#11 The Blackwater Massacre 05:50:26

All right, guys, so September 16th, 2007, what's known as the Blackwater massacre, Raven 23 incident. I want to get each and every one of yours firsthand accounts of what happened. Blackwater security guards shot more than 30 unarmed Iraqis in Baghdad in 2007. Blackwater security contractors were serving time for killing 17 Iraqi civilians in 2007.

Four Americans received lengthy prison sentences today for an infamous incident during the Iraq War. All four are former Blackwater security contractors convicted in the killings of 14 unarmed Iraqis, including women and children, in Baghdad in 2007.

especially in 2007 with it being deemed the most violent bloody year of the entire war. They said that in 2007 there was an average of 180 engagements from insurgents a day. Can anybody stick in their head? I'll tell you. What do you mean we get out?

As soon as we came to a stop within a minute or less, I started hearing the pings on the side of my vehicle. And at the same time, I heard, I don't know if I heard Paul yell it out on the radio or just yell it out down the turret that there was a white Kia that was presenting a threat and it was coming towards the vehicle. So he landed in the middle of this gun battle.

and just walked over as we were loading our brother's remains. We had already put them in body bags and we were dragging them back up the hill. And he just lands in the middle of the gunfight. Lands his bird and then he gets out. He wanted to see

that it was his brother and then as soon as he seen it was his brother he got back up and they started laying down suppressive fire for us again but like it was just a crazy moment you know that it was just it was tragic man like I said it was the worst day of my life for sure. He had just taken a drag off his cigarette and the EFP came through the window compartment and he lost his arm and the only reason why he was the driver is he took his hand off the wheel to do something I don't know if it's the light one

take a puff or what but he lost his his arm behind it the other thing that he said that was so critical that didn't get introduced at trial was that these Iraqi Witnesses said the white Kia punched forward like a car bomb a really good friend on the line here you guys might know his name's Eddie Gallagher

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to The Sean Ryan Show. This is episode 011, the very first episode in our brand new studio. I want to start off by saying thank you because we had a massive influx of patrons after the last episode, and it's patrons like you that make this entire production possible.

If you can't support us on Patreon, head down to the description, please click the iTunes tab, go over there, leave us a review, even if it's just one word, that helps us more than you know. So please, leave us a review. Now let's get on with it. In SRS 011, what you are about to hear

is an untold side of the most controversial gunfight in the Iraq war, also known as the Blackwater Massacre. These gentlemen have never been given the opportunity to tell their side of what happened in Nasir Square, Baghdad, Iraq that day. Please welcome Paul Slough, Evan Liberty, Nick Slatton, and Dustin Hurt, Raven 23.

Enjoy the show. All right, gents, welcome to the Sean Ryan show. So just for the audience, you gentlemen are from Raven 2-3, also known as the Blackwater Massacre, and which is the most controversial gunfight in all of the Iraq war and possibly in American history.

So kind of how this happened is how I got introduced to you guys is Evan. You know, I was checking messages on Instagram and check the outbox and there's a message from Evan and I'm pretty sure it just said. Yeah, just said I loved your podcast and was a big fan. Yeah. Thank you for everything you're doing. And you were part of Raven 2-3. Correct.

I was like, it's been a long time since I heard that name. So I jumped off real quick, Googled it. And I blew my mind. I was like, holy shit. You know, I didn't even know you guys were out. And so I reached back out to you. And I think you kind of got cold feet. And, you know, you're like, I don't think you're actually going to reach back out. And I was like, well, here I am. You know, let's do this shit. And got in touch with the rest of you guys. And so here we are.

But, you know, kind of taking this thing on, this is I just want to say this is the biggest, probably most important interview I will ever do. And I'm going to do my damnedest to to give you the best interview you will ever have. And and I want to give you guys a platform, as we all discussed, for you guys to tell stories.

your side of what happened and you've never been given the chance or the opportunity to do that and so that's exactly what we want to do here is give you guys the opportunity to get everything off your chest and 100% your side of what exactly happened back on September 16, 2007. So when I took this, you know, and I agreed to do it and I started digging in, I got a

overwhelmed with the amount of information and just how in depth this case went. And so before we get going, I just want to say, you know, thank you to you guys and your families for your

for helping me with all the information. Gina Keating did an amazing job on her podcast, which is the number one thing that I used. And that's linked below. It is full of information that you can't find in the regular press, the mainstream media. Bill Cofield helped a lot and supportraven23.com. There's a ton of information on there.

And we'll be talking about some documents, some videos, all kinds of stuff, email chains, cables from State Department. And just for the audience, that will all be linked in the description. None of this shit is being made up. It's all fact. It's documented. And the links are below. If you don't believe me or these guys, don't take our word for it. All the proof is linked below.

So, kind of where I want to take this interview with you guys is there's a lot of people that probably don't know exactly what Blackwater was. So, I kind of want to start at the beginning or what it took to get in. So, I want to go around the room and get an introduction from you guys, kind of what you were doing before you went to Blackwater, how you got into Blackwater, what was the vetting and training like,

When did you guys all meet? What was the op tempo and the deployment schedule when you guys got in? Then we'll walk us into the incident, the Raven 2-3 Blackwater massacre, and then the indictment, prison, what you guys are doing now. So let's just start with Paul. You know, what were you doing before?

Before, I had just come back from a rotation in Iraq with the National Guard unit. We were primary convoy security and then a PSD for our battalion commander and our S3 shop. I'd come home and basically was working at a Home Depot, and it just wasn't a good fit. I missed the mission. I missed being in Iraq.

in what I felt was an honorable task for the nation in helping another nation just come out of a horrific season that they had been in. And so I, ironically enough, went to a job fair and there was a Blackwater rep there and I met him and I'd heard the name before and I had a very limited understanding of really what Blackwater was other than

being in Iraq. And so I conversed with him and he said, yeah, give me your resume and give me your DD-214, all that good stuff. And we'll go from here. And so the process was really just kind of a back and forth, filling out the packet and then being accepted and going to the vetting process there in Moyok. So you'd been, you'd had combat tours before with the military. Yeah. How many tours did you do? That year, just prior to that. Okay. In the Guard, yeah. Okay.

where were you when 9/11 happened? I was at Hunter Army Airfield. We were on a tarmac. Weirdly enough, we were on what was Red Cycle at that time and so we were attached to a tank battalion and a ranger battalion and we were set up as a response force for the globe in the, you know, if there was a need for that and so

Yeah, we were sitting on the tarmac. Our lieutenant came outside and said, hey, you guys were under attack. And at the moment, we were all just kind of ribbing one another because we were on this red cycle, right, that we were going to go deploy here, deploy there, deploy, you know, any other number of the places in the world and everything.

Anyway, he said, yeah. He said, for real, we're under attack. And at the time, his father-in-law was a chaplain at the Pentagon and was reading last rites when he called him and said, it's really happening. Nick? So I was in the 82nd Airborne Division. I was an infantry sniper, and I was a team leader. I was at the point of reenlistment, you know, deciding to stay in or get out, and they were pushing me to either go to Division Lurse

or to go to SFAS. And so I had to get out of the 82nd in order to do that. I had to like out process. And part of that out process is you have to go to job fairs as well. And it was a triple canopy recruiter that picked me up first. They said, hey, you know, you're sniper qualified. We could use you. And they said, you can get into the OGA after you do some time on state. So that was my goal anyway. That's what I wanted to do. And

Blackwater ended up winning the contract, so it switched from Triple Canopy to Blackwater. They took me to training, and it was amazing, man. There was high-level SEALs, high-level CAG dudes, high-level SF dudes. I was still a kid. I was like 22. And so they had...

been fighting longer than I had been alive. So it was awesome. And they took me under their wing because I came with a real humble attitude. And I was just like, man, I don't know this stuff. I need you to help me. And they did. They were very awesome. And that was the best training I'd ever received. It was just out of this world how good we were trained. Just for the audience, it's civilian types.

Can you describe what SFAS is? Yeah, it's just the entry selection. I think it's called for Special Forces Assessment. So it's like basically... They wanted you to become a Green Beret. Yes, sir. You're trying out for Green Berets. And you'd done combat tours before? Yes, sir. I had two tours with 82nd. My first tour was right around the Fallujah area. And then that was... We were basically attached to Special Forces units and...

and CAG and stuff doing raids where we would just be after high value targets. You know, this is the guy we're looking for. We either capture or kill this guy. And then after that I came home. They slotted me for sniper school, went to sniper school, and then

My second deployment was more of like a peacekeeping mission. It was just in the Kurdistan region. Nothing was really going on there. So it was just, it was very nice. You know, I didn't like it at the time because I was an infantryman. I was like, I need to be fighting. But looking back on it, it was nice because I got to see the dark side of Iraq and also the good side of Iraq. The Kurdish people, they loved us. You know, first mission I went on, I was a team leader and, uh,

it was a very good chance we were going to get ambushed because it was basically a village that set back in this mountainside and it was almost like a cul-de-sac, the mountains. So there was only one way in and one way out. So I call a halt and I'm like, I'm just going to push up. And if anything happens to me, y'all just leave me. You know, I was like, come back and get me later, call air strike or whatever. And so as I'm pushing up, I noticed these local villagers are kind of going in and out of their, their huts.

And I see this woman come running out and she's holding something. So I look at her in my optic and she's got a tea kettle and she's screaming and Kurdish saying, which is like, welcome.

and she sets the tea kettle on the fire and then she starts dragging chairs out of her house and I'm like where are we at man you know it was like night and day difference so it was very awesome just to see the you know my first tour they were they were shooting at us they were blowing us up versus come come have some tea with us you know that was it was really good right on

Evan? Well, I grew up in New Hampshire doing a lot of outdoor stuff, fly fishing, camping, hiking, things like that, playing sports, basketball. I was a big runner when I was a kid and pretty much decided I was going to go in the Marine Corps pretty early. In 1998, when I was a junior in high school, I signed up for the delayed entry program and

Me and my best friend were going to go in the Marine Corps together once we graduated. One of the big mistakes I made when I was a kid was basically just deciding pretty quick that I was going to go in the Marine Corps, but not really giving a lot of thought into what job I wanted to do. I just knew, oh, you know, my uncle was a Marine, the Marines are the toughest branch,

I want to do something challenging. So I just signed up and then I had a female recruiter and she asked me, what do you want to do for a job? So she gave me the pamphlet and I started looking through it. And of course, you see machine gunner, security forces, MP, things like that. So I

I said, "You know what? I think I want to be in security forces." You know, I didn't do any research or anything like that. We didn't have the internet. So I just, it sounded cool and I was like, "Yeah, I'll do that." So she came back within a week and said, "You know what? Because of the date that you and your best friend want to go to boot camp, there's going to be a big time gap between graduation of boot camp and when you can go to security forces school."

So she said pick something else. So I said, you know what? Put me in for MP. I want to be in military police. So same thing. A week later she comes back and says, well, bad news. You have to be 19 to go to MP school. You're only 17 right now. So go ahead and pick something else. So, you know, typical kid. I went off doing whatever I was up to in those days.

And about a month later, she calls me and said, "You know what? I found an MOS for you. I put it in for you. It's my MOS. You're gonna love it. It's, you know, go to work in the morning, you're done by 16:30, and that's it." And I'm like, "Well, that doesn't sound like the Marine Corps that I'm imagining. What job is it?" And she said, "Supply." And my heart sunk. I was like,

What is that? What do you do with supply? And she kind of explained it to me, and I was sick, man. I was like, man, I want to be in the Marine Corps, but I want to do something badass. So I go off to boot camp. I'm hearing all these guys talk about how they're going infantry, they're doing machine gunner, they want to be a sniper and all this.

I'm stewing. I feel like I got screwed but the paperwork was in I was a young kid and I just went along with it after boot camp, of course you go to your MOS school and The school is only a few weeks long. It's a joke So I went to the school got stationed in North Carolina and from the moment I got to North Carolina I was trying to get out of that MOS and

Any by any way possible so I'd uh, I'd volunteer for different Duties I'd volunteer for different classes. I'd go to the rifle range when I didn't need to go to the rifle range I'd go on different exercises and I was kind of proving myself as a good marine But my higher-ups knew I was not into the job that I was doing so after about six months

My master gunnery sergeant came in with a Marine Corps Times newspaper and he said, "Hey, I think you should go down to talk to this recruiter." And he threw the paper at me and it was for Marine Security Guard school. And I said, "What's Marine Security Guard?"

And he said, "Well, there's an embassy basically in every country and there's a detachment of Marines at every embassy that protects the embassy, protects classified materials, and protects the diplomats that are in the embassy, you know, the American Americans working abroad." So I got excited and there was quite a process to get ready for the interview.

just to basically prove that you were qualified to go to the school. So I went to the recruiter and I sat down with him and he looked over my file and he said, "You know what? You look like you're a good Marine. You're a little young, but you're qualified. The only problem is you have to be at your duty station for one year." So he said, "I'm going to put you in the class

slated for right after you get one year on station. I'm like, okay, perfect. I go back to my unit and all these guys are, you know, Lance corporals, corporals, sergeants, they've been stuck in this MOS and they hate it. And they've been there two, three, almost four years. So I came back and I said, yeah,

They selected me. I'm going to Marine Security Guard school. And they said, no fucking way, man. You just got here. You've been here like five, six months. You're not going to Marine Security Guard school. I've been here in whole enlistment. So I said, I don't know. That's what he said. About a month later, the message comes out. Sure enough, my name's on the list to go to the school. So as soon as I hit a year on station in Camp Lejeune,

I left, went to Marine Security Guard school in Quantico, and my first embassy was Cairo. I spent about 18 months in Cairo. I'll backtrack a little bit. 9/11 happened right after I got selected for a Marine Security Guard school. And then the invasion of Iraq happened around the time I was in Egypt.

So yeah, I was in the Middle East but not necessarily in combat and then my second duty station was Cairo Egypt I mean, uh, Guatemala City so anyways throughout my enlistment all this combat is going on and I'm Pretty much dying to get over there and take part in it because I feel like hey, this is my duty, you know, like I

after 9/11, I just felt this huge feeling of patriotism and I wanted to contribute to that cause. So when I came to the end of my enlistment, I was thinking, well, do I try to get off Marine Security Guard, get out of Marine Security Guard Battalion and move to a different MOS and get over there in Iraq or Afghanistan? Or I could get out

go in the private sector and go with Blackwater or DynCorp at the time and pretty much guaranteed to be over there within a couple months. So Before you go on how did you hear about? Blackwater and DynCorp peers or well at the time the only thing I knew about Blackwater was the big incident that happened in 2004 in Fallujah where

four Blackwater guys got ambushed and pretty much burned alive and drugged behind their vehicles and strung up on a bridge. And it was a big international incident. It was in the media a lot. So I knew that that happened right around the same time frame. And you wanted to go in after you saw that? Well, I would. That caused me to backtrack a little bit because my friend was

Writing me emails back and forth say hey, you know, I think we should go with Blackwater You know, it's a it's a quick way to get over to Iraq and I said hey Have you been watching the news like four guys just got strung up on this bridge? He's like well, you know, it's it's always a risk in combat and you know He's trying to justify it and at the end of the day. I knew that was my

Fastest way to get over there and I didn't know how long Iraq or Afghanistan was gonna last I mean little did I know 20 years later They're still in Afghanistan. But at the time you didn't know that you just thought hey, I'm 21 years old. This is my chance, you know, I'm in the Marine Corps. I'm patriotic I want to serve my country in pretty much the highest way possible in combat Right. So

Yeah, I emailed a Blackwater recruiter and I said, hey, it was really informal. I just kind of outlined, hey, I'm a Marine, I'm a Sergeant, I'm in the Marine Security Guard Battalion, I have a security clearance, I've worked alongside the State Department, and I'm interested in working for Blackwater. So I got a response, filled out some paperwork, and they accepted me.

And I got out of the Marine Corps in November of 2004. And within 60 days, I was in North Carolina training at Blackwater. Right on. For those listening, the incident that he's talking about that happened in 2004, those were Blackwater contractors, correct? All four of those men were prior special forces.

or special operations. I believe they were all special forces, Green Berets, correct me if I'm wrong. But they were stopped at a checkpoint by Iraqi insurgents who were dressed as police

You get a police uniform over there for, what, 20, 30 bucks? Yeah. And so they stopped thinking they were police, cracked seals on the vehicle. They were shot and killed by the insurgents dressed as police. Then they stripped them down, strung them upside down, and burned their corpses from a bridge while the...

local population cheered and celebrated. The company said they were guarding convoys delivering food around Fallujah. A small crowd descended on the burning cars. What happened next was gruesome. The bodies of the four Americans were pulled from the flames, poked, prodded and beaten.

One charred body was tied behind a car and dragged through the streets, a procession that included children. Two mangled corpses were hanged on a bridge over the Euphrates River. Yeah, Brian participated in it, and, you know, that's well documented. That's a well documented event. I had a friend who was actually part of that procession.

But that's so I'm kind of bringing that up because I want to paint the picture of, you know, this is who we're dealing with over there with general population and bad guys dressed as friendlies. So, Dustin. I'm a Marine as well.

I joined back in 2004 or 2000 and got out '04. I went into Marine infantry and then I went to FAST company which is in the security force battalion. It's the same school that he went through but I did that after my machine gun stuff. I spent two years or three years with FAST and then I spent another year with 2nd battalion, 8th Marines as a machine gunner. You know you're talking about 9/11 earlier.

we were out doing a site security exercise, which is if the embassy gets in trouble or anything like that, we roll in and we take it, we hold it, we do whatever it is. With FAST, you're basically on call somewhere in the world. They got different stations and if something happens, they send us in to reinforce, take different things like embassies or whatever they want done. And so we've actually set up around our armory saying, hey,

You know, this is how we would do this. We set everything up. We put our machine guns into position. And my captain comes out and said, hey, planes just hit the Twin Towers. And we're like, okay, this is part of the drill. And he's like, no, really, this is not part of the drill. This is real life. And it's still not sinking in. Well, we went from having no ammunition because we're on American soil, just doing exercise, to they start passing that ammo.

And when they did, me being a machine gunner, I went through advanced machine gun leadership school. And it was me and one of my buddies that I'll talk about later. We did the machine guns. And he said, hey, go lock and load the 50. And I'm like, sir, we're aimed in on base housing. If you want me to lock and load it, somebody hits the butterfly, we're going to shoot into the housing. And he's like, I understand, but lock and load. And I'm like, oh, damn, shit just got real. And so...

We ended up doing a normal rotation to Bahrain and we were there I think three, four months. I don't know exactly. And then we got the order to go to Kuwait for the buildup. So when before any troops crossed the border, we were in Kuwait doing, hanging out, waiting for a task for the buildup itself.

And we ended up hitting the oil platforms off the coast of Iraq with one of the SEAL teams and the Polish Special Forces, the GROM. And then we came back to Kuwait. We went in and did a trap mission for one of our F-somethings that got shot down. Went and recovered the officer's body. I think it was Lieutenant White, if I'm not mistaken. And the SEALs dove the lake and got out the stuff that needed to be taken out.

That way you didn't have the classified stuff just sitting in the bottom of the lake in Iraq outside of Karbala. So we rotated back to Kuwait again. Well, we'd already been deployed for so long, they went ahead and sent us home after that. That was...

The first time that I went to Iraq was the trap mission and then hitting the oil platforms. - You were hitting the oil platforms? - Mm-hmm. - You were with a good friend of mine, Mike Ritland, who I interviewed on here as well, and he was on those ops. I should connect you guys. - That'd be cool. - Yeah. - Mongo the seal I was talking about that I seen later on whenever I was with Blackwater, he was one of the seals that was on there too.

And so we rotated back. Well, my wife at the time, what her girlfriend at the time, fiance, we were supposed to get married sometime in the spring. Well, whenever I left fast and I went to second battalion, eight Marines, they said, oh, by the way, Herd, we're going to Afghanistan here in a couple of months. And I'm like, okay, cool. So I call Kelly and I'm like, hey,

We got two choices, get married now or get married later. So we decided to go get married. And then my honeymoon, literally, I got married on the Marine Corps birthday, November 10th. And that next week I was back in Afghanistan or, you know, first time I've been to Afghanistan, but what I'm saying back in the Middle East.

So we're over there. We do our rotation there. We was in a pretty light area. We just got blown up a couple of times and a few little stuff. We rotated back and I got out of the Marine Corps October, November. I was in vetting December. I was back in Iraq again with Blackwater. And so for me, it was just a,

Left one, I got a job at a liquor store just because I didn't have any income coming in. Then I got called and said, hey, your package went through. You got a school date. I went to school and went through the vetting portion and went through the training portion, doing the movements and all that stuff. Then I was back in Iraq December 2004. I stayed there until November 2007. Wow.

So how did you hear about Blackwater? Well, my buddy Billy actually went to a job fair that I was unable to attend. And he came back and he said, hey, man, we need to get a bio and a resume together because I was talking to one of the recruiters for Blackwater and he wants us to submit our stuff. And Billy and I did the same thing all the way through the Corps. We're both machine gunners. We went to Advanced Machine Gun Leadership School.

He's got a driving course that I didn't get. But other than that, our resume and bio is almost identical. And so he went with me, too, after FAST, the 2nd Battalion 8 Marines, to Afghanistan. And so he's the one that's like, hey, dude, we need to get together on this. And we talked to the same recruiter, and he helped us get everything in order. And then we went to the same class together for Blackwater. Good.

So open forum now. When you guys were talking to the recruiters at Blackwater, Blackwater is a massive, it turned into a massive company. It was the biggest private military contracting company in the world. And I believe it, I don't think it will ever be outdone. But with that being said, they had several different contracts. They had State Department contract,

A couple different State Department contracts. I believe they had air contracts for pilots. They had OGA contracts, other government agencies. I believe they had, did they have the DEA project as well? I'm not sure. Or was that DynCorp?

they might have done but all these different government agencies had separate contracts and just because you worked for blackwater wasn't all grouped into one they had several different uh whatever you want to call it divisions uh which were different contracts for different organizations so when you guys were talking to the recruiters were they telling you about all the different contracts or were they did they have one specific one in mind like you had mentioned oga um

In my case anyways, I didn't know those other contracts were available I think when I told the recruiter my history with the State Department Marine Security Guard battalion

He pretty much decided right there that my best fit would be with the State Department contract in Iraq So I didn't know those options were available They might have been to these other guys, but not in my case. Mine was pretty similar to Evan I'd been I was active duty before going into the guard and I'd been to Bosnia and and done some things and

For me, it seemed like the best fit that was kind of proposed to me was the whips contract. And besides that, I didn't really know anything other than that. Yeah, OGA was what I was wanting to do, but he said that this was like a foot in the door. He's like, you know, you get in and you get a reputation as a guy that's reliable and does his job well, then he's like, they'll pick you up for sure.

and so that was that was my plan all along that's what i wanted to do yeah i really didn't know it was just whatever they wanted me to do i was i was game was there any type of uh sales pitch at all or did they no not really nothing i was so on board with anything i just i just wanted to get over there i didn't give a you know i was i felt like i was missing out especially having the mos that i had originally and then being stuck at the embassies

all through 9/11, invasion of Iraq, all that. I was just anxious to get over there. I shared a lot of those same sentiments of wanting to get back to the mission because it felt like when we left, we were gaining traction. And to Nick's point, when you go past Mosul and you're up in Kurdistan,

You can see just the differences between northern Iraq and southern Iraq. It's like, wow, why can't this be mirrored south of here? What is the bifurcation? Yeah, I can definitely see that. You know, continuing on with the mission of service to the country, I just wasn't ready to hang it up. I was debating on reenlisting for...

If Blackwater didn't work out, I wasn't going to continue just that little job doing a liquor store. I worked for a great dude, but when you served as a Marine and everything else, and then you're sitting there while everybody else is still doing service to their country, they're out there fighting that fight.

You're just sitting there and it's like, this is not what I was made for. I was made to continue the service. Wasn't fulfilling enough. Yeah. This is, this just is not me, you know, stocking a shelf at a liquor store and, you know, helping people do that. And it's like, man,

I've got a skill set that needs to be used because stateside, there's no use for a machine gunner. There's no use for stuff like that unless you go law enforcement or something like that. And it just really didn't fit with who I am. You know, I wanted to go out and continue to serve the country in any manner. It didn't really matter to me. So what was the training like when you guys got there? How many different,

How many guys were in the course? Or how long, actually, sorry, how long after you guys talked to the recruiters were you offered a position or an opportunity to prove yourself at vetting and training?

Well, I know I went through, I think it's DS class 14 or 15. I went through some of the very earliest classes they had, you know, cause they were running them like every week, every two weeks. And so you had like three or four classes still going through as I was going. And, you know, later on we had to go back and recall on like two or threes and stuff like that because we wasn't authorized.

And I know we showed up. I don't remember how many we had, but the vetting portion of just the shooting, the rifle, the pistol, the shotgun, the 240, the saw, the fan fire, the AK, the CQB and stuff like that. It's, I can't tell you how many dudes that we dropped during all that because it was for us, it was show up, perform, or you get the window or aisle seat going home.

And so I don't know how many we started out with, but I know we lost tons of dudes in that and dudes that are supposed to be, you know, top tier guys, but it's either they're out of shape. They haven't shot in a long time. They just, for whatever reason, they didn't make it through the vetting portion. And then, you know, then you had to learn the movements, which is mirrored, um,

like the Secret Service moves off of the formations to move principals around when you're doing the protective detail. And so you had to learn all that and it was awesome. I mean, just learning the different stuff. Because in the Marine Corps, I was never exposed to any of that. What about you guys? How long after

you talked to the recruiter did you wind up with that was it months was it a year was it no weeks in my case it was weeks and when i initially got over to uh moyock north carolina that's where the blackwater training was

I was just impressed by the facility because, you know, it's thousands of acres with long range chute ranges and, you know, CQB houses. There's a driving track. There's, I mean, everything you can imagine there.

Is there so it was it was pretty impressive and then as far as the class goes there was Maybe 15 guys in the class. I was right behind him so he was class 14 I think I was 17 or 18 so maybe a month or so later and like I said the class was relatively small, but I was the absolute youngest guy and and by a long shot so

You had guys that had been in the SEALs for 20 years. You had former Green Berets. You had guys that have seen a lot of combat. And I was pretty intimidated, you know. But a lot of the training was just ensuring that you were qualified and you could actually do what you said on your resume. For example, qualifying with weapons.

