Shawn Ryan Show - #11 The Blackwater Massacre

Episode Date: August 19, 2021

After thirteen years of political persecution and wrongful imprisonment, four U.S. veterans reunited last Christmas with their loyal families after receiving Presidential pardons that some described as “an affront to justice.” In their first joint interview on The Shawn Ryan Show, the four men of Blackwater USA’s Raven 23 Tactical Support Team sit down with Shawn Ryan to discuss the most controversial gunfight of the entire Iraq War, the complete system failure of the U.S. government, a corrupt court system, and incompetent journalists that demonized them as war criminals and convicted them before standing trial, despite their innocence. In an extensive interview, Dustin Heard, Evan Liberty, Nick Slatten and Paul Slough discuss their ordeal as well as their experience in battle, their time in prison, their faith, and reuniting with their families. Special appearances from Gina Keating and Eddie Gallagher Donate to these men HERE: https://pipehitterfoundation.org Proof of Evidence/Documents/Emails/Cables https://static.bashcrash.io/2013.03.12%20Letter%20from%20McCool%20to%20AUSAs.pdf https://static.bashcrash.io/2019.08.14%20%20Transcript%20of%20Sentencing.pdf https://static.bashcrash.io/Ex%20H.pdf https://static.bashcrash.io/Haithem%20email.jpeg https://static.bashcrash.io/IMG_0473003.jpeghttps://static.bashcrash.io/IMG_0474.jpeg https://static.bashcrash.io/IMG_0475.jpeg https://static.bashcrash.io/IMG_0477.jpeg https://static.bashcrash.io/JessicaNewspaper.jpeg https://static.bashcrash.io/Raven%2023%20cables-Clinton%20email.pdf https://static.bashcrash.io/123_1.jpeg https://www.supportraven23.com Raven 23 Presumption of Guilt Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/raven-23-presumption-of-guilt/id1468783839 Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website - https://www.shawnryanshow.com Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/VigilanceElite TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@shawnryanshow Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/shawnryan762 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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on Soldiginero.com. Plus, free shipping with the code Soldiginero10. All right guys, so September 16th, 2007, what's known as the Blackwater Mask or Raven 23 Incident, I want to get each and every one of your first-hand accounts of what happened. Blackwater Security Guard shot more than 30 unarmed Iraqis in Baghdad in 2007. unarmed Iraqis in Baghdad in 2007. Blackwater security contractors were serving time for killing 17 Iraqi civilians in 2007. More Americans receive lengthy prison sentences today for an infamous incident during the Iraq war. All four 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. I'm going to go with it. I'm going to go with it. I'm going to go with it. I'm going to go with it. I'm going to go with it. I'm going to go with it. 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 brothers' remains. We had already put them in body bags. We were dragging them back up the hill and he just lands in the middle of the gunfight. The lands is burdened and it gets out. He wanted to see

that it was his brother and then as soon as he's 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's tragic man like I said it's worse than my life for sure. He had just taken a drag off his cigarette and 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. Take a puff or what? But he lost 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 carbon. I have a really good friend on the line here. You guys might know his name is 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 wanna 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 the Cir square Baghdad Iraq that day. Please welcome Paul Slough, Evan Liberty,

Nick Slatton, and Dustin Hurd. Raven 23. Enjoy the show. All right, Gents, welcome to the Sean Ryan show. So just for the audience, you gentlemen 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, I says, 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. 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, Google did. Now 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 he kind of got cold feet.

And you're like, I don't think you're actually going to reach back out. And I was like, well, here I am. Let's do this shit and got in touch with the rest of you guys. And so here we are. But 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 give you the best interview you will ever have. And I want to give you guys a platform as we all discussed for you guys to tell 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 16th 2007. 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 overwhelmed with the amount of information and just how in depth

this case went. And so, kind of before we get going, I just want to say, you know, thank you to you guys and your families for help of 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 support raven23.com. There's a ton of information on there.

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 what I want to take this interview with you guys is

there's a lot of people that probably don't know exactly what black water 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 for me guys, kind of what you were doing before you went to black water, how you got into black water,

what was the vetting and training like? When did you guys all meet? What was the optempo and the deployment schedule when you guys got in? Then we'll walk us into the incident, the Raven 2, 3 Blackwater Masquer, and then the indictment, prison, what you guys are doing now. So let's just start with Paul. What were you doing before? Before I'd just come back from a rotation

interact 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. It just wasn't a good fit. I missed the mission, I missed being in what I felt was an honorable task for the nation and helping another nation just come out of a horrific season that they had been in. And so ironically enough went to a job fair and there was a black water rep there.

And I met him and I'd heard the name before and I had a very limited understanding of really what black water was other than being in Iraq. And so I conversed with him and he said, yeah, give me your resume and give me your DD214 and 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 Moelle. So you'd had combat tours for the military? Yeah. How many tours did you do? That year just prior to that. Okay. In the garden, yeah. Where were you when 9-11 happened? I was at Hunter Army Airfield. We were on a tarmac.

Weirdly enough, 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 a tarmac. Our lieutenant came outside and said, hey, guys, we're under attack.

And at the moment, we were all just kind of ribbon one another because we were on this red cycle, right? That we were going to deploy here, deploy there, deploy any other number of the places in the world. Anyway, he said, yeah, he said 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 rights when he called him and said it's 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 Lers 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, you know, black water ended up winning the contract, so it switched from trip canopy to black water. They took me to training and it was amazing, man. There was, you know, high level seals, high level cag dudes, high level SF dudes, you know, 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 humblad to two. 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 trying. Just for the audience, it's civilian types. Well, can you describe what SFA says? Yes, 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 brewery. Yes, so you're trying out for green breweries. it's like basically wanted you to become a green beret. Yes, sir, you're trying out for green berets. And you've done combat tour.

