Blackwater: From The Inside Out
Tim Beckman
Copyright 2010 Tim Beckman
Discover other titles by Tim Beckman:
IQATF: The Less Lethal Option
Green Beret’s Guide to Six Sigma
License Notes
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Blackwater: From The Inside Out
Book 3 in the Path Less Travelled series
This is a collection of my experiences while working for Blackwater Security in Iraq under the WPPS I and II contracts. The opinions contained herein are my own and are not intended as being representative of Blackwater Security even though it no longer exists as a company.
Table of Contents
Chapter – Ever Day Is An Adventure
Chapter – Becoming A Window Licker
Chapter – Coffee And A Rocket Anyone ?
Chapter - Templars And Training
Chapter – The Slow Steady Downhill Roll
Chapter – Tactical Operations Center
Preface
Considering all the gossip and rumors and innuendo in the media over the past several years concerning private security and specifically the actions of Blackwater, I wanted to make the average person informed as to what this life was really like.
This book isn’t based on interviews and it’s not written with an axe to grind by someone who’s never served their country. I proudly served with Blackwater for two deployments, and while we didn’t part company as the best of friends, I can honestly say in our time, we were the finest protection a client could have gotten and no one could have done what we did to the standard we did it. No one.
When I say I served with Blackwater I mean that. I am a retired US Army Special Forces team sergeant with multiple deployments back before Afghanistan made Green Berets popular. I consider protecting the highest representatives of my country from imminent peril to be service.
The arguments about what we cost are really irrelevant and made by people who are uninformed. We don’t get retirement. You can fire us the minute you don’t like what we are doing. We have no recourse. You can hire us and expect to have 100% performance the next day anywhere in the world. Look at the Hurricane response. Sure, pulling guys out of Iraq and placing them in Louisiana the next day was bound to have bad repercussions, but there were hundreds of armed security in place faster then the local government could respond. The question should be not why was Blackwater there, but where was the local government? Our military is stretched way too thin and everyone knows it. There just isn’t another effective solution to catastrophic requirements.
At the beginning Blackwater was the pinnacle of what professionalism in protective services was all about. In my opinion shooters were appointed as managers at one point and that’s been a recipe for failure since the Romans. Greed also started to kick in, which I witnessed destroy great companies and effective contracts during my several years in Iraq. It’s just a fact of human nature and has to be monitored by people on the outside. I cannot speak to what the company is all about these days since they no longer technically exist.
So I hope you enjoy this glimpse at the world that was Blackwater, from the perspective of a guy that served on the quick reaction force, walked the box, carried a long gun, and managed staff. This is the real deal.
Tim
Chapter - Every day is an adventure
We got the word to saddle up and do the advance for the Ambassador’s meeting with Al Hakim, the former Badr Corps leader. We loaded up our three Suburbans’s and headed out the 14th July bridge gate of the Green Zone. The residence was only a couple miles away to the South. Upon arriving at the final traffic circle we took the small dirt road under the highway bridge overpass towards the residence.
Passing one after another along the narrow windy road off of the main street to the residence, I was thinking this would be a bad place to get hit, but we got all the way in. We staged our vehicles under the bridge abutment in front of a collection of raggedy 1970s looking Iraqi sedans. Unloading the trucks we started the drill. This meant myself and the primary Designated Defensive Marksman or DDM moving up the staircase attached to the two level bridge to set up, while the dog team started working the grounds below and the detail leader went to make link up with the Iraqi security detail that usually worked this venue.
Getting into our DDM positions we split the area since I only had a 5.56 carbine and he had the 7.62 rifle. Scanning the river and grounds I saw plenty of small boats. One of my jobs was to inspect the inside of the boats from my sniper position, while the primary above me had the far side of the bridge and any targets on the far shore. We were careful not to ‘put glass’ or look through our sniper scopes at the client residence, this is a big no go and could cost us our jobs if reported. Even as a sniper there were protocol rules.
About the time I started updating the sketches I already had for this venue, since we came here about every week, I heard the dog team come up on the radio and say they had a hit.