Qualifying and land navigation came a little bit later medical stuff CQB stuff, but the one thing that they did actually teach you there and not just Verify that you were who you said you were was like he said Executive protection type stuff because most guys in the military aren't doing that type of mission so that was the one thing that we did they did hammer that home because that was going to be our mission overseas and

And just like him, we dropped a lot of guys. And I think we started with maybe 15 and we graduated or we finished with less than 10 for sure. Okay. So it's like a, what, 30% attrition rate? Yeah.

Yeah, the attrition rate was even higher in mine when I went through. I had a similar experience. The shooting was basically just a vetting like you had talked about. Like you can either do it or you can't. We had dropped a lot of people in that. But when it changed over to the personal security, they, like, I remember one of the instructors, he really took me under his wing. And because he knew I was just an infantry guy, you know, he knew I'd never done this kind of stuff before. And he really helped me and, uh,

and i learned a lot from that man i mean he had been over there you know walking the box for years in baghdad so he knew exactly what he was talking about he gave me a lot of tips that kept me alive when i was over there and after i graduated that they sent me to the ddm course and they said it was completely opposite you know everybody was nervous they were going to fail the first course

This course was like, look, we're just here to make you shoot better. They're like the only person that's ever failed this course. He lied on his resume. He said he was a sniper and he wasn't, you know, and you know, you can talk to somebody for five minutes and figure out whether or not they were really a sniper. Right. So,

it was awesome they just showed us a lot of hold offs you know i had done a lot of dialing you know ddm is designated marksman correct yes so they that was the most fun i think i've ever had you know we just shot a lot and those guys had been over all over the world you know as a sniper and they were they were very helpful it was really cool you know because i was a kid i was in 22 so i had all these older guys that just took me under their wing and

they gave me the shirt off their back, so to speak. They filled me with knowledge and sent me over there. And a lot of things they showed me kept us alive. When I was at DDM, the things they showed me, it worked in a real-world situation. So it was awesome. I share a lot of similar sentiments. I was 25, 26 maybe when I went to Moyoc and was just completely blown away by the professionalism at every turn. I mean, from the chow hall to...

To the classroom time, to being behind a firearm or being behind the wheel of a car, every instructor there was professional to the letter. And I'd never walked a box before. I didn't know what that was. And frankly, I'd never driven in the manner that they wanted you to drive.

meaning you got the lead and the limo and the follow. And so your ultimate purpose is to be in between a threat and that principal, period. However it works out, that principal comes home alive. And that was our mission. And so again, to be around a lot of these guys, one of them, his name was Carlos, and forgive me, I can't remember his last name, but he was an SF guy, had been around this line of work for decades.

years, almost as long as I'd been alive. And I think he sensed that I was willing to learn and I was a cultured kid. And he taught me a lot of things that had a lot of carry over into that position in that environment. Could you explain what walking a box is?

Yeah, so walking a box is basically you've got plates on principle. If you're walking from point A to point B, you have plates on at any given angle because you're in a 3D battlefield. And so you've got typically one to two guys on the flank. You've got your lead agent and you've got your follow agent. And it can be...

other layers of protection outside of that. But that box is what's plates on principle in the event that that rounds come in. - When you're talking plates, you're talking armored plates. You're literally putting yourself with a body armor on in between you. - You're the sponge between the threat and the principle. Yeah.

Blackwater's had a bad rap for a long time. And I remember when I was in the SEAL teams, I heard a lot of bad things about it. And then later on, I also worked for Blackwater and found a lot of that to be bullshit. So what I want to do now is, you know, when I was in, they were, it was, we're hiring Walmart security guards. That's the kind of shit I was hearing. And then when I actually showed up for my vetting,

It was a state-of-the-art facility. It was like nothing I'd ever seen before in all my time in the SEAL teams. I had never seen anything that state-of-the-art, and we used it a lot. We would fly in from the teams right down because, you know, Moyock's right down the road from the SEAL teams, and so we would train there. And so kind of what I want to get at now is the fact that it wasn't

There were no fucking Walmart security guards working there. And so I kind of want to walk through and this is just once again open forum. What was it like day one when you showed up to training at Blackwater? You know, what was what happened? Were they welcoming? What were you guys doing? Was it right to training? Well, day one for us, you know, we went right into it. If I remember correctly, you got to think that's been almost 20 years ago.

Getting pretty close on that. But I know the first thing, if I remember correctly, that we did was the PT test. And coming out of the core, it was like a joke after, you know, what we did. And it was like a mile and a half run instead of three. You did some sit-ups and pull-ups, dummy drag, stuff like that.

And then, you know, it's one of those things that you're sweating everything because you're basically told when you show up, show up and perform or go home. And it's not a, it's not a here, let me show you what to do. And so there was a lot of pressure with it. And it's one of those things that when you're not used to that environment, when you're used to being military and everything else, and you're,

Used to having somebody say, all right, well, look, you did it this, you did this wrong, do it this way. It brings a whole different mental aspect to it because it's one of those things that show up or perform or window or aisle, whichever. And so, you know, it's, it was that portion of it was just a mental thing.

as far as having to get through it. So the first thing was the physical fitness test. Right. Well, I think in my case, I probably had a little different experience because I remember when I showed up at the airport, like I said, I was a 21-year-old kid. So I showed up at the airport, and there was supposed to be somebody there to pick me up. This is the day before training is supposed to start, so...

I'm looking around. I don't see anybody. I'm calling. I can't get in touch with anybody. There's no cell phones. I'm using a pay phone. So I called my dad and he said, listen, because I was about ready to say, no, I'm out of here. You know, you know, I just I'm kind of reconsidering it. You know, maybe maybe this is a sign. Maybe I shouldn't go because this is right after the four Blackwater guys got hung up on the bridge. So he said, listen, get a hotel.

"Go tomorrow, do the training, everything's gonna be alright." So, of course, everybody else was already at the classroom.

Somebody picked me up at the the hotel brought me over there and they had already done like a physical exam, you know like checking you over. Oh, they were given physicals. Yeah, yeah well for in my case So I remember you know 21 year old kid. I walk into this classroom. There's a bunch of whatever 30 40 year old guys in there and there's a female nurse and she said alright well

Drop your pants. We got to do a hernia check. Literally, like right in front of everybody, she did the hernia check. And I'm like, OK, well, welcome to Blackwater, I guess. I was so embarrassed. But yeah, after I got over that horrible experience, the first thing after that was, I think, the PT test. And I didn't have an issue with it. I've always been pretty good at stuff like that.

One thing that was different than Marine Corps PFT test was like a dummy drag. So I think they have a 100-pound dummy or something. You have to drag it a certain distance and a certain time frame. And then I think we moved into the weapons qual. And like Dustin said, you got to qual on M4. You got to qualify on Glock 19 shotgun, 203, I believe.

M249 saw, all that stuff. And yeah, got through that and moved on to the next thing. I can't really remember the exact order of things, but the training was outstanding. They tried to make it as realistic as possible what you were going to face once you got on the ground in Baghdad. And they did an excellent job as far as vetting. You know, the weapons qual, like they said, it was just...

either you pass or you don't but the actual personal security side of it they really took time to teach us the correct way to operate overseas and yeah i was just grateful to all those instructors man they're awesome awesome people when you showed up was it the same was it physical physical fitness shoot falls yes sir paul

Yeah, same. Get to the hotel and it was really almost like a conveyor belt, for lack of a better term, of just, you know, you hit this station, station, station, station. And it was it was either pass, fail. It wasn't, well, you know what, you need to improve here, go there. It was just either pass, fail. Yeah.

And then one thing I will say that later on, I know Evan and I both had to go back for a recall because the State Department brought in 203 grenade launchers.

And originally when we went through, they were not authorized. And then they started bringing them in. Well, the guys that had been there for a while, like Evan and I, we had to fly back to the States and go through WPPS 2 qualification, which was just basically abbreviated version of the original qual vet that we went through.

And then, you know, we went in and requalified on all the weapons. We went out to the 203 range, did that. And I think we did the simulated attack on principles and stuff like that before we went back out. And I know that

From the first time I was there to the second time, I mean, it was just a world of difference. They actually had the Connex box town the last time I went there. And so, you know, Blackwater was always improving. It was, you know, always going. And one thing I will say that was just excellent was the driving course because it wasn't just –

a high speed track to where you just drive. They actually had people bump you with cars and you learned how to ram through, push through, you know, learn how to pit people. But the, the thing that was awesome about it too is they had simulated IEDs.

along the side of the road. And so you'd be driving and here, you know, it would be projected up, but here an explosion would happen. And then, you know, you went into your medical stuff behind it. And so it was, it was good, good stuff. So when you guys showed up,

It was physical fitness, weapons quals. How many weapons quals and exactly what weapon systems were just pass fail? There was no instruction, correct? No instruction. Here's the weapon system. Here's the qualification. You got one shot. If you fuck it up, you're out. Glock 9mm. It was the M4. It was the SAW 249. It was the 240, I don't know,

I don't know, Bravo, I think. We had Golfs in the Corps. We had AK. And then later on, like I said, when we went back, you had to do the 203s. And the shotgun as well. And the shotgun as well. And they actually yanked you guys off a deployment in Iraq to fly you back just to qualify on a new weapon systems that's been implemented. So they were extremely proactive.

to make sure you guys were up to snuff and up to speed on everything that you might and there was guys um you know they couldn't meet the standards and they were out of there before the end of the day i mean it was pass or fail you you couldn't qualify on a weapon too bad see you later i mean you had to meet the standards and everybody did is there so after the weapons quote i like this because they're literally getting rid of people the minute you show up

they're eliminating the weak links starting with things that people can't control you know the physical and then physical Fitness if you don't show up prepared to get the hell out of here yeah even with the PT test there were some guys that that didn't pass a PT test I was like wait a minute

The medical training was good too. I remember there was one simulation where they put you in a vehicle and you're blindfolded. And there's two other people in the vehicle, they're trainers, and they're simulating that you're driving down a road in Iraq. And when they tell you to pull the blindfold off, you have to react to whatever situation they present to you.

So, you know, they they're just talking back and forth. They're pretending they're on, you know, whatever mission in Iraq moving down route Irish, for example. And then they throw like a flashbang or something to simulate an explosion. You pull the blindfold off. You look at your driver. The driver's got his eyeball hanging out. The guy in the back seat's got his leg blown off.

And I remember I did really well in that because it was drilled into me that security is first, you know, treating your teammates for whatever injuries they may have and

comes after security. So I provided security, laid down some fire where the threat was, and then started working on the guy with the leg that was blown off because he was pretty much the most serious injury. And then I moved on to the guy with the eye injury. And yeah, I did really well in that, but that knocked out a lot of people as well.

So it was a process. How many days did it take to get through the weapons call and the PT test? I don't recall. Various days. It took a little while. Maybe a week? Yeah, it might have been a week. And then you moved on to the next thing. Like I said, I can't remember exactly the order of things, but in every step of the process,

way you would lose somebody you know if somebody was good at pt maybe they they couldn't shoot certain weapons or maybe they couldn't perform in the medical training or the attacks on principle they were a little shaky and they just get rid of them how long uh all together was vetting slash training

I think the certificate says 164 hours, so I don't know how many days it was broke down to. Over a month? Yeah, I want to say it was a month. About a month. About a month? Yeah. And then the DDM course was like half that after that. So you went through about a month and a half of evaluations. Yes, sir. It doesn't even sound like it's really training. It's more...

They want to see how you react in certain scenarios and they're constantly evaluating everything. And then you had the peer evaluation too. Yeah, that was a big one, yeah. If you are sliding through but your peers see it, then you can be peered out. And so, you know, that got a few people too was somebody just doing something stupid the instructors didn't see and, you know, basically –

We could be like, hey, man, you fucked up. You did this and take it to the instructor and they'd send them home. And then the training blocks were CQB, which is close quarters battle. Let's just talk about that specific thing.

training block? How was it? What were they doing? Were you guys hitting houses? Were you hitting? - Shoot house. - Shoot house? - It was, for us, it was because everybody's got a different background as far as, you know, each unit has their own type of CQB they do. Whether, you know, you got a man high, a man low, around the corner, different things.

So what they did is they walked us through it one time and they said, I don't care how you did it, where you come from. This is how I want you to do it here. And so that way everybody's running like a standard format. And we went through the shoot house several times. I think the first time was a dry run. Second time was sim. And then if I'm not mistaken, the third time was live fire. And so it was a fast pace, fast pace. And if you couldn't keep up or perform, it was,

Get out. Window row. One big thing during that portion specifically was safety. So if you're in a stack about to go into a room,

And you flag somebody, even the lower part of their leg. And for people that don't know, when you flag somebody, it's basically you're pointing your weapon at something that you don't intend to shoot. Even if it's just for a split second. I just want to reiterate that. So if I'm holding a gun and I go like this and sweep you guys, even if it's just for a split second, that's an ejection from the course. Yeah, they took safety violations big. That was a serious thing.

Yeah, to Dustin's point, not to step on you, Nick, but it was trying to get everybody on the same page as what the stack looked like and how they wanted you to move and flow through a room or through a hallway or whatever presented itself.

and how everybody had their specific responsibilities. And to Dustin's point again, it wasn't necessarily, you know, you had guys from MARSOC, you had guys from SF units, from SEAL teams, and they just wanted everybody to be on the same sheet of music moving forward to see really kind of how you operated as a team if you were able and willing to do that.

That's extremely hard to do, you know, when you're coming. I mean, I remember doing it on the OGA side, and I thought it was a huge pain in the ass trying to get on the same page as the Marsock guys, as the Green Berets, as the CAG guys, you know, the Rangers. And then, you know, and then when you throw soft, unconventional, unconventional together, then it gets even trickier. So that's no easy task at all because everybody has a different way of

of doing that. And so do you, the reason you were probably doing CQB because it's a reactive unit, correct? So do you think the reason you were doing CQB is if the principal was taken hostage

you would have to go in and extract that principle that you're protecting. You've also got something that is called Alamo Up. And what that is, if somebody Alamos up, is a principle gets hit on venue, right? Well, if the team can't make it out to their vehicles, what they're going to do is they're going to go find a hard point. And they're going to hold that hard point and basically put shooters through

throughout wherever they need to be, then they're going to put the principal somewhere where it's safe, as safe as they can get them. And like us, you know, we're all on Raven 2-3, which is one of the TST teams.

And so as a TST team, when something goes boom or bang, we're the ones that would go. And so with the CQB stuff that we were doing, if a team's Alamo'd up, let's say on the 10th floor of a building in Iraq, well, then as a unit, we've got to be able to clear up and get them and then clear back down on the way back out. So, I mean, again,

It was real life. You know, it wasn't just, hey, you're going to do this to check this box. It's, hey, you know, whenever you get to your team, everybody's going to start doing their own form and get whatever needs to be done. But, I mean, it was stuff that we could actually use. It wasn't just check a box. Yeah.

What does TST stand for? Tactical Support Team. Okay. It's Quick React Force. All it is is QRF, and most of our vehicles had two 240s, one in the front, one in the back, except for one that just had a teacup up on the top, which was one 240. How long was the CQB portion?

And how complex did it get? Were they throwing in live role players on that as well with hostage scenarios? It was. It was three days of CQB training without the role players. And then at the end, basically it was like accumulation. It was like they taught us all this stuff along the way and it was like vetting. And then at the end, your final vetting was attacks on principles. So it was like basically this is all we've taught you. This is all you've learned. And then they...

put it to the test and you know the instructors were the bad guys they're the ones shooting at us so yeah it was really good and they you know they had run those scenarios countless times and so you're coming into it fresh so it's they've got the upper hand for sure the instructors know that area like the back of their hand so it was it was awesome it was great training how about the driving

Awesome. For sure. Yeah, that was probably the funnest part. Getting to do a pit maneuver on a BMW is something you don't get to do every day. When you get to smash through vehicles that are parked and ram through, punch through, that's when you're wrecking vehicles and you see how much abuse that vehicle can take and still keep running for a time. I mean, it's...

opens your eyes to what you're going to be doing in country. Yeah. Why would they have you wrecking into vehicles? Because if you're driving the streets of Baghdad and they try to set up a blockade to keep you from moving to where you get an L-shaped ambush or anything else, you got to learn how to, where to hit the vehicles to push through everything. You got to know, be able to drive out. Or reverse out if you have to, yeah. And how long was the driving portion?

I think it was three days as well, right? Yeah, three or four days. Something like that. I think everything was three or four days. Okay. I mean, each block, each one was its own individual block. So it's like you did one block, then you moved to the next block, and then to the next one, the next one, until you were done. Medical? Yeah, you had to do a full psyche valve to make sure that you wasn't off your rocker.

Oh, they did that as part of the physical? They did that as part of your overall evaluation. And you went in there. I know me personally, the lady, which they try to trip you up just to see if you got anything. So you sit down and they're asking you questions and they just pick something and they just keep pushing and pushing and pushing. And then finally you're like, what have I done? And they're like, okay, you're good. But they want to make sure that you're sound of mind before you continue. Yeah.

What I was getting at, that's good to know, but what I was getting at is the medical training, the TCCC. How in-depth did they go with that? What kind of stuff were you guys learning? Did you do any live tissue labs? What was that like? It was what he was talking about. Mostly it was scenarios like you would come upon whatever on the battlefield, and then they were evaluating, you know, do you know how to put on a turn kit? It was just basically like,

combat lifesaver stuff basically like I can patch you up good enough to get you to the cache kind of thing so they had really awesome props like they had arms that were amputated that like would would pump out liquid and stuff so like it was it was we hadn't seen anything like it in the military you know yeah so it was the scenarios were

Very well thought out. And I think it was just because they had such a good collective of guys. Like I said, they had all those high-tier level guys that kind of put their heads together and they were like, well, what worked in your unit? What didn't work? And they kind of just

put all that together and got rid of the stuff that didn't make no sense about the military and use the stuff that did make sense right and so I think it was just by the time I got there you know I was the last one in by the time I got there it had involved it had evolved into something that was just amazing you know everybody talked about how well the training was I've never heard anybody say that it wasn't good training you know so yeah

- The continuance of that training too with the medics on your team was always, I mean, they wanted everybody to be as proficient as they were in the event that they were taken out. - Was there any more training? Did they give you a final exercise or? - That was the taxon principle. - Yeah. - That we were talking about, the scenario. - And like Paul said,

Once you finish the vetting and you're qualified to get deployed the training doesn't stop there It's not oh you're good to do a whole contract and you don't have to train we'd rotate Work days off days, but when we were off we would be training so we would continue on with the CQB stuff and

the vehicle maneuvering, you know, you go to the rifle range a lot more than I would in the military anyways because all that stuff was available. So

Yeah, I got a lot out of the training in country as well because you, like Paul said, you learn from the experienced guys on the team that have been in country and have probably seen every possible scenario that you can encounter over there. So, yeah, that was very beneficial to me too. We didn't talk about the PSD training, the personal security detail training. How in-depth was that and how

I think that was one of the portions that they really went in detail with because, like I said, there's not really many units in the military that are doing executive protection type stuff in high threat environments. So for me at least, I got a lot out of that because...

I hadn't had any experience with it, so I don't know about you guys. Definitely. I mean, that's what I was saying earlier is we didn't do any of the stuff in the Marine Corps. We never learned how to walk formation, how to stand on the doors and wait until everybody's set. And when you're running a three-car motorcade, you've got to think you've got shooters that are in the front or in the back seat of each vehicle. You've got shooters that are in the back seat.

of the other vehicle and everybody's got to move into a position to where everybody but the driver gets out. There's always a driver with the car. And then that way if something happens at any time,

you know, you got to be able to go in a heartbeat. And so learning how to go from carrying a machine gun to moving a principal around, that was the only portion that really wasn't vetting quote unquote until the end, because they wanted to make sure that you understood what you were doing and how you were doing, not just, Hey, you move over here. So I know like at the hotel at night, we had matchbox cars and we would say, Hey, you know,

The door guys are moving to here. The AIC is going to get out and whenever everybody gets set and they call set over the radio, then they're going to say, "Hey, crack in the door, open the door," whatever terminology. And then they open the principal where the guys on the far side of the vehicle is going to come around to the principal side, catch up the principal, and then you're going to have one guy on the front, one guy in the back.

And at least one guy on each side of them, sometimes two guys on each side. And everybody in there has got a sector, a job to do. The AIC, the person is the agent in charge of what AIC means. He's going to be right behind the principal. And so he's within arm reach to where if something happens, his job is to reach up and grab him by the collar of the shirt and then say,

Just take him to a vehicle, get him in, climb on top of him, put his body on top of the principal's body to move him out of the hostile situation. And then you worry about everything else later.

Yeah, with that, there was also advanced team training as well, as far as what the advanced team is to look for, because the advanced team is the one that's going to receive the three-car motorcade. And so you're going through all your steps and processes and boxes that you have to check to be ready for this principal, because you've got to set up the time, the person that they're meeting, all the extemporaneous stuff that goes into the meeting. Plus, you have your own team that's on-site security that's got the scene locked down, ready to receive the principal.

and that was so that was the only portion that wasn't pass fail until you mess up you're out in the end yeah it was it was it was but during but during the training itself um it was it was training i remember um during that training when you were talking about if you didn't pick it up quick enough like they would get fed up they sent a couple people home during that portion they're like look if you we've told you this many times if you don't

perform this movement the way you're supposed to you're out and a couple guys just they couldn't grasp it for whatever whatever reason but yeah they broke it down very simple i felt like they they because that was like the meat and potatoes of what we were going to do over there you know so they were like get this you know this is very important and basically they just said you know you've

you are the one that gets shot, not the principal. So you're stepping in front of any danger. You're taking that round. You're killing whoever's trying to kill your principal. It's all about getting him back safe. They told us that those people are worth more than you are. They're worth more than anybody over here. You do whatever you got to do to get them home to their family. And so that's what we did. So throughout the entire vetting slash training, there are

just constantly running you through scenario after scenario whether it's a medical scenario whether it's a PSD scenario driving scenario CQB scenario target ID scenarios and they're just constantly throwing shit at you evaluating you and jet launching dudes that can't they can't keep up out yes sir so and then so you guys all got through it and what happened then they give you a contract

I know for me, I graduated the vetting course there. I went home for like a week or so and then I know it was like around December 15th, December 20th, I was back in Baghdad. And I stayed in Baghdad for most of the three years that I was there. And I know whenever we first got there, Dinah Core and Blackwater shared the contract and

And so they were still building what was known as the man camp. And we actually lived in a big warehouse with all the KBR and everybody else guys because they were still building the facilities there. And so

You know, I'll never forget back whenever I first got there, like around Christmas and stuff, we'd go up on the roof of the trailers and you'd watch the fireworks show out in the town. And they were dropping JDAMs. They were, you know, IEDs. You could see the tracer around skipping. And I mean, it was wild. Because back in those days, I mean, it was full on. They were going hard out there. Yeah.

Yeah, I deployed pretty quickly because, like I said, when I was on Marine Security Guard duty, I had a top-secret clearance already. So with Blackwater, I believe the security clearance was secret, so it was below that. So I deployed pretty quickly, and it was kind of like a culture shock when I got over there. These guys might have already had experience in Baghdad, but for me it was...

Kind of like, okay, here we go, because this is what you asked for. So I remember when I got over there, they assigned me to a team, and I met with the team leader, and he said, listen, our team is being tasked to go out in the middle of the desert and protect some scientists that are digging up a mass grave site. They're preparing for Saddam's trial.

So if you're not willing to do that or you're not prepared to do that, I could put you on another team. So I said I was willing to do it. So

I think we went out in the desert. It must have been two weeks after I got there. And I was actually on the advance team to go out there, so it was me and two other guys. And I think the Army transported us out there. So we're flying out in two Black Hawk helicopters, and there's nothing to see for miles around, all dirt. And then all of a sudden we're getting close to where the mass gravesite is.

And you look down and there's a perfect square of grass. And that was exactly where all the bodies of the people that Saddam had killed were buried. So we were out there maybe, I think it was over a month. And you just slowly watch the scientists dig up the dirt with a tractor first. And then each step of the process, they got smaller and smaller tools until they're like

using brushes and uncovering all these skeletons. So you would see what I assume would be a woman with a small baby skeleton with a bullet hole in the skull. And it was a shocking moment for me, but it kind of...

validated why I was over there and it it made the mission even more important because it was a historic thing you know we took Saddam out of power and he was gonna pay for all the things they did to those people how many bodies were in there I think there was over a hundred were they all skeletons or were there yeah they had been in there a while and you could tell they must have said

you know, pack up all your belongings. We're going to put you in a different place or move you somewhere else. I don't think these people knew they were going to get marched out in the middle of the desert.

basically be shot in the back of the head because you could see layers and layers of clothing a lot of the clothing was still there but it was just skeletons and uh just bodies stacked up on top of each other so it was the first thing you did the very first thing i did when i got to iraq we found another one of those down around hill in the joff is i went out with the team

I guess it was the same scientists or different ones that were looking for mass graves and we found another one out there and they actually started digging until they found something. They covered it back up and then later on they went out and retrieved the bodies out of that one too. So after WIPs training I went to the DDM course and then after graduation of the DDM course I think like the next day they shipped me over to Baghdad

And they said, based on my background in the infantry, they wanted to put me straight on Raven 2-3. And like they said, you know, that was a tactical support team. And within a few months, January 23rd happened, where they shot down one of our helicopters and killed five of our brothers. What had happened was the door gunner of one of the helicopters had taken a round to the head and

They flew him back to the cache and the other little bird, they always operated in pairs, right? So the other little bird elected to stay with the team that was in contact on venue. And so we were tasked with, at first we were tasked with extracting the principal team. And so when we were en route, we got ambushed and they shot out one of our tires out of our lead vehicle. So we had to execute a tire change.

