This book begins with an explosive Hollywoodesque opening – a convoy of 4 large armoured vehicles belonging to Blackwater rolling through the streets of downtown Baghdad, stopping all other street traffic and raising tension with the heavy weaponry pointing everywhere as they protect and escort US VIPs out of their heavily fortified Green Zone.
The date, 16 September 2007 and the time, 12.08pm.
Iraqi police on duty scramble to stop traffic to make way for their American ‘liberators’. The convoy does a sudden u-turn and comes to an abrupt halt. A Blackwater operative manning one of the roof mounted heacy machine guns opens fire into the crowd of cars and people.
Total pandemonium ensues. A woman screams from inside a car. Her son, the driver, is in her arms, all covered in blood from a bullet to the forehead which leaves half his head gone.
Bullet casings continue to rain down from the armoured vehicles as another Blackwater gunner emerges and starts to shoot also. More pedestrians and drivers are shot. Cars explode and windscreens shatter. The grieving mother craddling her dead son is also shot. An Iraqi police officer at the scene later recalls witnessing her head explode and parts of it flying past him.
The explosion of smoke bombs to cover their exit from the area signal finally ended the carnage. 15 cars destroyed and 16 innocent Iraqies – men, women and children, dead. 2 burnt beyond recognition. The final tally of what came to be known as the Nisour Square Massacre.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nur al-Maliki called Blackwater’s act “criminal” and said that the Iraqi Government had had enough of the endless lethal incidents involving Blackwater operatives. This anger however, would be met by a standard US response in other Blackwater incidents – indifference, stonewalling and political foot-dragging in investigating and bringing the perpetrators to justice.
It pays to have friends in high places and Scahill reveals the intricate network of powerful allies and lobbyists Blackwater USA fostered and paid to protect its interests in the corridors of power. With the Nisour Square Massacre as the backdrop, Scahill launches into a comprehensive piece about the founder of Blackwater, Erik Prince and his privileged family history, his time as a Navy SEAL and his rise to prominence inside Prince Corporation – the company founded by Prince’s father, Edgar Prince – whose right-wing Chrisian values guided Prince Corporation’s policies and political causes that it supported.
This kind of upbringing would later be reflected in Erik Prince’s Blackwater USA (later Blackwater Worldwide), shaped as a self-righteous quasi-religious movement embarking on mercenary missions in the Middle East with the zeal of a Christian Crusader, with a narrow Christian worldview – seeing each mission not solely about protecting Amercian VIPs and their allies, but primarily about advancing the greater Amercian neo-conservative, far right Christian beliefs at that time being advocated by (and in sync with) the Bush Doctrine of actively promoting (where necessary, regime change courtesy of the US military and the ‘Coalition of the Willing’) liberal democracy around the world (notably Iraq and Afghanistan).
Scahill investigates the origins of Blackwater – how it was created as a response to, and evolved with the pressing need in America to retrain its law enforcement agencies and armed services with the emergence of the likes of Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing or the Columbine High School massacre and September 11, 2001. The book shows how Blackwater slowly entrenched itself into the American military industrial complex, revolutionising the way the Government outsourced military services at a scale never seen before. Private corporations such as KBR (Kellogg, Brown & Root), DynCorp, Halliburton are all now the indispensable private contractor component in all recent American military foreign expeditions.
Prince describes this as inevitable as Governments the world over strive for leaner and meaner fighting forces – faster, better and cheaper. The military is not designed to be cost effective, and Prince often sums it up by posing this question -
” When you ship overnight, do you use the postal service or do you use FedEx? Our corporate goal is to do for the national security apparatus what FedEx did to the postal service.”
The book also highlights the ups and downs of Blackwater, beginning with the Nisour Square massacre and the subsequent vilification of Blackwater and other private security contractors in the media and by some quarters within the US Government and its revival in the court of public opinion after the ambush, mutilation and killing of its 4 of its personnel in Fallujah, allowing for an image ‘make-over’ with American propaganda painting the death of the 4 dead contractors as gruesome attacks on heroic ‘civilian’ personnel on a “humanitarian mission”, a status often used very flexibly by Blackwater when explaining that it does not come under the purview of the military (in cases where they violate the terms of their service or from their assigned duties in supporting the military) – and in cases where its denouncers attempt to sue it through civilian courts, Blackwater attempts to revert to and obtain legal immunity from its other status as a component of the “US Total Force” – a status that Blackwater argues accords it a position within the many branches of the US Military, that is, the private contractor branch.
There are interviews with the families and colleagues of the murdered Blackwater operatives, bringing to light the operational failure on the day of the ambush, how personnel were often sent out into the field with less than sufficient armour and other hardware as cost and profit are given priority over the safety of its staff; a trend that is increasing by the day as private security corporations such as Blackwater grow and start to behave like the profit-driven corporations that they truly are despite the occasional facade of patriotism and altruism that its founders like to put up publicly.
The signs are ominous – as companies like Blackwater expand and further entrench their presence in US military deployments, its army of private contractors are slowly moving to the fore and taking over more and more roles traditionally played by regular armed forces. Its obscure legal status – whether a civilian entity or a branch of the US military – allows it to utilize jurisdictional arbitrage to hinder attempts to bring it to account for its many trangressions. It becomes, in the end, the true coalition of the willing – voluntary, profit-driven mercenaries – who operate and are accountable to no one except their principals.
