Licensed to Kill (23 page)

“We're looking for a guy who can be led, who can listen, who doesn't come with ears shut, and who can shoot. A guy who doesn't play well with others is not going to do well. In this type of environment, about sixty or seventy percent of the people are leaders. If they are a leader that can't follow, they don't make it here. You can really read a guy just by watching. The eyes will tell a lot. You can stop a guy in the middle of an exercise and ask him what he is doing. If he gives that big deer-in-the-headlights stare, chances are his brain is a big dry-erase board with nothing on it. I tell them, ‘If you don't know what you are doing, don't do it faster.' There is no suppressive fire for contractors. They have to account for every round.”

He excuses himself to address the class of a dozen students carrying M4 assault rifles. They are pretending they have come under attack and are working on extraction techniques. The men split off into two-man teams and practice a “scoot and shoot,” where one lays down covering fire as the other retreats, and then they switch so the other can reload and move back while the other fires at the cardboard assailants. “Okay, let's remember to communicate. Plain, unbroken, American English,” Dave yells.

Although the instructors love plain American English, they yell out commands through a small megaphone in their own special language: “Download your primaries. Leave your pistol hot. We go dry first and then we go live. Suck up the shade. Drink water. Get your sling on. Observe your weapon.” The instructor uses an air horn to pause the drill. Sometimes it's to communicate a better technique, like shooting around a corner; sometimes it's to point out that they would have all been killed in a real-life scenario.

In one instance, a gun jams—a stovepipe in gunnery lingo—and the student, Miller, stops to unjam it. Dave, the instructor, stops the lesson and shows him the correct way to eject the bullet casing from the M4 without endangering his teammates. “All right, you get a stovepipe. Remember… slap.” He flips a switch on the side. “Pull.” He pulls back the bolt with two fingers. “Observe.” He peers into the barrel to make sure the bullet has been ejected. “Okay, then, release and tap.” Dave calls the method “SPORT.”

A hand shoots up. “We never use that acronym,” says a beefy blond-bearded student. “In the Navy we use ‘tap, rack, bang.'”

“Whatever tribe you are from, just follow the procedure,” replies Dave.

That evening, the instructors get together back at the Ramada for a closed session to decide who has survived the day. Each day they meet for distillations of the day's performances and a culling of the class. Of the nine instructors and staff in the room, four will go over the driving and five evaluate the shooting. Jim explains, “We started at forty-six. Two dog handlers have dropped. Right now we are at thirty-eight. Not bad, but there are more to go. Last class we dropped nine in one day. Now we are looking at dropping some for weapons safety.”

The instructors lock the door to the coincidentally named Delta Room, close the curtains, and break out the beer and chips. The tan manila folders on the conference table contain the men's full personnel files and a full-page black and white photo of each person. Even though it contains the men's personal information, they refer to the candidates by number while discussing each individual performance. One instructor pulls a file, calls out a number, and looks around for agreement. “A little nervous but performs well as a team player?”

The rest nod while sipping their Miller Lite.

“Forty-two, thirty-eight, thirty-five, forty-five, and thirty-one are not looking good.”

As the instructors go through the class roster, it becomes apparent that their focus is on the 20 percent who may or may not make it. Although most of the washouts got booted early on, a few candidates still run hot and cold—retained because they initially displayed skills but progressively show more incompetence or questionable decision making.

One of the instructors reads from his hand-written notes and expands: “Sixteen came up early on the radar after we changed his title to NUG [for knuckle dragger]. He is an ‘excuse-er.' I told him until he sees targets, the weapon stays on safe. The dumb-ass award goes to the guy who puts his weapon on fire. His critical thinking consists of dog turd.”

Another instructor compares his notes. “Sixteen is a cork in the river. He has no cognitive ability. When they ran, he ran. When they stopped, he stopped. And, oh yeah, Mike had to take him aside to talk to him about his urination. He was pissing on the range.” The instructors laugh.

Another instructor adds, “By the way, sixteen on the end of his last run didn't give a ‘last man' call out. He let three run by his barrel. It has been sixteen, sixteen, sixteen all day,” referring to the number he had been admonishing.

