The Bremer Detail (23 page)

“Whooped ’em again, Josey!”

I was going home.

Afterword

We landed at Andrews Air Force Base, and the U.S. Secret Service met us and took over the security for the ambassador. The threats against him would continue for quite a while. For the Blackwater guys who worked with me, this, in and of itself, was probably the greatest testament to what we had accomplished. We had protected a man who would need the U.S. Secret Service to protect him while he was in the United States, and we had kept him alive in the most dangerous place on Earth at the time. This is fact, not fiction.

Many things have been written about Blackwater in the years that have gone by. Some were good, some were very berating. I want to emphasize that the guys who worked with me were some of the finest professionals, and finest men, I have ever known. They did an excellent job for me. We accomplished our mission. Ambassador Bremer came home alive. In the following years I worked with many of those men, and in some pretty rough places.

I am not in a position to comment about some of the accusations made against the larger Blackwater community. I was not there. I have read the news reports and the books, and I’ve spoken to some of the guys who were on the ground when some of the incidents took place. What I do want everyone to know and to thoroughly understand is that The Bremer Detail was not involved in any of those incidents. I am extremely proud of the fact that my team of guys never fired a single shot while we were protecting the ambassador. To paint all the guys who worked for Blackwater as mercenary thugs who killed people is beyond irresponsible. My guys did none of that. The OVERWHELMING MAJORITY of the guys who worked for Blackwater did none of that. It is the few who have sullied the patriotism, professionalism, and history of what the rest of us accomplished. We took a nearly impossible situation and made it work.

Erik Prince and Blackwater took on a mission that had never been done before or since. To have a private company protect a head of state in a war zone was a decision that took real balls. If we had failed, Blackwater would have forever been remembered as the company under whose watch Ambassador Bremer was killed. To have a private citizen become the agent-in-charge of a head of state’s protection team in a war zone was also unheard of. It had never been done before, and it has not been done since. With all the extra scrutiny that we were under every single day, we would have been quickly replaced if the DOD, the U.S. Secret Service, the State Department, or anyone else felt that we were not up to the job of keeping the ambassador safe, or that we were not behaving or acting in the best interests of the United States.

Failure would have been catastrophic for the United States. To criticize what we did without speaking to any of us, or knowing us, is disrespectful to the highest degree. Do people realize that Blackwater got the contract because there were no federal agencies that could provide adequate protection at that level? Mr. Prince should be applauded for stepping up to the plate and saying that he would take it on. And my team should be too.

The proof that we were extraordinarily successful in what we did, and how we did it, lies in the sole sourcing of the contract that Blackwater got to protect Ambassador Negroponte after Ambassador Bremer departed. This decision was not made lightly by the State Department. I know, as I spent many hours with State Department officials dissecting every aspect of The Bremer Detail.

There was no template for our mission; no doctrine for this type of protection operation; no tactics, techniques, or procedures—commonly referred to in the industry as TTPs—to study and rehearse. We stole ideas and techniques from every resource we could find. We invented new things every day. The guys who worked with me would evaluate what was working and what was not working and we would change accordingly. There were no egos. If it worked, we would use it and we did. If it did not, we discarded it as quickly as we could. The tactics and techniques that we finally established were eventually distilled into a working form and became the basis of what would become the State Department’s Worldwide Personal Protection Security (WPPS) program. Our tactics became the curriculum, and our professionalism became the standard. The earliest Blackwater instructors for this program were all guys who had worked for me. They knew what worked and what did not work, and they had the knowledge and the skill sets to teach it and show you why and how it worked.

Leadership is a strange concept. Leaders lead from the front, not from the rear. Monday morning quarterbacks never win games—only the guys who play on Sundays do. I played the game every day for over ten months. I signed up for 30 days and stayed for 313. When I signed on I was going to be one of two Blackwater guys providing a support element to the U.S. Army CID.

Roughly nine days later I was the first and only private citizen AIC to protect a head of state in a war zone. It was an interesting ride. Despite the problems that I have discussed in the preceding narrative, every decision came down to the two basic leadership tenets that I learned in the Marine Corps:

1. Accomplish the mission.

2. Look out for the welfare of your men.

I sent many guys home who were not prepared mentally or physically to be there. I have no hard feelings toward them. They were out of their league. They did not know what they did not know. Blackwater management did the best job they could to keep the pipeline of men flowing, but they were also running a business and sometimes lost sight of what we were actually doing. And the reason was simply—they also did not know what or why we were doing what we were doing. It had never been done before. They should have come over and worked the detail for a period of time. If you have never done something, how can you judge it?

When The Bremer Detail was started there were, in my estimation, perhaps 250 guys in the U.S. private security sector who had the skill set and mental toughness to do the job. Of these 250 there were about 60 working on the Karzai detail in Afghanistan. This left Blackwater with about 190 from which to choose. By the time we left, I probably had somewhere in the vicinity of 130 or so guys who rotated in and out. Ten percent were fired. Ten percent completed one rotation and I sent word back I did not want them back.

So in February 2004 there were approximately 180 of the 250 skilled, private protection guys under contract. By March 2004, between Blackwater, Triple Canopy, Dyne Corps, Aegis, Erinysis, etc., there were nearly 2,000 guys under contract providing PSD services in some capacity. This eventually swelled to more than 5,000. Some were non-US companies, and non-US citizens.

My point is that what we accomplished while on The Bremer Detail apparently seemed easy to some, and the results speak for themselves. We had zero incidents, no one was killed, no one was shot at by my team, and the ambassador got home safe. Other details cannot make this claim even though the threat level we faced was considerably higher and the profile and schedule that Ambassador Bremer kept more arduous.