After we fought our way out of that ambush, and then as soon as we got the new tire on, we get a new mission that the secondary little bird that stayed with the team on venue had been shot down and that we had to recover them. And the last grid that they gave us was actually over the river. So we were like, man, this bird crashed into the river. So we were driving all these dead-end back alley roads, and we were just getting shot up, man. You know, it's a miracle that we even made it

to the crash site and we fought our way through five ambushes just to get to the site. - Five ambushes? - Yes. And so once we made it to the site, we realized that we were completely overwhelmed with enemy combatants. There were way too many of them. And the army shows up and they save us. We would have died. There was like 19 or 20 of us and the Apache helicopters. I remember being up in the machine gun and

One of my buddies was in the lead vehicle. I was in the second vehicle and we had set up in what's like called a herringbone so that more effective field of fire. So like this vehicle pulls that way, the second one, the third one, and the fourth one, right? So that you've got better angles to shoot. And there was a five-story building that was probably about 800 meters away. So pretty long ways away. And all of a sudden,

round hits in the street in between my vehicle and the lead vehicle. And I call out, I was like, there's a sniper. Like I call it out on the radio. Second shot, it hits my vehicle. And so I'm just, I'm laying waste towards where I think he's at. He's in the

and the third, I think he's in the third level, and my buddy thinks he's in the fifth level. And so I'm shooting at the third story, my buddy's shooting at the fifth story, and then I can just picture in my mind, dude's got me in his crosshairs, like I'm about to get shot, right? And then all of a sudden, Apache just flies overhead, and it puts a Hellfire missile in the fifth one, and in the third one, and then the building just pancakes like that, and we didn't take any more fire from that building. You know, he...

I don't know who that Apache pilot was, but I'm thankful man, because he definitely saved us that day. And so we fought for about three and a half hours and we finally recovered our brother's remains. And I found out that it was Art. He was one of my boys that I went to whips with and he was a really good guy. He was actually a Vietnam helicopter pilot.

So he was an older gentleman, but he was an awesome pilot. And, you know, those guys, they elected to stay when they didn't have to. You know, they put their lives on the line to protect that principal team until that principal was able to be extracted and moved back to the green zone. And, you know, they gave their lives for it. And, yeah, it was the worst day of my life, man, for sure. Was this the gentleman you were telling me whose twin brother was also flying? Yes, sir. So he landed—

in the middle of this gun battle and just walked over as we were loading our brother's remains. We had already put them in body bags and we were dragging them back up the hill. And he just lands in the middle of the gunfight. He lands his bird and then he gets out. He wanted to see that it was his brother. And then as soon as he seen it was his brother, he got back up and then they started laying down suppressive fire for us again. But like,

It was just a crazy moment, you know, that it was just, it was tragic, man. Like I said, it was the worst day of my life for sure. Sorry to hear that, man. Yeah, so we graduated. They called a ceasefire and said, if you're still standing, you made it. You're deploying. And so it was probably a month after that, I guess, I deployed. And I show up to Baghdad and they said that,

They needed bodies in Kirkuk, which is in northern Iraq, Kurdistan. Having been up there before, I was somewhat familiar with it. The embassy up there was not much bigger than a postage stamp. And it was a little bitty. We were known as a Spartan element, I believe. It was us, some members from British Parliament, and I want to say some Kiwis were there too.

I know there were some Kiwi New Zealand security forces there, but for the most part in that region it was pretty quiet. In other words, when there were times when we would go to Sulaimaniya, we would take off our kit because it was such a welcoming environment. They really wanted us there and it was almost like having an extra layer of security being in that area.

That said, there were of course car bombs here and there. There was an attack on the front gate, but it wasn't Baghdad. Once Dine Corps took over that contract, we were all moved down to Baghdad and set up as an advance team for Ambassador Khalilzad. We operated from that point as APD Green, Ambassador Protection Detail Green.

And so we were the advanced element for him. At that time, we, I was not part of Raven 2-3, but January 23rd to Nick's point is, well, that's one of the bracelets that we all wear because it was, yeah, a horrible day. Shane Stanfield, which was the first gunner he talked about, was the first helo gunner that was met with a round and then

All of us were listening to the radio while they were out. We were in Suburbans, we weren't in fighting platforms, so we were really kind of handicapped. But every one of us staged and were ready to move at any given moment. And there was almost just a line of Suburbans from every gate that was in the IZ all the way back to the man camp of people lined up ready to go at any moment's call.

And it was probably one of the most helpless feelings that I've ever experienced. Because here you have a team that is actively engaged and, pardon my language, but there wasn't a damn thing we could do about it except stand by and wait for some directives because in the end it could have been way worse of us getting in the way in non-fighting vehicles. But yeah, that day will probably live in infamy for my lifetime.

How many, when you guys got in the country and you were all in Baghdad at the man camp, how many state department contractors lived there? I think it was a 600 capacity man camp. 600 state department contractors? Now, you've got to think, there's people rotating in and out basically Monday through Friday. They're running flights. I don't know if it was two days a week, three days a week, or five days a week. I'm not sure. But I know that

You would fly from wherever you're at in the U.S. to Jordan. From Jordan, you would fly into Baghdad. From Baghdad, you'd be picked up by another Blackwater element that was called the team house. And then they would take you in and drop you off at the man camp when they finally got it finished. And so I think it was 600 capacity.

Now, how many rooms were open at a given time? I have no idea. But you – I know we had 26 teams out of Baghdad, if I'm not mistaken. There was 26. 26 teams? Yeah, 26. How many people on a team? What, 19, 20? Because you had – or 22, 23, something, because you had to give guys days off because sometimes the off-tempo –

You just, you had to give a guy a day off if he needed it. And so that's not counting all the outlying sites like Hilla up there where he was at. And then you had some just different locations. And so there was, there was a bunch of us. They call it the man camp and there was females in there, but I mean, that's what it was dubbed. And so I can't tell you how many people were there at a time.

Was that part of the green zone? Yeah. Were you guys flying into Biop? Yeah. Taking Route Irish, which was the most dangerous road as long as I know. To be honest with you, though, yeah, we got hit on there, but it was when we ran down Haifa Street that you're almost guaranteed to get hit.

Everybody talks about Biop being a bad place, but I'll tell you right now that every time that we made a run down Haifa Street, I was there for the founding of 2-3 when they stood up the team. I was already doing PSD. I did that for like a year and some change before I went over there to the TSD teams. And every time, I know in the beginning days before we realized how bad that area was to run down, that...

We'd run down it, and we got hit every time we went down it. We got grenaded, IED'd, or something one day by IPs, Iraqi police, because they actually closed the checkpoint behind us. And when they did, everybody's like, oh, shit, here we go. And sure enough, it happened. So, I mean, Bob, yeah, we made countless runs down that, and, yeah, we'd get hit every once in a while on Bob, but it wasn't like some of the other roads. Really? Yeah.

What was your deployment schedule like? Was it two months on, one month off? Was it different for everybody? Were you guys working with the same guys your entire career? I think for the most part, they do rotations of 90 days in country and then 30 days vacation. And you could sell your leave back sometime, but...

If you wanted to stay, but they didn't really like that all the time because if you stay over there too long, like these guys were saying, the threat level was so high and you never get a break from that, that stress. It starts to take a toll on you.

So you had an option of doing a year contract, at least when I first got there, they had year contracts where you could do the 90-30 rotation for a year. And they also had a six-month contract. So you did 90, go home for 30, then do another 90. And that was a completion of your contract. And I switched teams a few times. So the first contract I did was the team that went to the desert and

and did the mass grave site security. And when we weren't in the desert, we did traditional PSD movements. And then I got moved to another team where we had a permanent principle. A lot of times you're not protecting the same person.

A lot of times you just get a run sheet from the embassy and it could be whoever, whatever diplomat needs to go out in the red zone and meet with an Iraqi official. So you go to the embassy, you bring them out and bring them back and that's what it is. And the person that you're protecting could change day to day. With the second team I was on, we had a designated principal. So

We rode with this guy every day. He worked in the green zone but would go out in the red zone a lot. And then I took a short break between contracts, between my second and third contract, I believe. It was just, you know, a month or so or a couple months. And when I came back, they were going to assign me to the ambassador detail.

the ambassador's detail. So, uh, I wasn't real keen on that. I didn't really want to go to the ambassador's detail because there's so much support and there's, uh, it's so much, um, you're the, the inner layer of security. So, uh, you're never really on the front lines, um, so to speak. So I kind of put up a little bit of a fight to the, uh,

the detail leader or whoever was assigning me, I said, listen, there's no way you can put me on another team. And he said, well, I can put you on red detail. And red detail is made up of the teams that were quick reaction force teams, the tactical support teams. And that was right up my alley. So I said, yeah, go ahead and put me on that. And that's when I moved over to Raven 2-3. I believe Dustin was already on the team.

and then I showed up and then Nick and Paul came later. - So none of you guys knew each other until you were all attached to Raven 2-3? - Right. - And that was what, 20 man team, 19 man team? - I'll say this, when you're in such a large camp,

There's a lot of people that you know, you recognize faces, but you may not know names. So still to this day, whenever I see people that reaches out to us and everything else, I'm like, who is this? Because one, it's been so long. And two, over there with just so many of us that were there, it's like, oh, I know that dude by his face, but I didn't know his name. And so for us,

we're, you know, Evan and I were on two different, I was on team six originally. And so he was on a different team and your team is kind of the, the tighter knit group. You know, every dude on there because you're going in and out of the red zone in Baghdad. And so like, like I said, whenever we started up two, three, I was one of the founding members of it. And so,

Um, then Evan came, I got to know him. He was in the truck with me in the back. And then later on, if I'm not mistaken, Paul came and you're pretty much in the, uh, ERV or, uh, follow, follow, or no, you were in the follow with me. Okay. So Paul was in the follow with me. Then Nick came and, you know, that's how we all got to kind of got to know each other was we had the different

When they bring you together on a team is whenever you really start beating people. I don't know if this still holds true today, but I remember hearing Prince say that Blackwater is the only private military contracting company that never lost a principal. Do you guys know if that's still true? I believe that is true. And the figures, I'm not exactly sure of the exact figure, but

It was over 100,000 missions, and we never lost a principal, not even a principal injured. So that's a pretty amazing job with one of the most difficult tasks there were over there. Especially in 2007 with it being deemed the most violent bloody year of the entire war. They said that in 2007 there was an average of 180 people

engagements from insurgents a day in Baghdad alone. We did lose 43 of us of all the different contracts. There's the number that we know that I know is 43. And so there was 43 contractors and whatever

A lot of it was on the WPPS contract because we was running Baghdad every day. And, you know, where the other ones are at, I'm not real sure. But, you know, we never lost one. And we ate a lot, though. Yeah. You know, a lot of our brothers died. A lot of your brothers died in this. It was the most effective protection unit in the entire world. And that was with some...

standards that were put down from the State Department, for example, they dictated that the PSD teams roll around in high profile convoys and black Suburbans and big vehicles that everybody in the city knows there's an important American in there, there's an important diplomat in there, and they just create a huge target. And despite that, we still didn't lose a single principal. That's incredible.

But hey guys, let's take a quick break when we come back I want to talk about just kind of the daily routine and the op tempo of what you guys were facing. Uh, once you all met All right guys, we're back from the break you guys have just Uh all met you're a part of raven 2 3 now And uh, so I want to kind of go over like I said earlier the op tempo Of kind of what your day-to-day life was and uh, what the operational environment was what the threat was

But just before we get into that, Paul, if you could talk a little bit about use of force and the steps that you guys would take that were mandated from State Department, your rules of engagement before you actually fire a shot. Yeah, so with the environment that it was, there was always...

the use of force there was the use of force continuum and it started with literally just your voice and in the hand motion to stop or kiff and then it could elevate to water bottles and then to pin flares and then to if you if you had to you had to engage a threat directly be it in the engine of the vehicle or the driver or or the the threat themselves and so

Those were the steps that were always, I mean, just pounded into your psyche at that point. They were part of your everyday vernacular and just a big piece of your toolbox. And it was something that all of us followed to a T. I think we probably threw more water bottles than anything. And a lot of times it wasn't even necessarily a threat. It was somebody just not paying attention or it was someone in a car that was pulling out into traffic and they just didn't see you coming. It's just an honest mistake. So it wasn't always...

this environment of just total chaos and destruction. - Did you guys have signs on the back of your vehicles that said in Arabic and in English, stay back 100 feet or you will be shot? - Yes, sir. - So that was the first thing they would see. Second thing would be vocal, yelling. Third thing would be water bottles. - Hand signals. - Hand signals? - Yeah, I mean, it could be both in the same. - Yeah, throwing a water bottle at the vehicle

pencil flares which are basically a 9mm flare and then then if the threat keeps coming you can raise your weapon and then if it continues to come you can put a round into the grill

And if they continue to come after that, you can go to the windshield and neutralize the threat. So the reason you guys are doing that is because of all the vehicle-borne IEDs out there. And I just want to throw a couple examples up real quick of exactly what a vehicle-borne IED is.

So what happens over there is you'll get a white Corolla, because that's probably the most common vehicle, a white Toyota Corolla, and they would come out of traffic. Whether you stopped at a checkpoint, they'd blend in with the gen population. And it would speed up while you guys are giving these signals, you know, hey, stop. That way, if it is somebody that is not a car bomb, then they get it. They see, hey, don't go any closer, stop.

or I'm gonna be neutralized. But if it is a car bomb, you guys have to protect your boys. And as I'm talking, there's video up right now of different examples of what exactly that looks like and how devastating a car bomb can be. Right, and what people have to understand is everyone in the city, every Iraqi knows

the rules of engagement. They know that they shouldn't get close to a convoy and our convoys, like I said before, they are super high profile. It's not like we're riding around in taxis and trying to blend in with the crowd. We have shiny black Suburbans, we have big armored vehicles, so it's pretty common knowledge that, okay, when you see a convoy come through, you stop, you pull off to the side of the road, let them go by, and then continue on with your day.

And another thing, in a V-Bid explosion, every meter is very important. So when people watch in the movies, I guess, they might get an image of a V-Bid like, okay, well, if I'm 100 feet away from this thing and it goes off, oh, I'll be all right.

No. There's explosions, there were explosions during that time period that will level a building. We were just talking about a specific incident where an explosion happened, I think it was 600 or more pounds of explosives went off early morning and it blew up a hotel.

And this explosion was literally miles away from where I was. And I was sleeping at the time. And I had one of those old webcams on my table. And the shock from that explosion that was miles away was so strong it knocked the camera off my table. And I jumped on the ground because I thought it was a rocket that hit right outside my trailer. And when I opened the door, I couldn't believe it because I could see the...

the smoke rising from, you know, miles and miles away. So when you're talking about just for the audience, when you're talking about every meter counts, what you're talking about is how fast a blast wave can die down. And just one meter could possibly save your life. Maybe you'll keep a couple of limbs, you know? And so the, you know, obviously the farther you are, you know, the, the, the weaker the blast wave gets. And that happens, um,

you know, with a regular IED, it happens faster than something like a 600 pounder. But so with that being said, it's imperative that you go through that use of force continuum, you know, fairly fast because the greater the distance, the better the probability that you're going to survive the blast. And so I just wanted to, you know, say that for the audience who haven't

who hasn't experienced, you know, getting blown the fuck up. One thing to add on the use of force, that was dictated to us specifically by State Department. That wasn't something that we made up ourselves. And...

you have a big issue with the military because they had a different continuum of force, use of force. And so they had a problem with some of the ways that state departments set the guidelines that we should follow. They didn't think that certain things should be done this way, that way or whatever. But at the end of the day, our boss was U.S. Department of State. It was not the military. It wasn't Blackwater. It was U.S. Department of State. And so

When the embassy puts out, it says, hey, I want you to take this step, this step, this step before you do anything. The military might say, well, you got to do all these other steps before you can do something. But the problem was, is we didn't work for them.

And a lot of the friction that we had with military units and everybody else that was in the area was that the commander thought that he should be able to dictate what goes on in his area of operation. That's fine if he's running his area for the military. But whenever it come to us, we were setting stone the steps that we had to follow by state.

And so it's not something that we took lightly because if we overstepped our bounds, then we were responsible for what we did. At the end of the day, if we did something messed up, you could get charged or you could be fired like this. So it's not something that we took lightly. Another thing in regards to the rules of engagement is

Blackwater was the largest contractor in Iraq at certain times and it was the highest profile name. But there were many, many companies from other countries as well that were operating in Iraq that didn't have those same rules of engagement. So when they would go out and they're not wearing a military uniform,

the local Iraqis would assume it was Blackwater. But 99% of the time, it was just some other contracting company that may have engaged a car or a person and not followed the same strict rules of engagement that we had. But because the only name that they knew was Blackwater, we got thrown under the bus for it. That's a good point. I didn't think about that. If somebody asks you, who do you work for because you did something messed up?

Are you going to tell them, hey, man, I work for Triple Canopy? They're going to be like, oh, no, I work for Blackwater. That's a good point, too. Take it up with them. So a lot of the dirt that was put on us that smeared with the, you know, you talked about this, the notoriety that had to do with Blackwater during that time, everybody thought we were trigger happy. But you've got to think, how much was actually us versus how much was other companies that were doing things that,

Instead of saying, hey, I'm Donnacore, I'm KBR, I'm Triple Canopy, I'm whoever. No, hey, we work for Blackwater. Go ahead and call the embassy with your complaint. I forget what the percentages are, but Eric Brent said once in an interview that our percentage or our ratio between actually engaging a target and disengaging and getting out of the area was, I want to say, like single digits. It's less than one half of 1%.

Yeah, I mean the percentage is just unreal. If you look at the narrative as opposed to the actual percentage, it doesn't even line up. And another thing people have to keep in mind is it depends on what team you are working with in Blackwater. So you had PSD teams that were doing protection for diplomats, and then you had the quick reaction force teams or the TST teams that we were on. So if you're on a PSD team...

the likelihood of you shooting was relatively slim because of your mission, you know? You're trying to move your principal from A to B safely, let him do his business, and bring him back to the green zone safely and as quickly as possible.

So I worked over there for two contracts on PSD teams and I didn't shoot a single round. It was only until I moved to a TSD team where we were actually going to the engagements where I saw more firefights and shot rounds. So when people say, oh, these guys sound like they were into a lot. Well, we were into a lot because our teams were getting hit a lot.

So Raven 2-3 was only mobilized when there was an active engagement happening to people that, to your teammates and the principal who's being protected. No, the way that worked is there was three TST teams. You had 2-2, 2-3, and 2-6. All right. What we did is we did a three-day rotation. We did one day on, one day off, one day, or one, I'm sorry, one day on, one training day, one day off.

And most of the time it didn't work out that way. Most of the time, if you're secondary primary, you're both working. And then the third team is on standby in case something happens. And even if we're training, we're still fully loaded out because at any time that we could be called, I showed you the picture that we'd just come from the gym and we're in gym shorts and we got our armor, our weapons on because we had to go out because we

we were off. We were all in the gym. We were all doing this and that. And we got the call. And every second that you take to get gone is people are in a bind. And so what they would do with us is let's say that,

You've got five teams running in this part of Baghdad. You've got five teams running over here in this part of Baghdad. Well, they would get one TST team to cover these guys, one to cover these guys. Now, we may go out to a different location in Baghdad to stage, and then the other one may stay in the green zone at one of the checkpoints waiting to see if something happened. Or we get a call on May 23rd,

Like we'll talk about a little bit, all three TST teams ended up showing up for that event. I guess what I was getting at is you're only mobilized, you're only going to go into the red zone if there's an active gunfight happening and people need support. You're not there to do surveillance, reconnaissance, the, what do I want to say, traditional combat.

psd work you're you're there for when hits the fan and that's it right no go ahead oh the only other function we served as going out in the red zone was kind of what he was hitting at is like say the venue was a high threat venue and so the psd team was worried you know arrivals and departures is usually when they would get hit you know when they're showing up to the venue they would get attacked that happened a lot so we would

Basically escort them in to the venue with these big trucks with big guns, you know, kind of like a show of force. So the insurgents would be like, oh, these guys got backup. Let's leave them alone. So we would do that sometimes as well. But yeah, mostly our function was what you said. We're just waiting. And if anything happens, we're going to help whoever needs help. If you guys leave, things have already gotten bad. Yeah. Or they're expected to be extremely bad. That's right. Okay. Yeah.

So kind of moving on to day-to-day operations, which we kind of covered in a nutshell, but I want to kind of give what the deployments were like and how many engagements would you guys say you would get in a week? Well, personally, like I said, when I was on my first couple of contracts,

and I didn't shoot a single round. So on a PST team in 2005 and midway through 2006, we didn't see much combat at all. When I moved over to 2-3,

and it started to get progressively worse in Iraq because of different situations on the ground, I think we were getting in engagements a few times a week. Especially towards the summer of 2007, leading up to this incident that happened, we were going out multiple, multiple times a week.

On top of that, with the rocket attacks and the mortar attacks, we were talking downstairs earlier about the TCNs who worked in the kitchen and the chow hall. These were people that you saw every day. You actually developed relationships with these guys. And one rocket attack in particular, we went and scooped up bodies. And they were in the bags in the back of the Bearcat. We were taking them to the cache. And so it was...

I don't know, it was almost layer upon layer. And it was like a, you could feel like the momentum just picking up all the time. And it was like, where does it stop? Because at some point it's got to come to a stop, right? And it felt like the enemy were getting more brazen, more aggressive, and more tactical. It wasn't anymore just kind of engaging and then it would just break off. I mean, they were starting to buck and hook around corners and

I mean, they were getting sharp. Back in the old days, you'd hear mortar. You can tell the difference in between outgoing and incoming. And you'd hear that thump in the background. And you'd hear it fly over. You're like, oh, that's nice. And then...

it progressively got more and more. And towards the end of 2007, right about the time that our stuff was happening, it's like you'd be sitting outside. We used to hang out in like folding camp chairs and we'd all sit around and everything. And you'd look at your watch and be like, well, it's getting to be about that time. And then in the background, you can hear all the thumps of the mortars and the rockets being launched and

And it wasn't anymore, oh, that's nice. One just went by. It was time to hit bunkers and get behind sandbags because, I mean, they were raining on us hard. You know, used to, it was just if they got lucky, they might get somebody. Then they got the embassy dialed in, which we were right across from this embassy in the LZ Washington. So, I mean, there was shit coming in on us. And I know one night –

Forgive me, I don't recall the name. Kertouche something. Kertouche Rocket. Kertouche Rocket hit right in the middle of our camp. I'm talking hit the top of a sandbag bunker. One of our guys was actually on Skype with his wife and a piece went through his eye

and lodged in the back of his head. Well, the TST teams, there's three of us. Our job was to go in and make sure nobody was dead or injured in the camp. And so we had a guy that was on another team with me. He got hit in the leg and we were actively working. Our medics were working on him, trying to get him patched up to where we could take him to the cache. And the next volley started coming in and the

instead of the medics leaving, they hunkered down over the top of this guy. And, you know, we're still receiving rockets and mortars. And when that guy got hit, somebody kicked in his door.

And they thought he was dead because he had shit coming out of the eye. What they didn't know is that his feed of Skype or whatever it was, Vonage Skype, whatever, was still going. And his wife could hear everything that was going on. And he ended up living through it. But, I mean, we were getting hit hard from all angles. I'm talking just getting the shit kicked out of us. I remember when I was there in 05, it became pretty routine. And it was every night.

And then bullets were coming through the Connix box. You know, just you'd be sleeping and be like. Especially when a soccer game happened. Yeah. Yeah. And that specific incident, I was actually sitting right outside on that block with my best friend over there, Tommy Lopez, who passed away in the States later. But yeah, he actually heard the rocket coming in. So he was the one that warned me.

we popped up out of our chairs to dive in the bunker and it hit, like Dustin said, and destroyed this guy's trailer. So that explosion was so big, we were kind of out of it and we're in the middle of the smoke and it was like out of a movie because I looked at Tommy and we had been going through a lot of

Shit recently, you know, he was on two three also and I said Tommy are you alright? You know, what's wrong? Are you alright? And he just looked out of it and he didn't answer me and That very next day he quit and went home. He just couldn't take it anymore. Damn Let's talk about some day-to-day operations and and some of the engagements that you guys got in leading up to 16th September

So you want to talk about the next one that we talked about January 23rd? We did. So the next one that I recall would be considered the Central Rail Station incident that was in February. So we get called out that there's a team in contact on venue at Central Rail and that one of the DDMs has been shot. And so as we were driving up, we noticed it's the Iraqi Army is engaging our team.

So the people that are supposed to be on our side are killing our brothers up there. And the helicopter lands on the rooftop as we were pulling up. Blackwater assets load up the injured guy. He actually lived. He got shot through the wall and I believe it lodged in his hip. Yeah, I think it went through his side into his hip. So he actually lived though. And they got him to the cache. And again, you know, the...

the air assets, they wanted the birds elected to stay with us while the other one took him back. So we had a close air support from that helicopter and we got into a probably 25 minute engagement there and it was taking too long. And I remember I was, you know, I was pretty fresh to the team. I had been through the January 23rd incident. And so I was the machine gunner that day as well in my vehicle. And I remember I was in the command vehicle that day

the gun and I remember it was taking too long to get the principal to us and so I said, you know open the back doors and so we opened the back doors and we just backed the Bearcat, you know The Bearcat is almost like a Brinks security truck. It was like the worst vehicle we had, you know, it sucked but anyway that day it was very beneficial because it had two doors that opened up and they just the driver was awesome he just

sandwiched it against the side of the building. And so they just brought the principal and literally like chucked him in there to us. And so we were able to close the doors and we got the PSD team into our motorcade and we drove out. But I just thought it was just crazy that it was the Iraqi army engaging us. And they clearly knew that this was Americans that were having business here. And it was just like, it was like our first really

Taste or my first taste of like Iraqi army, you know turning against us and then and then we saw that like they were talking about the tempo in 2007 and I believe that was like the the troop surge time. Is that correct? Yeah, so it was like the more troops that got over there the just the hotter it got and it just kept picking up and then Anybody want to talk about the next one was May 23rd. So I

We had a, what I was talking about when a team Alamo's up, they had a guy jump across the fence and pop a few rounds or something. They had some fire from the buildings too. And we was not too far away at one of the camps. I believe we was eating lunch at Shields, if I'm not mistaken. And we come rolling into the traffic circle.

and we start picking up fire. Well, by the time that we were done, we ended up having all three TST teams there, but we had an Army team come up behind us, and they ended up opening up with AT-4s and a .50 cal, and then Apaches came on station about the time that we were leaving, and they hit some stuff after we had left, and so, you know, it's

By the time you get three TSD teams all in one area, it's a bad day. It's not just a, hey, we're in a skirmish, we're popping some rounds, and then we're moving on. Our job was to stand there and take it until they could get the principal out, until they deemed it was safe to move the principal. So we stood there and went toe-to-toe, I don't know how long. I know it was a long time. And so how many rounds that we went through that day

is a lot. That's the one that I gave you the video clip of. So, I mean, when you get an army convoy open up with their 50s and everything else, plus you get all three TSD teams, and then the PSD team was actually in the venue, and they're shooting over the top of us into the building. I got it! They're breaking their head, I'll tell you. What did you do that?

