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No company in our time has been as mysterious or as controversial as Blackwater. Founded by former Navy SEAL Erik Prince in 1997, it recruited special forces veterans and others with the skills and courage to take on the riskiest security jobs in the world. As its reputation grew, government demand for its services escalated, and Blackwater's men eventually completed nearly one hundred thousand missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both the Bush and Obama administrations found the company indispensible. It sounds like a classic startup success story, except for one problem: Blackwater has been demonized around the world. From uninformed news coverage to grossly distorted fictional portrayals, Blackwater employees have been smeared as mercenaries, profiteers, jackbooted thugs, and worse. Because of the secrecy requirements of Blackwater's contracts with the Pentagon, the State Department, and the CIA, Prince was unable to speak out when his company's opponents spread false information. But now he's able to tell the full and often shocking story of Blackwater's rise and fall. In Civilian Warriors, Prince pulls no punches and spares no details. He explains his original goal of building an elite center for military and law enforcement training. He recounts how the company shifted gears after 9/11. He honors our troops while challenging the Pentagon's top leadership. And he reveals why highly efficient private military contractors have been essential to running our armed forces, since long before Blackwater came along. Above all, Prince debunks myths about Blackwater that spread while he was forced to remain silent-myths that tarnished the memory of men who gave their lives for their country but never got the recognition they deserved.
He reveals new information about some of the biggest controversies of the War on Terror, including:
• The true story of the Nisour Square massacre in Baghdad.
• The actual details of Blackwater's so-called impunity in Iraq.
• The events leading up to the televised deaths of Blackwater contractors in Fallujah.
Prince doesn't pretend to be perfect, and he doesn't hide the sometimes painful details of his private life. But he has done a great public service by setting the record straight. His book reads like a thriller but is too improbable to be fiction.
- Sales Rank: #203365 in Books
- Published on: 2013-11-18
- Released on: 2013-11-18
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.25" h x 1.19" w x 6.25" l, 2.03 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 416 pages
Features
- Blackwater's side of the story from Erik Prince
Review
“Prince’s book belongs on the shelf next to the memoirs of the other Iraq and Afghanistan war chieftains…. we need Prince’s story to help us understand the history of the post- 9/11 wars and the myriad roles contractors played in these conflicts.”
—The Washington Post
About the Author
Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL, founded Blackwater in 1997. He served as its CEO until 2009 and its Chairman until 2010, when the company was sold. A native of Michigan, he now lives in Abu Dhabi, where he pursues a variety of business ventures.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction
December 6, 2003
AT ELEVEN P.M., EIGHTEEN CARS, WATCHED OVERHEAD BY U.S. ARMY APACHE and Kiowa Warrior helicopters, as well as by a pair of Blackwater helicopters, known as Little Birds, stormed out of the Green Zone. They turned onto a pockmarked roadway, drove past scorched traffic barriers and burned-out remains of vehicles once used for suicide bombings, and sped toward Baghdad International Airport. A motorcade escorting a head of state and the U.S. secretary of defense doesn’t travel light. Especially not on the “Highway of Death.”
That multilane stretch of asphalt connects Iraq’s largest international airport with the coalition-occupied Green Zone. For years, insurgents had effectively owned the five or so miles, ambushing convoys, diplomats, and American troops roughly once a day. So dangerous was the road that the State Department would ultimately outlaw its personnel from using it at all. And even before that, no one took that road without a plan.
But sometimes Paul Bremer wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Shortly before eleven p.m., Bremer, the United States presidential envoy and administrator in Iraq, had finished a meeting with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld outside the Green Zone. To the surprise of his Blackwater security detail, Bremer insisted he would see the secretary off at the airport.
Frank Gallagher, the barrel-chested head of the detail charged with keeping Bremer alive, quickly recalibrated travel plans. “Needless to say, some of the radio traffic back to me expressed grave concern about doing the mission and questioned my sanity,” Gallagher later remembered. “But I could see the look in [Bremer’s] eyes that this was not open for debate.”
