Kitabı oku: «Cemetery Road», sayfa 11

CHAPTER 16

IN JANUARY 2004, I left Washington to embed with a company of marines in Afghanistan. Before I left, I reached out to Paul to ask for tips on surviving in combat conditions. To my surprise, I got Jet instead. Newlywed Paul had left Mississippi at the age of thirty-one to begin working as a military contractor in Afghanistan. This shocked me, but Jet explained that 9/11 had tripped a sort of reflex patriotic fervor in Paul. He’d wanted to re-enlist in the Rangers, but this turned out to be more complicated than he’d hoped. Then he heard from some old Ranger buddies who’d been hired as private military contractors. They told him tales that sounded like a cross between the Old West of Hollywood and Lawrence of Arabia, complete with horse cavalry charges.

Paul boarded the next plane to Kabul.

After two ninety-day rotations in Afghanistan, he shifted to Iraq, where he quickly realized that military contracting was the new growth industry. All you needed to get a fat government contract was a couple of armored vehicles and a football team’s worth of vets who didn’t mind getting shot at. Paul already knew the veterans, and the Bienville Poker Club was happy to provide the capital to field an armored unit in Iraq. What better bragging rights could Mississippi businessmen have at every golf course, hunting club, and cocktail party in the South than being able to say they had their own Special Forces team slinging lead at the ragheads in America’s far-flung war zones? I wasn’t sure Paul would get his venture off the ground, but that was his problem.

I flew to Afghanistan and embedded with regular marines. I got to spend a little time with some private contractors, but I came to know only a couple well. They were former Delta operators—very different from the contractors I would come to know in Iraq. I learned a lot about war in eight weeks. Combat answered the questions I’d pondered while reading Hemingway and Conrad and le Carré and Michael Herr. The eternal male questions: Will my nerve hold when the bullets start hitting around me? When the guy next to me gets blasted into big wet pieces? If I’m asked to pick up a weapon and help, will I acquit myself competently? Honorably? The answers to the first two questions proved affirmative. But in Afghanistan I was never asked to pick up a weapon, not to fire in anger anyway. That would come later.

In Zabul Province I bonded with young men whom I would never have met back in the world. The America those boys had grown up in was far different from mine, though I was only ten or twelve years older than most of them. Their notions about war were alien to me—I who had been nursed on Paths of Glory and The Bridge on the River Kwai by my father. Those kids had a kind of nihilistic enthusiasm about combat, one bred from later war films and first-person shooter video games. They’d come to Afghanistan expecting an adrenaline-churning synthesis of Rambo and Apocalypse Now, but one fought behind an insulating layer of technology, as in Doom, Halo, and Call of Duty. They seemed to understand that they’d been posted to the graveyard of empires, but this awareness was hidden behind the ironic distance they wore like an extra layer of armor. They’d evolved this armor as children, to protect themselves from the pain of disintegrating families. They’d never been infused with the unified, idealized image of America that still lives within me. Nevertheless, they fought with remarkable bravery, and they made sure that I was as safe as possible under fire.

Iraq was different.

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.

Paul’s second team—Sierra Bravo—had been providing security for the German engineer in Fallujah and Ramadi. Protective detail work was different from airport escort duty. In that situation, a ShieldCorp team worked what was called a “diamond” around a VIP. In case of attack, the team’s primary responsibility was getting the protectee “off the X” and to safety. The team could return fire defensively, but its main mission was to avoid escalating contact.

During its first six weeks of duty, beginning in February 2004, Sierra Bravo’s coverage of the engineer had gone smoothly. There’d been a couple of incidents with thrown rocks and bottles, but the team had evacuated its VIP in seconds with no shots fired and no casualties. However, the general situation in Central Iraq had begun deteriorating. That same month, disgruntled veterans from Iraq’s disbanded army had ignited a nationwide insurgency. On February 12, in Fallujah, they launched an RPG and machine-gun attack on U.S. commanding general John Abizaid and Eighty-Second Airborne general Charles Swannack. Eleven days later, they simultaneously attacked three Iraqi police stations and freed close to ninety insurgent prisoners. The situation was spinning out of control so rapidly that General Swannack placed al-Anbar Province under the direct authority of a Marine Expeditionary Force. On March 27 a U.S. special operations surveillance team was flushed out of hiding and had to fight its way out of Fallujah. Four days later, a massive roadside bomb killed five soldiers of the First Infantry Division as they worked to clear a supply road used by private contractors.

All this was only prelude to the March 31 ambush that wiped out the four Blackwater contractors. It was then that I arrived in-country. After my “initiation” riding with the airport convoys, Paul invited me to Ramadi to live with the Sierra Bravo protection team. Compared to the War Wagon gauntlet of the convoys, protective duty seemed almost soporific.