- Got it, got it. - Follow, is that US Army or ING? - We need more 240.

Let me know.

into the building that we're taking fire from. And what people don't understand is when they think they see in the movies of war, you got a guy standing there, you got another guy standing there and you see each one of them bring their weapon up. What they like to do is they like to take and get on the rail of the building, the lip, and just hang their AKs over and just spray down at you. And so it's not like you can kill that dude with one shot.

It takes multiple shots and getting lucky. He's got to look up to see where it's at and be firing before you can actually hit him. It's hard to hit the end of a barrel that's being shot at you. So when you're just standing there, you would think that, hey, man, we can roll in here. We can take care of this. But the difference in between what we're doing at that time versus the military, the military you close with and destroy the enemy by fire maneuver. We didn't do that.

we would stand there and fight until they got ready to leave and then once they once they leave we can disengage were you guys able to communicate with the apaches or was that military community military they didn't have comms what the way that we you didn't really know if they were going to show up or not no the way that we could communicate though was actually calling back to the base

And in our talk, the Tactical Operations Center, I think there's military assets in there and they can communicate. But we had no direct comms with military. I will say that any time we got into a major engagement, though, the Apaches were there within minutes. Those guys were spot on. Like I said, I don't know who those Apache pilots were, but they saved our lives more times than I can count. Yeah.

Like I would be dead if it wasn't for those guys. So thank you. If you're saying this, we appreciate it. Yeah. On that specific firefight, me and Dustin kind of had a close call. We were telling you about earlier, um, as we were rolling out, uh,

And we both kind of experienced something weird at the same time and we didn't really realize it at the moment. But we were, you know, pushing back to the green zone. We're just rolling out of the circle. And I felt like something wet on the back of my neck.

So I reached up and my initial thought just popped in my head. I thought he got shot. I thought it was blood because it was warm liquid in the back of my neck. So I just went like this and it was clear. And I went about my business and we rolled back to the green zone. When we got back to the green zone, somebody that was on one of the other teams, I believe, he said to Dustin,

Hey, who was the gunners in the follow vehicle? And he said, oh, it was me. And he said, hey, you guys almost got shot. So a round or multiple rounds must have came through this case of waters that we had on the top of the trucks, and they exploded on the back of each of our necks. You're talking not that far behind me, a water box disintegrated. Yeah. Yeah.

How many vehicles did you guys go through? They would break quite often. It seemed like we had such good mechanics that they always were able to piecemeal us a motorcade together. You rarely had the same truck. It would last for a while and it would take damage. And then...

by the time you started work the next day they would have you a replacement like they were just yeah we had some we had some great mechanics they worked i never seen them not working like they were always in there fixing something at night they didn't have the lights set up and then we did it those dudes were awesome i think we lost what four vehicles i think the efps and uh ieds yeah and uh stuff like that total is i know two that just got mangled

and now I mean they'd get shot but it wouldn't really do nothing to them but the EFPs would would mangle them were you guys ever hit with uh IEDs or EFPs or car bombs uh I was on Haifa I don't know if it was a grenade or IED I'm pretty sure it was a grenade I know we got hit then with one but

I don't think 2-3 ever took a EFP or a car bomb, but I know, I think it was 2-2 and 2-6. I'm pretty sure they both did. And that was our sister teams. And one of our guys, he had just taken a drag off a cigarette and the EFP came through the window compartment and he lost his arm. And the only reason why he's the driver is he took his hand off the wheel to do something. I don't know if it's the light one or

take a puff or what, but he lost his arm behind it. And then another one... With an EFP? Yeah. Another EFP hit the vehicle, and I know we went out and recovered the vehicle and the guns and radio and everything out of machine guns. And the damn barrel of the 240 was bent like this because I don't know if that vehicle thumped and then came back up or what, but...

through the armor of that vehicle in the engine compartment, there was a hole about like this. And the EFP went through the armor of the vehicle and lodged in the center of the motor. Our Intel analyst went out with us, her name was Mia, and she actually, I was there when she did it, she recovered the piece of the EFP that was in the motor compartment. And so our team never took

blast like that but our sister teams did I think they they got smarter as time went on with those EFPs as well because they started you know using what am I temperature control temperature controlled detonators you know to trigger the EFP and

So that when, instead of like a remote debt, like a garage door opener or a cell phone or whatever the hell they were using that day, these vehicles would come by, they would pick up the temperature of the engine and that would set the EFP off. Well then, I remember when I was there, I saw...

vehicles starting to put ammo cans on poles out front because then they were also doing just regular motion would set it off. Well, it would hit the ammo can and it would detonate right in front of the vehicle. So then they started putting them on a time delay

like a second delay or something so the the efp would be triggered wait a second for the vehicle to pass and then you know and it just got more and more and more effective you know as time went on and uh so i just want to you know put that out there but that reminded me of uh what happened that day um because we got

AARs and debriefed on any incident that had to do with any kind of insurgent improvement that you were talking about, how they got smarter in their tactics. But they had actually, the Iraqi police had stopped traffic and waved our sister team through and they had a watermelon stand set up

and they had put the EFP inside the watermelon stand. I think it was multiple array. I think it was more than one actual projectile, but they had a laser that they could turn on and off. And so they would turn it off, you know, for normal traffic. But when we were coming through our sister team, they turned it on and detonated it. So like the cops were complicit with it. You know, they let, they let them set it up. The cops were probably the ones that actually set it up, but

Yeah, they blew our guys up.

Didn't kill any of them, but he got ejected from the turret and hurt really bad. One of them lost his arm, I believe, and then there was a follow-up attack. So these guys are having to cross-load the casualties. They're having to engage the enemy, secondary attack, and then they're having to burn the vehicle because it's immobile. They can't get it out of there, so they're having to thermite the vehicle all within a matter of seconds because seconds count at that point. Yeah.

Yeah, those guys did a great job. By the time we got out there to help them, they had already took care of business and sanitized the vehicle. All we did was hook up to the vehicle and drag it out. They were squared away. Yeah, they would use IEDs to initiate the ambushes, and they would hide them in trash bags, cars, concrete, T-walls.

curbs, whatever they could, whatever would just blend in. And then it got, it got so ridiculous every time. You'd see a trash bag on the side of the road. It was an alternate route. To this day, that still triggers. Yeah, I still have a problem with that. I see a trash on the side of the road. Dead animals. I mean, just anything that they could put them in. Bodies. Yeah. Everything. So, I mean, you know, it's, I think the next one was,

right around the corner from, I don't remember the date, but the traffic circle is here where my vehicle was in this lane and then we arched in this way. We got another one in between the next traffic circle, same exact venue, Almanac City Hall. I know that I don't think that one was as bad as the first one. I don't think we stayed there as long, but

It's you lose track whenever you're out there. You know, it's sometimes it feels like you've been there forever and you've only been there a minute. Sometimes it feels like you hadn't been there very long, but you've been there forever. And so, you know, one of the things that we was discussing earlier is when they ask us, well, what was this guy doing? I don't know what this guy's doing. I have a sector of fire that I'm responsible for.

In me being the very tail end gunner of the convoy, I have a whole range to cover. And so, you know, there's times like in that one, I had guys with AKs that were moving down. Well, if I engaged as a machine gunner, I'm accuracy by volume of fire. So in other words, I'm not shooting one round and laying it down. I'm shooting a burst. If I was to shoot a burst,

into where those guys were and that particular one, I'd have been hitting all kinds of traffic and everything else around. And that's where Nick came into play. I said over the radio, I'm like, hey man, I got a problem back here. Can you take care of it? And he took care of the issue. And so I'll let somebody else go into the rest of that one. Well, you particularly have a reputation, I believe it's you, of being extremely...

You err on the side of caution when it comes to firing around. Well... Am I correct? Is that... Yeah. It's not that I err on the side of caution, but unlike 90% of our team, actually probably I know that there was only like one or two actual machine gunners that were on there that's been to machine gun school and done everything like that. I fully understand what that weapon does. And so it's...

It's an area weapon. It's not a precision weapon. And so whenever I'm taking a shot with it, I've got to know my target and what lies beyond. Because if I hit somebody with a machine gun, it's not going to stop there. And if I hit somebody with a burst, yeah, I may get you with one or two rounds, but I've also got a lot of rounds pushing through an area. And so...

I've got to know what's behind it. Now, granted, if you're in a fight for your life, you do whatever it takes to survive because you don't have a choice. But if there's a different tool for the job, why hit something with a hammer whenever it can be done with a screwdriver? And so, you know, that's like Nick being the DDM. He can take a precision shot because he's got optics.

And so there was so much traffic and stuff from where I was at that if I put a big burst into those guys that were back there, I would have ate all kinds of stuff. And I wasn't comfortable with doing it. And now later on, some of those guys were coming through alleyways and everything else. And that's fine because there's no collateral damage. And so I've got to know what I'm hitting. I got to know what's beyond my target because I,

A 240 for me is a small weapon. I'm used to 50 cals and Mark 19s. And so whenever you start playing with 50s and Marks, that's a lot more damage causing weapon. And whenever you shoot those into things, it'll punch through a wall and keep on going. You know what I mean? It'll go through a car and keep going. So...

It's not that I'm cautious. I understand the weapon system. I meant that as a compliment. No, I mean, but it's, I'm not saying it negative toward you. I'm just saying it's, I understand what that thing's capable of. Yeah. Yeah, it's, as best as I remember, the principle was hard-pointed, and we pulled up, and if memory serves me well, it was almost immediate. It wasn't a pause. It was as soon as the driver's

put the vehicles in park or maybe they didn't even put it in park yet. We just kind of settled into our area. We started receiving small arms fire. I remember hearing over the radio of someone saying, watch the diska because the cops were starting to get up towards the vehicles where the diskas were mounted. And had that opened up on us, I mean, you're not going to stand up against that. A diska just being the Russian version of the .50 cal.

And so I think what Dustin was talking about, the guys he was trying to engage, they were coming down the alleyway trying to button hook towards me, which was the broadside of our Bearcat. And at the same time, we were receiving small arms fire from a guy up on a, you remember the great big water, red water towers that were on top of the houses? There was a guy up there that had me in his sights,

And it was a lead gunner, whoever, I can't remember who that was, had stopped that threat because had they not, I mean, it had me dead to rights. I was in the middle of doing a reload with the 240. And then we broke contact pretty quickly. I don't think we were there very long. Yeah, that one didn't last too long. Yeah, it was about 10 minutes total, I think. I think we were probably like five minutes on the scene. And then we got the principal down.

in our motorcade. That's what we would do a lot of times. Once the PSD team had the principal loaded, we would just put him in our package. So we have two vehicles in front. We'd put their three-vehicle motorcade inside of our motorcade, and then we'd have two vehicles behind that. So we would just kind of escort them in to the green zone. That happened quite a bit. And they had ambush set up

on both sides of the river, I remember. And it was kind of stressful because they actually, traffic was blocked. So we actually had to get out and deploy the fire team on foot. So we were taking contact while we were on foot and we had to clear out traffic, you know, and we got that done pretty quick because we were taking rounds while we were out there. So we had to leave the safety of the skin of the vehicle and get out there on our feet and take contact and

We got the vehicles out of the way finally and yeah, it was 10 minutes. For me, that was the first time I had actually seen them bounding towards us. And they were coming down the bank of the river and yeah, it was, that was a mess. And the guys, like you say, they'd gotten out of the suburbans to try to clear traffic and, you know, fortunately we got out of there, but.

What was your guys' relationship with the principals with the State Department? We didn't know. Didn't have a clue who it was, who they were, what they were doing or anything else. Never worked with the same one? Sometimes. When we was on PSD, yes, but on the tactical teams, no clue who they were or anything.

Anything, it didn't matter. The only time we ever saw them is when they were in trouble and we were dragging them out of somewhere. That's the only time we, you know, that's my only experience with a principal because I was on the, I was on 2-3 the whole time, so I never had any encounters with principals or State Department officials unless they were in trouble and they were calling for our help to come get them. As the advance team for Ambassador Kalilazade, he seemed to really have a lot of respect for us because he

I'm not going to speak for the man, but I think he really understood what it was in that environment because he'd been there for so long. And I think he truly appreciated everything that we put on the line for he and his staff. And again, I don't mean to put words in the man's mouth or by any means any of that, but just given my very limited interaction with him, he really seemed to

to respect us and to care about us. There wasn't a disconnect there at all. - That's good. What were you guys, were you guys getting fed intel at all? Did you get any intel briefings, BOLO lists, anything? - Every morning. - Every morning? - Yeah. - BOLO list for the audience is be on the lookout for blank, whatever. - White Kia Opel always was on the list. - White Kia?

Like you were saying earlier, the Toyota, it was Kias, Toyotas. Motorcycles. Motorcycles. Taxis. Taxis. Bongo trucks. Yeah, ambulance. They always stole ambulances and blew those up too. That was the first thing we saw that one day. That was our last day. I remember seeing that thing thinking, all right, here we go.

Every morning you guys were getting an intel dump, and who was giving that to? Was it Mia? Mia, our intel analyst. She was Blackwater. Do you know where she was getting the intel from? Was it military? The embassy? I don't know. The department, I assume. All those assets had a, like he said earlier, they had a talk, and they would all share. We didn't know. We never went to the talk, but the way that we were –

We were informed this was a united effort, basically all interagency cooperation. They would kind of lay out and they had sources out there at the time. And this is what's going on in the city. We had really reliable intelligence as far as routes. Like they had really good assets on the ground that would tell us these are the routes where you're going to get hit. So we advise you to take this route. And it was usually spot on. I mean, as far as the routes go.

We are traveling to the same places a lot of times with the PSD teams are traveling to the same places So there's only so many routes you can go I mean you could pick three different routes, but normally only maybe two of them are useful maybe one so There's no way around it. You got to go down the same streets Normally around the same time all the time so you're just a huge rolling target and

One of the biggest needs too for like coordinating intelligence is you may have an army asset team over here doing whatever it is they're doing and it's your objective at that point then to kind of stay out of their way because you don't want to cross paths unnecessarily and you don't want to interrupt what's going on. So for instance, if a principal is over here at say Ministry of Oil,

and your route happens to cut right through where some military operations are going, obviously you don't want to do that if you can help it. And so that's where that interagency cooperation really helped for any kind of blue on blue incident, because that's obviously the last thing you would ever want to happen. - Friendly fire is never friendly. - How well did you guys know the city? - They were great from backwards. - Corey knew it like the back of his hand. - Yeah, very well. Yeah, our tactical commander, he was,

He had his shit together. He knew all the back streets, all the main avenues. Like Dustin said, he was normally the rear gunner in the follow vehicle. So he's looking at the city rolling backwards all the time. So if you turn him around, he might get lost. Drive backwards, I can tell you where to turn. We knew the city pretty well. I mean, there's places like Solder City and stuff that...

they didn't want military going in. But if we had a meeting there, if the principals had a meeting, we didn't have a choice but to go wherever it was that they were going. And so, I mean, when it was the military couldn't go, we still would. And so, because if the boss says, hey, you got to take somebody here, you're taking them there. It doesn't matter. The only place that I knew that was blacklisted to drive into was Ministry of Health.

and most of the time they would fly a team in, drop some people in, let the diplomat do his meeting, and then fly them back out. Is there anything specific you guys want to cover before we move in to September 16th? There was also the DART incident as well. So there was a helicopter that was shot down at one of our sister camps, which was like,

South of us it was called Hilla, right? Yeah, it was halfway between Hilla and Baghdad. So they were flying, they were taking guys for their leave. They would fly them back to Baghdad so that they could hop on a plane and come back to the States. And like you said, they were halfway in between. So it was about, it was probably like a 15 minute flight from where we were to the crash site where they had got shot down. And they always traveled in pairs. So the air guys were squared away as soon as

That helicopter got shot by RPG. It crash-landed. All occupants, all of our brothers on there survived. And the other one sat down and immediately cross-loaded, and they were able to get them all back to safety in the green zone, but the bird was still out there. So our mission was... Right quick, if I can. The pilot got his tail rotor shot off, and he landed his bird under hotline wires.

Wow. To put it in context of how good a pilot this man was, or two pilots, it was amazing. I mean, the biggest thing I think was a scratch maybe on a couple of the guys, but in context of a good pilot, that's what he made. He was my neighbor, actually. I knew the man, and he was a Vietnam Air pilot. We had like Vietnam Air aircraft. We had Hueys, and we had Little Birds.

And the Huey, he was flying that. I think he was one of the only guys that had been through the RPG simulator back in Vietnam. So I think he had been shot down like three different times by RPG fire. And all of his crew always lived like everybody. Like he knew how to crash land. Wow. He was a very good pilot. But so our mission was we're supposed to fly out there and set up security, which was like 10 or 15 minute flight. And then we had to wait.

for them to fly back and load up mechanics, bring the mechanics out, take the sensitive stuff off the bird. And then that was going to be our mission. So as we were flying out there, they tell us you're going to land in a hot LZ. There's active enemy combatants out there. And so as we were flying closer, I realized that the army is already on station and there was Apache gunships that were circling. There was two of them and there was a,

a mine sweeping vehicle, a Bradley, and a Humvee out there already, right beside the crash site. So when we landed, I noticed, and a lot of the guys were talking about how the Apaches were, they were engaging with their chain gun. They were lighting up this tree line and this village where the RPG attack had come from. And so we set up security around the bird and I linked up with the local assets,

I think he was a lieutenant and a sergeant is who I talked to and another guy on our team talked. And we're just saying, all right, look, y'all got the big guns. We're here. Told him what our mission was. He was like, all right. And so we're sitting there for a minute. And then we notice all these locals start coming out of the woodwork. And there was this crowd that had

men, women, and children in it. And they're looking through the optics on the Bradley and they're telling me this. And they've got people with AKs, but they've also got civilians intermixed in this crowd. And so what the Apache did, he just kind of flew low and kind of dispersed the crowd. And so they all kind of peeled off and they started chucking their weapons into the fields. And a lot of times what they would do, they would just put them in a feed sack and pitch them out in the field.

so we've been there maybe two minutes three minutes and then they just started coming back out of their houses when the apaches gained elevation again they started pulling their weapons back out and they started engaging us and then firefight broke out and then somewhere in the middle of that the mechanics show up and then and then they start they start helping us engage and then uh the apaches they uh i guess they were asking for permission to use hellfires

And we eventually got the Apache logs later, and they laid down a lot of ordnance. Like, they blew up a couple buildings and a tree line, and then we didn't take any more contact after that. They killed all the bad guys. And then we, yeah, that was it. We took the, the mechanics took the sensitive stuff off the bird, and we loaded back up and flew back. I know this is not on this subject, but you said before we moved to September 16th.

We'd be all over Baghdad, all over the city and everything, right? And one of the things that they like to do to convoys in general over there with the military is cut off the last vehicle and then everybody else would have to turn around and come back. And so, you know, you're always on the watch for ambush and everything else. Well, it was my vehicle. We had a car right as we were coming across a bridge.

that jacked out in front of us. I'm talking just pulled. Well, my driver did what he's supposed to do. He drove through to keep us from getting ambushed. I don't recall if we took rounds that day. You did. I don't. I got my bell wrong. I actually broke my back. I got two rods, six screws in my lumbar. And...

I couldn't tell you if we took a single round because we hit so hard that it almost ejected the front gunner. It rang everybody's bell inside of it and I ended up, I knew I got hurt but I didn't realize how bad. And so you know the threat that we faced every day was all day every day of

Shit could happen at any second, any time. And we wasn't a team that didn't leave the wire. In other words, we wasn't sitting around just playing on our computer and doing whatever. We were constantly on the go because somebody needed us for something. Whether it's just like they're saying earlier,

Okay, they bring in the heavy trucks and it's a show of force or whether it's something that went boom or bang that we're actually responding to But you know, we're under the threat of attack all day every day And that's what people don't understand is the prosecution sold in the sewer square Like this is right outside of here in Nashville that it's a safe place that nothing ever happens there but

Baghdad wasn't like that. Baghdad was like the Wild West of... What was it, about a month prior or two that the car bomb went off underneath the square and blew a crater in that thing the size of something you'd see on the move? Bill Cofield said that that crater, I believe, was 50 meters deep and 75 meters wide. That's how big that fucking car bomb was. Yeah.

And it was sold as if it were DuPont Circle in Washington, D.C. It was rivers of blood. When we went out there, it was like, you know how you hear that term, rivers of blood, or blood flowing in the streets? It was literally like...

just people like they're they didn't even know how many people got killed like it was a crowded thing dude drove it i think it was actually in april i think it was a few months before that but but he actually drew drove his car underneath there was like a tunnel that went underneath it and the people were milling about that circle and he detonated and it just

Blew people to pieces man, and we had drove through there and it was just it was insane still being repaired Yeah, and all those months later September like they were still Repairing it the tunnel wasn't open yet. I don't believe Bill Cofield also said that that's why the circle was so crowded that day was because that That entire section was shut down. That's right. And there's we'll get into this later. But I

And the threat was real, whether they want to admit it or not. And that's why when the FBI team eventually showed up three weeks after it happened, they didn't just walk out there and try to take pictures of the curb and pick up supposed evidence. They went out there with a platoon of security guys as well because they didn't want to get blown up. Full kit. Yeah. Apache's on station.

And when patches come in, it's a game changer. You don't want to jack with a flying tank. Yeah. And so whenever they're there to start with, things are a lot less likely to happen. Yeah. They were definitely, they had the privilege of being the full protection, air, ground, everything. And you guys didn't. But let's take one more quick break. When we come back, we'll get into the September 16th.

all right guys so september 16 2007

what's known as the Blackwater Massacre Raven 23 incident. I want to get each and every one of yours first-hand accounts of what happened when you got that call. So let's start with Nick. So we were all in the green zone. There was a huge explosion and immediately we started moving to the vehicles. We were all running. They called us on the radio, said that one of our teams had been get got hit by a V-Bid

As we rolled out, we rolled through checkpoint 12. We ended up in Nisra Square. And as we were rolling into the circle, we noticed, it was strange, man. We noticed a lot of military, Iraqi military and a lot of Iraqi police just on foot scattered throughout the circle. And we had never seen anything like that. More than usual? Yes, sir. Usually they were at specific locations like guard posts and stuff. But there was a heavy presence of

And so immediately that got my hackles up and I felt like that something was about to happen. And so we were directed that everybody was okay in the team that the V-Bid had went off. It had actually exploded outside their venue. So what they were going to do, they were going to load up the principal and they were going to travel through Neeser Square. And so we were just going to facilitate that.

a fast route for them to get back into the green zone then we were going to put them in our package and drive into the green zone right so we had been there for maybe 15 seconds maybe 30 seconds at the most and we started taking incoming fire and i heard on the radio the ips are engaging us and so i looked out and i saw multiple iraqi police at first

They were kind of like this with their AKs and then they started raising them up and they started engaging and then firefight broke out and I heard our vehicle just cut off and Evan had said that our vehicle's down. I heard that on the radio and we were hearing impacts on the side of our vehicle and so I was like, man, we're hit. I just knew we were going to die and so I heard the machine gunners engaging

And eventually the firefight ceased and it was probably maybe two or three minutes of back and forth between us and the enemy. And then the shift lead calls for a tow out, which means the second vehicle, our vehicle was the third vehicle, the second vehicle is going to back up and they're going to dismount fire team members and hook up a tow strap to our vehicle so that we can be pulled out. Right. And so they do that. They execute the tow out and we're traveling

back to the green zone and I remember hearing on the radio that the PSD team Raven 4 that the initial attack had happened our sister team I believe it was Raven 2 2 had picked them up and put them in their motorcade and they were receiving contact as well on their route back so they took another route away from Easter Square back to the green zone and so that was two separate firefights yes sir within how close of each other

Within probably two and a half miles, I would say, is the heart compound. That was the compound they were at. It's probably two miles from the circle. So within that area, I didn't know exactly where they were at, but on their way back to the green zone, they were taking incoming as well. So you've got a radio log where we've got multiple engagements going on. We've got

We really believed on an after action report, we really believed that this was a kidnapping attempt. We really believed that they were going to detonate that V-BID and have the PSD team drive through Neeser Square because that was the most direct route back to the green zone. And there was a huge water truck and a bus, like a big city bus.

and they were going to just block off that intersection so that the PSD team would be trapped in there and then they were going to kidnap the principal. That's how I feel about it. But they didn't expect guys with machine guns, up-armored vehicles to roll into their ambush. So I think they just panicked and initiated their ambush prematurely. And so we get towed out. We make it back.

Out of the circle, and as we're leaving the circle, I hear on the radio, we're still receiving fire, and somebody else calls out, we'll shoot back, and then he says, I can't shoot back because I can't see where it's coming from. And that was the last thing that I heard on the radio. We made it back to the parking lot, and that was it. Do you have any idea how many people were engaging you? I saw, personally, I saw two people engaging me. I saw two Iraqi cops engaging me.

Paul? Yeah, my memory is much the same as far as coming into the circle. It was really spooky. It was weird because there was a lot of active INGs and IPs, and not to beat a dead horse, but it was really something that was not normal. And everybody knew that something was wrong. And so as we pulled into the square, it was, again, scary.

As we got settled, it seemed to be almost immediate as far as incoming fire. And at the same time, there was the white vehicle that was pulling out of stopped traffic. And everybody, including Iraqi witnesses, said that it was what they thought was an apparent V-BID. And so in...

The thought process of preserving the team and engaging a legitimate threat, the thought for me was to stop that VPAT. And so that's what I did. I engaged the threat. And following that, there were five other, if I recall correctly, five other threats that were engaging us.

And as the call was let out that our command vehicle was disengaged and not able to start anymore, I heard Corey Wainscott say over the radio, Command turret gunner, take up six. Because basically it was the wall of steel between us and the enemy where we were receiving fire from. And then the ERV backed up.

hooked up the tow out and that's when I witnessed other threats trying to engage what I thought was Dustin. And so we got the tow out, we got hooked up and we start moving out and the volume of fire had died way down but there were still other rounds coming in and again like Nick I heard we're still taking fire, we're still taking fire.

