Not even Jet knows the truth.
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.