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  Crazy Horse was a tightly knit group. We were all family, in some ways more than others—Tony was in one of our tank platoons, and his brother was in the other. We heard the IED go off, and when the word went out across the radio that Tony had been killed, the entire troop was crushed. Everybody liked Tony, and both he and his brother had a lot of friends.

  The Troop Commander came over to us as we were just sitting there, not knowing what to do, and he said, “I need you to take your guys back out there. We have to control that sector. The tank platoon is devastated—hell, both tank platoons are devastated, but we have to go back out. I don’t want to have to order you to go out there.”

  I said, “Not a problem, sir, we’ll go out there.”

  When we went back outside the gate, it was very hard controlling my troopers, keeping them from shooting every Iraqi who was out there. We left the gate with tears in our eyes and heavy hearts, but we were professional and dedicated. We went back out into the lion’s mouth, and my platoon of Crazy Horse troopers swallowed their feelings of revenge and did their jobs. Nobody even fired a warning shot. Tony Mitchell was the only casualty we had in our troop while I was there, and yet we went right back out, did a patrol, and didn’t participate in any abuse or revenge killing or anything else. That’s one of the hardest things to do in war—after losing a friend, to immediately go back out there with those same hostiles and not let your anger overtake you.

  We did another eight-hour patrol of the section until we could get another unit to cover for us. When we finally made it back to base we’d been up for more than 50 hours.

  I feel somewhat responsible for Mitchell’s death. My crew and I had driven up and down that route three times right before he went out, which means we missed those fuel cans, missed the guy planting the IED, missed something.

  CHAPTER 23

  SYRIA VS. KENTUCKY

  On December 14, 2005, the day before the Iraqi elections, we were set up at the 3rd POB headquarters on the Tigris River. We’d been working 18-hour days for close to two months, and everybody was exhausted. We had four Bradleys with us and an MP with his bomb-sniffing dog. Everybody was chilling, and I was hanging out with Cochran and Kennedy and the MP just outside the old hotel in the 3rd POB’s compound.

  That morning we were just sitting in the sun like lizards, relaxing, enjoying the quiet time before something else exploded or somebody started shooting. I looked at Kennedy, then over at the MP.

  “Hey, the Commander wanted to see you at the front of the compound,” I told the MP.

  “Yeah? About what?”

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “Okay, I’ll be back,” he told me, and left the dog with us. He was barely out of sight when that dog crawled into my lap and I started feeding him some muffins I had left over from breakfast. That dog loved me and hated his owner, in part because I was always feeding him good food instead of crappy dog chow. I’d give him muffins and ham slices and whatever else I had every chance I could, because he was too damn skinny. That MP, he never could figure out why that dog liked me so much, or why I kept sending him on so many useless errands.

  At about 10 that morning the 3rd POB guys opened up from the roof of the hotel with their big 14.5 mm antiaircraft guns. We hardly paid it any attention, because the truth of the matter was that the Iraqis loved those damn guns and used any excuse they could find to shoot them. They were shooting across the river at something—again—and we just ignored the noise and continued chilling. Until one of them came running down from the roof to us.

  “Sergeant Jay, Sergeant Jay, sniper!” he told me, panting.

  “What?”

  He pointed up at the top of the old hotel. “Sniper, sniper! We have hurt, wounded, and need some help. The sniper is on the other side of the river.”

  “Shit.” I looked at Cochran and said, “Call the CO and tell him we’ve been asked to help the POB as they’re under fire and they’ve got wounded, and we’ll keep him informed.”

  “Kennedy, go wake everybody up, tell them to head to the roof,” I told him, and he trotted off. The hotel was 14 floors, which meant from where we were sitting we’d have 13 flights of stairs to climb. Working elevator? Ha. I looked over at the ramp of the Bradley, where our rifles were sitting, my Barrett (32 pounds) and Kennedy’s M14 (14 pounds). After another glance at the top of the hotel, I walked over to the Brad, grabbed the M14, and jogged toward the door of the hotel. I heard Kennedy coming up behind me. He grabbed the Barrett and followed me into the stairwell.