My verdict? 4 out of 5. This is a brilliant piece of investigative work, offering an in-depth discussion of the origins of Blackwater and similar corporations, the scandals and incidents that have defined it and the realpolitik it indulges in – lobbyists and spin doctors, the hiring of former top government officials to sit on its Board and head its management – to show that it’s going to be a permanent feature (and slowly, a substitute for) of the US fighting forces and how they will operate now and in the future.
Back in the 1990s when I was a law student, I spent an inordinate amount of time playing computer games at the expense of my studies. It was not unusual for me to play Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon for up to 12 hours non-stop, skipping meals and very often also, university lectures.
I would spend my waking hours playing these games and in my hours of slumber fantasizing about being a member of such a military team on special missions, sneaking around with a sniper rifle and taking out the enemy indiscriminately.
If, like me, you enjoy these games and love watching documentaries about special forces missions, then you will find Andy McNab’s Bravo Two Zero very appealing. It is a raw, fast-paced and true account of a mission McNab was in during his time as a member of the elite British SAS (Special Air Service) at the time of the first Gulf War.
The book reads like a short autobiography of McNab, starting with his abandonment as a baby – left on the steps of a hospital (“I had never known my real mother, though I always imagined that whoever she was, she must have wanted the best for me: the carrier bag I was found in when she left me on the steps of Guy’s Hospital came from Harrod’s“) to his adoption and later on his rebellious teenage years and his run-ins with the law over petty crimes that led to his signing up with the army. Caught walking out of a house they had broken into, McNab and two other men were put into a remand hostel while waiting to be produced in court – “I hated being locked and swore that if I got away with it I’d never let it happen again. I knew deep down that I’d have to do something pretty decisive or I’d end up spending my entire life in Peckham, fucking about and getting fucked up. The army seemed a good way out. My brother had enjoyed it, so why not me?”
And so began his military career, starting as an infantryman in the Royal Green Jackets with postings to Gibraltar and then Northern Ireland where he saw action against the IRA. In time, McNab came to hear of the SAS (“I felt deprived that the Green Jackets had not been sent to the Falklands. Everytime there was some action, it seemed to me, the SAS were involved. I wanted some of that – what was the point of being in the infantry if I didn’t?)
His first attempt at the SAS Selection failed in 1983. In 1984, McNab tried again. Bravo Two Zero gives an account of the training and selection process that ‘entrants’ have to go through – a 4-week endurance phase, a 4-month training period which includes a spell in the jungle in Asia and lastly a Combat Survival course. Candidates are taught survival skills for 2 weeks and then sent in to see a doctor. “He puts a finger up your arse to check for Mars bars, and you’re turned loose on the Black Mountains dressed in Second World War battledress trousers and shirt, a greatcoat with no buttons, and boots with no laces. The hunter force was a company of Guardsmen in helicopters. Each man was given the incentive of two weeks’ leave if he made a capture.”
What followed was a simulated capture and interrogation module, weeks of weapons training and then parachute training before finally, the handing over of the famous sand-coloured beret with its winged dagger and motto “Who Dares Wins”.
The moment of truth came in January 1991, when together with 7 other men in his team codenamed Bravo Two Zero, McNab was inserted by helicopter behind enemy lines in Iraq and tasked with taking out Scud missiles that were being launched by Saddam’s army at Israel to provoke a counter-attack (and thereby stoking Arab anger in the hopes of splitting the Coalition forces spearheaded by the US).
Beset by poor intelligence from the very beginning, McNab and his men had inadvertently been dropped in an area teeming with Iraqi troops. And coupled with inter alia communication problems, Bravo Two Zero’s attempt to exfiltrate was doomed. And from bad to worse, the squad’s planned rendezvous with their helicopter did not materialise because the pilot fell sick on the way to the pick up zone and was forced to turn back. Having stumbled upon an Iraqi shepherd and thinking that their mission was compromised, they decided to abort and return. But attempts to contact their base and Coalition aircraft in the sky all failed. This left them with no choice but to try to get to the Syrian side of the border on foot.
Along the way, there are comedic encounters with shepherds and also deadly skirmishes with Iraqi patrols. To read about how the squad trekked through the desert, evading the enemy and the survival tactics they employed is both inspiring and amazing.
But the most thrilling part of the book is undoubtedly McNab’s account of what happened after his capture by the Iraqis, his transfer to different Iraqi units; passed along to undergo the brutal interrogation and torture techniques used by Iraqi intelligence officers at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison – some of whom, as McNab discovered, were trained by the British government at Sandhurst. You have to respect the man for holding out mentally against his captors’ attempts to break into his mind, and these violent attempts are all described vividly and in detail. Definitely, not something those computer games can simulate.
In the end, McNab was handed over to the Red Cross and made his way home. Out of the 8 members of Bravo Two Zero, 5 survived. McNab went on to serve and become Britain’s most highly decorated serving soldier when he left the SAS in February 1993. As is also the case with one of his fellow squad members, Chris Ryan, McNab (which is actually a pseudonym) subsequently launched a successful literary career especially with his Nick Stone action hero series (See my previous review of McNab’s “Crossfire“).
I give this one a 3 out of 5.
Side notes (source: Wikipedia):
- ITV produced a TV film version of Ryan’s novel also titled The One That Got Away, in 1996. The film starred Paul McGann as ‘Ryan’, and was directed by Paul Greengrass, director of the films United 93 and Bloody Sunday.
- The BBC produced a TV film version of McNab’s novel, also titled Bravo Two Zero, in 1998. The film starred Sean Bean as ‘McNab’ and was directed by Tom Clegg. In addition to using all of McNab’s characters’ pseudonyms, the names of the three deceased patrol members, Phillips, Consiglio and Lane were also changed for the film.
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