I have written this to ensure the legacy of fhe Bremer detail, to ensure that the incredible body of work that my team accomplished and things that we did are not diminished, devalued, belittled, or taken for granted.

Before anyone gets the idea that I am somehow being disrespectful to all the guys who followed us, I am not. The problem was not in the people who filled the positions, but in the selection and training phase that failed to deselect those who really weren’t cut out for the work. This was a systemic problem for all the companies chasing the contracts. Of all of them, Blackwater did the best job. To fill this many positions so quickly, corners may have been cut. When money becomes the overriding factor in chasing contracts without realizing the extreme difficulties of the job, there are bound to be problems. Unfortunately, in a war zone, these problems can result in catastrophic incidents. I cannot reiterate enough, there was no template or handbook written on how to perform what eventually became
Combat PSD
protection operations. You had to learn by doing it. You had to see what was happening and react accordingly. Overreact and innocent people might be killed. Underreact and you or your people got waxed. The sandbox was an unforgiving classroom. You could make all the plans you wanted, but when you walked out the door, the plan changed. The bad guys didn’t read our plans; they did what they wanted, when they wanted. They had formulated their plan based on the surveillance they had done on us. We reacted to their actions. They played offense, and we played defense.

The keys to a proper attack or ambush are based upon the following three principles:

1. Surprise

2. Speed

3. Violence of action

The bad guys pick the time, the place, and the weapons they believe will give them the greatest possible means to succeed. Action is always faster than reaction. Training fundamentals had to emphasize core, automatic reactions that increase one’s chances of survival. During an attack there is no time to think.

All new guys have a reaction lag time. They may not immediately realize what is happening as bombs go off or bullets whiz past their heads. This was a big reason why each time that my experienced guys rotated out, the guys who stayed behind were nervous about the new guys who came in. Experience cannot be taught. Experience is earned one day at a time. Seeing and knowing what is happening and reacting accordingly is learned—mentally and physically. The longer a team works together the more they trust one another and the better they get at the job they are doing.

There were a lot of guys who came in and did an excellent job. Unfortunately, other guys should have never been in Iraq. And, as seemingly always, negatives got more press coverage than positives.

Blackwater eventually had forty-three guys killed while doing their jobs. None of them were Bremer detail guys.

Coming home after 313 days running the roads in Baghdad was tough. Not just for me, but for all the guys. The transition from looking for threats everywhere to being a
normal
citizen was not easy. Going to bed and waiting for mortars and rockets to land, driving down the road not letting anyone pass you, driving as fast as you can, waiting for the trash in the road to explode, and waiting for ambushes at every intersection is not something that is easy to let go.

The families of the guys who spent months over there with me had a real adjustment period as their men tried to integrate back into a civilized society. We had missed many events in the lives of our families—birthdays, funerals, weddings, graduations, sports events—that can never be made up. We missed them, but we had had to concentrate on each minute of each day in the sandbox. The real world had ceased to exist for us. We had left the real world one day, and returned what seemed like the very next, as if our homes had existed in a state of suspended animation. We picked up right where we had left off and expected that everything would be the same. Nothing was the same. We were not the same, nor were our families. Resentments and misunderstandings stirred in all parties involved.

As contractors there were no support systems in place for us; no Veterans Administration to help the guys or their families get back to some semblance of normalcy. We became the forgotten men and women who helped the country. The media ridiculed us and painted us as less than honorable people who went over there solely, as in the case of the PSD teams, to quench our thirst to maim or kill people, and make ungodly amounts of money leaching off the American taxpayer at the expense of the war fighters with whom we shared the battle space. Some in the media claimed we had no morals or moral culpability, that we were cowboys with guns running amuck and running roughshod over anyone who got in our way. As in the military, there will always be the 2 percent who make mistakes and ruin the reputations of the other 98 percent. Just once I would like to see the media applaud the sacrifices the 98 percent who supported two wars and fought thousands of miles from our home shores. It will probably never happen. Contractors are a disposable item. Use them, then trash them. Cash and carry with no long-term career prospects.

The toll on the families was tremendous. Especially after the media began to portray us as worse than the bad guys. Many guys wound up in divorce court. I did. The fact that the “real” bad guys were trying to blow us up almost every day has been glossed over and the stories of the incidents where contractors crossed the line were endlessly repeated. Wives looked at their husbands and questioned whether or not they had murdered people. Children wondered if Dad was one of “them.” All I can say to the families of the guys who worked for me is, “We were not ‘them.’”

Since The Bremer Detail ended I have met or heard of quite a few people who claimed to have been with us yet never were. I even ran into a guy who claimed he had been the AIC! More disturbing has been the claim by some that they held leadership positions when they never did. In an attempt to set the record straight, the guys who held high-level leadership positions are listed below:

Ops/Support: Ken H, DT, RB, Peter F, Russ T

Medics: Doc Jones, Doc Phil, Jadicus, Dufop

Drivers : Q, Travis T, FB, Larrycade, Scott S, JD (Chief) W, Gino N, Dorian A, Bama, WW, Dan B

Tactical Commander: HB, Riceman, Tony T, Mongo, Carmine

Shift Leader: Drew B, Bird, Riceman, Mongo, BV, MP

Advance Team Leader: Sax, Scotty H, B-Town

Door Gunner Team Leaders: Cowboy John Hall, Dave Bradfield, BV

AIC: Frank Gallagher

A few guys may have held a leadership slot for a day when someone was sick, but the guys listed above were the leadership members of The Bremer Detail team.

I want to thank several people publicly for helping us do our jobs. For the most part I have kept their names out of the details, but they deserve a mention and have my undying respect and gratitude. They worked as hard as we did in their assignments and took the same risks we did. I know I probably pissed a lot of them off a time or ten, but their efforts and sacrifices were very much appreciated by me and the team. Thank you.