And I heard shoot back or fire back. And it was clearly Dustin saying, I don't have a clear threat. I don't have a clear target. And he popped smoke. And we moved back and we're driving down the right side of the road, buttonhood back, going towards the IZ. There were people up on rooftops of apartment buildings that were watching us. Clearly they were

They were watching what we were doing. We got back in the IZ and then went to Patriots. And then Nick pulled me out of the turret, peeled off my kit and my flight suit to check for holes. But I was good. - And the white, was it the Kia? - Mm-hmm. - And the white Kia, were you being engaged by threats when the white Kia was headed your way?

as i recall it was all at the same time it all happened at the same time so it was definitely it appeared to be a coordinated attack and that that same car if i remember right was on the bolo list that morning that same car was on the view there was a bee on the lookout for the white key of for a possible yeah would all you say that yes

were there any other assets in there did you guys have air did you have drones or was mill there so there was a drone um i think nick can speak a little better than that than i can i know that air showed up kind of at the tail end of things and they were our support as we were coming in but as far as i recall uh air didn't engage at all air yeah the helicopters the gunfight had pretty much dissipated by then

And the drone was already on station from the V-Bid that had gone off just a couple minutes earlier, correct? As I understand it. So it was already up in the air by the time you guys even rolled out at checkpoint 12? Yes, sir. So I was the driver of the command vehicle, the third vehicle of the convoy. So we rolled out, rolled into Nisour Square, and I agree with these guys that there was something off about...

the Iraqi police activity. It just seemed to be a bigger number of Iraqi police and even, I think, Iraqi National Guard.

And typically when you see them, they're either directing traffic by shooting their weapons in the air or they're lounging around in the shade resting. They're not really too active. So I did notice when we pulled up into the circle, it was totally packed with traffic and the IP seemed to be maneuvering around and kind of like frantic movements and that caught my attention.

So, pretty much as soon as we came to a stop, within a minute or less, we received incoming fire, small arms fire, and I started hearing the pings on the side of my vehicle. And at the same time, I heard, I don't know if I heard Paul yell it out on the radio or just yell it out down the turret that there was a white Kia that was presenting a threat and it was coming towards the vehicle. So...

I'm kind of scanning the area, looking for threats. I see the activity. I see some IPs raising their AKs, firing at the convoy. And then at the same time, that white Kia is coming forward as well. But as a driver, your job is to safely move the team from point A to point B and also give the turret gunner a secure platform to protect the team.

So while I was looking for threats and scanning the area and calling out things that I was seeing, my job was to drive. So I just happened to glance down at the dashboard and all of the dash lights were illuminated, which kind of concerned me because that would mean that the vehicle is turned off. So I turned the key again and it wouldn't start. It just kind of clicked.

So I did a couple times and I looked over the team leader to my right and I said, "Hey, Haas, this vehicle's dead, man." And we were kind of in the middle of receiving all that fire. So as we spoke about earlier,

We were in armored vehicles, but just because you're in an armored vehicle doesn't mean that you're totally protected. It doesn't mean you're behind a force field. Yes, it does protect against small arms fire, but once you receive a certain number of small arms rounds or even explosion or an RPG, you're going to have big problems no matter what armor you have.

one of the images that kind of would pop into my head was that image of the four guys in Fallujah that got burned in that convoy and strung up on that bridge. And, you know,

It was a life or death moment. So the team leader kind of snapped me out of my driver mode because the vehicle was obviously disabled from incoming rounds. And he told me to open the door so he could engage. So I swung the door open with my foot, leaned back against the seat, and he leaned over me and fired at some threats that he was identifying.

I'm not sure how many rounds he really shot. It wasn't more than one magazine, but he pulled back. I shut the door and started working on the vehicle again. Shortly after, I kind of gave up on the vehicle because it was not going to start and it was just...

Yeah, it was a waste of time. So he told me to open the door again and that's when we both engaged. I saw an IEP that was kind of behind a fighting position. It was like some sandbags and he was actively shooting at the convoy. So I shot in his direction, neutralized the threat and shut the door.

I think it was at that time where there was like a little lull in the firefight. And there's a few things that you could do when you're being actively engaged or you get hit by an IED or VBID. One of the things that you could do is the X is what you call the area when you're

Basically, it's the danger area where all the fire is going to be directed at the X. The X is basically the best way to describe the X. The X is the entire focus of the battlefield. It is a magnet for bullets.

Right, so you want to get off the X as fast as possible, your vehicle being the X because it's disabled and they're already shooting at it. Right, so we were kind of sitting ducks at that point. So one of the options that we had was for the follow vehicle to actually put their bumper against our rear bumper and push us out.

But because of the way the vehicles were positioned, the amount of traffic in the circle and the route that we would have to take to get just off the X, it wasn't feasible. It just would have been too hard to maneuver the vehicle without power steering. So the team leader made the call that we're going to tow out. And like Nick said, the ERV vehicle, which is the second vehicle in the convoy,

backs up the follow vehicle covers provides cover for the side of the threat they hook up the tow strap and then they tow you out so on the way back i do remember uh guys calling on the radio that we're receiving fire still from back in the circle and dustin came on the radio and said he didn't have a clear shot and then um just uh we we got pulled back to the green zone fighting the vehicle the whole time and that was it it was uh

relatively minor engagement in the big scheme of things. It's serious anytime you discharge your weapon, but the amount of firefights that we had been in in the weeks leading up to that, in comparison it was relatively minor engagement in my opinion. As we rolled into the circle,

we started receiving fire. I don't recall exactly the timeline of how fast everything happened. I mean, it's been some time ago. I just know that we're being shot at from the south down there. There's an area that I could clearly see people engaging us and I neutralized the threat. And I'm not sure how many people was there. It's just one of those things that

you've got a problem and you've got to solve it. And like they were saying about the IPs and everything, one of the things that was dividing my attention is there was a bunker that had a belt fed in it off to the... It'd be out of the area that we came leaving the checkpoint. We drove right by it. And so not only was I dealing with the active threat, but I was also kind of keeping an eye on that too. And so...

I know that after everything, it was short. It wasn't a big firefight. It was after everything was done, I started throwing smoke on the way out. And that way it covers our exit to where if the enemy can't see you, then they can't shoot you. You're providing concealment for the entire convoy. Yeah. I threw every smoke that we had and...

They said that we was acting irrational or stuff like that. And so my fire team member, which is the guy inside the vehicle, he handed me up a thermite. And I looked at that and realized it was a thermite and not a smoke. I could have thrown it. I could have just chunked it wherever and let whatever burn. But instead I handed it back to him saying, "Hey man, if we need this, we're gonna need it. I'm not just gonna throw it."

As we were leaving, and it'd be to the north of the circle, I could still see shit skipping off the pavement around us. And I called out on the radio, and I said, hey, we're still taking fire. And that was after the towout and everything else. And it wasn't a lot, but it was still enough to concern me. Well, I actually got hit by something.

I don't know what it ricocheted off of, but it hit me in the chin strap of my Kevlar. And so I had a big old pop knot on my chin and it landed in the bend of my arm right here. And the NOMAC suits like 12, 1500 degrees before it's supposed to combust. And I was actually on fire. And so I put the fire out with my glove and everything. And then

Whenever I called and I said, "Hey, we're taking fire." I got the order from my team leader saying, "Shoot back." And I called back over the radio. I said, "I can't shoot back. I don't have a target. I'm not just going to open up." I had 400 rounds linked together. And if I wanted to be malicious, I wouldn't have had one linked up. I had all kinds of ammo in the truck too. So I had plenty of ammo if I wanted to be malicious.

We got back to the Patriots parking lot and as soon as we came into the gate before we got there, I stripped off my armor and had my fire team member check me because I knew I'd been hit by something to make sure that I didn't have a hole in me that I didn't fill because of the adrenaline and everything else. And so I didn't have any holes in me, which was good. And when we got back to Patriots, I went and got my burns dressed and everything. So

That was pretty much the short and sweet of it. How many other teammates out there out of the 19 of you guys were engaging threats? Do you know? Was everybody? No. It would have been... I think there was like seven total. Seven? Seven out of the 19, I think, engaged. The way the trucks were positioned, we were spread out across the southern side of the circle pretty good. So...

The distance between the league lead vehicle and the follow vehicle would be what it was a good good distance so what the people in the the lead in the second vehicle are looking at is

not necessarily the same as the third and fourth vehicle and there was a median that went basically right where the second and third vehicle were separated so if you were in those first two vehicles that street that most of the threats were on was blocked by palm trees in that median so and it's hard to

really say with any accuracy how many guys were firing also because we were all in us three were in one truck Dustin was in the follow so Like we've said before when you're in a firefight you're kind of paying attention to the threat and doing your doing your thing You're not really conscious of hey this guy in this truck is firing out this porthole or this gunner is shooting in this direction You really don't know

So anything that I would say now would be something I heard after the fact. So, yeah. How much distance was between you guys and the threats that you were engaging? 75, 100 meters. The Kia did get pretty close as well. As far as the IPs maneuvering, yeah, 50, 75 meters. The Kia was a very controversial topic when you guys got to court, and there was a...

Another shooter who engaged the Kia who wasn't there? Right. That wasn't you guys. Mm-hmm. There's actually two other shooters besides us that engaged the Kia. And one was dropped for lack of evidence because nobody saw him shoot. He's the one that said in his sworn statement that he shot. And then the other one that's not here with us today took a guilty plea and

He's admitted to killing the passenger and if not the driver, if I'm not mistaken. - So just to recap, there was a V-BID, your team got hit, your sister team got hit. They went out to go recover them. There was also an army engagement also happening at the exact same time, plus your engagement. So that's three firefights within five mile radius, correct?

Then you showed up, there was already a drone on station who was filming footage and you had two Blackwater Little Birds on station as well out there. So you get back. Did you guys think anything of it? No. It sounds like a pretty minor engagement compared to some of the other stuff that we just talked about. When we got back, the main concern was get ready in case we had to go back out.

- Yep, I brought the vehicle straight to get repaired and get loaded up. And my main concern was getting that vehicle ready to go back out. - Yeah, 'cause there was still other teams out there on venue. - And remember this, there was 180, there was an average of 180 engagements a day in the year 2007 when this happened. So at what point did you guys get indicted?

Well, uh... Before we go into the indictment, the thing that was weird about this shoot versus others is, okay, normally the shooters do a statement. Okay, at the end of the day, if you shot your weapon, if you discharged it in any manner, you're supposed to do an after-action report, an AAR. And when you do...

Whoever shot is supposed to turn the statement to the detail leaders. And then the detail leaders walk that to the embassy. And as soon as we got back in, we was eating chow. And they started looping a video from the tower over and over on CNN.

A video of your guys' firefight was already on CNN? After. Right after. How fast are we talking? About 30 minutes. 30 minutes CNN was rolling this? Yeah. It took us just enough to go from cross-loading our vehicles to make sure that we were ready to go back out.

I got my burns treated. We went back in. We were eating lunch in case we had to roll again. And my whole team is sitting at a table and there's the big old school TV that's back there in the back, big square one. And it's on CNN. Well, it just starts looping the video footage afterwards.

And you see one burning vehicle. The Iraqi fire department or whoever it is hasn't even got there to put it out yet. There's a couple vehicles that are still there that I guess were disabled back behind the Kia. And you don't see bodies littered all over the street like what it says. And if I remember correctly, that video was shot within just minutes.

few minutes after the after the firefight itself and so the thing that struck me odd like I was saying about the statements is normally the shooters just do a statement and then It's taken over there to the embassy if they got questions they call you but later that evening they wanted the whole team to write a statement and I guess because of the CNN stuff and so

The whole team had to sit down and do their sworn statements, which are Garrity statements. It says, I declare underneath the penalty of perjury that this can't be used against me as long as I tell the truth in whatever the statement is. I don't remember the exact heading. I'm sure one of those can be found, the actual statement.

And what you do then is you go in and it's a work statement. It's just like a cop. When a cop discharges a weapon on the streets here in the U S he's got to go in and he's got to give a work statement. And what he's telling his boss is because of an investigation is going to happen. And so he gives a statement. Well,

It was weird that the whole team got called over. So we started doing our statements. Then we went to the embassy and turned them in in person. And then, um, I know that we went back like three other times and there was people that said that they didn't shoot that did. And, um,

That caused a lot of friction because there was a grenade or two, I don't remember how many, that were shot. And there's only certain people within the motorcade that had grenades. I was one of them. Paul was one of them. And there's, I don't remember who the others were, but there's unaccounted rounds that were spent. And so what created friction was the person that shot that said that they didn't

They started pointing the finger, and it went from just a questioning to a more aggressive interrogation of, where did this round come from? Well, if it didn't come from you and it didn't come from him, where did these rounds come from? It's like, I don't know, dude. I don't know what to tell you. And so after we all did our statements and we kept going back and forth in between the embassy and the

the man camp and answering the investigators questions and you know, being honest. I haven't deviated. I've never said anything outside of my sworn statement and I stand by that because what I said right after the incident, whenever I wrote that statement out, everything was fresh in my mind. If I tried to give you a recap of anything that's today,

There's been so much talk of everything else and the years that's gone by. I just couldn't give you an accurate statement because of all the things that we've heard in court, the, you know, in everything else, it's just not fresh. And so I know that after we gave those statements, before we were indicted, that there was a State Department agent that actually leaked those to the press.

So I know Paul's statement was on CNN. Part of my statement was on CNN. And so they took a protected document and leaked it to the general public. I don't recall how long after that until we got indicted. So I think so. The incident happened September 16th, 2007. I stayed until the end of my contract. I wasn't able to go out and work.

And like he said, that initial night when instead of just calling the shooters, they called everybody over there and the way they were interviewing everybody, there was definitely something a little different about that firefight.

So we kept going on with our days over there, working out, watching TV, hanging out, waiting to go back to work. And then it was about three weeks later that we received word that the FBI was going to come over and investigate.

So in my mind the firefight was a minor engagement So I invited them to come over investigate. I'm like, you know if this is what it takes to resolve this thing Come on over and do it. So shortly after that my contract was up so I went home and that was the first time I met with a lawyer and I was so naive at the time I guess you could say or

I just didn't have any experience with the justice system. I didn't realize how serious this whole thing was about to get because one of the first things I asked my lawyer, I said, "Hey, when can I go back to work?" And he said, "Listen, forget about Blackwater." And right there, I knew it was about to get serious. So,

It took about a year later when I got that final call where he said, listen, I was in Columbia at the time overseas. And he said, you got to come back. They're going to indict five guys on the team. I don't know if it's you, but you better come back just in case. So I came back and sure enough, I was one of the five. Well, let's take a quick break and then we'll get into what happened in court. All right, guys. So now it's...

2009, two years past the actual incident in Nazar Square, and you're just now getting indicted, correct? Late 2008. Late 2009? 2008. 2008, so about a year and a half afterwards. So press says there were 17 killed, 17 innocent civilians killed, and I believe 20...

20 injured. 21, if I'm not mistaken. Something like that. Now, they didn't send an FBI investigative team for, what, three weeks after the incident. So, I don't know what the hell they could have found three weeks after the incident at a circle, a major traffic circle in the middle of Baghdad. But they didn't show up for three weeks after the incident. And let's start with what happened when they indicted you guys.

Well, how many of you got indicted and what were you being indicted for? Like I said, I got a call from my lawyer saying that he got word that five guys from the team were getting indicted and he wasn't absolutely sure it was me, but it was my best interest to come back to the United States just in case because I was one of the shooters. So I came back to the States. I met with them.

And I figured out that it was going to be me, Dustin, Nick and Paul and a fifth guy on the team. The first thing that popped in my mind was, well, why us and not the other shooters? And one of the reasons was because

Simply, they took the reports, the protective reports that we wrote, and used those against us to figure out who shot, first of all. In the case of one of our teammates, as soon as they started pressuring him, and he figured out he was in the middle of a big investigation, he immediately flipped and started to cooperate with the government. And that was the first time where

I caught word of that because, you know, in my mind, no one did anything wrong out there. And I was going to fight and prove that I was innocent. And I sure as hell wasn't going to cooperate with a faulty investigation and throw my buddies under the bus. So when I learned that there was a guy on the team willing to do that,

I thought, well, maybe he feels like he did something wrong, which to this day, I don't believe he did anything wrong either. I just think that he's weak and he folded when they pressured him. And, you know, we hear a lot of stories about heroic deeds in combat and people getting medals of honor for jumping on grenades. And in his case...

He's actually the total opposite of that. So instead of jumping on a grenade to save his teammates, he was willing to push us on the grenade to save himself. And the only problem with that is that we survived, and I'm willing to tell everybody he's a coward. Now, this specific person you're talking about, Ridgeway, correct? There was beef within the team,

between nobody really liked him. He was kind of known as being late all the time. He didn't keep himself in shape. What else? So there was a grudge between him and the rest of the team, correct? Well, it's not that nobody didn't like him. It's he used to hang out with us and would drink beer and scotch or whiskey, whatever, in the evenings. And it's the worth ethic.

You know, it's, all right, we got a mission to do. You need to be on time to do the mission. Personally, he wasn't that bad of a dude. But when it came to work itself, that's where people had a problem with. It was job performance type stuff that was the issue. Yeah. Can I just say one more thing? I would agree with Dustin. My problem with Ridgeway is nothing stemming from...

What he did in Iraq or how we interacted on the team. I was friendly with him We joke around, you know, he was a prankster or whatever his job performance like like Dustin said subpar But my main problem is what he did when he came back to the States, you know, so I just want to make that clear it's not like

we were at each other's throats overseas. We worked together. We got along fine. Did I agree with everything that he said or everything that he did? No, but you don't really get along with everybody on your team anyways. It wasn't a major problem. My problem is what he did when he came home, when he showed his real colors. Well, when you guys say that he flipped and this investigation and the courts...

there's so much that goes into this i don't know if we can cover it all but he reversed his statement correct five times five times there's i believe five different fbi 302s that's right initially he said that uh he was taking enemy fire he's he stuck with that he stuck with that part of the story until like i think like 2014 and um he just uh

They convinced him that he shouldn't have done what he did as far as people in vehicles. They convinced him that he did something wrong, like he should have done everything he could not to engage a few people that were in vehicles. But he maintained for years that he was taking contact from that bus stop where there was, right after the incident, there was brass

Pictures of brass taken at that exact location that he had maintained that he was receiving enemy fire from for years of what kind of brass ak-47 shell casings were scattered at the exact location that he said he was taking fire from and he even that's even in his FBI 302s, right the initial interviews he's like

He admits that he was taking fire from here, but his lawyer got him to plead guilty to a count. Both counts had to do with vehicles, like that he shouldn't have engaged for some reason. So they basically convinced this guy that he did something wrong, and then they just kept chipping away at him over the years. It's the same police that I said I took fire from. It's not just him saying that he took fire from there, because I engaged threats in that area too. And so it wasn't him just saying, hey,

I shot here, here and here. I don't know where all he shot. I've never read a statement, but I can tell you for sure where the AK shells were is where I took fire from 100%. And there are photos of the shells at the exact location where you guys said that you took fire from. Yes, sir. And then he reversed his statement, made a plea deal with the government.

saying that I changed my mind, I was wrong, I wasn't taking, nobody took any fire. That's right. The government accepted his first statement saying that, okay, you took fire, and we'll let you plead guilty on that. And then the government changed its strategy to nobody took fire. And when they did that, it was, we're no longer going to give you the plea deal unless you say that you took fire or did not take fire. I apologize.

And so he had to go back and say, all right, well, I never took any fire out there that day. I was never engaged at all. I never heard or seen anybody shoot at us. They said there were 17 bodies, 17 dead, correct? They only found two bodies. No autopsies were done. There was no attempts to match the bullets to the victims. And the...

Iraqi army and the Iraqi police were in infiltrated by Iranian influence Soleimani so

you guys gotta help me out here with the with with with the chronological order here because there's so much stuff to cover i got some things to say about what you just said about the autopsies right so they did pull bullets out of some of the bodies but they didn't match ours they were actually ak-47 rounds that they pulled out of some of the dead people that they were trying to put on my brothers and then they lost those

rounds that they had pulled out so they actually did find bullets in some bodies that they had at the hospital where they supposedly took all these victims to but when they tried to match them to our weapon systems they found out that they were more consistent with ak-47 than our weapon systems so they lost those rounds they never brought them back to the states who lost those rounds the fbi the fbi just happened to they left them in iraq that's right

What about the drone that was over top? Because that seems like the drone could have proven everything. They deleted the footage. They deleted the footage? Absolutely. So the way that it was presented is there's a beginning and there's an end, but there's no middle. And in the middle, that's the actual engagement. So they're trying to say that it was deleted as a normal course of business. How can the middle of a stream...

from a drone be deleted? It doesn't make any sense. Why would it be deleted? - So they had drone footage. Were you guys in any of the drone footage? Were your vehicles in any of the drone footage? - Yeah, we pulled in and then there's just a black hole and then us being towed out. - So there's what, roughly three to 10 minutes of drone footage pulled? - The drone footage shows our vehicles in the circle and then it's not till later on

that it picks back up in the circle. And it's like, we're already gone out of the circle by then. So I don't know how much time had elapsed. It shows a lot of Iraqi police milling around and it shows, that's all it shows, you know, there's a big gap. And we were trying to track down that gap, my lawyers were, and the only answer they could give us was it was deleted as a normal course of business.

But they didn't delete the drone footage of you pulling and setting the vehicles into the circle. They didn't delete that. That's right. They've got pictures of us. There's still photos of us sitting in the circle. I don't know if it's satellite or drone, but there's beginning drone footage and there's a middle drone footage that's missing. And then they've got end drone footage, right? So at some point, they took the middle out.

And we got them to confirm that, yes, at one time this was whole footage. Like a man from the geospatial agency testified. And he said, yes, at some point this was complete footage. And so my lawyer was like, so you had it and now you don't. And he's like, correct. And he's like, no further questions. And the footage leaving shows the big wet spot on the ground where the radiator was blown out.

the vehicle that had to be towed out so you can see all the radiator fluid the the big wet spot on the ground so there wasn't much time they just they'd literally just pulled the actual firefight that's right right because I mean it was over 100 degrees how long does a wet spot on the street last in Iraq you know sure that's a good point US Army captain took photos of

the documented 7.62 shell casings. He reported to the FBI that Iraqis were cleaning the shell casings from the exact spot they took the fire from. There's a picture, or there's a disc that had 52 pictures on it, and they turned over to us 50 pictures of the 52. If I remember correctly, that's almost the exact number.

And what happened was, is during trial, they let the Iraqis testify. And that's the captain that took those pictures. He gave those over to the investigators. Well, midway through trial, after everybody had gone home, they said, oh, we found these pictures. It's an honest mistake. Well, what that did for me is I'm like, all right, cool.

This shows exactly where I said I fired at. This shows that somebody was shooting at us. And then the next pictures that they took, those shell casings are gone. It's AK brass. And our judge said, well, that's old brass. How can the judge determine if it's old Chinese, Russian, whatever it is, ammo that's been stored in a warehouse or anything else? And...

where's the forensic analysis of anybody saying that this is old brass, new brass. This stuff had been sitting out there for a week, a month prior to our stuff. It's, I've never been a conspiracy theorist, but I mean, when you get a picture of one time that they took it, the brass is there. You got a picture of the next time they took it and the bottle cap that's still sitting on the ground is gone. I mean,

That's convenient, just like the drone footage. And this Army investigator had no communication with you guys, no relationship with you guys. You'd never met him. It wasn't like... No, I think what it was is he was based relatively close to where it happened. So he heard the gunfire and he loaded up his platoon and headed out.

So he was at the scene pretty quickly, and he started taking pictures of different things that he thought would be important if something happened there. And one of the things he took a picture of was AK-47 shell casings, exactly where everybody was seeing incoming fire. And basically what it comes down to is,

It just shows from the very beginning, this guy was on the scene minutes after it happened and there was evidence that supported us. And then as time elapsed and even a day later, two days later, three weeks later, when the FBI shows up and tries to do an investigation in an unsecure crime scene, they didn't.

Lock anything off all the cars were moved There was only one car that remained in the circle and that was the white Kia and that wasn't even secured It was just pushed on the side of the street basically what this all shows is from the first minute those Iraqi police under their Iraqi police chief Colonel Ferris was

cleaning all all these evidence that supported our theory of incoming fire and Basically piling on all the all the all the evidence that would make us look bad So, you know if it was five five six rounds or shell casings on the ground Oh, you know, let's let's show all this and on this video and and send it to CNN or oh, there's magazines over here There's 203 rounds over here

It was just, it seemed like it was just rigged against us from the very start. How long did the first, I mean, how long did the first case go on for before you guys, before it got thrown out? It was about a year. So we got indicted. We figured out that Ridgeway was cooperating.

And, you know, the four of us, we stood strong and said, you know, fuck no. We don't feel like we did anything wrong. We're going to push this to trial. And we're going to make you fucking prove that we're guilty. And if not, you've got to leave us the fuck alone. Because at this point, a couple years has passed, or a year and a half.

we were already tired of dealing with this. Like we said in the very beginning, the firefight was not a major engagement. And as it ballooned from there and got media attention and just got exaggerated, we were just exhausted from this whole process. And we just want it resolved. So we were fine with pushing it to trial. It was only later that I understood that

That's a bad idea. I don't care who you are. I don't care how innocent you are if if you go to trial you have less than 1% chance of winning and most people that are criminals they understand that and 90% of people plead guilty before they ever get to trial and

We have never been in trouble. I've never had even a speeding ticket. So my experience in the justice system was basically zero before this. So I figured I didn't do anything wrong. I'm going to be cleared. I want to go back to work. I want to keep serving my country. Let's go to trial and get this resolved. So it was about a year after the indictment that we were finally doing the final preparations for trial and

and we were presenting different things that the prosecution was doing that was basically illegal. Things having to do with evidence, using our protected reports against us, basically using those reports to figure out who shot. And we presented this all to the judge,

We all went home the the hearing for that all the misconduct that the prosecution was doing That took a couple weeks, but our lawyer said listen don't get too excited This type of stuff rarely works plan on going to trial so it was about a month or so after that hearing and You guys can talk about your personal experience when you heard it, but I was driving in New Hampshire and

And I got a call from my lawyer. Back then, anytime I got a call from my lawyer, I got sick to my stomach. I was like, fucking shit, what now? Sometimes I'd get an email. If I was overseas, because I lived in Colombia a lot of times, he would email me and say, call me ASAP. And I'd start sweating because he never had good news. So he called me and he told me that he had my dad on the other line, but he was...

