Cowboy Up!

[The Reaper]

A lot of poetic license, but some info, nonetheless.

TR

New Republic
May 24, 2004

Baghdad Dispatch
Cowboy Up
By Joshua Hammer

It was just before dusk at Baghdad's Al Hamra Hotel, and the patio by the swimming pool was humming with activity. "Bushmaster," an Australian security contractor wearing an olive-drab floppy hat, sat at his usual table drinking chilled vodka straight from the bottle. "Have a swig of Stoli, mates!" he slurred across the courtyard to a trio of hulking operatives from Blackwater Security Consulting, the secretive U.S. outfit whose guards had been ambushed and burned to death in Falluja a month earlier. Suddenly, there was a commotion in the lobby, and 30 South African mercenaries wearing khaki shorts and body armor marched single file into the courtyard. Bulging arms covered with multicolored tattoos, shaved heads gleaming, they carried an arsenal of weaponry--black M-4 assault rifles, 9mm pistols, stun grenades, serrated knives. Gathering in a semicircle, they answered a military roll call, barking out their names and ranks in guttural Afrikaans.

One of the South African mercs picked up the rifle of an Australian soldier seated poolside, handled it admiringly, then peered down the laser scope at a table full of journalists. "It's like the holding pen for the [South African] Truth and Reconciliation Commission," muttered a food-service provider from the military--a self-described "war profiteer"--seated at our table.

In the last few months, Baghdad's corporate warriors have all but taken over the city. They cruise the streets in late-model SUVs, the long, steel barrels of their automatic weapons protruding from open windows. They've essentially taken over a dozen hotels in the capital. I counted as many as 100 "security consultants," as most prefer to be called, lounging poolside at the Al Hamra on several evenings this week--four or five times the number I saw in my previous visit to the city. As many as 20,000 contractors are currently believed to be in Iraq, and the number keeps growing.

These private armies have assumed many duties normally carried out by troops during wartime. A Virginia-based firm, Custer Battles, guards Baghdad Airport. Erinys, a British company, protects oil fields. Blackwater provides bodyguards for officials of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and escorts military supply convoys along Iraq's dangerous highways. DynCorp of Virginia has been hired to help train Iraq's police and the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps. And, of course, CACI International Inc. provided interrogators inside Abu Ghraib prison.

For American soldiers and Marines in Iraq, the rapid proliferation of contractors is, at best, a mixed blessing. Some troops I talked to say the contractors' presence frees up their own thinly stretched units to carry out operational activities--including running security patrols, searching for improvised explosive devices, and battling the growing insurgency. "We fight the war, and they do the shit work," one top officer in Baghdad said.

But many troops resent the fact that the private gunmen earn as much as $1,000 per day--ten times the average Marine's salary. And several told me that they find it alarming that so many private gunmen are on the loose in Iraq, unbeholden to military regulations. As the violence intensifies, some contractors have engaged in sustained firefights and even pitched battles with Iraqi insurgents; as many as 50 contractors have been killed in action.

"I went to Baghdad last month and couldn't believe how many armed foreign civilians were moving around the streets," I was told by a major in the First Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq. "It blew me away."

The U.S. military and the contractors work in close proximity.

When I flew around northern Iraq two weeks ago on an inspection tour of police academies with Lieutenant General David H. Petraeus--the former 101st Airborne Division commander who is now rebuilding Iraq's security forces--Petraeus's entourage was guarded, in part, by Blackwater's private security men. In Najaf in April, where hundreds of fighters from Moqtada Al Sadr's Mahdi Army surrounded CPA headquarters, eight Blackwater operators, one Marine, and three Salvadoran soldiers fought side by side from the CPA's rooftop. After ten hours spent fending off sniper fire and rocket-propelled grenades, the men were resupplied by a Blackwater helicopter flown by a veteran Army pilot, who dropped clips of ammunition onto the rooftop. A short time later, the helicopter returned and evacuated a Marine. Some American officials sense commitment and dedication from the contractors. "I looked in their eyes," Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the chief U.S. military spokesman, told The Washington Post after meeting the American mercenaries. "They knew what they were here for. ... They were absolutely confident."

Sometimes, however, the mercenaries' activities do more harm than good. The uneasy relationship between the troops and the contractors reached its nadir on March 31, when the four Blackwater men were brutally murdered in Falluja, their body parts strung up on a bridge. The previous day, the four contractors, all heavily armed but driving unarmored vehicles, had reportedly escorted a food convoy to a nearby Marine base. They spent the night at the base, apparently ate alongside the troops, and then left the next morning for Baghdad, inexplicably taking a shortcut through the resistance stronghold. "We would have told them not do it," said one Marine officer. The officer angrily called the contractors "cowboys" and said they had failed to inform anyone on the base about their plans, a direct violation of military policy. The Marines learned of the ambush and murder by watching CNN.

Some troops I talked to had felt a powerful urge to avenge the contractors' deaths. "They were Americans, and they were brutally murdered. My instinct was, 'We've got to go in,'" said First Sergeant William Skiles, a leader of Echo Company, Second Battalion, First Marine Regiment. But many others were incensed that the mercenaries had forced the military's hand. "My first questions were, 'Who are these people, what were they doing there, and why didn't we know about it?'" said Lieutenant General James T. Conway, commander of the First Marine Expeditionary Force in Falluja. Conway told me he'd had a plan in place to establish military control over Falluja but that intense political pressure to invade the city following the Blackwater killings obliged him to move far more quickly than he had wanted.

Conway expressed his reservations to Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of allied forces in Iraq. But he was told that Washington demanded immediate action. Days later, Conway sent two battalions into Falluja, where they killed hundreds of Iraqi combatants and civilians, leveled much of the city, and caused a wave of international opprobrium that ultimately forced Conway to withdraw his troops.

The ambush killings in Falluja, and the beheading of a contractor this week, sent shock waves through the mercenary corps in Baghdad. Even so, the brutal attack seems unlikely to dampen the contracting boom. "These guys may be chastened, but nobody's talking about leaving Iraq," I was told by one "security consultant" as he sipped a Carlsberg poolside last week. "For one thing, the money's too damn good." He also pointed out that most of the contractors are the hardest of the hard core-- veterans of such elite outfits as the U.S. Special Forces; the Rhodesian Selous Scouts, the former special forces of the Rhodesian white regime; and Executive Outcomes, the now- disbanded South African mercenary army that fought in Sierra Leone and Angola.

These men thrive on the danger of working in war zones. As the security consultant spoke, a contingent of 25 Blackwater operatives seated across the pool passed around a bottle of Jack Daniel's and two bottles of vodka donated by Bushmaster. As if on cue, one Blackwater man pulled out anacoustic guitar, and his two dozen comrades burst into a rockabilly ditty: "Goin' Down to the River with My Dirty Ol' Shotgun." Bushmaster, an empty bottle of Stolichnaya at his feet, grinned and tipped his hat.

Joshua Hammer is Newsweek's Jerusalem bureau chief and the author of A Season In Bethlehem: Unholy War in a Sacred Place, published by Free Press/Simon and Schuster.