  “Sarge, you’ve got my gun,” he called up after me as we moved up the stairs as fast as we could. “Sarge, you’ve got my gun. Sarge . . . (pant) . . . you’ve got . . . my gun. Sarge . . . (pant) . . . you’ve . . . (pant) . . . got . . .” Pretty soon it was just heavy breathing behind me, drawing farther and farther back. Hey, I may be old, but I’m not dumb. I had quite a lead on him when I got to the roof.

  My Iraqis were ducking and bobbing at the edge of the roof, firing their AKs in the general direction of the river.

  “Anybody see him or know where he is?” I yelled over the noise. They were right, he had to be on the far side of the river, but that encompassed a big swath of countryside.

  “No,” several of them told me.

  “Then what the hell are you shooting at? Get off the roof,” I told them, and moved forward toward the low wall around the edge of the roof. As I moved forward, they moved back, still firing their AKs—and one of my Iraqis shot me dead center in the back from six feet away.

  I spun around, murder in my eyes, and his eyes went as wide as dinner plates. I grabbed the AK out of his hands, threw it off the roof, and put a boot to his chest. He went flying backward down the stairs just as Kennedy came chugging up. Kennedy didn’t even ask, he just avoided the tumbling body.

  Fuck, did that hurt. The AK round hit me right in the center of my SAPI (small arms protective insert) plate. If I hadn’t been wearing my armor plate that would have been it for me, I’d’ve been killed. As it was, I still have back problems because of the blunt force trauma to my spine. That dude’s lucky I didn’t throw him off the roof after his rifle.

  In pain, and now seriously pissed, I duckwalked to the edge of the roof, Kennedy at my elbow. I heard the rest of the platoon thudding up the stairs behind us as we got into position. A round hit the wall near us, causing both of us to flinch. Kennedy and I scanned back and forth, back and forth through our rifle scopes. I was so pissed, I never wanted to shoot someone in the face as much as I did at that moment.

  “You see him?”

  “No, I don’t see shit,” Kennedy told me.

  I was just getting the M14 set up and in a solid position when a round hit the wall right next to my face, spraying me with dust. Getting shot in the back had pissed me off—now I was furious.

  “I need this fucker,” I growled at Kennedy. The insurgent sniper hit the wall again, six inches to the other side of my face. He was all over us, and we still hadn’t even spotted him. We ducked down, moved, and popped back up, still searching for him.

  “I think I have something,” Kennedy told me. He talked me into the spot, which was a long way off. “Just in front of the tree line, I think I saw some dust, maybe from him firing.” I used the Bushnell laser range finder to get the range. It was 852 meters, a hell of a long shot. I called the range out. And were there two of them? I looked through the scope again. If that was a guy, he was laying down, and all I had was a head shot. But off to the side, was that another guy?

  “I think he’s got a spotter with him, off to the side. You see him?”

  “Yeah. Shit, eight fifty-two?” I knew what he was thinking. We hadn’t zeroed either rifle in weeks. That wasn’t a big deal when we were only shooting out to 100 or 200 yards, but 852 meters? That was over 930 yards, well over half a mile.

  “Yep.” I cranked the elevation knobs on the scope. “I’ll take the one on the left, you take the one on the right, and fire after I do.” I put th
e crosshairs on the tiny little smudge and slowly, carefully, squeezed the trigger.

  My shot was on line, but 10 meters short—I saw the dust kick up. “I’m short,” I told Kennedy before he fired. I gave him the range adjustment.

  Through the scope I watched as my smudge stood up—it was a man. He calmly dusted off his pants, picked up his rifle, collapsed the bipod, and started walking away. Well, shit, I had the windage right for the first shot, and while I’d been low, now I had a standing target—much more forgiving when it came to elevation. I held high, fired three more shots, and hit the sniper in the hip or leg. Injured but not down, he started limping to make his escape. I emptied the rest of the 20-round magazine at him. He was on the ground by my fourth round, but I still emptied the magazine. Fuck finesse.