I guess obligated to tell me first that the judge had dropped all the charges against all of us. We were good to go. The prosecution got hammered because of all the illegal shit they were doing. And I can get my passport back. I can go overseas. I can do whatever the fuck I want. I'm good. And I thought this shit was over. And that was...

In late 2009, it was on January or December 31st, 2009. And I thought I was totally cleared. And here we are in 2021. We just barely resolved this.

I don't really understand why they hammered you guys, you know, at the beginning. I mean, I kind of, I know now the end game and we'll get into that later. But, you know, just for an example, in 2005 alone, 17,000 civilians were killed

by tribal and or insurgent violence. And that's according to Iraqi body count dot org. So, you know, they only found two bodies with you guys that were, you know, civilians. And we already went over that. That was a justified shoot. But well, the original body count and I'm not real sure on the numbers, but

But I want to say it was around 10 people total that was reported to the U.S. Embassy before everybody got a hold of it. That was reported but was not found? That was reported. And how they found the report, let's talk about that, because the Iraqi police coroner, Kareem? Ferris, yeah. How did he ID the bodies? Let's talk about how that happened.

Well, I'll go into it a little bit. Basically, we didn't find out his whole history until well down the road. We're talking seven years later, but basically, he was the main Iraqi investigator in Iraq. So, immediately after, he was the guy that was in charge of gathering evidence, gathering up supposed witnesses, organizing statements,

basically doing everything having to do with the investigation. So when the FBI showed up three weeks after the fact, they went straight to him.

And of course, he turned over all the evidence that he had collected. And what a coincidence, there was no AK-47 shell casings, even though you could walk down any street in Iraq in that time frame and pick them up off the street. So he had none of that. All he had was 5.56, and he had 2.03 shell casings, and he had everything that basically made us look bad. And then he had all the witness statements organized where...

you could tell that they were not written by that specific person because they used the same verbiage and the same language throughout all of them. And you have different people from all walks of life that may have been out there that have different levels of education, different vocabulary, but for some reason in these witness statements, they were all very similar.

And one of the things that he did to speed up his investigation was he basically made an infomercial. And he put it out on Iraqi TV and he said, "Listen, if you were in this area, if you or anyone else you know was involved in this, come to the police station and make a statement." In my mind, that was basically

promoting people to go down there and make a claim to get possible payment from the U.S. Embassy or some other benefit from the United States as far as asylum or whatever. Was that in the commercials that they would be paid? I'm not sure it was in there, but I think it was implied. There was one particular witness that sat on the stand and actually testified that the police chief had told him, he said, if I tell somebody to go left, they go left.

if i tell somebody to go right they go right put down on paper what i tell you and that same police chief said hey if blackwater will pay us x amount of dollars per person and we'll make all the witnesses go away there won't be any to testify so that can basically explain why right after the incident

The body count is disputed, okay? Was it four, five, six? Whatever the number was, it grew over time. Wouldn't they know pretty much within 24 hours how many people were involved in this? That commercial put it out across Iraq to basically come down and make a claim and you can possibly benefit from it. We'll get into this later, but when we finally went to trial,

We figured out that that Colonel Ferris had links to two terrorist organizations and that only later did the government try to distance themselves from him after all the things they worked hand in hand with this guy for seven years and he was their main guy. And then when it became a little bit public or unsealed that he was a possible terrorist, they didn't want to work with him anymore.

They had video of the U.S. government finding 7.62x39 shells. The U.S. attorney, assistant U.S. attorney, hid those photos that you were talking about for seven years of the shell casings at the, I believe it was the bus stop that they were shooting at you guys from. Hid those photos for seven years and there were no repercussions for withholding the evidence on the

on the assisting U.S. attorney's side. Was that the first indictment? Yes. No, that was the second indictment. But the judge said that it was a harmless error, and that's how he ruled on that. Because, I mean, at that point, you can't cross-examine a witness if they're not in the country. They have video of gunmen dressed as police changing their shirts and walking away after the gunfight.

Did you guys know that? I didn't know that. I just knew that we had guys in the Little Bird helicopters that witnessed that too. So, I knew it was real. There's actually footage of that. Yup, this says that there was an actual video from a pilot. But, there is a ton of evidence here that was not released that was in your guys' favor. One thing that people have to keep in mind

When we were trying to prepare for trial throughout the years, we only have access to what the prosecution gives us access to. So it's not like our defense team could fly to Iraq and put in a subpoena and talk to random witnesses and possibly get somebody that was going to say, oh yeah, those Blackwater guys were getting fired upon.

They weren't allowed to do that. This is a very unconventional trial. It's never happened before like this. So the FBI team and the prosecution went overseas and they gathered up the people that Colonel Ferris

gave them on a platter and they didn't dig and try to find people that supported our side of the story. So they flew those same people, including the guy that was linked to two terrorist organizations. They flew him over to Washington, D.C. to testify in front of a grand jury. And, you know, he could do it, stay in a nice hotel and take a picture in front of the White House and

and we didn't have the freedom to go and actually proactively find people that could support our side of the case. So from the very get-go, it was one-sided. The deck was stacked in their favor, and they knew it. All the vehicles that were supposed to be there that had anything to do with the incident was moved to a military base. And if I'm not mistaken, it's the same...

paper run, infomercial, whatever the statement was done that said, hey, if you had a part in this, if your vehicle was there, if you were there, come in. Well, they moved all that stuff to a military base. And our attorneys actually requested permission to go to Iraq with a forensic team of their own and do a trajectory analysis to do

just any type of analysis on the vehicles itself. Well, those vehicles were later deemed that they got crushed or lost or something, and they were denied the right to go and actually look at the vehicles themselves. So the case, the first time you guys got indicted, the case was dismissed for all four of you. Ridgeway flipped.

He said you guys weren't taking incoming fire. They didn't find enough evidence to convict any of you guys, so they dismissed the entire case, right? How long was it between that case and the next one where you were re-indicted for the second time? How much time had passed? It took about two years to re-indict us. So you guys were... You thought everything was fine for two years. Then...

Biden comes on TV and what happens? Right. So when we got the news that we got the case dismissed on December 31st, 2009, I really thought I was cleared. I was celebrating, was going to go on with my life and put this behind me. And it was about a week later, less than a week later, somebody sent me a link saying

to a video of Vice President Joe Biden in Iraq addressing the media and they were questioning him on our case because the Iraqis were outraged about the whole incident mainly because of the way it was portrayed in the media and Vice President Biden basically said, "Listen, dismissal is not an acquittal. We will appeal this and they will be prosecuted." So

When I heard that, my heart kind of sunk because when the vice president says you're going to be prosecuted, you can damn sure believe that you're going to get prosecuted. So that happened. So technically we were cleared, but we knew that the government was going to appeal that dismissal.

and possibly bring it back, but I still had confidence that it would never make it to the inside of a courtroom again. So it took a good two years before they reversed the dismissal and indicted us for a second time. All right, so the first case got dismissed. You guys are free. Then Joe Biden comes out. He announces he's going to re-indict you again.

And this is where it gets extremely complicated. What I'd like to do is bring in an expert, Gina Keating, the investigative journalist who's been following us for six or seven years now. And so I'd like to get her in here, get her take. She's going to give us chronological order on exactly what happened. And then when you guys come back, we'll talk about what happened when you got the verdict. All right, Gina.

I just want to say thank you so much for taking the time to come down here. We tried to film this and it got a little confusing. There was a lot of emotion and I don't think anybody knows this case better than you.

other than maybe the attorneys yeah so uh i just want to say thank you for coming down here and and uh helping us out to get this stuff squared away oh it's my pleasure it's nice to be able to use this knowledge again because i accumulated it over five years of covering the case so yeah you're the expert your podcast that you produced uh was incredible and it was really hard to find

anything that informative that wasn't typical media bullshit. And so it really helped me put this whole thing together. - Thank you. Yeah, it was, I wouldn't say fun to do, but it was really rewarding because we finally got to tell the story of how this could actually happen in the United States to American citizens in the US judicial system.

One thing that I would like to bring up just for the audience, you know, with everything that's going on today in politics and in our country is when I made the phone call, I had no idea that you were a liberal. And I think the first thing that you said to me is, I just want you to know I'm a liberal. And which actually I think is great because it brings hope.

a new light to this and it it shows that um regardless of what everybody sees in the media today that there are things that Democrats and Republicans can come together on uh for the greater good and uh you just you don't see that anymore anywhere in the media and so when I get the opportunity I want to I want to bring that out and tell people and show people that

it's possible that we can still work together. Oh yeah, I mean absolutely. It was so obvious to me that this is one of the basic things that we all need to agree on is that the criminal justice system needs to work for everybody. There needs to be a presumption of innocence regardless of what your job is or who you work for or who you support politically.

And one of the reasons that I kept going on this case for so long and I was so passionate about it is a little selfish, which is I don't ever want this to happen to me or anybody else who I love.

And it was such a broadening experience for me because I grew up in a big city. I worked in Los Angeles for a long time. That's most of my media experience. And I was covering, you know, four red state small town guys and their families and really getting to know them and the reason that they think the way that they do and what they expected of the justice system. And that's something that we all agree on. Mm-hmm.

regardless of where we're from. So it's really important that we stand up for each other, especially in this kind of thing. It's the most basic thing that we all deserve. You're a major reason on how these guys got pardoned. And you and the team that you put together on the podcast, you got Trump's attention. And congratulations, because it worked. Thanks.

And, but before we kind of dive into the nitty gritty stuff that happened in court and all the evidence withholding, how did you get involved in this whole thing? Yeah, that's a really kind of funny story. And I'll tell you the whole thing and, you know, you can keep it in or not, but

I had this Shih Tzu named Jessica Simpson, who's one of my favorite actresses. I just think she's really cool. And she would go, went outside one day. I mean, she never did this. She got out in the front yard of the house where I was living in Texas with my boyfriend and.

and she dragged a newspaper in and she had never done this and we lived in a really blue collar neighborhood not a lot of people got newspapers so i was like this is weird i wonder who's this is and i just sort of ignored it and then over the next few weeks like she would just every once in a while get out and drag a paper to our door and so my boyfriend just picked it up you know and he would read it and one of the times that he dragged she dragged the paper in

It was the story of the Raven 23 guys getting sentenced in 2015. And he saw Dustin Hurd's name and he said, I wonder if this is my good friend's kid. But he lives in Maryville, Tennessee. And he said, but I think this is him. And he said, there is no way this kid did this. There is no way that

that he did this and he was really upset about it and you know obviously i'm an investigative reporter and he said you've got to do something about this

And I said, "No way, dude. I'm a business reporter. I don't know anything about foreign policy or the military. I was totally against the Iraq War. I am not touching this." But he kept bugging me about it. And a few months later, when we went back to his hometown, Olney, Texas, we met Stacey Hurd, Dustin's dad. And my boyfriend pushed me on him and said, "She can help you with this."

And I said, all right, give me the case file because I've actually done a lot of reporting on criminal cases. I won some awards, investigative awards. So just give me the case transcript and I'll look at it.

So I got it over Christmas and I went over it in 2016 for a few months. And I looked at it and I thought, man, there are a lot of irregularities in this case. There's things that I would have questioned, things that should have resulted in a new trial. Prosecutors had hidden some evidence or refused or failed to turn it over when they should have. There are just some things here that really don't seem right.

But I'm not a lawyer, so I wasn't sure. And about this same time, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers wrote an amicus brief supporting these guys and saying that they should never have gone to trial at all, that the case was rife with prosecutorial vindictiveness and misconduct, that the judge had made fatal errors, that there were precedents that were being made in this case that were dangerous for civil liberties.

So I then thought, okay, I'm not crazy. There is something really wrong with this case. And that's when I made the decision, okay, I'm going to go and visit these guys in prison. And if they are good guys and I feel comfortable with this,

then I'm going to take this and try to get some coverage for it or write something. I didn't know what I was going to do, but that's how I got involved. So you picked it up pretty much right after they went to prison. Right, yeah. So they got sentenced, I think it was October of 2015, and then I heard about it, maybe it was April, I heard about it sometime in that same time frame, like days after they got sentenced because we saw it in the paper. Right.

So it took me about eight months, I would say, to actually convince myself to do it. Wow. And you dedicated, you pretty much put just about everything on hold and gave damn near six years of your career to get these guys out.

Yeah, I mean, there were times when it was like I went to graduate school during those years also and, you know, had some family things that I had to take care of. But yeah, I mean, I wrote my Netflix book. I did a movie.

But this was always on the back burner. I was always trying to find some way to get some publicity for this. But it wasn't clear exactly how that was going to happen because there was such animus against these guys. You know, they were monsters. They were war criminals and all this stuff. So it it seemed like a real losing battle. And in fact, I had, you know, colleagues of mine. And in fact, my agent, when I went to him, said, don't touch this.

Nobody wants to hear about this. No one's interested in this anymore. Just let it lie. It isn't going to work. And I just, I could never...

I couldn't interest anyone in it, you know? And so, and that was the really difficult part was there were a lot of months when I would be talking to them either through email or they would call me from prison. We would try to figure out, you know, what can we do? How can we get some, how can we get some light brought on this case? Because it's, as it unfolded, there were more and more crimes that were committed against them in prison.

In the course of these three trials that took place. I mean the prosecution was shameless They just kept violating their rights and nobody seemed to care. That was the most frustrating thing. Yeah Well, let's move into Let's move right into it. So I'm gonna

use this report that you sent to kind of guide me here because this case is so complicated. But just before we get started, I just want to let the audience know that we're going to be

Gina is going to prompt us if there's actually emails or documents, videos, everything is linked below in the description. So if you don't believe us, you don't have to take our fucking word for it. You can go to the description and download the documents yourself and we'll be splicing videos in of evidence throughout the interview. - Great. - So I'm gonna let you pick it off.

Okay, so just to talk about how the case got started. So the most important thing to remember here is this case dragged on for 13 years. It was brought before the first judge in 2008. That's when the first indictments came out and it was dismissed by the first judge to hear of it on January 31st of 2009.

At that time, the Obama administration was very interested in getting Nouri al-Maliki to be elected as prime minister because they felt that they could work with him. But his big beef when the Blackwater guys were pardoned was, "I need somebody to blame for all the violence that's going on here. And you just let these guys go and I need a win. I need to not look soft with the Americans."

So you need to bring this case back. It was two days after the judge threw the case out, not on a technicality, but because the prosecutors had violated their constitutional rights so thoroughly that the judge said, you can't bring this case, it's dirty. And so Hillary Clinton wrote an email to her lawyer

second in command at the State Department and said, "What do we got to do to bring this case back?" And we know that because there were emails leaked from Hillary Clinton's email server that we found that show exactly that. So that's one document that you can link to is Hillary Clinton talking to Harold Cohen saying, "What do we have to do to bring this back?"

At the time, the State Department, I'm sorry, the embassy in Baghdad were writing these cables to Washington, D.C., saying, oh, my gosh, Iraq is going crazy. Baghdad is going crazy. They're so angry that this case was dropped. We need to do something about this. And the three main things that they were upset about or that they were threatening to do was kick all of our troops out of the country. This is in 2000, early 2010.

They wanted to kick all of the contractors out of the country who were protecting U.S. diplomats. And they were talking about nullifying some leases with ExxonMobil. All of those things are in the diplomatic cables that I gave you, and people can read them and they can see all of the things that were coming out of Baghdad at the time. The imams were upset about it. The Iraqi Congress was upset about it. Everyone was...

up in arms about this and blaming these guys and saying that they were getting away with murdering Iraqi civilians. So this is, if you look at these, it's very obvious where the impetus to try these guys came from. So for the rest of that year, they went to grand juries trying to come up with a theory of how you can put these guys in prison for murdering

a combat related incident. And that's difficult because if you're going to charge someone with manslaughter or murder,

they can't be trying to defend themselves, which is what was happening. There was evidence that is, you can now see, we have a video that we gave you showing Army investigators looking at shell casings on top of a bus stop that show that insurgents were shooting at these guys. I think they probably described that there were probably eight to 10 insurgents in the square. And they, when they returned from the incident,

told the State Department investigators exactly where they were. The next day, the State Department went out and found shell casings in the places where they had designated. And the State Department said, this is a clean shoot. There is no problem with this. But because of all of these things that were happening politically,

they had to go back and reinvestigate it. And, you know, and then they came up with this ridiculous theory that they had. So they go to trial in 2014 and they are convicted. They, the prosecutors bring over the largest number of foreign witnesses ever, uh, in any U S trial to testify. Um, there was a, um,

a failure of the defense to challenge the number of victims. So you had all of these people coming to testify on the stand in Washington, D.C., and it was, I'm sure, extremely difficult for a jury to rule against these people. I mean, some of them definitely had lost loved ones and had seen horrible carnage.

but it's not even really clear whether all of that occurred in Nassau Square because there were two other incidents that happened that same day so this was such a flawed investigation that you know it just was kind of like a show trial yeah let's start on this you have you've written a great timeline here oh okay and I want to go

Kind of start from the top. Why did the government indict these men in 2008 but wait almost seven years to try them in 2014? Okay, so as I said, the first judge to hear this case was Judge Ricardo Urbina, who is a Clinton appointee. And he looked at the case and he said, no.

You know, you not only do you have some technical issues here with using their statements against them, but you don't have a case. You violated their constitutional rights multiple times. So I'm throwing this case out. You can't bring it.

So then it goes to the appeals court. And as I described, you know, the appeals, the appeals court comes back and says, yeah, you can try them. So all this political stuff is happening at the same time, but it takes such a long time for them to formulate a new theory of the case to get witnesses like Jeremy Ridgeway, who was their main witness and Matt Murphy and some of these other guys to change their stories and to

do plea deals that it took that long to re-indict them and bring them back. And at the same time, the FBI and the DOJ was exerting an immense amount of pressure on them just to plead guilty and testify against each other because they didn't want to bring this case to trial because they had no case. So that's why it took so long. Okay. Just before we kind of get into all the corruption and evidence that was withheld,

They weren't even allowed to try them or got extremely tricky because they had the Military Extra-Territorial Judicial Act. Right. And so basically what that is saying is they couldn't, that was saying they couldn't try them in Iraq, correct? So they had to bring them home.

Yeah, it's something like that. Okay, so when they were caught in a very gray zone, all of them are veterans. And had this happened while they were in their respective services, they would have come home and been tried in the military justice system. But because they were civilian contractors,

There was an order that Paul Bremer made when he was in charge of Iraq when we first invaded that said that any civilian contractors or civilian employees of the United States had to come back to the United States to be tried. But there was a question as to whether or not they could be tried under Mija because that applied to defense law.

related contractors. DoD contractors. Exactly. So, but the Blackwater was working for the Department of State. They were protecting diplomats and that was what their job was. But because it was so violent in Iraq, there was a lot of overlap with their mission. They would actually get called out to help the DoD on different combat missions. And so

Because of this, the DOJ wanted to try them under Meeja. Now they argued, no, that's not right. We shouldn't have to be charged under that. We should just have civilian contractors under the State Department. But they lost that. The appellate court said that they actually were on the defense mission, even though the number two guy testified for the defense and said, no,

I am number two at the Defense Department. They weren't working for us. They're State Department contractors. What's interesting is I think it was talking to Nick offline at dinner the night before I interviewed them and how they kind of went around that is they saved a Army convoy that got hit. And so they saved...

active duty service members lives and they use that against them so that they could try them under Egypt. Right. So no good deed goes unpunished. I mean, they, they do that a lot. There were several leading up to the Nassau square incident. They were called out a lot to support the army. So that it just makes it even more galling that they're out there doing an active duty combat mission, not just protecting diplomats and they, and they get,

They get hammered for that. It was so, so hypocritical. It's really hard to believe. So kind of moving on about the next kind of block we have here is how, why did this take so damn long, which we kind of covered, but, um,

no it was three don't forget it was three trials so we had the 2014 trial all of them were convicted um and then they went to the appellate court and the appeal appellate court said okay nick slatton should be tried separately um and so he gets a new trial and these other guys need to be uh re-sentenced because this gun charge that you convicted them on does not apply to them

So, that dragged on because the judge was waiting for Nick to be retried. They retried him one time and the jury found, hung and they didn't get a conviction. And then they went back again and convicted him three months later. Then the guys were able to appeal.

So are we're resentence so it just it was it was horrible It was so bad of the government to do this 13 years on those families 13 years on those guys it was absolutely a waste of resources Nick took a polygraph yes, and so before Not just any polygraph according to Nick the top polygrapher from FBI had recently retired and was now

He kind of started his own private business. So they hired him to give Nick the polygraph. And it sounded like the gentleman that gave him the polygraph had convinced himself that this guy, that Nick was guilty. And had kind of verbalized to Nick, I'm going to find out that you're lying. So Nick takes the polygraph, passes the polygraph, and...

the guy apologized to him saying, you didn't do this. Oh, yeah. I mean, that polygraph was kind of like the last desperate act because it was there was no first of all, there was no evidence that Nick did what he was accused of. And in fact, the government decided not to include him in the early stages of the case because they didn't have any evidence that he did anything wrong.

So after the case was dropped, they decided, you know, we kind of want to put him back in. But they had let the statute of limitations on a manslaughter charges expire against him. So they couldn't file really any charges against him except murder because that doesn't have a statute of limitations.

So they put him back in the case with this ridiculous theory that somehow out of the porthole of one of the vehicles that he was able to shoot someone that wasn't even in the range of his rifle. And that he shot this white driver of the white Kia, even though Paul Slough and every other team member on the

Raven 23 said Paul Slough did it. Paul Slough made four sworn statements. I'm the one who shot the Kia driver. Everybody said Paul Slough shot the Kia driver. The FBI told the father of the Kia driver that Paul Slough shot his son. In fact, the FBI tried to bring the father back to the United States to testify against Nick in his second and third trial.

And the guy said, no, we have that email too. He told the FBI, I will not come back and testify against Nick Slatton. You told me for seven years that it was Paul Slough that shot my son. I won't come and participate in this lie.

So I don't know what more you need. They had no forensic evidence. In fact, it wasn't even physically possible for him to have shot the Kia driver. You have Paul Slough saying, "I shot it," in all the statements that he made, contemporaneous and for years after that. No one said Nick Slatton shot the Kia driver except for the prosecutors. So this attempt to exonerate himself

And to bring some kind of sanity into these proceedings was him going to the polygrapher and saying can you just show I'm not lying But that failed too because they decided to prosecute him again. Yeah, what so how did this how did they just because that this gets so frustrating because of how did they just completely dismiss the fact that Paul was the one that shot the white Kia and

Now they're bringing it on to Nick and they used their statements that they made at the end, which was apparently also illegal to use those. So what happened? They had Ridgeway who flipped his entire story, who said all along that he was that they had they had taken contact. They were receiving fire and that it was self-defense. Yeah. Then Ridgeway changes a story. How did

to where that they've shot first. How did they switch? How did they take? How did this happen? I mean, this is the most difficult thing to understand because it's not like it, you know, nobody knew about this case. The national and international media were covering this case.

Nothing was done in secret. They just literally, between the time that Judge Urbina was through the case out to when they brought it back and this other judge named Judge Lamberth took it over, they simply decided, okay, we're going to go to a grand jury. And instead of letting people testify, the witnesses testify to what they saw, we're going to write these summaries. And the summaries are going to be whatever we say they are.

So we're going to take all the witness statements and we're going to edit them just to say all the stuff that we want them to say. They kept out everything that was exculpatory towards the guys. All the evidence that they were shot at was removed from these summaries that were presented to the grand jury. They were threatening witnesses.

They were hiding evidence from the witnesses who, like Jeremy Ridgway, who testified, ended up testifying against the guys. So those witnesses felt like, okay, I'm going to be railroaded. I might as well just fall in line here. That was the decision that Ridgway apparently made because he didn't know that there were shell casings that were found. There were photographs that the

the prosecutors had, there was plenty of evidence showing that this was a gun battle and not some kind of freak out by these guys. Like the prosecutors were saying, they just completely made up this theory of the case and they shopped it to the grand jury and they got away with it.

And there's a wonderful document that I'll give you, which was written by a former prosecutor who was representing this guy named Donald Ball, who was also in the case for a while. But this lawyer said to the prosecutors, hey, you better watch out because if you keep doing this, I'm going to report you for misconduct.

because he saw what they had presented to the grand jury. And he said every single witness that testified that there was shooting, even the Iraqi witnesses, you've removed that from what you presented to the grand jury. This cannot be right. But by this time, they have this new judge, Judge Lamberth, Royce Lamberth, who, for some reason, just decides to go along with whatever these prosecutors want. He allows this case to go forward, even with these flawed indictments.

And he just kind of went along with the story. When the prosecutors would come to court and they'd get caught not bringing in evidence that the defense eventually found out about, he'd just say, series of harmless errors. So the judge was also complicit in this. And it's not just me saying this. The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers also questioned this judge and his rulings, found him very vindictive.

found him violating the men's civil rights. So it was very disturbing and it happened in broad daylight and no one in the media questioned this, which was very upsetting to me.

You brought up some interesting points in your document about this judge who also had something happen to him in Vietnam. Do you want to dive into that a little bit? Sure. So that was another thing that was really disturbing to me because when I was trying to get people interested in this story, they would say, well, how come the judge is allowing this? And I thought, you know what? I got to figure out who this guy is. So I went and did a

a good investigation on him. He's a career federal employee. He was a JAG in Vietnam for a year. He went in country. And there is an incident that he talks about a lot that he seems to be very proud of, which I find incredibly hypocritical. And that is that he went into a village to investigate a case in which some rangers were accused of

capturing some Viet Cong guys and slitting them open and stuffing their bodies with rice. And this obviously is a war crime. They were caught talking about it in a bar. So he was charged with representing them and he flew into the place where the bodies were supposed to be.

But on the way down the landing, the helicopter started having engine trouble. He freaked out and grabbed an automatic weapon and started firing into the jungle towards the village, just firing like crazy because he thought that they were being shot at. And they have this hard landing and he realizes, haha, nothing was happening. It was just, um,

It was just engine trouble. So that to me was so incredibly hypocritical that he could sit on the stand and accuse these guys of freaking out and losing their cool. And, you know, they're good men, but they just lost their nerve. Well, that's what happened to you. You ought to know about that. But that isn't what happened to these men. And there's no evidence that they did this. And the other thing that about that story that was so hypocritical was that

He brags that he wasn't allowed, that he won that case in favor of the Rangers because they couldn't find the victims' bodies. There were no autopsies performed in this case. None. And so here you have this major case with not one single autopsy performed. Wow. So how are you proud of that? Yeah. You know, that you're putting these veterans in prison with no evidence whatsoever. Yeah.

