Table of Contents
FOR DAD AND WILL
Im not the guy to run with
Cos Ill throw you off the line
Ill break you and destroy you
Given time
The Hollies, King Midas in Reverse
PROLOGUE ON THE BORDER
THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT ORIGINAL SIN.
In the early days of the Iraq war, there werent enough troops. As the situation deteriorated, a parallel army formed on the margins of the war: tens of thousands of armed men, invisible in plain sight, doing the jobs that couldnt be done because there werent enough troops. The armed men traveled in convoys of multicolored pickups, modified with armor and stockpiled with belt-fed machine guns, frag grenades, flash-bangs, smoke, even shoulder-fired missiles. They wore bulletproof vests over their uniformsusually khakis and polo shirts with the company logoand covered their bodies in mosaics of tattoos. They protected everything from the U.S. ambassador and American generals to shipments of Frappuccino bound for Baghdads Green Zone. They referred to each other by their radio call signsShrek, Craftsman, Tequila, Goatnever bothering to learn each others names.
The armed men got to kill Iraqis, and the Iraqis got to kill them. It was U.S. government policy.
I MEAN, THERES NO FUCKIN WAY IM GONNA LET them cut my head off on the Internet, said Josh.
He was twenty-three-years old and still looked like a marine, his dirty blond hair sheared down to his pink scalp. A tattoo swirled around his left forearm in meticulous cursive, almost like a Hall-mark card: The unwanted, doing the unforgivable, for the ungrateful. We were sitting on the border in the black Chevy Avalanche, me and the two mercs, blasting the air conditioning, waiting to cross into Iraq. The two of them were telling me about the death pact they had made. As death pacts go, there wasnt much to it. If they were about to be kidnapped, the other merc, whose name was Jon Cot, was to put a bullet in Joshs head with his Glock, then turn the gun on himself.
Sounds reasonable, I told them, and it did.
Cot, an ex-army paratrooper, hadnt exactly dropped out of the University of Florida, where he had been an unlikely accounting major. It was more like a well-paid sabbatical. He said he was planning to go back to school in the spring, this time as an exercise physiology major. He was clean cut, well built, articulate, relentlessly cheerful; you could easily picture him up on a billboard wearing a milk mustache. Im the kind of kid who has to have fun no matter what Im doing, he would say. One of the fun things that Cot liked to do was drive around Baghdad, where most Americans tried to melt into the floorboards, and blast Led Zeppelin and the Notorius B.I.G. through the open window while rocking back and forth in his seat, fingers splayed. Cot was also something of a health nut. On the front seat, he carried canned peaches and assorted nuts, along with his locked and loaded AK-47 and a dogeared copy of The Insiders Encyclopedia on How to Build Muscle and Might. His name was pronounced KOH-tay, and everyone called him that. As in, Okaaay, Cot.
His friend Josh Munns was serious business; in 2004, he had fought his way into Fallujah with a marine sniper platoon. A year later, he found himself installing swimming pools in Redding, California, bored out of his mind. I need something to shock my system to remind myself Im still alive, he explained. That was one of the reasons he came back to Iraq. Another was the three-story fixer-upper he had just bought back in Redding with his fianc. Her name was Jackie, just like his mom. Once a month, he took his paycheck$7,000 in Kuwaiti dinars stuffed into a white envelopeto a Kuwait City exchange house, which then transferred the money into his California bank account.
It was about 9:30 A.M., early November 2006, and everything shimmered in the heat. The border was a moonscape of rocks and baked earth, the sun washed out by dust and diesel fumes spewing from the semis moving north. We were on our way to Basra, a once-peaceful city that now evoked the same dark imagery as other infamous Iraqi slaughterhouses, like Ramadi and the Triangle of Death. None of us wanted to go. The day before, insurgents had taken out three mercs from another company. The U.S. military, which catalogued troop fatalities by more than thirty potential causes, didnt count the mercs among the dead. The attack wasnt on the newsthey almost never were, like they had never happened. But everyone was talking about it, calculating the new odds. I hate that place, one of the mercs kept saying. I hate that fucking place.
Our team leader, John Young, was a forty-four-year-old former carpenter and U.S. Army veteran from Lees Summit, Missouri. He was small and wiry, maybe five foot seven. He shaved his head where he hadnt already gone bald, making it look like his sky blue eyes were sinking back into his head. Young had been in Iraq for nearly two years. One of his proudest possessions was a black flak jacket, frayed at the collar from where a bullet had come out of nowhere one afternoon, slamming him into the steering wheel and nearly ripping through his neck. The company displayed the tattered vest on a card table in the lobby back at headquarters, like a trophy won by the company softball team. Young knew that he wasnt normal, but he seemed to have come to terms with it. I may be fucked up, but at least if Im talking about it I know Im fucked up, and that justifies my fuckedupedness, he told me, smiling. And Im okay with that today. He couldnt bring himself to leave Iraq. This is me, he would say. This is me.
Cot rolled down his window.
Hey, Young said. Do you guys know the way?
There was a pause, as full and pregnant as the Mesopotamian sun. Cot and Josh shot glances at one another.
Nooooo, Cot said, his voice rising. Dont you?
Young stammered something about Harrys route, something about well figure it out and MapQuest and I thought you guys knew the way.
I wondered if Id heard that right. Did he say MapQuest?
Well talk about it later, Young said finally, turning to walk away.
Josh was fuming.
Why the fuck am I riding point? he snapped at Cot. I dont know where were going.
Cot chuckled.
Yeah, its not the getting hit part that bothers me, said Josh. Its the getting lost and getting hung from a bridge part that bothers me.
ORIGINAL SIN.
A government launches a preemptive war predicated on a myth. Insurgents rise up to confront the occupiers. Lacking a sufficient fighting force, not to mention political will, the government rents itself a private army, piece by piece. Hundreds of companies form overnight, like mushrooms after a rainstorm, some with boards of directors and glass offices, others that are scarcely more than armed gangs. The companies hire from a vast pool of veterans and ex-cops, adrenaline junkies, escapees from the rat race, the patriotic, the bankrupt, the greedy, the terminally and perpetually bored. They hire Americans and Brits, South Africans and Aussies, Fijians and Gurkhas. Peruvians who fought the Shining Path. Colombians fresh from the drug wars. They give them weapons (although many bring their own) and turn them loose on an arid battlefield the size of California, without rules, without laws, with little to guide them except their conscience.
