if they wanted to me to take the meeting; and if so, how much information to give up. They told me to proceed and try to win the contract. Blackwater HQ mentioned a bonus for me and B-Town if we succeeded.

B-Town and I spent almost twelve hours over the next two days going over our entire operation. Fred P, head of the High-Threat Protection Program for the State Department, asked the questions. It became very clear, very early that Fred knew his stuff. He asked very detailed and very probing questions about every aspect of what we did—from personnel selection to training to operational standards to discipline. He asked about the dog teams, how we integrated the helos into the operation, how the advance team operated, what each person did. He touched on every conceivable subject. Fred was not a typical diplomat. He had been part of many teams operating in high-threat areas and knew what questions to ask. He wanted just the facts.

A few days later the State Department awarded Blackwater the contract for the future ambassador. The company now had a DOD PSD contract and a DS PSD contract. I have to say, the Bremer guys were doing a pretty damn good job. (B-Town and I are still waiting for the bonus checks. Apparently the promise made to us was forgotten, while the guys in Blackwater HQ decided how large
their
bonus checks would be. We heard they were substantial.)

Around this time, we took the ambassador to a meeting near Sadr City. As we left our helo, pilots warned us that our preselected route was not going to work due to a car accident that had backed traffic up for several miles. We detoured to our secondary route only to learn another accident was slowing traffic also on this road. The helos took over as our eyes in the sky to select and direct us to a third route to use to get the ambassador back to the palace. We jumped medians and drove the wrong way down streets, finally getting on a highway that allowed us to move quickly. Unfortunately, on this day, the traffic gods were against us. We ran into yet another accident that slowed traffic to a crawl. By now everyone in Baghdad knew that wherever in the air the Little Birds were, Ambassador Bremer was below. As we crawled along, people in the other vehicles stared at us with looks of bewilderment, hostility, disdain, or happiness. It was odd to see the different reactions of people who were suddenly this close to the de facto president of their country.

The shift leader made the decision to have the guys “run the fenders” to provide extra security to the motorcade. Running the fenders meant that two men from the lead car and two men from the follow car would take positions on foot around the limo and run alongside it as we navigated through the congested area. As the trip had been to Sadr City I had decided we should have one of the SAWs in the follow car in case we were attacked on-site or upon arrival or departure. The SAW weighs about twenty-five pounds, and the ammo adds another five pounds to the load. The temperature hovered around 115 degrees as the guys took their positions. We were in a dicey spot.

Mid Day was assigned to the left front of the limo. As he kept pace, a small truck pulled up alongside our vehicle. The driver snarled and angrily shook his fist. Mid Day moved closer to the vehicle and put himself between the limo and the potential assailant. He waved at the guy to keep moving. The driver reached to his left for something. Mid Day didn’t know what he was reaching for. He raised his M-4 up and pointed it at the guy. G-Money was right behind him, and he too aimed his M-4 at the potential bad guy. As quickly as he could the guy sped away and never looked back.

On the right side of the limo Carmine was keeping pace while humping the SAW. If you have never run with a weapon or anything else that heavy in your arms, you have no idea the Herculean effort he was putting forth. In addition to the SAW he was wearing his body armor, Glock pistol, radio, extra ammo for the SAW, and spare pistol magazines. Carmine had been one of the Army Rangers on the “Blackhawk Down” mission. I knew he would never quit, but between the load he was carrying and the heat I was fearful he would become a heat casualty. Behind Carmine ran Jadicus, the team medic. In addition to all his tactical gear he had about fifty pounds of medical gear in a rucksack he carried whenever we were outside the Green Zone. Jad must have had seventy-five pounds of extra stuff strapped to his body while running in the 115-degree heat. As a former SEAL I knew he also would die before he would quit. But the medic was never supposed to be assigned to running the fenders. Apparently when we departed Sadr City, the guys had made a fill-and-flow adjustment that landed Jad in a different position than normal. He never complained, but later I told everyone, “It better never happen again.”