Everything got really quiet and we all stopped what we were doing waiting for the first report from the dog team. I hadn’t done much work with the dog team before, since most Iraqi’s wouldn’t let the dogs on their property. Today we were lucky that we had a team with two dogs, one seasoned and one new. The new dog had sat down behind one of the Iraqi sedans below, which was how they indicated the presence of explosives.
The handlers pulled the dog off and brought the other to verify and sure enough, he sat in the same place. Not too good.
I figured we would get pulled off and head back to the Green Zone but the Ambassador was set on this meeting and our instructions from the embassy were to set up the advance vehicles as sort of a blast wall in front of the sedans and continue to the advance. Crazy but true. About this time the DDM above me comes up on the net and says there are people on the other staircase across the river setting up a banner or something. We both start scanning the staircase and sure enough there is a small group of people unfurling a banner and there is also someone setting up a tripod and what appeared to be a video camera facing towards us.
Another call in to the embassy with this update. No change to our mission. The other sniper and I split the targets in case it comes to a shooting event. I’ll take the runners and he gets the stationary ones since his rifle was bolt action and mine was semi automatic.
Then just when it seems like things can’t get worse, the liaison guys report in that there are no security guys around. This is really ominous as usually there are 40 – 50 armed former Badr Corps guys strutting around eyeballing us, but today there aren’t any.
Finally the embassy says we can pull out and come back, it’s just too many coincidences at one time. We really carefully get back into the trucks and wind our way out of the residence. The couple guards at the small shack near the front entrance ask what’s up and I seem to remember the detail leader telling them something about us having forgotten some gear and that we would be right back.
Soon as we were clear we passed the Army Explosives Ordinance Team or EOD coming in to check out whatever tripped the dogs.
As we are unloading the trucks back at our compound we get the update from EOD. The sedan that the dog sat down next to was full of AMFO or what is more commonly known as ammonium nitrate fertilizer mix. It was evenly spread throughout the whole car so you could not tell from outside that there was anything out of order. Typically car bombs around this time would be leaning hard to the rear or to one side due to the weight of the artillery or rocket rounds inside. This was a pretty sly way to trick us into not noticing.
Alongside the dirt road where we came into the residence there was also a giant pile of sand, not uncommon in Baghdad. This one however contained five 122mm rockets rigged to detonate. Apparently the plan was to let us get in and set up, then let the detail with the Ambassador come in as well. They would then blow the sedan. Because AMFO is what we call low order, it produces a blast wave but not so much fragmentation or spalling. The blast wave would have thrown our armored Suburbans across the parking area, effectively killing anyone in the detail walking ‘the box’ and the client inside ‘the box’, as well as dropping the staircase with us on top of it. On the off chance that anyone managed to survive the initial attack or that the reaction team came to our rescue, the rockets alongside the only way in would be detonated and this would cause massive fragmentation which would effectively vaporize everything and everyone within 50 meters.
A great plan, which thankfully didn’t work.
This being my last day on my first contract with Blackwater.
Chapter - Walking away
Couple months before I hit my 20 year mark in the Army and I find myself every morning having to talk myself into going to work. My rule is that if you have to do that it means you have the wrong job.
This should be the best time in career. I was a Special Forces Team Sergeant and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are kicking and Green Berets were finally all the rage. Most everyone probably saw the guys riding horses into Afghanistan and the numerous shots of Green Berets with full beards and piecemeal uniforms squatting with the Afghanis drinking chai and doing the deal. Instead though, we in the 1st Battalion of the 10th Special Forces Group here in Stuttgart, Germany were sitting on our asses.
Some of the teams got deployed to Africa but we all felt like that was just to free up the ‘Africa Group’, the 3rd Special Forces Group, who were deploying to both wars. Then to top it off, our Group headquarters back in Colorado decides to stop through here on the way back from their first rotation into the ‘box’ and we get called into an assembly in the post gym. At the assembly we get treated to a slide show of all the accomplishments and awards of the guys from the 2nd and 3rd Battalions of our Group that got to go to fight. About 10 minutes into it a couple of us Team Sergeants walk out. I could hear our Battalion Sergeant Major bitching that we were being disrespectful. Yeah fuck him I remember thinking.