The trip out was uneventful, but Gallagher sensed the worst was yet to come. The show of force had certainly tipped off the insurgents that something unusual was going on at the airport. And Bremer’s Blackwater motorcade would have to travel back to the Green Zone without the Pentagon detail that had accompanied Rumsfeld.
Once Bremer had said his good-byes to the secretary, the Coalition Provisional Authority leader and his right-hand man, Brian McCormack, climbed into the back of an up-armored Chevy Suburban SUV. Gallagher gathered his Blackwater team. “I explained that getting back to the Green Zone was going to be an adventure, and made sure that everyone was aware of the dangers,” he said. “We promised to have a cup of mead in Valhalla later that evening.”
Contractor humor.
Around eleven twenty p.m., Bremer’s pared-down convoy pulled away from the airport. The nimble Blackwater helicopters darted out front, providing top cover and scanning the roadway for threats. Gallagher, in the front passenger seat, wrapped his fingers around his matte black M4 carbine and stared out into the darkness that enveloped the roadway. Bremer and McCormack chatted about meeting schedules for the next day.
Suddenly, a call from a Blackwater bird above: “Be alert—a vehicle ahead is backing down an on-ramp onto the road.” The driver of Bremer’s SUV pulled into the far left lane, closest to the highway median. The lead and follow armored cars maneuvered to flank Bremer on the right.
There was a jarring crack against the bulletproof window on Gallagher’s door—what he later learned had been an AK-47 round that had marked him for death. And then, with a horrible flash of light, an improvised explosive device (IED) rocked the armored Humvee behind Bremer’s SUV, destroying the Humvee’s axle with a deafening blast.
Bremer’s driver swerved and battled to keep all four tires of the SUV on the ground. From the darkness, insurgents opened fire with AK-47s, rattling machine-gun fire off the right side of the car. There was nowhere to hide; flames and headlights provided just enough light to grasp what was unfolding. “We’d been ambushed, a highly organized, skillfully executed assassination attempt,” Bremer later wrote. “I swung around and looked back. The Suburban’s armored-glass rear window had been blown out by the IED. And now AK rounds were whipping through the open rectangle.”
“Tuna! Tuna! Tuna!” shouted the voice from the radio in Bremer’s SUV. It was Blackwater’s shift leader, limping along in the battered armored vehicle, calling out the code for the SUVs to drive through the ambush: Leave the Humvees, he was saying; get Bremer out of there now.
Contractors in the two helicopters above unloaded enough ammunition to repel the attack, while Blackwater’s drivers ignored the burns on their feet from the heat of the blast and stomped on the gas through the fog of smoke on the roadway. One of the trailing Suburbans pulled immediately alongside Bremer’s car, shielding it while speeding down the Highway of Death so close together that the cars’ sideview mirrors touched. “I asked for a casualty report and learned that two of our four vehicles were damaged, but limping along,” Gallagher said.
The stench of explosives lingered in the ambassador’s vehicle as they made it to the Green Zone. And soon, the Humvees and helicopters made it back as well.
Miraculously, no one was injured.
Since I first enrolled in the Naval Academy after high school, my life’s mission has been to serve God, serve my family, and serve the United States with honor and integrity. I did it first as a midshipman, then as a SEAL, then—when personal tragedy called me home from the service—as a contractor providing solutions for some of the thorniest problems on earth. The business of war has never been pretty, but I did my job legally, and I did it completely. Too well, perhaps, growing Blackwater until it became something resembling its own branch of the military and other government agencies.
During my dozen years as company CEO, we filled contracts for the State Department, the Department of Defense, the CIA, elite law enforcement agencies around the world, and many others. We did everything from protecting heads of state to delivering the mail. Blackwater expanded from a simple training center in the North Carolina swampland to encompass dozens of business divisions ranging from surveillance blimp development and construction to intelligence services to K9 operations. We became the ultimate tool in the war on terror, pushing a thousand contractors into Iraq and hundreds more into Afghanistan under the Republican Bush administration, then continuing a connection to Democratic president Barack Obama that was closer than he has ever wanted to admit. My company’s history is a proud tale of performance excellence and driven entrepreneurialism.