We had been running for about fifteen minutes before the helos told us we could hop the median in another three hundred yards and head back against traffic to yet another route they had plotted. We moved to the left lane, and mercifully Drew B (the shift leader) gave the command for the guys to get back in the vehicles. Thank God these guys lived in the gym whenever they could. It paid off on this mission.

As luck would have it, the State Department had one of its teams shadowing us in the convoy to see how we ran the roads. Jumping a median in an armored vehicle takes skill not a lot of drivers possess. It can easily result in the vehicle getting stuck in such a way that the car’s undercarriage hangs up on the median with both sets of wheels having limited or no contact with the ground. Getting unstuck requires a series of back-and-forth rocking movements, which take time. Our guys made it over, the DS guys did not. They radioed me and said they were hung up and would meet us back at the palace. Off we went. They came in about fifteen minutes behind us. I had sent the Little Birds back to keep an eye on them. It was the least I could do; they had been part of our convoy, and by extension part of my responsibility. We still had not lost anyone nor had we fired a shot.

Bill Miller had a nearly impossible job. As the new RSO of a start-up embassy he was responsible for integrating the CPA methods into what would become a full-time State Department mission. We were on a DOD contract, so technically we did not fall under his umbrella. That being said, other “non-Bremer” Blackwater guys were going to be part of his world. I did my best to work as closely with Bill as I could. With the news that the new ambassador would be protected by Blackwater, I wanted what we did to be as transparent as possible. I sincerely hoped that the DS guys and Blackwater would learn how each side operated before the transition was made.

Once again we went to the Baghdad city council. The place was the usual beehive of activity. Scores of people knew we were coming as the ambassador’s plans had been announced. Due to intel reports we were extremely diligent in how we set up the concentric security rings. Sax double-checked everything. The sniper positions were carefully selected, the dog teams made their runs. Access control areas—parking, the press pool, and arrival and departure sites—were swept. Everyone’s ass puckered tight.

As we were departing my phone rang. I recognized the number as one of the intel resources I spoke to regularly. I answer, “Hello.”

“Frank, this is Slash. You at your destination?”

“Just leaving.”

“Take a different route back. We just intercepted radio traffic about you guys. White van, guys with RPGs looking to ruin your day.”

“Roger. Thanks.”

An RPG, or rocket-propelled grenade, is designed to kill tanks. It would tear an armored vehicle up with ease and kill everyone inside. There are no armored vehicles, let alone many tanks, that can withstand a direct hit.

The arrival, the meeting, the exit went well. We changed the return route. Ever vigilant, we got back safely, without incident. I called Slash to tell him we were back. He said the bad guys had gotten stuck in traffic and had missed us by five minutes. Thank God for Baghdad traffic. We had dodged another potential attack. We were good, but luck is also a wonderful friend to have in a war zone.

Blackwater established a team house inside the Green Zone from which they coordinated all the non-Bremer and non-Dirty 30 projects. The team house quickly became a holding pen filled with a cast of men waiting for contracts to be signed so they could begin work. As the AIC for Bremer’s detail I had strictly enforced a series of rules designed to ward off unwanted and unfavorable attention. My guys had to wear shirts with collars, no ball caps, no cool-guy thigh holsters, no body armor in the chow hall (unless it was straight from a mission), and when having a drink the men were to lock their weapons in the trailers. Guys on the other gigs had no such prohibitions. Blackwater T-shirts seemed to be mandatory palace wear. Guys walked around with knives strapped to their forearms or lounged around the pool at night wearing Blackwater shirts, their weapons littered around them. It was a nightmare for me.

Every time one of these guys did something stupid, I would get the call. I must have explained a hundred times I was responsible for the Bremer team only, and I was not responsible for any other Blackwater guy. We went to the airport one day to pick someone up. When we got to check-in the guy at the gate said that the “Bremer” guys were already inside. Really? After convincing airport security we were legit, we walked in and found four guys there in combat shorts, ball caps, and sleeveless shirts pretending to be Bremer guys so they could access an area they were not authorized to be in. Brutus tossed them out. One of the guys told Brutus he was going to kick his ass. Too funny. It would have been a very short fight.