Let's talk about all of the evidence withholding, starting with maybe the first thing, which I think is the rounds. Right. Okay, so let me get to the page of that, that page, because there's a lot to go through. There is so, this was so incredibly angry because this didn't just happen, you know, again, there were three trials. So this was a constant thing.

element of this case. So in the very first case involving all four of them, there were two major Brady violations. And that's a violation when the prosecution is aware that it has exculpatory evidence and doesn't turn it over. So the first thing was that

there were photographs taken right after the incident within minutes of Raven 23 exiting Nisser Square there was an army captain named Peter Decorow who was at a base right near Nisser Square and he heard the gunshots and came out with a camera to um

to take photographs to see what had happened. And he also interviewed several of the Iraqi civilians who were walking around in the square at the time. Those civilians described hearing a gunfight. They described seeing gunmen who were shooting at the convoy. They showed, here are the shell casings. So DeCaro took pictures of these shell casings

handed over the notes that he took of his interviews with these Iraqi civilians, handed over the film to the army investigators, and they were lost. They were lost until halfway through the first trial when the prosecutors magically found them. And the witness statements were lost forever. Do you have those pictures by chance? Yes, I do. Wow.

We'll put them on screen here real quick. Okay. And we also have, at the time, Army investigators went to the square and took video of this. So we also have video of that investigation where you can see the AK-47 shells.

So that was one. The second thing was during the trial, there was a witness who was very important, who was a traffic cop who was in a kiosk real near the square. And he was the closest policeman to the Kia that was shot. And in his testimony during the trial, he testified that the driver was shot

and like immediately coming into the square. And that, you know, he ran to the car and he was trying to get the mother out and then she was shot and he had to retreat because there was so much gunfire. Well,

So the guys get convicted and they do something called victim impact statements, which allow people to tell the judge, you know, this is how this affected me. And this is why you should sentence this person harshly or whatever. So this guy writes a statement that says,

Well, I wasn't actually, I didn't really run up to the car. I actually was so afraid that I stayed in my kiosk, but I could hear the boy and his mother in the Kia talking about what to do because they were being shot at.

And this is completely different from what he testified to. And it proves that Nick Slatton could not have killed that driver because the prosecution's theory was that he drove into the square, shot the driver so that he could set off this massacre of Iraqi civilians. So clearly, you know, there's a huge discrepancy in this guy's testimony. That was not disclosed to the defense until about five days before sentencing.

And it was buried at the bottom of this massive pile of victim impact statements. They didn't tell anybody. And so when the defense found it, they moved for a new trial and the judge said no. Wow. So that was the first two in the first trial. Just before we move on with the...

For everybody listening, the white Kia was, it did wind up being two innocent people. Exactly. But the other thing that Peter Deckerow, the army captain who testified and who took pictures of the shell casings and talked to the witnesses, the other thing that he said that was so critical that didn't get introduced at trial was that these Iraqi witnesses said the white Kia punched forward like a car bomb.

And, you know, as they I'm sure told you, they had received a security briefing that day saying, look out for a white Kia. It might be a car bomb.

So there was perfect, it was very tragic, but there was a reason for them. They had a reasonable belief because of the way that this vehicle was behaving that it was a car bomb. It was a justified engagement, and I believe the court even said that that was a justified engagement, correct? At one point, yes. And so just for everybody listening,

The whole reason that was a justified shoot is because that's their tactics. They load up a car, nine times out of ten it's a white Corolla or a white Kia. And there's signs everywhere. They went through the use of force.

and the car just kept coming, coming, coming, coming. If it doesn't stop and you're going through use of force, then you have to protect yourself because it may be a car bomb. And there was a V-Bid. Was it a V-Bid or a regular ID that just went off?

yeah like 20 minutes 20 minutes before they came out yeah so it was it was perfectly reasonable for them to believe that this was an attack on them and like i said iraqi witnesses interviewed by peter decoro also believed that it was a car bomb so you know i mean you the thing is the standard for self-defense was met

And they should never have been tried. They shouldn't have. And as we talked earlier, these guys only come out, they only leave the green zone if there's an engagement and somebody needs backup, somebody needs them to come get them out of a gunfight. And so they're not just rolling around town looking around for stuff. Right, exactly. Yeah.

Okay, so let me go quickly through the rest of this. So then there was also some evidence that, this is so ridiculous, there was a drone, an army drone flying over the scene at the time of this incident and they managed to

find out about the footage, the defense did, and said, "Okay, you need to preserve this." They said this to the government, "You need to preserve this so that we can examine it and look and see if it helps our case." Well, oh my gosh, what happened? When they finally got to look at it, a huge chunk in the middle was gone.

And the defense asked the government and the government said, well, it was your responsibility to get this preserved, which is completely bullshit. And then the second thing was, well, you know, we repurpose this. But if it's repurposed, then why is the beginning and the end still there and the middle's gone? They have, talking to these guys, they had this drone footage actually had them rolling out

to Nassar Square, you can see the vehicles rolling out. Then the footage is cut. And then when it picks back up, I think they said it was maybe a 10 minute segment gone, missing. When the drone footage picks back up, you can actually still see where the radiator is.

It leaked all its fluid on the ground. It still hadn't dried up. By the way, it's about 100 and I don't know how many degrees every day in Baghdad. Right. And the other thing that we all wanted to know about was there was testimony from some of the helicopter pilots that were flying over at the time and also some civilians that there were gunmen dressed as Iraqi police and Iraqi army who were leaving the scene

after this was over and taking off these uniforms and abandoning them. So, you know, if that was the case, you know, the government's theory that there were no gunmen in the square is completely null and void. Which brings me to one of the other most important Brady violations that occurred during this case, which was the government contended there were no enemy gunmen in the square, there were no terrorists, and yet they had evidence

that the guy who investigated this case, the Iraqi national police colonel named Feras Karim, was known to U.S. intelligence as a potential terrorist. He was allegedly selling

information about American troop movements to the Baader Korg and the Mahdi army. And they knew this and they didn't turn this over. When the defense finally asked for evidence, just any kind of background that the government had on witnesses, policemen, army people who were in the square that day,

They came up with two people that had intelligence files on them. One was the guy who headed the investigation and they couldn't figure out who the other one was. So that nullifies the government's theory that there were no terrorists in the square that day. And they didn't get that evidence until 2018.

Is this the same guy that they flew into the U.S.? And then didn't call him. To testify. Yeah. And then somebody had leaked to the prosecution that he had two different ties to two different terrorist organizations. So they quietly...

flew him back in the middle of the night before court the next day. Right. That's the I heard that theory. I was never able to confirm it. I had no cooperation from the Department of Justice at all. I filed multiple Freedom of Information Act requests about this case. I never got one single document. I went to Washington, D.C. during this sentencing and tried to talk to one of the prosecutors, the lead prosecutor there. He ran for me like

little red riding hood from the wolf so it's been very difficult especially talking to them about who these iraqi witnesses were i know that none of them had any kind of background checks before they came into the united states um so and and nothing was shared about these people uh to anyone until nick slatton's second trial so um

Yeah, so we don't know a lot about what was going on, but it seems pretty clear from the summaries that were filed by the government that this guy who was prosecuting American soldiers was a terrorist. Wow. Is that unbelievable? That is infuriating, to say the least. And they don't even know who the second guy is because the judge wouldn't unseal...

the report. These are 13-year-old reports. Why can't we see them? That's what I want to know. Yeah, that's a damn good question. Maybe we will get to see them someday, but I doubt it. Maybe. Okay, so that's one. Let's see, where were we? Those were all the biggies, but there were more. I mean, there were so many more things.

Things that they did. Oh, let's talk about the DART mission. Okay. That's a good one. Okay, so one of the main things that the government had to do to keep Nick Slatton in the case and prove their theory that he, you know, had this, he was like an Iraqi serial killer who, you know, had this tactic where he would go into these engagements and purposely shoot somebody innocent so that he could, you know, convince the rest of the people around him to just stop.

set off a massacre. That was their theory was that he hated Iraqis so much that he had these, you know, he had these different engagements where, you know, he, he wouldn't really see a threat, but he would try to get everybody to go along with him to kill as many Iraqis as possible. So the only way that they could prove that he had intent to commit murder, which you've got to have and premeditation, those are the two main elements that separate manslaughter from murder is

And so how do you prove that when he goes into a combat situation, he's never seen the victim before and he doesn't know anything about the situation. So this is how they do it. They decide that they're going to prove that he's done this before. So a few days or weeks before the Nassau Square incident,

Blackwater gets called to help rescue a downed helicopter. Okay, it's a few miles outside of Baghdad and the army is already there by the time Blackwater gets there. Nick is a sniper and he sees a guy in an apartment building who is

who has a scope and a rifle, and he shoots the guy and takes him out. At the time, the army says, you know, this is a clean shot. It happens probably 20 or 30 minutes after

a lot of other ordnance is shot into this building during this engagement by the army. And that's really what happens. It's completely unremarkable because it happened every day. But the prosecution seizes on this and because the defense has no record of this incident, they completely reconstruct it to be, guess what?

Blackwater rolls up and Nick Slatton says to his buddies, Jeremy Ridgeway and Matt Murphy,

"Hey guys, I'm going to just shoot somebody. You just follow my lead." And he gives them a wink and a nod. And that's what the prosecutors say. Who told the prosecution that? Was it one of the guys? No, I mean this is the thing that's so crazy. They had a PowerPoint from the State Department which investigated this. They had Matt Murphy and Jeremy Ridgway's original testimony from this which

describe the incident the way that I described it at first. And then they had an Apache helicopter log telling them what the timeline of this all was. But instead of being straight with it, they take this incident and completely rewrite it to where Blackwater gets there first and Nick Slatton sets off this massacre by shooting an unarmed guy in an apartment building. And Nick is

Knew that it was complete bullshit, but nobody else but they couldn't prove it because they had no documents showing this until after Nick is sentenced Someone finally comes up and says hey, here's what really happened on that dart mission They completely fabricated it so that they could make it look like he had a prior incident where he was trying to get his fellow Blackwater guys

to shoot at civilians. Wow. Is that unbelievable? Yeah. So they basically, so they get Matt Murphy and Jeremy Ridgway on the stand in the case, knowing that they had already testified to something completely different, got them on the stand and got them to lie about what happened in that DART mission in Nick's trial. And how these prosecutors are not in jail or disbarred, I don't know.

Because I can't think of anything that spells suborning perjury more than that. Yeah. God dang. Oh, did they tell you about how the FBI used to, would chase them down in their hometowns? Nick and... No. And Dustin? Yeah. So when they were trying to get the guys to plead because they knew that they had no case, they went, they sent agents to...

to Nick's house, to his family farm to try to question him, and to Dustin's house also, and just parked there and went around town and tried and followed them and tried to intimidate them. Really? Mm-hmm. They did not tell me about that. Yeah, they did. Let's talk about the motives on why...

this case became so important with the SOFA agreement with the Exxon Mobil contracts coming up. So the SOFA agreement is the status of forces agreement. Yes. And the status of force, the status of forces agreement was between Iraq and the US, which basically stated when we went over there,

That our troops would be out by a certain date. I think was it December of 2009 I think is when we were supposed to start withdrawing with you know, we're gonna have to check this but it was actually 2011 for the sofa agreement that we're talking about Okay, I think it was you'll start pulling troops in 2009 and the last ones will be out by December 2011 I think that's right. Yeah

So what was going on at that time when the SOFA agreement was getting ready to expire?

So in this you're talking about like what happened with the with the Iraqi. Can we talk about the election, too, because that kind of feeds into it as well. That's why. Yeah. Right. So then this is this was very hard for me being a Democrat to talk critically about the Obama administration and Joe Biden, because what I saw in these

in these diplomatic cables was really troubling to me. So at the time, if you, if everybody remembers Hillary Clinton and, and

Barack Obama ran in 2008 on getting out of Iraq and they were about as anti-contractor as you could possibly imagine. I mean, they were like fighting each other for which one hated contractors more, which to me was extremely disingenuous. Later, when I found out that by the time Obama got out of office, there were three contractors to every soldier in Afghanistan and two contractors to every soldier in Iraq.

um we could not have prosecuted the war without contractors um and the contractors were exactly the same people in most cases as the troops so to um to put the this blame on contractors i found really pretty repugnant um so what was happening in january of 2010 when the

you know what hit the fan with Judge Urbina dismissing the case was two things. Number one, Nouri al-Maliki was about to stand for election in March of 2010. And he was not, according to the polls, going to win.

But he was the person who we backed because we felt like we'd put him in when we invaded Iraq and we could deal with him. We felt like he was somebody that we could negotiate with. He was a known quantity. Surprisingly, Iran's Soleimani also backed him, which is kind of ironic if you think about it.

So when the Blackwater case was dismissed and everything started going crazy in Baghdad, the Iraqi government threatened to not approve the SOFA agreement, which would let our forces stay in Iraq and stabilize it.

And we had some massive things going on that needed to keep on going, which was we needed to withdraw in an orderly fashion and we needed to keep everything

Kind of calm for the oil companies that were trying to get their leases So they did not want so they wanted to keep they didn't want the sofa agreement to expire because we would have had to pull troops out right if we pull troops out that destabilizes the entire country which makes for a complicated election cycle, right so Obama and Biden

needed that agreement signed so that we could keep troops in country so that they would have a smooth election. Yes. Iraqi prime minister did not want to keep the troops there because he wanted these Blackwater guys prosecuted. So he told them, I'm not signing it. Pull your troops out. We re-indicted

Well, first, Joe Biden ran over to Iraq and stood up with Iraqi government officials in front of the cameras and said, "Hey, we're really sorry this happened. We're really disappointed at this outcome. We don't think that it's right. And we promise we're going to get justice for the Iraqi people." Let me take this opportunity to express my personal regret

for the violence in Kisour involving Blackwater employees in 2007. The United States is determined to hold accountable anyone who commits crimes against the Iraqi people.

While we fully respect the independence and integrity of the U.S. judicial system, we were disappointed by the judge's decision to dismiss the indictment, which was based on the way in which some evidence had been acquired.

A dismissal, I want to make clear, is not an acquittal. And today, I'm announcing that the United States government will appeal this decision. Our Justice Department will file that appeal from the judge's decision next week. Thank you, Mr. President.

Okay, so what you're, you know, a defendant and the second most powerful man in your country says, hey, you're guilty. I mean, that's basically what he's saying when he's over there in a foreign country talking about your case. So, yeah, I mean, he did it essentially because the Iraqis needed the Nouri al-Maliki needed to look tough. And that's also in those diplomatic cables.

in front of the Americans or he was threatening not to approve the SOFA or allow contractors to stay in the country. And then when they did re-indict, the SOFA agreement was signed how fast afterwards? It was the next week. I don't know. I can't answer that because I can't remember. I think when I talked to Cofield, Bill Cofield, Evan's attorney, he said that the SOFA agreement was signed the very next week. Yeah, I'm sure that's probably true. There was no...

there was no hiccup with the SOFR agreement. Um, so that, that tells you, you know, tells you everything you need to know. Yeah. What was going on? I'm a little confused with what was going on with the Exxon mobile contracts at that time. That was something that was mentioned in one of the very first cables. And, um, when I looked at those, I, uh,

Paul Slough's lawyer is the one who found those and he gave them to me. And I called Robert Ford, who was the charge d'affaires at the time in Iraq, in Baghdad. And I called him up and went over all these cables with him. I sent them to him and said, hey, do you remember sending these? And he goes, well, I didn't write them, but I absolutely remember sending them. And I said, well, explain this to me. Explain what was going on here.

And, you know, he just he kind of glossed over that part of it. But he said what happened here was not their fault. They did exactly what we told them to do. Everything that they did in Nisar Square was in their contract. They followed the contract. So I can't really speak anymore to the ExxonMobil part. But the fact that he included it as the third paragraph of all the fallout of ExxonMobil

The dismissal of that case says a lot. Yeah, interesting. Were there any other political reasons on why they wanted these guys down in prison? The other thing that was difficult for them was Eric Prince was not popular during the Obama White House years. He's Christian, conservative, rich, conservative.

They just, you know, they didn't like him. They didn't like that he was making a lot of money on the war, but it wasn't his fault. You know, reinstitute the draft if you're so upset about contractors, you know, but nobody had the political courage to do that. So it was really convenient to get mad at Eric Prince for being successful at something, which was training veterans and equipping them properly as we should have done when we sent people over to Iraq. So,

Everything having to do with this case was reflected in the Blackwater logo. That is something they could not escape. They could not escape the association with Blackwater. And I think that that's why it was so easy to convict them in Washington, D.C. I think that if Blackwater

They had actually tried them where they should have tried them, which was in Salt Lake City or Tennessee or Texas, where they were from. There's no way that they would have got this result. But Eric Prince was such a bet noir in Washington, D.C., that they were never going to get a fair trial because of him. Damn. Did he jump in and help at all?

Um, that's something you would have to ask the guys about. I think that probably, you know, he used whatever influence that he had to try to get them freed. I talked to him for my podcast and he did give me an interview. But I think that he was well aware that any kind of association with him was negative for them.

And I had an expert who actually defends a lot of these cases and is a former federal prosecutor and a former JAG. And I said, how much do you think this case cost the government? And he said, oh, $50 million, easy. They spent $50 million. Think about it. Three trials, 13 years. They brought probably 45 people over from Iraq and put them up. They went to Iraq and back.

Stored cars that were supposedly in Nisr Square. I mean, collected evidence. Think about that. Think about how expensive that is. All for an Iraqi election. Let's talk about the bodies. Okay. How many bodies were found?

That's a really good question because they were actually convicted for killing two people whose bodies never showed up, whose bodies were never found. They were basically people whose relatives said that they were in the surf square around that time, that same day, but they never came home.

They never found any bodies and they were accused of what, 17, killing 17 and wounding 20? Yes. Okay. So the body situation was very interesting because when I first started looking at this case, I went back to all of the contemporaneous cases.

news stories that were filed from Baghdad that day. And I also looked at the government, the Iraqi government statement about the incident. OK, don't forget there were three major incidents that day involving contractors and American soldiers. Right. Shootouts. OK, so when I looked

Within just a few miles of each other. We're not even talking all of Baghdad. We're talking, you could hear. Right, exactly. They were so close. So when I looked at this, the New York Times reporter who was there in Baghdad reported on that day that eight people were taken to the hospital. Eight, okay? Yeah.

on all of Baghdad that day. The Iraqi government put out a statement that said something like less than 10 people were killed in that incident. And all of a sudden,

you know they're uh the american government is running ads on iraqi tv asking anybody who might have had something to do with the nisr square shooting to please come forward and all of a sudden you get this enormous number of dead and wounded some of whom as i mentioned were never found the bodies were never found what were what was in those ads was there a reward

well, there was compensation it was a phone number and Just a call for you know anybody to come forward but by this time it was very well known that the US Embassy was paying people cash for being involved in shootings with American personnel and in the

State Department cables, which you will have on your website, you'll see that it was the standard payment was $10,000 for a dead family member, $5,000 for wounded, and $2,500 for property damage. This was well known by the time the Nassau Square incident happened. This is something I discussed with Robert Ford. Everybody knew this.

Whenever there was a big incident, people would just show up at the embassy and say, hey, I had somebody killed. We used to get that all the time. I spent 14 in and out of Middle Eastern countries and war zones for 14 years. And every time I would go to the embassy, there was always a line of locals trying to get some kind of compensation for something.

a dead gog or a shot car or a dead family member and there's never seems to be any proof

Yeah, I mean, that you can't blame these people. I mean, they're, you know, their society was completely upended by this war. You know, I do everything I could to get to get money as well. But, you know, when you're prosecuting people and taking away their liberty and, you know, putting their family through this hell, you want to have actual bodies. You want to have actual crimes. Anyway, one thing I wanted to read to you, because when I was preparing for this, I wanted

I wanted to say this because I think that people don't know it. One thing that was really disturbing to me about the way this case was presented to the Washington, D.C. juries was the prosecutors acted like, you know, that these guys drove into Times Square and just started shooting people like like it was that kind of atmosphere where it's just a normal day in Baghdad and no one was shooting and no one was dying. But in fact, this was at the height of the

the killings in Baghdad. There's a very reliable website that I used a lot just to try to get some kind of perspective on how much

how many casualties were occurring in Baghdad at this time in 2007, September, right? And you'll remember that this is the time of the surge. And there was a lot of fighting that was going on in opposition to this. So according to Iraqi body count, the first eight months of 2007 saw the most massive vehicle bomb-based attacks in Iraq's history.

They occurred with greater frequency than at any time during the war. That's right when this was happening. There were 20 bomb attacks killing 50 people. In one case, 500 civilians were killed.

So the U.S. government was going around to the media and saying, this is the worst massacre in Iraq history. And if you go on Wikipedia, you're going to see that. It's the worst massacre in Iraq history. That is complete bullshit. It is a total lie. There were somewhere between 868 to 1,326 deaths of civilian bystanders by U.S.-led coalition forces in 2007.

So, I mean, and that includes 88 children. OK, so to say that this was the worst massacre in Iraq in the history of the Iraq war is a total lie. And it shocks me that this continues to be perpetrated in the media. It shocks me when these guys are free and the United Nations makes a statement that this is the worst massacre.

Massacre the worst massacre in the entire war. Yeah, right at that time was what years were they putting that out - well up to 2007 so yeah four years. I think we wanted to know three Yeah for the first time four years and they were only able to recover two bodies No, they actually well, let's put it this way. They recovered no bodies because the bodies were removed from the scene immediately and

But of the body count for the Nassar Square incident, they counted two people where they don't even know what happened to them because they had no bodies. They don't have death certificates or anything else. They allowed them to be prosecuted for two people who just disappeared that day. The two, did they remove the bodies from the Kia?

No, those were still... They were still at the scene and they were the only two bodies that were still at the scene. That's kind of what I was getting at. Yeah. It's the only recovered two bodies. Exactly. And that was a justified shoot. Exactly. So, interesting. Okay, so yeah, we talked about Nick, about the fact that the government just basically set out to defame him and that was their entire strategy. I mean, they were attributing things that he said to...

other people. I mean, they essentially, according to the documents that I reviewed, they interviewed all 19 members of the Raven 23 convoy. And they essentially, from what I could see, took everything negative that every one of those people said about Iraqis and attributed it to Nick. You know, what I don't understand is why did they move it from Paul to Nick?

What was, why did they want Nick so bad? So this is something that I spoke to Nick's sister, Jessica Slatton, who's a lawyer. And she's even, she is incredible on this case. She knows every single detail. And I asked her that because it just seemed like it'd be so easy to just let him out of the case and just go with the other three guys. And what she told me was that right after the incident happened,

Nick was talking to Jeremy Ridgeway back in the green zone and they were discussing where they had taken enemy fire and Ridgeway

went back to the State Department and said, hey, you know, Nick Slatton saw gunmen in this place, this place, this place. And then the next day, the State Department investigators went out. This is probably the first time that they'd ever done this, an investigation to this degree of, you know, scrupulousness. They went out and found the shell casings exactly where Nick described they were. Okay, but then they get Ridgeway

to flip and say, oh, you know, there wasn't anybody shooting in the square. So if they had not had Nick as a defendant, he could have been called as a witness. He would have been able to verify the State Department report that was introduced. He would have been able to impeach Jeremy Ridgway.

So he was kind of a dangerous witness. Okay. So I think when I talk to Jessica, that's kind of what she comes up with. But frankly, you know, I'm going to just say what the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers says about the prosecution. They were just vindictive. And they wanted to re-indict him. And he said no. And he went to the appeals court and he won. And that made them angry. So what they decided to do was charge him with murder.

And their vindictiveness had no end. I mean, I can tell you stories from that moment to the moment that he was released that you would not believe. The DOJ continued to go after him while he was in prison.

It was terrible. You weren't allowed to talk to any of these guys at first, correct? Right. So when I first decided to investigate this case, I tried to go into, I applied to the Bureau of Prisons as a journalist and said, I want to come in and interview them with a recorder or whatever. And they turned me down. They said, no, you can't. So I reapplied as a friend of the family.

and under my maiden name and they let me in. However, I got to see Paul, Evan and Dustin and I went to Florida to visit Nick in the Supermax where he was at the time and the prison wouldn't let me in. So I can't explain that.

But the other thing that was, I thought, really horrible was they designated these guys as all high-risk inmates, dangerous inmates because of their training. And they had a lot of strictures put on them because of this. They weren't allowed to communicate with each other, which I thought was particularly cruel.

There were a lot of times when I would try to get a hold of Dustin and he would just disappear into the solitary housing unit for no reason. And I'd call and say, where is he? You know, what's going on? And they wouldn't tell me. So it was it was terrible. I mean, they were violating their rights, torturing them essentially the entire time they were in prison. So moving on from that.

You started gaining traction after you were able to gain access and speak with them and kind of start putting your research all together on that amazing podcast that's out and linked below. But one thing that I wanted to kind of cover is when you started trying to get President Trump's attention to pardon these guys,

At some point you kind of renamed was, I can't remember if it was you, but the case got renamed the Biden four. Right. And that,

it sounded like is eventually what got his attention. Yeah, that was by the time that I started making the podcast, I had the very good fortune of hooking up with a very well-known producer, Michael Flaherty, who was the co-founder of Walden Media. We met doing a different project and he asked me one day if I had any other projects. And I was so desperate. I said, I know this is going to sound completely crazy, but

you've got to hear about this case and to his credit

You know, he really researched it and took it in and he was absolutely outraged. And the great thing about Mike is that he has a lot of contacts in on the conservative side of the political spectrum and with the media. So he immediately, as soon as he kind of wrapped his head around what was going on, contacted all of his friends

and people he knew on that side of the aisle. And it was wonderful to see how they really dug into it and really looked at the facts before they said anything. But then they came out in great favor of them being pardoned. So Mike knew someone who was very close to the White House Counsel's Office under President Trump. And that

was how we helped get the pardon packet that had already been filed by Paul Slough's lawyer kind of helped move it along a little. You know, we just sort of combined forces. Those guys knew some people, we knew some people, and it got escalated that way. And then Mike got us on Fox News and

together and he got Kristen Slough on Laura Ingraham's show. And so very slowly we started to get traction. David French from the National Review wrote a really wonderful, well-researched, well-thought-out article about why these guys needed to be pardoned. And it had extra meaning because he was a JAG and he also was active duty in Iraq.