The public relations battle at home, however, was very different from a firefight on the front lines. Those conflicts my men and I were trained for. Stateside, though, thanks to endless waves of frivolous lawsuits, congressional hearings, and inaccurate press reports, Blackwater was slagged as the face of military evil. Gun-toting bullies for hire. We were branded mercenaries and murderers, and were made the whipping boy for the public’s fury over the Bush administration’s policies in the Middle East. After failing in their multiyear effort to win hearts and minds in Iraq, the bureaucrats decided a company that had repeatedly answered this government’s pleas for help was suddenly more valuable as a scapegoat. I was strung up so the politicians could feign indignation and pretend my men hadn’t done exactly what they had paid us handsomely to do.
There is much the government doesn’t want told about the work we did: the truth about our State Department–sanctioned operational tactics in Iraq, for instance, including our rules of engagement; or Blackwater’s crucial involvement with President Obama’s ever expanding terrorist-hunting tactics in Pakistan and beyond; or even the depth of government reliance on contractors today and the outsourcing of its war machine. Government agencies don’t want that spotlight being shone on our work, nor to applaud the greatest advantage Blackwater offered them: increased capability. They want increased deniability.
For years my company’s work was misconstrued and misrepresented. At the time, our government contracts explicitly barred Blackwater from responding to the public broadsides. We were never allowed to explain things such as how we secured the contracts we did, or what really happened during a bloody Baghdad shoot-out in September 2007, or the way shifting political tectonic plates crushed my company as an act of partisan theatrics. Or how the one job I loved more than any other was ripped away from me thanks to gross acts of professional negligence at the CIA.
So now I’m done keeping quiet. What’s been said before is only half the story—and I won’t sit idly by while the bureaucrats go after me so that everyone else can just go back to business as usual. The true history of Blackwater is exhilarating, rewarding, exasperating, and tragic. It’s the story of men taking bullets to protect the men who take all the credit, a tale of patriots whose names became known only when lawyers and politicians needed to blame somebody for something.
Our critics have spoken. Now it’s my turn.
Reprinted from CIVILIAN WARRIORS: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of the War on Terror by Erik Prince with permission of Portfolio, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright (c) BW Productions, LLC, 2013.
Most helpful customer reviews
131 of 142 people found the following review helpful.
Great story, great insight into one of Iraq's most closely guarded chapters from the man at the center of it
By Alex
Just typed up a couple pages, computer crashed, can't retrieve it, so here now goes a quick summary from the top of my head:
Erik Prince, real Man of Mystery speaks. Portrayed by some as archvillain, thought by others to be some kind of modern day Knight Templar, this real life Navy Seal and entrepreneur tells all about the founding of Blackwater and their role in Iraq.
The book starts off as a mini-biography of his dad, a man who started off as a salesman making forty cents an hour to founder of a billion-dollar company. Prince makes it clear that his father instilled in him the foundation that led to his later success.
It was as a Navy Seal in the Balkans that Prince first realized the need for private training facilities for special operations and highly focused training. Previously, Seals and their elite counterparts often had trouble getting sufficient training time on military training facilities that were over capacity from general use training by others.
Columbine becomes a turning point for the Blackwater team as law enforcement brutally realizes the need for more specialized training. Several years later Iraq explodes and the need for highly trained security teams draws Blackwater into its largest conflict and most controversial affair. While under government contract, Blackwater was forbidden to speak out publicly in its defense, especially against one high profile lawsuit that eventually tarnished its reputation almost beyond repair. Now free to speak, Prince effectively reveals The Other Side of the Story, and it's clear that Blackwater was often a scapegoat for others' ineptitude and politically driven agendas.
Many interesting stories are revealed, such as a huge ambush of the Polish Ambassor. Unlike Banghazi, this has a happy ending as Blackwater and Polish security valiantly band together and keep him alive. In a later ceremony honoring the fallen, the Polish ambassador gratefully credits Blackwater for his survival. Lesser known stories of BW's involvement providing security in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans are told. A sweet love story between him and his beloved wife Joan is interwoven in between them all.
