But a few weeks before Easter, on the morning of March 30, Zovko and Batalona got teamed up with another Blackwater contractor, thirty-eight-year-old Mike Teague from Tennessee, a former member of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, the “Night Stalkers.” Known as “Ice Man” to his friends, Teague was a twelve-year Army veteran who had been in Panama and Grenada before becoming a reservist.29 Most recently, he’d won a Bronze Star for his time in Afghanistan after 9/11.30 After Afghanistan, he returned to the States and took a low-paying security job before joining up for more lucrative work with Blackwater in Iraq.31 “This was the kind of work Mike loved,” his friend John Menische told Time magazine. “He was a soldier and a warrior.”32 That day in Iraq, Teague had sent an e-mail to a friend, saying he loved Iraq and the excitement of his new six-figure-salary job.33 The fourth member of this hodgepodge team was a face Zovko and Batalona had never seen in Baghdad, an ex-SEAL named Scott Helvenston. Their assignment was to escort some trucks to pick up kitchen equipment near Fallujah and then drop it off at a military base.34 It was one of the first missions under Blackwater’s new contract to provide security for ESS’s catering convoys. Before the mission, Batalona complained to a friend that the group had never worked together.35 On top of that, they were sent off that morning short two men, who were allegedly held back for clerical duties at the Blackwater compound.36 Then, there were the vehicles. Instead of armored trucks, the men were provided with two jeeps that had been recently equipped with a single improvised steel plate in the back .37
On March 30, 2004, Scott Helvenston’s first real workday in Iraq, he found himself behind the wheel of a red Mitsubishi Pajero jeep, speeding through the eerie, empty desert of western Iraq. Next to him was Teague. Helvenston had just met the others a day earlier—not the ideal procedure for men about to deploy to one of the most dangerous areas in the world. Following close behind the red jeep, hulky Jerry Zovko was at the wheel of a black Pajero; next to him was Batalona—at forty-eight, the oldest of the group. The mission they were on that day had nothing to do with Paul Bremer or diplomatic security. They literally were putting their lives on the line for some forks and spoons and pots and pans. The men, though, weren’t getting paid $600 a day to set the priorities or to question the bigger picture, just to make sure the job got done right and that their “noun” of the moment was protected. Today it’s kitchen equipment; tomorrow it’s the Ambassador.
In retrospect, there were all sorts of reasons those four men shouldn’t have gone on that mission. For one, they were shorted two guys. The CIA and State Department say they would never send just four men on a mission into the hostile territory these guys were heading into—six is the minimum. The missing man in each vehicle would have been wielding a heavy SAW machine gun with a 180-degree scope to mow down any attacker, especially from behind. “I am a designated driver so I am pretty dependent on my buds to pick up field of fire,” Helvenston had e-mailed to his ex-wife, Tricia, a few days before he set off for Fallujah.38 Without the third man, that meant the passenger had to navigate and defend from attacks pretty much alone. The men should have been in better-secured vehicles than SUVs, which are widely referred to as “bullet magnets” in Iraq because of their wide use by foreign contractors.39 The men also were supposed to be able to do a pre-operation intelligence assessment and review the threat level along the route they’d be traveling, but the mission was reportedly pulled together too fast. To top it all off, Helvenston was allegedly sent out that day without a proper map of the dangerous area into which he would be driving.40 It’s easy to look back and say the four men could have said, “No way, screw this, we’re not going.” After all, they were not active military and would not have faced a court-martial for disobeying orders. In the end, all they had to lose in refusing to go was their reputations and possibly their paychecks. “We just shouldn’t have gone [on the mission],” Helvenston’s friend and former Blackwater employee Kathy Potter told the News and Observer. “But these guys are go-getters, and they’ll make do with what they get.”41
So off they went into the quiet of the western Iraqi desert. It’s hard to imagine that the men didn’t talk about the short stick they seemed to have drawn. Going anywhere near Fallujah in those days was scary business for non-Iraqis, and they didn’t need any intel to know it. The U.S. Marines were in the midst of a major offensive in the city, and nobody from the military in their right mind would have headed through Fallujah with only four men and without serious firepower. Blackwater management was very well aware of this. In its own contract with ESS, Blackwater laid it out, recognizing that with “the current threat in the Iraqi theater of operations as evidenced by the recent incidents against civilian entities in Fallujah, Ar Ramadi, Al Taji and Al Hillah, there are areas in Iraq that will require a minimum of three Security Personnel per vehicle. The current and foreseeable future threat will remain consistent and dangerous. Therefore, to provide tactically sound and fully mission capable Protective Security Details, the minimum team size is six operators.”42 [Emphasis added.]
In the immediate days preceding this particular mission, the situation in Fallujah was already spiraling out of control. U.S. soldiers had been ambushed in the city, civilians had been killed, and word was getting around that “the city of mosques” was quickly becoming the city of resistance. A day before the four Blackwater men set off for Fallujah, a Marine convoy near the city had hit an improvised explosive device. Within moments resistance fighters had moved in on the vehicle, opening fire with AK-47s, killing a Marine and wounding two others.43 The next morning, as Helvenston and the others headed to Fallujah, the Marines shut down the main highway from the city to Baghdad.44 Nine Marines had died in the past eleven days around the city. After months of relative calm, a giant was rising from the rubble of “Shock and Awe,” and Scott Helvenston and the other three Blackwater contractors would soon find themselves in the middle of it all.