Until it didn’t.

On April 4 U.S. forces launched punitive surgical strikes into Fallujah. By the next morning, they’d surrounded the city, and tension across the country rose to an ominous pitch. The climate in Ramadi, which had seemed calm only days before, suddenly made us feel like a lone outpost on the edge of civilization. Ninety percent of the Iraqis who walked past the house Sierra Bravo used as its base scowled openly at us, and the two Iraqis employed by the team—an interpreter and a cook—got so nervous that they couldn’t sleep.

I wondered why we didn’t just evacuate until the battle for Fallujah ended, but Paul took his orders from the Pentagon, and that meant staying put. In a matter of hours, one-third of the population of Fallujah fled the city. The insurgents who remained were armed with RPGs, heavy machine guns, mortars, and antiaircraft cannons. Once American forces attacked Fallujah in earnest, all Central Iraq exploded into chaos. The Mahdi army declared itself and began attacking Coalition targets, and in Ramadi, a full-on Sunni rebellion sparked to fire. As chaos erupted around us, Paul moved the German engineer out of his private house and in with the protective team. Paul’s sources told him that many Iraqi national police officers had turned on the Coalition and he shouldn’t look to anyone in a police uniform for aid. With no other option, we hunkered down to wait out the fighting.

The Ramadi insurgents had a different idea. They’d known about the Sierra Bravo house for months, and they had no intention of giving us a pass. At two P.M. on April 8, a hundred Iraqi men gathered in the street in front of our house, and half of them carried either Kalashnikovs or American M4s donated by the Iraqi police. Inside the house, we had eight ShieldCorp contractors, two Iraqis (the cook and the interpreter, both males), the German VIP, and me—the embedded journalist. By Paul’s calculations, we had enough food and water to last three days and enough ammunition for about the same, depending on the intensity of any assault. If the insurgents brought up mortars or antiaircraft guns, of course, the equation would change radically.

Paul’s biggest regret was that our team’s Mamba had not been on site when the rebellion broke out. It was being serviced in Baghdad, which was two hours away on a good day. By the time Paul called Team Sierra Alpha to rescue us in the other Mamba, the insurgents had sealed off our section of Ramadi with roadblocks. A call to the Joint Task Force brought a similar answer and some free advice: Keep your heads down until we take Fallujah. Then we’ll escort you back to the Green Zone. The army didn’t seem to realize that regaining control of Fallujah might take more than a few days. (In the end it took six months.)

The first shots near our house went off around 4:00 P.M. It was sporadic fire, directed skyward, but it rattled the hell out of me. Paul ordered his men to hold fire. Ten minutes later, the first clips were emptied against the windows and front wall of our house. Concentrated bursts chipped away huge chunks of brick and stone and shredded the plywood that Paul’s men had used to barricade the windows. Paul was on the first floor with me. He shouted that everyone’s guns were “cleared hot,” but they should still hold their fire to the last possible moment. The ShieldCorp guys had cut gun ports in the plywood with a jigsaw, and they’d posted their three best snipers on the roof of the two-story house. But all obeyed Paul’s order and silently watched the insurgents blast the face of the building without letup. As the walls shuddered around me, I realized that unless a JSOC team dropped out of the sky in a couple of Black Hawks, this was the Alamo.

When Paul finally shouted the order to return fire, the Iraqis in the street began dropping three and four at a time. There’s nothing quite like watching the effect of automatic rifles in the hands of skilled soldiers with good fire discipline. Team Sierra Bravo cleared that street in less than two minutes. The problem—as we all knew—was that the Iraqis had virtually unlimited replacements in Ramadi, while we had none. We couldn’t even replenish our ammunition. I wasn’t firing, of course, but I was absolutely part of the group. We were going to live or die together.

After the street emptied out, Paul called a quick conference in the kitchen. So far as he knew, we had no hope of rescue. Sierra Alpha couldn’t reach us, and the army and the Marines were too hotly engaged elsewhere to bother with us. The German engineer asked about ShieldCorp’s Little Bird, which sounded like one of God’s angels at that moment. Surely, I thought, with enough covering fire, it could pluck us off the roof and whisk us to safety. Of course, with a crew of two, the helicopter could hold only six passengers, but I felt the logistics could be worked out. Maybe we could divide into two groups and escape in two runs. Paul explained that CENTCOM had grounded private aircraft in this zone, at least for the time being. Cobra gunships and low-altitude ScanEagle drones were swarming over the flat roofs of Fallujah, and the Joint Task Force didn’t want any confusion created by pilots not under its direct command. We were, Paul announced, going to have to hold out through the night.