After evaluating everyone's shooting performance, the discussion turns to driving class. “We can count all the good drivers on one hand. They picked up the two-car motorcade pretty quick. We are evaluating about two or three drops. We are discussing four. We had a little fender-bender today between the lead and the follow. The scenario was this—we pulled out of the circle, the lead comes up and blocks up and the limo swerved. Someone hit a bumper.” The instructor pauses. “We have insurance on this?” The rest nod. “Okay, I don't have a problem with that. Decision to drop?” The chorus nods again silently. “Okay, we can get 'em home in time for church.”

They've worked their way through the stack of personnel files and go back to review their discussion. They have decided to drop three applicants just one day short of the final exercise. One other, Don Stout, an excop, they deem to be “too immature,” but they decide to retain him, though they agree he will need an “ass whipping” to correct his “cockiness and lack of focus on the task.” An ass whipping is a term to describe a serious talk about how close he came to being dropped. The instructors pack up their empty bottles and corn-chip bags and head back to their rooms at the Holiday Inn.

At dinner the students discuss their career expectations. They're nearing the end of the training class, and if they make it through the final cut, they figure they will make it to graduation. Strangely enough, the candidates seem to have a limited understanding of what will happen if they are hired. Angel, a former Special Forces and current Triple Canopy employee, is eating with them and answering questions.

Don Stout, the small-town cop from Mississippi, opens up. “This job means more than you know. I just got married eight months ago. I've never had to provide for anyone before. I've got a lot riding on this.” Don has trouble coming to grips with the 90/30 cycle of rotations, but Angel explains it clearly: “You get ninety days in-country, then thirty on leave, and then another ninety if you get back on a detail.” They all know they will make between $500 and $700 a day. Don does the math and calculates that it adds up to $18,500 a month, and at best $162,000 a year. There may be a $30-a-day per diem, one suggests. His fellow trainees chide him about his need to continually ask questions, but Don appears oblivious to their criticism. His next topic of concern is about what there will be for his wife if he gets killed. Angel explains that he will get Defense Bases Act (DBA) coverage that only pays out $65,000 if he is killed but that many contractors get supplemental insurance if they can afford it. Don pipes up with one last comment on his possible demise: “For my funeral, I want them to play the Black Watch on bagpipes.” The rest roll their eyes.

The Cut

Saturday begins with a downpour. The sun has not yet risen when the men begin trickling down to the breakfast area. They sit together in clusters, trying to make a decent meal of the motel's tiny buffet-sized muffins, cereal, and junk food. By 7:00
A
.
M
. they have gathered outside the classroom, standing around the closed door in a huddle that emanates the smell of soap and drugstore aftershave. An instructor opens the door and beckons Poor, a bald SWAT team leader from Orange County, California, to come inside the motel meeting room. Minutes later, Poor reappears to read from a list of candidates. “The following will go in for counseling, the rest will wait in their rooms until called.”

As Poor calls out the numbers, each of those asked to stay behind react as if punched. When he hears his number, Don Stout winces and drops his head. All the bravado of yesterday has vanished. When the rest of the group heads off to begin another day of training, they leave behind four very nervous and dejected men.

First, the instructors call in Summer, an SF retiree in his early thirties. The other men all look at Summer, shake their heads, and wish him luck. As the door closes, a tangible, almost theatrical, tension settles over the remaining three as they wait to find what their future holds. When the classroom door opens, the men meet Summer's eyes with hopeful, imploring looks. Summer makes a cutting motion across his neck. The rest know for sure they are out. Stout starts chain-smoking Marlboro Reds.

The ritual repeats itself as the next two go in looking nervous and come out looking depressed. Only Stout remains. He can't stand the pressure. He turns to me and a torrent of almost panicked words seem to just fall out of his mouth: “I have to provide for my family. How can I provide for my family? There is not much in the Smokey Mountains.” He pauses for a moment, clenching his jaw to fight back the tears. “I am a Medal of Valor recipient. My mother was dying of cancer, so I turned down Blackwater, turned down a couple of offers. I need this job. You know how much I spent on this gear and getting here?” It is all crashing down. He stops blabbering, appearing to become resigned to his fate. “I have never met a better bunch of guys. It's poetry to watch them work. I have seen some Feds do this, but they don't match what these guys do.”

