As Vigilant Resolve continued to exact a deadly toll on the people of Fallujah, Iraqis in the U.S.-created security force began deserting their posts; some joined the resistance to the siege, attacking U.S. forces around the city. “In all, as many as one in four of the new Iraqi army, civil defense, police, and other security forces quit in those days, changed sides, or stopped working,” according to Anthony Shadid.61 When the United States attempted hastily to hand over “responsibility” for Fallujah to an Iraqi force, some 800 AK-47 assault rifles, twenty-seven pickup trucks, and fifty radios the Marines gave the brigade ended up in the hands of the resistance.62 Lt. Gen. James Conway would later admit, “When we were told to attack Fallujah, I think we certainly increased the level of animosity that existed.”63 In the midst of a worsening public relations disaster for the United States, Kimmitt said, “I would argue that the collective punishment on the people of Fallujah is those terrorists, those cowards who hunker down inside mosques and hospitals and schools, and use the women and children as shields to hide against the Marines, who are just trying to bring liberation from those cowards inside the city of Fallujah.”64 For most of the world, though, it was the United States that was responsible for the “collective punishment”—a phrase in Arabic that evokes images of the Israeli policy against Palestine—of the people of Fallujah. In fact, those were the exact words that the UN envoy to Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi, used when he declared, “Collective punishment is certainly unacceptable, and the siege of the city is absolutely unacceptable.” 65 Brahimi asked, “When you surround a city, you bomb the city, when people cannot go to hospital, what name do you have for that?”66
In the end, perhaps as many as eight hundred Iraqis died as a result of the first of what would be several sieges of Fallujah.67 Tens of thousands of civilians fled their homes, and the city was razed. And yet the United States failed to crush Fallujah. Far from asserting U.S. supremacy in Iraq, Fallujah demonstrated that guerrilla tactics were effective against the occupiers. “Fallujah, the small city at the heart of the Sunni Arab insurrection, was considered something of a hillbilly place by other Sunni in Iraq,” wrote veteran Middle East correspondent Patrick Cockburn in a dispatch from Iraq in late April. “It was seen as Islamic, tribal and closely connected to the former regime. The number of guerrillas probably totaled no more than 400 out of a population of 300,000. But by assaulting a whole city, as if it was Verdun or Stalingrad, the US Marines have managed to turn it into a nationalist symbol.”68
Testifying before Congress on April 20, Gen. Richard Myers, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, defended the operation. “As you remember, we went in because of the atrocities on the Blackwater security personnel, the four personnel that were killed and later burned, and then hung on the bridge. We went in because we had to and to find the perpetrators. And what we found was a huge rat’s nest, that is still festering today—needs to be dealt with.”69 The April siege of Fallujah would be followed a few months later, in November 2004, by an even greater onslaught that would bring hundreds more Iraqi deaths, force tens of thousands of people from their homes, and further enrage the country. In all, U.S. forces carried out nearly seven hundred airstrikes, damaging or destroying eighteen thousand of Fallujah’s thirty-nine thousand buildings.70 Approximately 150 U.S. soldiers were killed in the operations. Meanwhile, the “perpetrators” of the Blackwater ambush “were never found,”71 as political and military officials had vowed, further underscoring the vengeful nature of the U.S. slaughter in Fallujah. The Marines renamed the infamous bridge “Blackwater Bridge,” and someone wrote in English in black marker on one of its beams: “This is for the Americans of Blackwater that were murdered here in 2004, Semper Fidelis P.S. Fuck You.”72 Journalist Dahr Jamail later concluded, “[I]n April of 2004, as a city was invaded and its residents were fleeing, hiding, or being massacred, there was considerable public awareness in the United States of human beings whose bodies had been mutilated in Iraq, thanks to our news media. But among thousands of references to mutilation in that month alone, we have yet to find one related to anything that happened after March 31… [M]utilation is something that happens to Blackwater-hired mercs and other professional, American killers, not to Iraqi babies with misplaced heads.”73
CHAPTER ELEVEN
MR. PRINCE GOES TO WASHINGTON
BEFORE THE invasion of Iraq, when most people heard the term “civilian contractors,” they didn’t immediately conjure up images of men with guns and bulletproof vests riding around a hellhole in jeeps. They thought of construction workers. This was also true for the families of many private soldiers deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their loved ones were not “civilian contractors,” in their minds but were often thought of and referred to in family discussions as “Special Forces” or being “with the military.” Their actual employer or title was irrelevant because what they were doing in Iraq or Afghanistan was what they had always done—they were fighting for their country. The parents of one Blackwater contractor killed in Iraq said it was their son’s “deep sense of patriotism and his abiding Christian faith that led him to work in Iraq,”1 a common sentiment in the private military community. So on March 31, 2004, when news began to reach the United States that four “civilian contractors” had been ambushed in Fallujah, several of the men’s families didn’t draw any kind of connection. After all, their loved ones were not civilians—they were military. In Ohio, Danica Zovko, Jerry’s mother, heard the news on the radio that “American contractors” had been killed.2 After she saw the images coming out of Fallujah, she actually wrote her son an e-mail, telling him to be carefuclass="underline" “They’re killing people in Iraq just like Somalia.”3
Katy Helvenston-Wettengel, Scott’s mother, was working at her home office in Leesburg, Florida, with the television on behind her.4 “I was sitting here at my desk, doing research, and I had CNN on in the background,” she recalled. “And the noon news just all of a sudden caught my attention, and I looked over there and I saw this burning vehicle and I thought, ‘Oh, my God.’” It didn’t cross her mind at the time that the footage she was watching was her own son’s gruesome death. “When they said contractors, I was thinking construction workers working on pipelines or something. I changed the channel because I thought, This is just getting insane, I can’t watch this anymore.” Helvenston-Wettengel went on with her work, but then she heard the men described on the news as “security contractors,” which made her nervous. “I said, ‘My God, Scotty is a security contractor, but he’s not in Fallujah. He’s protecting Paul Bremer in Baghdad,’” she recalled. “I called my other son, Jason, and he told me, ‘Mom, you worry too much.’” Anyway, she reasoned, her son had just arrived in Iraq a few days earlier. “He wasn’t even supposed to be on any missions,” she said. Helvenston-Wettengel went out that afternoon to a meeting, and when she returned home at seven o’clock that night, her answering machine was blinking like crazy: eighteen new messages. “The first four were from Jason, saying, ‘Mom, it was Blackwater. They were Blackwater guys that got ambushed.’” Helvenston-Wettengel called Blackwater headquarters and got a woman on the other line. “This is Katy Helvenston, Scotty’s mom,” she said. “Is Scotty all right?” The Blackwater representative said she didn’t know. “It’s been twelve hours!” Helvenston-Wettengel exclaimed. “What do you mean you don’t know?” She said the Blackwater representative told her that the company was in the process of doing a sort of “reverse 911” with its contractors in the field in Iraq. “She said there were about 400 of them and that 250 had checked in. I asked if Scotty was one of those and the woman said, ‘No.’” Helvenston-Wettengel said she called Blackwater back every hour, desperate for any information. In the meantime, she found Fallujah on a map and realized that it wasn’t that far from Baghdad. By midnight, she knew in her heart that her son was dead. “Scotty had been so good about calling me and e-mailing me, and I kept thinking, He would have called me and let me know he was OK, because he knew how worried I was,” she recalled. “I just knew it.”