  As I was firing on the first sniper, Kennedy finished adjusting the elevation on his Leupold scope and engaged the spotter. The insurgent must have fired just as Kennedy did, because as the Barrett was coming down out of recoil a bullet zipped up Kennedy’s sleeve, grazing his arm. Kennedy hit the man in the head with his first round—a hell of a shot, especially considering he’d never fired the Barrett before.

  “Shit! I’m hit!” Kennedy said, grabbing his arm. He didn’t know how bad it was at first, but the round had barely broken his skin and only made a red mark on his arm.

  With the sniper and his spotter down, the woods behind them emptied out, and we saw half a dozen guys with weapons running to a white truck. By this time the rest of my platoon was on the roof, with their M4s.

  “Everybody fire at the truck, just a couple rounds,” I told them.

  The truck had to be close to 1,000 yards out and started pulling away with guys in the bed. My platoon fired en masse, and we could see the bullets come down on the far side of the river. The bullets hitting the ground looked like a small rain cloud kicking up dust, but they hit short of the truck.

  “Adjust up and empty your mags!” I told them.

  Everybody fired again, and I watched as the truck swerved suddenly and went into a ditch, flinging guys out of the bed. I don’t know how long it had been since the U.S. Army used volley fire in combat, but we did it that day, and it worked.

  I called up Burgoyne and told him what had happened. He said he would be by in about 10 minutes and wanted to see where the bad guys were. That gave us enough time to get down off the roof.

  Our 3rd ACR owned that side of the river. When they approached the white truck they saw a few guys still moving in the ditch and shot them before getting close. The truck had been so far away that most of the bullets from the M4s had just dented the sheet metal and not penetrated. At least one had gone through the driver’s window, though, hitting him in the arm, which had caused him to swerve into the ditch. The accident had caused more death and injuries than our bullets did.

  Both the sniper and the spotter were armed with Romanian PSLs, what most Americans who know about guns think of as Dragunov sniper rifles. They are stretched, accurized versions of the AK design firing the 7.62x54R cartridge, very similar in ballistics to our .30-06. Romanian rifles had very good quality control compared to some guns from Eastern bloc countries, and Romanian AKs were highly prized by anybody who could get their hands on them. The standard scopes on PSLs weren’t that good compared to what we were used to, but a good shooter could do a lot of damage with one. The scope on the sniper’s rifle was a commercial German model, even better for sniping than the standard-issue 4x scope.

  That sniper was a better shot than me. He was hitting within inches of my head, from half a mile away, before I ever saw him. I just got lucky. I was later told that he wasn’t Iraqi, but Syrian, and was believed to be the same sniper who had killed upwards of 20 American soldiers with some damned good shooting. Some of those kills had been filmed, with the footage put on the Internet or sent to Al Jazeera. Whether he was that guy or not, the sniping stopped after I killed him. They wrote up the incident in Stars and Stripes with a photo of me and Kennedy,* and I got the Bronze Star for killing the sniper, but I didn’t know who he was at the time. All I knew was that he pissed me off.

  My sniper logbook is in the 3rd ID museum at Fort Stewart along with a few other things I brought back, including an RPG-7 sight and the Iraqi flag we pulled out of As Samawah. In all, I got credit for 121 kills with a sniper rifle during my second tour. As I mentioned before, the Army wasn’t big on “confirmed kills” in Iraq, so that number isn’t a guess Kennedy and I came up with looking through binoculars. I took 121 rifles off dead guys whom I’d shot. I didn’t know it at the time, but that’s more kills than any U.S. sniper had during the Vietnam War. However, I think that’s a bit like comparing apples and oranges. Most of the time I was engaging two or three guys at once, at relatively short distances. We had a target-rich environment.

  It was only a few short weeks later that Crazy Horse went home. I officially left Iraq on January 10, 2006.

  When I went to Iraq in 2003 I was an E6—Staff Sergeant. When I returned in 2005 I was an E7—Sergeant First Class.

  Adjusting to a stateside routine is always difficult after being in combat, and I had very little tolerance for bullshit to begin with. One Friday afternoon, the Sergeant Major told me to go have my guys jump into the Dumpster to retrieve aluminum cans. My first reaction was “Are you out of your mind?”