You see Special Forces is like football in some ways. We train and train for the big game and when the day comes we don’t want to sit on the sideline and watch. This was especially painful to me since I would say I was one of the few Team Sergeants that pitched the need to stay on top of Unconventional Warfare (UW) and Foreign Internal Defense (FID) training instead of just door kicking and recce. FID is when we go into a country and train legitimate forces of the recognized government to put down insurgency. UW is when we go into a country and train insurgents to overthrow an established government. Afghanistan was all about UW and Iraq was looking like textbook FID or what the big army calls Counterinsurgency (COIN). Naturally after Paul Bremer screwed the pooch and dismantled the whole Iraqi security apparatus, we in the teams could see the big problem with insurgents looming on the horizon. After all, this is what we have been doing since the mid 50s when Special Forces were first created.
That day in the gym pretty much sealed the deal for me and I dropped my retirement papers. Honestly I hadn’t been happy for a while. It had become something of a standing joke with my guys that if I didn’t get fired every year or so I wasn’t doing well. I’ve just never been someone to shortcut training and after getting my MBA I started to see things that were jacked up I hadn’t even noticed before. I tried to apply some business doctrine to daily operations and that didn’t sit well with the chain of command. No one wanted to hear about hundreds of wasted man-hours on things like trying to get a guy into school or automating and integrating our research process to make information more available and efficient.
Some things I do look back at and smile inside with that ‘I told you so’ feeling. Like when Rob and I started the first Forensics Exploitation Team in Charlie Company and even through we validated the whole evidence collection and integration process during the ’04 Olympics we got no love from headquarters. Now it’s a part of every military operation even for the regular military and is tied into the national agencies and even has a sexy new name – Sensitive Site Exploitation!
I started dropping my resume into the Resumix system, which is the place where you apply for government jobs. I figured as a graduate of most of the cool guy schools and years of teaching and mentoring US and foreign military and civilians, I would easily drop into an opening and make that smooth transition we all dreamed of from the green suit to the black one. Little did I know that the government service was just like the military. It’s not what you know but who you know.
Of the hundred or so positions I applied for during the months leading to my retirement I got considered for a whopping two. Pretty disenchanted with the whole ‘good old boy’ system that government service work was and still is, I started to look for contractor work.
Just to set the record straight, I really hated contractors when I was in the green suit. The ones I recall seeing were the guys who ran chow halls and maintenance and billeting in places like Kosovo and Tuzla. These guys were mostly KBR, which we used to joke stood for Kosovars, Bosnians, and Romanians. Just a small step up from thugs and criminals in my mind and by using them to do what military folks used to do they were crippling out ability to self sustain. I still believe that most things military related should not have contractors doing them. I also recall a retired First Sergeant at Fort Hood who used to come by the day room and offer broken bone insurance to us. He only got let into the area because of who he used to be and what he was selling was crap for the young soldiers. I couldn’t see how someone could sell their reputation for a buck but there are some people who don’t have a reputation to worry about I guess.
I had almost given up hope, but ran into a guy at the Special Forces Association clubhouse in Boeblingen that I worked with before who had gone contractor in Iraq.
Pat and I chatted about the company he worked for called Triple Canopy. He was getting great money and had already established himself in what was a pretty much all ex-SF guy organization. He passed a recruiter name to me and suggested looking online for Iraq jobs. When I got home I spent a couple hours online refining my resume and pitching almost all of the 124 companies offering contractor work in Iraq at the time. Within 48 hours I got offers from a couple places but I decided to focus on Triple Canopy and Blackwater. I had heard of them like probably everyone else after the guys got rolled up and burned in Fallujah.
Since I hadn’t prepared for the eventuality that I wouldn’t have a job right away after retirement, money was a pending issue. Blackwater offered me a class date for training before Triple Canopy did and that’s the only reason I went the direction I did. In retrospect I can say the years I spent working near the Triple Canopy guys I have never been anything but impressed with their leadership and the way they treated their guys. They kept guys on retainer when contracting was looking bad for a while in ’05-’06 which no on eels was willing to do. It should be no surprise to anyone in the business that they are still around and others are not.
