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