As he shuffles through the doorway, Stout carries himself with the air of a defeated man. When he comes out ten minutes later, he looks like a man transformed. They've granted him a reprieve; he only got a warning about his performance level and pointers on how he needs to improve. “Man, that was an ass puckerer,” he tells me. “First thing I said when I sat down was, ‘Permission to release bowels, sir.'” He chuckles at his good fortune, but then he snaps back into his recalcitrant mode. “If you saw
Deliverance,
that's where I am from…. There is nothing else out there for me.”

Afterward, Jim Troutman comes out and tells me that two of the men have been asked not to come back, but the third (Summer) was told he could reapply in one year. “He needs seasoning. I think he will do fine when he comes back.” Jim feels for the men, particularly since they made it through all but the final day of the course. “Some of them cry. Some of them get angry. It can be tough, but you also know the guys over there, and you don't want to send them over because they might end up killing someone.” Of the two dozen men they have scrubbed, the final cull is the toughest. He explains, “They passed the black and white part of the course, but here we deal with the intangible.” He feels bad for most of the guys but recalls one particularly memorable candidate he was glad to let go. “We had a guy just like David Koresh. He had knee pads on, a bushy beard, long hair—a real wild man. He was pissed when we let him go. We don't want happy triggers. You want numbers, but you don't want a guy to turn a Mark 19 [grenade launcher] on a crowd.”

The washouts have a couple of hours to pack before Cecil drives them to the Memphis airport. I bump into Miller, an olive-skinned and slightly overweight ex-Ranger, on the upper walkway of the motel shortly after he has been told to pack his stuff. He tells me, “It's the first time I have done the duffel bag drag and I wasn't happy.” He admits that he has not been performing well and invites me into his dim room to discuss things out of range of the other students' stares. He begins by admitting that he accepts the instructors' critiques. “What I could do at twenty-six is not what I can do at thirty-six.”

Still, it burns that a small-town ex-cop made the cut over him. “I jumped into Panama in eighty-nine,” he says as a way of protest. “The other guy they dumped is SF. They left in two cops!” Miller's incredulity exemplifies the IC world's unspoken pecking order, shaped by shooting skills and combat experience. Retired cops fall at the bottom of the food chain, followed by army reserves, FBI, regular marines, Army Rangers, Marine Forward Recon, all the way up to Vanilla SF, DEVGRU (SEAL Team 6), and finally Delta Force. Each of these has a different language, culture, affiliation, and loyalty, so they nearly always break into like-minded groups and view the other tribes as somehow suspicious. Miller just doesn't think that makes much sense to hire ex-cops if they're supposed to end up in a place like Iraq. He feels himself getting angry and changes his tone. “Even though they binned me, the instructors are top-notch. I thought that with these guys I would have a better chance of staying alive.”

Miller has relaxed enough to really start talking, and within minutes he pours out his story. “My legitimate business is a moving company. My hobby is big-wave surfing. My other hobby is skydiving. I was also a professional freestyle fighting teacher. I am thirty-six and won't even be boxing and wrestling for much longer. Even though I have a furniture moving business, I do some gigs part-time, mostly in the private sector. Mostly bodyguard work. I would just reenlist, but I am too old. I have two kids, an ex-wife, and a mortgage. We are older now. We have more responsibilities. The first time I went downrange in Panama, I was making fourteen hundred dollars a month. When you are older, you are stupid if you don't make money with your skills.

“When nine-eleven happened, I was pissed. I wanted to go downrange. So I went this route. My money from my first rotation was going to be for my daughter. I want to get in a custody battle for one of my daughters. Unlike some of the other guys here, I know the realities of what this work pays. Let's say you make sixty grand for your first rotation, you are only going to bring home forty. If you did three rotations, you might make one-twenty a year. My wife is making ninety, and she is not getting shot at.