So when we started to get these credible people saying, hey, I looked at this and this is really wrong. That's when we started to get traction. And the whole idea of renaming them the Biden for, I think, yes, was had to do with the election. But also, you know, just because we we also wanted to send a message to Joe Biden that this isn't right what you did.

you know, interfering in this way, doing this in the criminal justice system is wrong. And we want you to know that we saw it. Do you think he saw it? I don't know. But I was a little bit happy that, you know, he's taking seriously the need for criminal justice reform because we really need it. Yeah. You know, I'd be extremely angry if, you know, anybody in the Biden administration tries to mess with these guys again. That would be

all hands on deck, we would not forget it. Do you think that's possible? Well, you know what? I was a little worried about it when they first got pardoned. I was really worried when the UN came out negatively against it. That was...

kind of none of their business and it made me angry that nobody seemed to research what was going on in this case before making those stupid statements. And then, you know, people in the media, even people I knew coming out who knew me and knew about how I was involved in this case, getting angry that they were pardoned without even knowing what was going on. I mean, if this had happened anywhere else in the United States with any other people,

The press should have been outraged that they were in prison. But because they were Blackwater and because of the association with the Iraq War and because they were contractors, no one will look below the surface of this story. It's a real shame that it doesn't seem like anybody will look below the surface on any media anymore. Whatever they see is gospel and that's it. And that's a...

dangerous spot to be in. It is. But you know what the great thing about now is? We can post all these documents and videos that show you exactly what was going on and people can make up their own minds. So before we kind of wrap this up, I have one last question. I understand at least why the U.S. government was so

motivated to put these guys, to lock these guys up, to appease the Iraqi government. What I don't, one piece that I still don't understand is how and why they flipped Ridgway, which was a major turning point in the entire case. So he completely changed his statement. And do you know why? The government, when it used those protected statements that it wasn't allowed to use,

from the guys, the ones they gave right after the incident to the State Department investigators. When they were not allowed to use that, they decided to change the theory of the case to say they just went out into Nassau Square and started shooting people for no reason. They didn't have any reason to discharge their weapons. Therefore, they're guilty of manslaughter, involuntary manslaughter, attempted manslaughter, whatever. So they needed somebody to say, someone on the team to say,

"No, I didn't see anybody shooting. I don't know why we were shooting." And the person that they got to do that was Jeremy Ridgway. And my theory about this is that Jeremy Ridgway was one of the most vulnerable members of the team. He had real bad PTSD. He had lied on his Blackwater application about his experience.

He was the one person who was described by the other people in the vehicle as having shot a lot, probably a lot more than he needed to. In fact, Tommy Vargas, who was the vehicle commander in that vehicle, told me that at one point during the incident, he grabbed Ridgeway, who was up in the turret,

and told him to cease fucking firing because he was worried that he was going to melt the barrel of his weapon because he was shooting so much. So Ridgeway was very vulnerable. If there was going to be someone held accountable for killing civilians, it was going to be Ridgeway and he knew it. So the government worked on him a lot.

And then they also, remember, were withholding evidence. And they were saying, we got no physical evidence that you guys were being fired at, which was a total lie because they had the Decorow reports and the Decorow photographs that they didn't turn over to the defense. So Jeremy Ridgway is operating in this universe where nobody is going to believe him. And if anybody gets caught, it's going to be him.

So he says, what do you need me to say? And that's essentially what happened at the time. Like I said, he was suffering from very severe PTSD. And I don't think it was very difficult for them to intimidate him into testifying. He was also older than the rest of the guys. He had a family. And I'm sure he was thinking about that as well.

But he completely reversed his previous statement. He did. And there were also, you know, he had statements that were made to the State Department. He had emails that were sent to people that were part of the evidence. I don't know if they were shown or not. But he absolutely changed his testimony from we did nothing wrong, we were being fired at, to I didn't see any gunmen. Well, I can tell you just about everybody that's been on this show has probably

severe PTSD. Yeah. And that has nothing to do with flipping a story. Yeah. So I don't think that's a valid excuse. No, I don't either. But I think that, you know, he's not the same kind of man as the rest of the guys. That's for damn sure. Yeah. But... It was so tough for them. That was, you know, I mean, imagine that. You come out of combat. You can't get your life together. Yeah.

Really, because you have this hanging over your head and then you have to go to and every decision went against them. By the time they got to that trial in 2014, their lives had been on hold for seven years. And they all walked in there thinking, there's no way we're going to get convicted. The only one who thought that they would was Nick Slatton because of the experience that he had with the prosecutor's

and getting charged with murder. But when I saw them, and when I went to visit all the prisons, I ran into Bill Cofield at Evans Prison in Pennsylvania. And I just said, why didn't you put on more of a case? And he said, we didn't think we could lose with the evidence that they had. They had no evidence. We shouldn't have lost. And I think they all believe that.

Dane but swing is the guy I was telling you about who stood up to judge Lambert he stood up there during Nick's sentencing and said I Almost left law because of this case damn that's one of the most powerful lawyers in this country and That's what this case did to him Wow, I mean I have that transcript to bucket. Let's throw it in. Yeah, I

Well, Gina, I just want to again say thank you so much for coming up here and jumping in and helping us kind of organize this portion and to try to fit this in whatever we just did. An hour and a half, two hour segment is no easy task.

so hope everybody can follow along but once again all the documents are linked below you can download them you can read them yourself for those that are listening that don't know what a cable is that is a government email essentially and but before we do close out

Where can we find you? How can people find you, follow you? I'll link the podcast that you did below. Yeah, I really want that to get as much attention as possible because that will tell everybody the story of it. So it's Raven23PresumptionOfGuilt is the name of the podcast. And if you want to follow me on Twitter, I can't remember what my Twitter handle is.

You can't remember? I can't. I think it's just Gina Keating. All right. Well, we'll link that below too. Okay. So we'll link your Twitter below. The podcast is linked below. All the documents and the videos, uh, are all in that file down there. So go check it out. And, uh, Gina, thank you again. And, uh,

If you have not heard of it, Netflix versus the world, which you produced. I wrote it and produced it. Wrote it and produced it. Phenomenal doc. So cheers. Thank you. Thank you. So many of the articles say this is a war crimes trial. The president publicly showing support for the Navy SEAL. He was a great friend.

He was one of the ultimate fighters. Tough guy. Not to mention 19 years of service, eight overseas deployments. He was found not guilty of murder and attempted murder and has long proclaimed his innocence. We overcame this and we're going to continue to make sure that this does not happen again to warriors in this country. Our family saw behind a curtain we never knew existed.

After enduring a very public two-year trial, overcoming a travesty of justice filled with false allegations, mainstream media slander, political and legal corruption, we came out vindicated. We learned firsthand how broken and politically corrupt the system is and that our service members and first responders can be unfairly and unjustly targeted.

simply for doing their job. We vowed, having escaped injustice, we would commit ourselves to helping others in similar situations and fight to reform a broken system. The Pipehitter Foundation is dedicated to defending the rights and freedoms of our men and women in uniform, the same rights and freedoms they risked their lives to uphold. As a 501c3, our mission is to support service members, police, first responders, and their families.

through financial and legal support, advocacy, and public affairs. Throughout my career, I was always taught we don't leave our own behind on and off the battlefield. The Pipehitter Foundation will continue that sentiment and make sure our men and women get the due process they deserve by highlighting their stories and supporting them in their fight for justice. Join us. Together, let's fight for those who fought for us. Donate now at pipehitterfoundation.org.

So you guys just got the verdict. You're going to prison. What's going through your heads? This can't be real. We all prepared for it because you get a 50-50 chance. And, you know, it's a yes or no verdict. And never thought it would happen. I mean, it's always in the back of my mind that it could happen. And it was just complete and utter shock. It was like you're living in a daze.

And whenever they put the cuffs on you, it's like, oh shit, it just got real. - How long? How long are you going away for? - They upped the ante from the original indictment to where we're facing a 30 year indictment if we got convicted for anything. And Nick went from a 30 year indictment or the original indictment to a life sentence. And so I know for me, it's like, well,

I just got found guilty. I know it's going to be at least 30 years that I want to do because I'm 33 years old, I believe is my age at the time. And it's like, I want to be 60 years old, 60 plus by the time I walk out of prison. Yeah, I was just devastated, to say the least. Throughout trial, I...

I was pretty confident. You know, of course you never know and you're scared out of your mind, but I was confident that we were going to be found not guilty. The jury, when they came back, I remember them walking in the courtroom and you're standing there, everybody's silent, and you're trying to kind of read the jury to see if you can catch, you know, somebody looking at you, somebody smiling.

you know, give you a little indication of what they're about to tell you. And I remember I saw one of the younger girls was kind of joking back and forth with the other jury member. And in my mind, I thought, well, you know, if they're so jovial, there's no way they were about to convict anybody. So the first count that they were going to read was Nick's count.

So Nick's count was first-degree murder, and it carried, like Dustin said, a life sentence. So in my mind, Nick was good. I thought there was no way on earth he was going to get convicted over that. The standard of evidence for first-degree murder charge is too high. How are you going to charge somebody with first-degree murder in a war zone? The evidence was nonexistent. I thought that was...

no doubt about it he was not guilty so they said count one nicholas slatton guilty and as soon as they said that i knew we were all because in our cases myself dustin and paul it was we were charged with first uh with voluntary manslaughter so um if they found nick guilty on that

We were all done for. And sure enough, they went down the whole list, and it was multiple counts. It took them, you know, 5, 10 minutes to read them all. But you know, as soon as they say guilty on one count, that 30-year mandatory minimum is tacked on there, and you're going away. So I always told these guys as the trial was progressing that we were going to be found guilty because of all the stuff that Gina talked about.

that they got away with, all the evidence that they hid and stuff. So it wasn't a shock to me at all. I knew that the jury saw us a certain type of way because we were Blackwater. It was basically a trial against the name Blackwater. They didn't view us as individuals, and they didn't judge our individual actions, you know. So it didn't shock me at all.

At what point did you realize that you were just being used for political gain? I don't know, what would y'all say, maybe a week into it? I told y'all that? Yeah. Thereabouts. I think I didn't want to accept reality, and when Nick would, he would constantly say, no, this fucking matters, it's rigged. And I didn't want to hear that, you know? I thought, no, it can't be fucking rigged.

This is the United States, you know. I'm a fucking former Marine. I was over there serving my country. It's not rigged. You know, these people, all that matters is the people in the jury, what they think. It doesn't matter what the judge says or what the prosecution says. It matters what the jury thinks. And boy, was I wrong. They slammed us on every count. Yeah, the...

The term that I've used a lot is just crushed. And I don't think there's really an English word that aptly describes that feeling of hearing the word guilty and knowing what's attached to it. My wife and mother-in-law were sitting in the courtroom, and there was just an audible gasp.

when Nick's verdict came out because all of us were certain that if they found Nick guilty, like Evan said, it was closed for us. And so all the marshals were lined up against the wall and they got through the counts and read everything. And I remember locking eyes with the lead attorney, Anthony Ascension, and he just blinked and looked back at the judge.

And at that moment, the prosecutors said, you know, in light of the heavy sentences that this carries, we think that the defendant should be automatically taken into custody. And so we were, and the marshals came and got us, escorted us to the back, and had us up against the wall. They were yipping out our pockets, cutting our shoelaces out. And it was a feeling of...

helplessness like I felt on January 23rd. And there was so much uncertainty tied to it that I knew my wife needed to hear something and she deserved more than just seeing my backside leave that courtroom. And the attorneys came back

And Linda Bailey was one of the attorneys and she was just grabbing up our wallets and belts and shoelaces and everything. I mean, they just handed her a wad of shit and basically told her that, you know, this is it for now. And I told Linda, I mean, at that point, I think I was probably sobbing to tell Kristen, keep the faith. And that was the last statement I got to give her for a while because they took us directly to D.C. County Jail.

Nick, you had some interesting stuff to say about being in prison and how you found out and who was stopping you. Yeah, absolutely. So we left DC jail and went to Northern Neck, which was like a regional jail. They put me in the hole in there because I was pretty crazy. I was coming down off of a lot of medication. You know, they had me on Xanax and stuff. And

they didn't really know what to do with me. You know, they believed what they read in the papers. They thought we were all monsters. But me particularly, for some reason, they just put me in segregation. So I was by myself. And I got a Bible really quick. And I remember the first night I was calling out to God and praying. And, you know, I was...

I had really turned my back on God when I came back from the war. I was very angry and bitter, and I was eating a lot of pills and drinking a lot. And I would hurt people. I was really violent, you know, quick to fight. And so I really believe that God let me go down for something that I did not do just so that I would return to Him. Because like he was talking about being broken, that is the most broken you will ever see a human being is when they are separated from society.

That's about as low as you can get. I knew that I was going to be locked up for the rest of my life. I knew that I was facing a life sentence. I'm calling out to God. I'm like, "You know I didn't do this. What are you doing?" He answered. He said, "You don't run this. I run this." I'm like, "Well, what am I supposed to do?" He said, "Love God and love your neighbor." That's what I started doing. I started just digging into His Word and seeking His face every day.

I saw many miracles that happened while I was locked up. It was a daily thing that I had to meet God. I had to pray. I had to get in the Word and talk to Him. But years later down the road, eventually we were pardoned by the president. It was a miracle. But that road, he was just shaving off all the bad pieces of me. The six years, all the anger and all the hate that I had stored up, all the...

all the grudges that I had towards people, he was just slowly chopping those off as I would do what he said, he would just cut those pieces off of me. And I remember this was after my third trial, you know, Gina talked about all that, but this was after my third trial, I'd actually been found guilty again. And they had me in a little regional jail and they had a riot in that jail. And so

The prisoners broke the sprinklers, they set the microwaves on fire, they ran the police out. And so I didn't participate in the riot. I just went and sat on my bunk, got my Bible and started reading it. And one of my friends, he saw me in there and he just came by and shut my door. And so the door is electronically locked, so only the police can open it from the control panel.

And so my cellmate was caught out there in the riot because he was participating in it. So when the riot team came in with their flashbang grenades and their tear gas canisters, he got pulled out. So they took him to the hole.

After that, they weren't being nice to us at all. They were starving us. It was about seven days. They just brought us styrofoam trays, but there wasn't hardly anything in them. I mean, there was maybe that much food, a tiny amount of food in each tray. And so we were hungry. And I had been reading books.

My favorite chapter in the Bible is Psalms 91. And I read that every day. I still do to this day, first thing. So in Psalms 91 in verse 3 it says, "Surely He will save you from the fowler's snare." And that really irked me that day when I read it because I was like, "Here I am, I'm starving.

I didn't do this. I've already been to trial three different times and I'm found guilty again and I'm getting a whole nother life sentence, right? Like, what are you doing, God? Because you said, surely you will save me from the Fowler snare. I was like, that's where I'm at. And I remember I boxed in the word Fowler snare and then immediately I hear on the speaker, there's like a little speaker in your cell where you can push a panic button. You know, something happens. I hear over that, slat and pack your stuff. You got a presidential pardon.

And this was a year and a half before the pardon even happened. There had been no mentions of pardons. It wasn't on any of our radar, none of that. And so I was like, "Man, I'm going crazy, right?" And so it was a couple days later, they let us out of our cells finally to call our family. I called my sister and she's like, "Nick, have you talked to anybody?" I said, "No, I've been locked down." She said, "Well, the New York Times reported that President Trump

is considering pardoned soldiers accused of war crimes. And it mentioned you by name. I was in the paper with Golston and Gallagher and myself. Those were the three names in the article that was written. And I was like, that's the same day I heard the voice that I was praying. And I was like, that's the day that the article from the newspaper was dated. I was like, I told her, I was like, look, God told me I'm going to get pardoned. She's like, yeah, you're going crazy, bro, right? But

It wasn't until a year and a half later that God fulfilled His word, but it happened. And then immediately, my lawyers started trying to track down leads, whether this was true or not. And then they had a whole new approach. We were already appealing in the courts, so they had this whole political thing that they were doing. And then I told them, I said, look,

it has to be all of us or I'm not going to take the pardon. And they're like, well, it just says you in the article. I was like, you heard what I said. I'm not going to accept a pardon unless it's all of us. And then Paul's wife ended up hiring a pardon attorney and

He put his head together with my lawyers and they started advocating, they started lobbying and a bunch of like congressmen and people got in our corner and it was just, God was just showing me that if I would have faith, like he fulfilled it man and it was just amazing. It was a complete miracle.

The one thing I'll say is whenever we stood there the first and second time and you get people speaking on your behalf that you've known all your life. My daughter spoke in my second sentencing and it's one of the hardest things that you'll ever have to listen to because I can tell you right now my back was to the court. I was at the very back. They were sitting sideways and

I was trying not to tear up when my daughter got done. When you listen to people speak on your behalf, it's really like listening to your own eulogy. There's no other way to put it. It's like you're not even there, and they're talking about the man that you are, the man that you have been, and then the man that, you know, if the court goes lenient on you, that you can be again. And that's not an easy thing.

Because you're standing there the first time. It's like, okay, well, I know I got a 30-year mandatory minimum. We know Nick's got life. And then the judge says, the prosecution, if I'm not mistaken, the first go-around was trying to give me 63%

67 72 or something some crazy numbers like that basically giving us a life sentence without a life sentence and the judge said no i want to give these three guys 30 years in one day and then nick still got life and until you actually face down odds like that it's it's you you can't understand that feeling

of getting a sentence like that and basically knowing that, okay, I'm 33, 34 years old. And by the time I do my sentence, if they give me a 60 year sentence that they're trying to do, you're not walking out of there. You'll be carried out in a box. And I can't imagine receiving a life sentence like Nick did. I mean, it's just, you can't comprehend that. And so to make it through

Not once, but twice of listening to stuff like that. That's probably one of the hardest moments ever is listening. It's like you're dead and gone and people are talking about you. Maybe to add just a bit to Nick's experience as well is I called myself a Christian for a long time. And I said that I knew Christ and that I followed him, but I'd never really had that intimate relationship. And I'd heard about it.

But I didn't understand it. And there's so many analogies within the text to our own situation. And I don't pretend to choose anybody else's worldview, but just reading the story of Daniel and Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego and what they went through as innocent young men, there's tons of material just within that.

Those four men's experiences and the furnace that the three went through and then Daniel was in the lion's den. There was no way out in natural terms for those four men. There was none. But in God's miraculous provision, all three men walked out of that furnace and didn't even have a hint of smoke on them. And Daniel walked out of the lion's den and not a scratch on him. And so I say that to say this is four men are sitting here in front of you today.

again as as proof of miraculous providence in God's care well John's last night at dinner Paul you brought this up you wanted to say thank you to somebody for the pardon and I think the best way maybe to do that is go through each one of you guys and Kind of explain what it was like when you heard that you were getting that pardon. Yeah, and so

However, you guys want to kick this off starting with you Paul, okay President Trump, thank you And thank you doesn't cover it. You gave me my life back. You gave me my freedom back You gave me my little girl and my wife and it's something that I I didn't know how experienced again in this lifetime and out of your abundant grace and mercy you You gave me a second chance at life with them with these three men. Thank you, sir. I

Thank you. President Trump, we love you, man. Thank you so much. Like he said, it's like we're back from the dead, you know. We thank God and we thank you. We think, you know, you had more guts than anybody we've ever seen or ever heard of. So you're an awesome man and you're welcome down in Sparta, Tennessee. Anytime you come hanging out, anytime you want, we love you. Everybody down there loves you. You bet.

Well said, guys. President Trump, thank you. Thank you for having the confidence in us, for having the courage to act despite getting political backlash. Thank you for giving me a second chance. I promise to not let it go to waste. And I look forward to seeing you in the White House in 2024. Sir, I can't thank you enough. My two children died.

are no longer going to be without their father. You give us a second chance at life and we're going to try to do our best to make it worthwhile. Thank you very much, sir. I just want to say thank you guys for everything you've done for this country and if anybody deserves the freedom they fought for, it's definitely you guys.

When you guys came here, I said that I wanted to connect you with some people and a really good friend on the line here. You guys might know his name's Eddie Gallagher. And

He wound up having a situation very similar to your guys. And so I want to introduce him right here. I got him on the line. Eddie Gallagher. Eddie, what's up? What's going on? Pleasure. Wow. So Eddie runs the Pie Pitters Foundation. And that whole foundation is, you know, to kind of help guys like you. So Eddie, I'm just going to turn it over to you, man.

Hey man, what's up fellas? Uh, dude, I can't tell you how awesome it is to see you guys here, especially at Sean's place, man. Like, I can't imagine what you guys went through, man. I got a taste of what it is to be, you know, have our government turn against you and sort of hang you out to dry, man. But, uh,

it's honestly it's an honor to be able to talk to you guys man i'm glad you guys are using this platform to tell your uh side of the story uh but i just want to let you know man sean uh told me that you guys were going to be on here we would follow and everything that's been going on at our nonprofit yeah highfitter foundation

Wow. Wow.

That's what our nonprofit's all about, man. That's what we speak to you, man. But I'm stoked for you guys. I can't wait to hear your guys' side of the story. Thank you, brother. Thanks, Eddie. Appreciate it. Well, that'll be linked in the description. So if anybody wants to donate, and there's going to be a lot of people that want to donate, the link's below. You can donate to Pipe Hitters Foundation. There's going to be a portal, like Eddie said, for your guys' legal fees specifically. So...

Yeah. Eddie? Yeah, man. You're the fucking man, dude. Go there and you'll be able to access it and donate. We can't thank you enough. I followed your story from inside the walls, man. It's awesome to be able to talk to you on this platform and be able to interact.

Yeah, likewise. I followed your story closely, too. I used to be running up and down the stairs in my unit watching Fox News and listening about your case. And of course, all these other guys I was locked up with would assume you were my co-defendant, but I had to tell them, no, I'm not on his level. But seriously, when I saw that clip of you walking into court,

with your uniform on with that big stack of ribbons and medals it uh it made me sick to my stomach because you had handcuffs on and I knew you didn't deserve that uh you deserved more from your country and I'm glad you got acquitted I'm glad you're doing well and thanks again

We love you, brother. Thank you, brother. I appreciate that. We love you, brother, man. America loves you. You know, we got your back. If you ever need anything, let us know. We really appreciate you. Anytime. Hey, same to you guys, man. Eddie, you truly set the standard, man, and keep showing the rest of us what it looks like. Anytime in the future, if there's ever anything that we can do for you or your family, your organization, please never hesitate to reach out. One more thing. I got one more thing.

I've seen you on Instagram doing the Murphy workout, and I officially want to challenge you, but I need a couple months to prepare, all right? You know, we'll discuss that for sure. All right. But hey, the sentiment goes likewise, man. Anything you guys need, reach out. Get my contact from Sean.

I know how it is, you know, afterwards when all this stuff blows over, it's not easy, man. So anything you guys need, hit me up and, you know, our foundation will be there. So, you know, God bless you guys. And I can't wait to hear your guys' side of the story. God bless you, bro. Thank you. Thanks. Eddie, thank you, brother. Thank you, my man. Appreciate it. I'll talk to you soon, man. Love you, bro. Love you, brother. Thank you, dude. You too.

Wow. Got us. Awesome. Wow. He's a good dude, man. I was sitting here looking at the orange spots on the carpet. I'm like, what the fuck? Those wasn't there a while ago. Right. Were you guys expecting that? No. No. I'm pretty happy, though. Yeah, that's awesome.

I was hoping for a cool coffee cup. A shot glass. I thought you were going to give us some gummy bears or something. I've seen the podcast. I can give you plenty of gummy bears, but I thought maybe that would be a little bit more special than... Depends on what type of gummy bears they are. I'm out. Right on, man. But yeah, Eddie is just... He's like you guys. He's just a solid...

Fucking warfighter got fucked over. And, you know, when I was talking to you guys and you had mentioned the legal fees and Nick, like when you were sitting in here yesterday and you said the only reason I'm here is to...

raise money for the guys that still have legal fees. I mean, man, I just, you know, and I think maybe you think that I took a little offense to that, but dude, I think that is the most honorable thing that, you know, you could do. You're not out here looking for fame. You're not out here, you know, doing anything. You just,

you just want to hook your boys up and same with you, Evan, and all you guys. You know, it's very respectable. God is good, man. One thing I'll say about this is we got locked up together and we walked out together. They never broke us as a team. Yeah. It's six years, two months. We got – they put the handcuffs on us, and then the times may have been a little bit staggered on which prison let who out.

But I know that I talked to everybody directly thereafter. You know, it may have taken us a minute to get a hold because of a number of situations. But, you know, one thing I can say about these three men sitting next to me is there's nobody I'd rather sit next to because...

We rolled in together. We stood there. We took it like men. We didn't turn our backs on each other. We didn't turn our backs on the country. And then we walked out with our heads high in the end because I'm not going to take a deal for something that I didn't do. I'm not going to sell these men out for something that they didn't do to save my own ass. And we can talk about who should have done what, who did what, this, that, the other. But at the end of the day, we went in together and

And we walked out together. There's no, and my family didn't understand. One day we're sitting inside the visitation room in FCI Memphis. I reached down and I pointed at the floor. I said, you see this spot right here? My ex-wife got all beside herself. I said, there's no place I'd rather be. And she's like, what do you mean? I said, I wouldn't have lived with myself had I took a deal and did what Ridgeway did.

I wouldn't have lived with myself at the end of the day if I'd have turned my back on these men. I mean, I'm not even going to lie to you. I wouldn't have. I would have ate a bullet. I would have fucking something, drank myself to death. But instead, I'm sitting here next to these men. I mean, dude, I can't thank you all enough. Thank you, brother. I'm alive today because of you three. I'm confident in that. Yeah, y'all saved me more times than I can count over there for sure.

Well, you guys are definitely a hell of a band of brothers. There's no doubt about it. And, you know, America owes you one. There's no doubt about that either. So for everybody that's watching, go to thepiepittersfoundation.org and donate and get rid of these guys' fucking legal fees right now. They deserve it. And I just want to say thank you guys for coming out here and getting your side out. I hope that felt good.

And I just wished all you guys the best of luck and God bless you. - God bless you. - Thank you. - Thank you, brother. - Thank you, sir. That was Pete. Thank you, brother. - Cheers.