Chapter - Inprocessing
I got a package in the mail one morning from Blackwater, which directed me to fly to Virginia in a couple days and link up with company employees for transport to training and possible selection for assignment. I had some apprehension as to whether I would be good enough to get on with the company since it was supposed to be founded by SEAL operators and pretty top notch. That they lost some guys in combat already also said a lot about the company.
Taking a couple changes of clothes, some sports gear, and my passport I kissed the family goodbye and left to earn some cash to pay the bills. This wasn’t the first time I had left to go somewhere dangerous without any idea when I would be back. The years I spent in Special Forces (SF) were always the call-in-the-middle-of-the-night-and-grab-a-bag-and-go type and after a while you get sort of system down. Then you create a series of actions that you repeat to lessen the drama and angst. This was much like all the others except that I would be in the states in school for a couple weeks at least before I found out where I was going. We pretty much knew that Baghdad was the work site and of course watched way too much TV about the ‘Green Zone’ and all the difficulties the troops were having with the insurgency that Bremer caused.
This was also about the time when the rage was for bad guys to snatch you up and put you in the orange jumpsuit on TV, cut your head off, then post the video to Ogrish.com. Yeah that was kind of a stage setter for me since I never had really had to deal with this sort of bad guy before and wasn’t sure how best to deal with the threat. In Iraq the first time, we didn’t even see the bad guys that were supposed to be up North. In Sarajevo, bad guys were more like thugs. In Africa, the bad guys were just straight out scumbags. This was a little unsettling to have a foe that understands not just the fight but the media aspect to the post fight. I was torn between being a little apprehensive and being a little in awe. I don’t want to give the impression of being supportive of the bad guys. I lost colleagues to the bad guys in Iraq, but to face off against guys with an A game that includes media production, torture and international support is much different then guys who are local thugs looking to claim territory for themselves.
Wheels down in Virginia and I saw a couple other beefy looking cats trying to look like civilians in the baggage claim area. Special Operations Forces (SOF) guys are really easy to spot when you are one. The watches and boots are give-aways to where a guy comes from in SOF. Sunnto watches were issued for a while as were Raichle boots. No matter what clothes a guy has on or how his hair is cut, always look for the boots and watch.
After I got my ritual Starbucks latte, I just sort of watched the gathering and started making mental notes. A little while later a guy comes in wearing 5.11 pants and polo shirt with the Blackwater paw logo on it and starts calling out names. We get checked off the list and load a couple vans outside to head to the compound. I noticed that none of the cops at the terminal made a big deal out of the vans sitting in the restricted area. Later on I found out that Blackwater had a deal with the cops for range access and many of them had served as static security guards downrange for the company. Always good to have cops for friends in my book.
We actually end up getting dropped at a hotel and the liaison guy hands us off the keys to the vans and a time and grid to be at for the next morning then he’s gone. As we check in I start to notice that there are some seriously old and some seriously out of shape guys in the gang too. That seems weird to me, but initially BW staff were just using the resumes as a selection tool for who could come to training. We had a bunch of serious ass kicking killing machine types from back in the Vietnam days in our group who on paper were probably spot on, but in person most were way out of shape and focus. I only worked with one Vietnam SF vet during my time with BW, but I knew him from my days at the Special Forces Qualification Course (SFQC) and he had been doing contractor security work in lots of nasty places since then and stayed in great shape.
A quick side story about the old timers. At one point the problem with recruiting guys who were not what they were on paper became so bad that the girls that make up the personnel processing section at Blackwater, called OSU, started mandating that we had to provide full length pictures in our packets that showed us in a bathingsuit or shorts from front and back. Ok, so chicks demanding guys to send in mostly naked shots. You can see where this went already I bet. Not that any of us ever sent in anything like playgirl poses. No way
Next morning we load our vans and navigate to the compound. We probably seemed like some crazy group of whackos to the hotel staff since we absolutely pillaged the breakfast buffet, making sandwiches for later and squirreling away all the eggs and bagels. The regular guests were probably pretty pissed when they showed up for chow and only found a crumb trail!