In 1998, Zovko headed for the relatively unknown (to the public) world of private security. He was hired by one of the largest of these companies, DynCorp, and was stationed in the Arab Gulf nation of Qatar, working at the U.S. Embassy, where he learned Arabic. That assignment grew into a career as a soldier for hire. He traveled a lot and did a stint in the United Arab Emirates. Whenever Danica Zovko would ask her son about what exactly he was doing in all of these exotic places, he would always tell his mother the same thing. “He would tell me he was just taking care of the Embassy and working in the kitchen. But then, all his life in the military—a good seven years—he was always in the kitchen,” she recalls with a doubtful tone. “Now I found out that he wasn’t really in the kitchen.” When the occupation of Iraq took hold, Zovko took a job, in late-August 2003, with the Virginia-based Military Professional Resources Incorporated, training the new Iraqi army. A few months before he left for Iraq, his mother had asked him, “Would you want to be a hired gun or something like that? Why would you put your life in danger for someone else?” He said, “Mom, I’m not. I’m going to train the Iraqis.” The job was short-lived, though, as many Iraqi recruits never returned after a Ramadan break a couple of months later. So Zovko was picked up by Blackwater, which was in the midst of its aggressive recruitment drive for Iraq deployment. It was a good gig for Zovko, especially because his buddy Wes Batalona, a tough former Army Ranger from Hawaii who had been in Panama in 1989 and Somalia in 1993, was by his side.
27
The two had hit it off during their brief stint training the Iraqi army, and Batalona was ultimately drawn back to Iraq in February 2004 by Zovko to work with Blackwater after the training job fell apart.
28
“Around that time, Jerry called me,” remembers his mother. “He was serious. He said I needed to write something down. I asked, ‘What is it?’ He said it was the number of the insurance policy, and I told him, ‘If I need to write down an insurance policy number, then you need to get your you-know-what home.’ And I hung up on him.” Danica Zovko instructed her other son, Tom, to tell Jerry the same if he called. “That was the first time we’d ever argued with Jerry or ever asked him to come home. He did not tell me he was working for Blackwater,” Danica says. The next time Jerry called, “he promised my husband and me that he would be there for Easter dinner, that we’d go to church together and that he’d take over the family business.”
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.
As luck would have it (or perhaps because they didn’t have a map), on the night of March 30, Helvenston and the three others got lost. They drove around for a while in the Sunni Triangle before making contact with the U.S. military in the area. They made their way to a Marine base that had recently been renamed Camp Fallujah and arranged to spend the night before heading off. It is well-known in Iraq that a lot of active-duty soldiers harbor resentment toward mercenaries. Most soldiers knew that guys like Helvenston and the other three were making in a day what an average grunt makes in a week. So it isn’t surprising that the Blackwater men wouldn’t have exactly been guests of honor at the base. Still, the four men crashed there and ate alongside the troops. One Marine officer from the base angrily called the men “cowboys” and said the Blackwater men refused to inform the commanders—or anyone on the base for that matter—about the nature of their mission.
45
According to a 2007 Congressional investigation, KBR personnel at Camp Fallujah reported that “the Blackwater personnel seemed disorganized and unaware of the potential risk in traveling through the city of Fallujah. One of the KBR contractors said he felt that ‘the mission that they were on was hurriedly put together and that they were not prepared.’”
46
The KBR contractors told Congressional investigators that they gave the Blackwater men “multiple warnings to avoid driving directly through Fallujah and informing them that there were ambushes occurring there. After one warning, one of the Blackwater personnel said that they would not go through Fallujah. After a different warning, however, the response of the Blackwater personnel was that ‘they would see how it went when they got out there.’ According to one KBR contractor, ‘It almost felt like they were being pressured to get there and get there as quickly as possible.’”
47
At some point before they set off the next morning, Helvenston called his mother, who said she was already sick with worry about her son being over there. But the fact that he hadn’t called in days made her even more concerned. It was the middle of the night back in Leesburg, Florida, and the ringer was off on his mother’s phone, so Helvenston left a message:
Everything’s fine mom. Please don’t worry. I’m gonna be home soon. I’m gonna take care of you
.
A short while later, Scott Helvenston was behind the wheel of the Pajero driving down Highway 10, heading straight for perhaps the most dangerous city in the world in which four lightly armed CIA-looking Americans wearing wraparound sunglasses could find themselves. It was about 9:30 a.m., and the city of mosques was awake and waiting.
The main drag through Fallujah is a congested strip, lined with restaurants, cafes,
souks,
and lots of people milling around. At some point before the men arrived in Fallujah that morning, according to witnesses, a small group of masked men had detonated some sort of explosive device, clearing the streets and causing shopkeepers to shutter their doors.
48
From the moment the convoy entered the city limits, the men stood out. In fact, it was very possible that the whole thing was a setup from the start. In a video purportedly made by an Iraqi resistance group, insurgents claimed they had been tipped off to the movements of the Blackwater convoy, which they believed consisted of U.S. intelligence agents. “A loyal mujahideen arrived who was a spy for the Islamic Jihad Army,” said a masked insurgent on the video. “He told our commander that a group of CIA will pass through Fallujah en route to Habbaniyah.”
49
The insurgent said, “They would not have bodyguards with them and they would wear civilian clothes—this to avoid being captured by the mujahideen, because every American that passes through Fallujah will be killed.”
50
Blackwater representatives later alleged that units purportedly from the U.S.-installed Iraqi police had escorted the men into the city.
51
A senior U.S. intelligence official “with direct access to that information” later told journalist Thomas Ricks that there had been a leak out of the Green Zone about the Blackwater convoy’s movements.
52
Claims of Iraqi police involvement were later contradicted by the findings of a CPA investigation provided to Congress.
53
As it happened, Zovko and Batalona—who had been in country much longer than Helvenston—led the way, followed by three flatbed trucks, that were to be stocked up with kitchen equipment on the other side of Fallujah. Taking up the rear, Helvenston and Teague were in the red Pajero. Shortly after they rolled into the city, the convoy began to slow. To their right were shops and markets; to the left, open space. As the vehicles came to a standstill, witnesses say, a group of four or five boys approached the lead vehicle and began talking to the Blackwater men inside. Before Helvenston or Teague could figure out what was happening, the unmistakable rip of machine-gun fire bellowed out on Fallujah’s streets. Bullets tore through the side of the Pajero like salt through ice.