I hadn’t even planned to go there, but in March 2004, something happened that shook the public and private masters of the American military effort. In Fallujah, four contractors employed by Blackwater USA were ambushed, killed, and mutilated. I felt the reverberations 1,400 miles away, when a team from DynCorp, a Blackwater competitor, described to me how the four operators had been dragged naked through the streets of Fallujah. This atrocity sparked outrage among the contractors, which was easy to understand. What surprised me was the fury that surged through the ranks of the regular military, right up to the generals. Instinct told me that the Blackwater ambush would not go unanswered, so I started reaching out to everyone I knew working in Iraq.
All agreed that some kind of payback was imminent, but no one knew where the hammer would fall. At that point, I decided to call Paul Matheson. I hadn’t spoken to him since deploying to Afghanistan, and I didn’t reach him right away. But I did reach Jet in Mississippi. As it turned out, my old quarterback had succeeded in starting his own defense contracting outfit, which he’d christened ShieldCorp. At that time he had two teams in Iraq: one escorting supply convoys from Baghdad Airport to the Green Zone; the other in a town called Ramadi, near Fallujah, protecting dignitaries for the Coalition. Jet gave me a satellite phone number, and fifteen minutes later, I was speaking to my old teammate.
Paul sounded like a starving gold prospector who’d just seen a buddy scoop plum-size nuggets out of a stream: “Something’s about to happen here, Goose. No more Somalias, that’s the word. The Pentagon’s gonna punish somebody. Afghanistan’s about to become a sideshow. Iraq’s gonna blow. You’d better hop a plane and get your ass down here.” I asked him how his business was going. “We’re just getting off the ground, but we’re doing good. I’ve got two contracts worth $4.1 million, but there’s a lot more coming. I can smell it. It’s about to be boom times for PSCs. I gotta run. Call me if you come down. You can ride some convoys with us. It’s like The War Wagon with IEDs.”
I still remember Paul’s wild laughter as he broke the connection. It unnerved me a little, the idea of war as a business opportunity—especially one that a ragtag start-up like Paul’s could play a part in—but I got on a plane and headed for old Babylon.
Iraq was a world away from Afghanistan. For one thing, it was urban warfare. It also attracted a different breed of contractor, probably due to rapidly escalating demand. While many contractors in Iraq were ex-soldiers, far fewer were former-JSOC guys. To my amazement, many were ex–police officers or sheriff’s deputies from tiny American towns, a majority from the South. ShieldCorp’s meager ranks exemplified this demographic. Contracting was the only hope most of them had to earn more than minimum wage. They’d gone through a dusty “training school” Paul ran outside Laurel, Mississippi—thirty acres of overgrown piney woods and a half acre of asphalt for driving school. But unlike Navy SEAL training, where only 6 percent of an experienced applicant pool is accepted for training and 75 percent of those fail to make the grade, about 80 percent of the semi-desperate applicants to Paul’s new company had been accepted. This, I learned, was true of most other private outfits in Iraq as well. I don’t mean to say that Paul didn’t have some good people. He had eight Rangers who’d served with him in Somalia in the ’90s. He had one ex-Delta operator called “Rattler” whom he exploited heavily at recruiting time (though I had to wonder why, with Delta credentials, Rattler hadn’t signed on with one of the blue-chip companies; I never found out).
There was another difference between Afghanistan and Iraq—one that would become critically important to me. In Afghanistan, the contractors knew the rules about enemy contact, and they were grim. If you were wounded, you had no instant medevac—no real medical care to speak of, in fact—and certainly not the lifelong benefits so critical with war wounds. Worst of all, if captured, you had little hope of rescue. If you were hit on the wrong side of the Pakistani border and couldn’t haul yourself out, you were stuck. You weren’t even going to be acknowledged. The “leave no man behind” ethos had been left behind with the regular military. In Afghanistan, contractors were expendable.
In Iraq, though, the contractors always assumed that if things got really bad, they could count on the Marines or the army to bail them out of a jam. The reason was simple: the regular troops knew the contractors provided many of the supplies they needed to live, so they felt enough pragmatic self-interest to offer what help and protection they could. Marines would quietly pass the contractors grenades and extra ammo, to be sure they had the best chance of survival in a crisis. Nobody anticipated things getting so hot that the regular troops would be fighting for their lives and wouldn’t have time for the cowboys who worked for bigger bucks.
That was what happened in Fallujah, only a stone’s throw from Ramadi, where I was embedded with one of Paul’s teams. I’m not sure why Paul had his guys there, when their job was protecting a German engineer employed by the United States in Fallujah. I suspected that Paul didn’t want his guys living too close to the bigger contracting outfits. Maybe he didn’t like the way his men stacked up against the competition. They were underequipped, for one thing, though Paul was bringing more gear and assets online every week. At that time ShieldCorp owned two Mambas—armored South African vehicles that mounted a light machine gun and had gun ports for the operators riding inside. ShieldCorp also owned six regular cars, which served as escort vehicles. But the company’s pride and joy was its Little Bird, the small but doughty helicopter originally designed by Hughes Aircraft, now fitted out as a gunship that could also serve as medevac in a pinch. Paul occasionally flew the Little Bird himself, but for the hairy stuff he had a former Special Forces pilot on his payroll, from the 160th SOAR out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky. The guy was a bit long in the tooth, but he could fly that chopper through a parking garage if you paid him enough.
I started in Iraq by riding along on three separate convoy escorts with ShieldCorp’s first Mamba team—Sierra Alpha—from Baghdad International Airport to the Green Zone. During those runs, our Mamba took dozens of rounds of machine-gun fire, several sniper rounds, and survived one IED detonation. After that near miss, I had the distinction of being able to say I’d been “blowed up” in Iraq. I also saw two Iraqi civilian passenger cars destroyed by Sierra Alpha for getting too close and not backing off after warning shots were fired in front of them. This happened in reasonably heavy traffic, and it reset my whole idea of America’s war tactics. What I’d witnessed was private U.S. citizens shooting Iraqi civilians prophylactically, without ever being fired upon. Such was the anxiety created by previous insurgent suicide attacks that the military was willing to overlook contractors killing civilians for getting too close to their supply convoys on civilian highways.