  His reply was, “Look, Sergeant Johnson, I don’t care if you’ve been to combat or not. We’re back here in the garrison world, and I’ll get my chance at combat. Until then, get your troops over there and make them clean that Dumpster out. We’re not going to be the embarrassment of Fort Stewart.”

  So I retired.

  While I loved the Army and had made a career out of it, I didn’t have much interest in riding desks. I didn’t go into the Army to sit on my ass, especially not when there was still a war on. I officially retired on July 31, 2006, after 20 years, 4 months, and 25 days in the U.S. Army. In that time, I spent almost 10 years working overseas (one tour in Bosnia and three in Iraq, starting with Desert Storm in 1991). Once I got out, I went right back to work—for Blackwater.

  Thanks to the American media, even people who don’t know anything about the military or modern private contracting have heard the name Blackwater, and to most of them it probably has a negative connotation. The simple fact of the matter is that we worked for the U.S. State Department and the Chief of Missions there, but because we weren’t encumbered by miles of red tape we could do things much more efficiently and quickly than the military. Not only that, they paid a hell of a lot better.

  I’d seen and interacted with contractors while I was in-country with Crazy Horse, and I have to admit the job appealed to me. I had a military pension, but it wasn’t going to make me rich. Even though I was only in my mid-forties, there was no guarantee how long I’d be able to earn a living for my kids. My Hodgkins lymphoma could jump out of remission at any time. Jaycob’s cerebral palsy wasn’t going to go away.

  So, I could go back to work in a country I knew very well, doing pretty much the same thing I’d been doing for the U.S. military, only for a hell of a lot more money. Not one of the toughest decisions I’d ever had to make.

  * * *

  * “Four Terrorists Killed in Separate Incidents,” Stars and Stripes, January 4, 2006.

  CHAPTER 24

  BLOOD, SWEAT, AND TEARS

  There was a real need for private contractors in Iraq thanks to a number of different factors.

  The first was just the size of our peacetime military. Compared to how many troops we’d had in the field during World War II, Vietnam, even during the Cold War, we were small. Fighting battles is one thing, but policing a country filled with insurgents, with more of them flooding in from half the countries in the Middle East every day, takes a lot of bodies.

  The second reason the U.S. government liked contractors was that we operated under what are known in the trade as Big Boy Rules. What’s that? The U.S. military, in all its wisdom, hardly trusts its soldie
rs with loaded weapons except when they’re on the front line. Americans died at the consulate in Libya because the Marines there weren’t allowed to carry any live ammo in their weapons. That wasn’t the first time that had happened, and unfortunately it probably won’t be the last. If a convoy is attacked or a helicopter goes down, and 90 percent of your weapons are secured in the armory, it’s going to take you a lot of time to get geared up and on-site. Private contractors didn’t have those same restrictions. We were all vets and were deemed adult enough to be responsible for our own weapons. We were all armed, and since we were on call 24/7, all of our guns were loaded. If a helicopter went down our reaction time out of the gate was one-tenth what the military’s was, so we went out and secured the scene until the Army or Marines showed up with the armor and heavy weapons. We were professional soldiers working for the U.S. government; we just had a middleman. Even though we would have had no problem getting alcohol shipped in, we had a dry facility. Supervising a bunch of A-type personalities with guns was tough enough—the last thing I needed was alcohol thrown into the mix.

  One of the reasons the Blackwater name is so well known is because of the incident where some of its contractors shot some civilians who had shot at them first. Oh, you didn’t hear that part on the news, about the “civilians” shooting at our guys first? Didn’t think so. That incident, ultimately, was what cost Blackwater its Iraq contract with the State Department. The PSD (Protection Security Detail) team involved in that incident was Raven 23, and afterward the management at Blackwater made me the shift leader of the team to make sure there weren’t any more problems. There weren’t, but it was too late for the company, although it took some time for the giant to fall. When Blackwater left, all of their contracts transferred to another company, and I and everybody else went right back to work for them, doing the same job for 50 dollars more a day. At one point I was supervising 128 people, but I was still going out beyond the fence, because I’ve always believed in leading from the front. Not only was I in charge of all the teams, I led a team. I never asked anybody to do anything I wasn’t willing to do.