The book is all meat and no filler whatsoever. Fact-dense with so many footnote links that it becomes hard to turn the page without accidentally touching one.
Perhaps the best summary comes from the book itself:
"There is much the government doesn't want told about the work we did: the truth about our State Department-sanctioned operational tactics in Iraq, including our rules of engagement; or Blackwater's involvement with President Obama's ever expanding terrorist-hunting tactics in Pakistan and beyond..."
113 of 126 people found the following review helpful.
Blackwater Wife
By EK
As the wife of someone who has worked for Blackwater for 9 years, I can attest that this book is 100% genuine. Finally a realistic and factual light has been shed on this company and it’s heroes. The men KIA and the men and women who risk their lives everyday for our country are getting the respect they deserve. It’s an informative read and I highly recommend it for anyone familiar with Blackwater and for anyone who would like to know the truth.
60 of 65 people found the following review helpful.
Eye opening and candid, well documented and troubling book
By J. M Ullman
well, like most people I had a negative opinion of Blackwater. First of all the name was ill chosen and reeks of evil. Second, of course, all I ever saw were the pics online and on TV of these massive guys cradling sub machine guns. Who were these mercenaries, I wondered?
Well, of course, like most people I was grossly under- and ill informed.
Prince has his flaws, of course, let's not be naive. My wife passed away from cancer too but i never was unfaithful. Could I understand why he was? Maybe? Maybe not. But at least he owns it. This was a book about blackwater, not about him, and he could have tried to cover up his foibles. He briefly mentions his family life throughout the book perhaps to show some of his humanity. I found him likeable and candid, and eminently believable.
He supports almost everything he says with documentation, and refutes most critics with equally valid documentation - e.g. when the government tries to accuse him of overcharging them. He contends they actually under bid most of the competition (which still is there, by the way - Triple Canopy, for example. Why isn't Hillary and Henry after them.?) and can prove it.
As far as Blackwater he does an excellent job explaining how this type of contractor is a time honored factor in warfare. Oddly most of their work was security, as opposed to combat. Our own nation was founded with the help of flat out mercenaries - LaFayette, von Steuben, etc. In addition, we fought against mercenaries - the Hessians. And he shows beautifully how biased and grotesquely ignorant, naive, and opportunistic people like Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and Henry Waxman are. The fact that Obama still employed Blackwater, the fact that Blackwater RESCUED Biden, Hagel and Kerry from the Hindu Kush and they were too stupid or naive to realize it wasn't the Army....the fact that lawyers tried to destroy them and never prevailed....were all eye opening examples of gross hypocrisy.
I overall thought it was an excellent book and the thing that bothered me the most was the subplot - the fact that our military is so bloated, so awash in regulations, bureaucracy, compliance, and so unable themselves to field a complete army - they NEEDED these type of contractors. For example, historically he says that it used to be for every 10 soldiers/military they needed 1 contractor. By the present day in Iraq, it is one contractor for each soldier. And part of that is the fact that the supposed Obama drawdown in Iraq is actually, like much else in this fraudulent administration - really isn't, because every soldier who is leaving Iraq is being replaced by....a contractor! So the amount of Americans or American advisors and contractors is staying the same. The number isn't changing; just that they are hired help instead of Army, Navy, Marine or AirForce. The government, army and State department simply do not have the personnel to do what they need to do. Partially this is because they are spread thin. Partially because they are inefficient. Partially because they are grossly (and willingly, btw) encumbered by absurd rules - rules of engagement in particular, but also rules about staffing, behavior, compliance, etc. What I took away from this is that our great army isn't so great. It is small and constrained by idiots - witness the entire idiocy of the Fort Hood shooter trial. Our soldiers are terrific but they are working for politicians, even their officers (if you don't believe me, read Honor and Betrayal next). And as a result, contractors have to step in and fill the gaps. They can do it faster, better, and more efficiently. That thin military....with nations like China and Mexico, North Korea and a resurgent Russia....who don't have the same rules....augurs not well for us.
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