Yes, sir. I had two tours with 82nd. My first tour was right around the Foulouse area. And then that was, we're basically attached to special forces units 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 and then my second deployment was more of like a peace keep emission. 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 infantry man. 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 there. The Kurdish people, they love this. You know, first mission I went on, I was a team leader. And it was a very good chance we were gonna get ambush because it was basically a village that set back in this mountain side And it was almost like a cold attack the mountains So there was only one way anyone went out. So I would call a hawk And I'm like, I'm just gonna 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 airstruck or whatever. And so as I'm pushing up, I notice 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 teak eddle. And she's screaming in a, in a Kurdish saying,

Bikarbik, which is like welcome and She sets the tea kettle on the fire and she starts dragging chairs out of her house, and I'm like, where are we at man? You know, it was like not in day difference So it was a very awesome just to see the you know my first year they were they were shooting out as they were blowing us up versus Come come have some tea with us, You know, 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 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 gonna go in the Marine Corps, but not really giving a lot of thought into what job I wanted to do. I just knew, oh, 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 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 a 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, 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 M.O.S. for you. I put it in for you. It's my M.O.S. You're going to 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 a, what a 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 bad ass. 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. And I'm still in. 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 M. West 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 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 by any way possible. So 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 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 better in the embassy. The American's working abroad. So I got excited. And there was quite a process to get ready for the interview just to basically prove that you're 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, Sargents. They've been stuck in this M.O.S. 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 Card 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 Card School. they said no fucking way man you just got here you've been here like five six months You're not going to Marie 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 and 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, and I'll backtrack a little bit. 9-11 happened right after I got selected for a Burying 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, Gwanwal City. So anyways, throw my enlistment, all this combat's 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 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 like, well, do I try to get off Marine Security Guard, get out of Marine Security Guard battalion and let move to a different M.O.S. and get over there and I rack or Afghanistan, or I could get out and go in the private sector and go with Blackwater or Dine Corps at the time and pretty much guarantee to be over there within a couple months. So before you go on, how did you hear about So before you go on, how did you hear about black water and dine coral? Pears or... Well, at the time, the only thing I knew about black water was the big incident that happened

in 2004 in Fallujah, where four black water guys got ambushed and pretty much burned alive and druged 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 saying, hey, I think we should go with black water. It's a quick way to get over to Iraq and I said, hey, have you been watching the news? Four guys just got strung up on this bridge. He's like, well, it's always a risk and combat and 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 going to last. I mean a little bit I know 20 years later they're still in Afghanistan but at the time you didn't know that you just thought, hey'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 the whole combat. Right, so yeah, I emailed a black rotter recruiter and I said, hey, a black rotter recruiter and I said, hey, it was really informal. I just kind of outlined, hey, I'm a Marine, I'm a Sergeant, Marine Security Guard, I'm in Marine Security Guard battalion, I have a security clearance, I've worked alongside the State Department, and I'm interested in working for black water. 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, direct. 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 they they stopped thinking they were police Cracked seals on the vehicle. They were shot and killed by the insurgent stress 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 convoy to the green food around Falujah. 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, thwarted, 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. The Participated in it. Yeah, I'm participated in it. You know, that's well documented. That's a well documented event. I had a friend who's actually part of that, but that's, so I'm kind of bringing that up

because I want to paint the picture of, this is Hoover, Dillon with, over there, with general population and bad guys dressed as friendly. So Dustin. Friendlies so Dustin Marie 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 the fast, and then I spent another year with segmentation 8 Marines as a machine gunner. You know, you're talking about 9-11 earlier. We were out doing a side 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

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 in the position. And my captain comes out and said, Hey, Plane 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. 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 soul just doing an exercise too. They started passing that ammo. And when they did, me being a machine guner, 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, hard 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 load, and I'm like out there. Shit just got real. And so, we ended up doing a normal rotation to ball rain. 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 old platforms off the coast, 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-sultans that got shot down. Went recovered the officer's body. I think it was the tent wide if I'm not mistaken.

And the seals, though, the lake, can 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 our rack outside of her baller. So we rotated back to Koi 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 our rack was the track mission and then hitting the oil platforms. You were hitting the oil platforms? 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 to you guys. That'd be cool. Yeah. Mongo the seal I was talking about that I seen later on when it was with black water you know he was

one of the seals that was on there too. And so we rotated back, well my wife at the time, what we're girlfriend at the time, if you want to say, we're supposed to get married sometime in the spring. Well, whenever I left fast and I went to Seagull Matayon, Hayden, Marines, they said, oh, by the way, Hurd, 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 and get married later. So we decided to go get married. And then my honeymoon literally, I got married on the Marine Corps birthday of 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 wide area. We just got blown out a couple times and a few little stuff. We rotated back and I got out of the Marine Corps October November, I was in Vettin, December, I was back in Iraq, again, with black water and so for me it was just a You know left one I got a job at a liquor store just because I didn't have any income coming in and then I got called and said hey your package went through you got a school date and so

I went to school and went to the vetting portion and went to the training portion, you know, doing the movements and all that stuff. And then I was back in Iraq December 2004. I stayed there till November 2007. So how did you hear about Blackwater? Well, my buddy, Billy, actually went to a job fair that I was unable to attend. 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 court. 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 to second battalion eight Marines to Afghanistan. and so he's the one that's like how you do 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. 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 that 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 that error 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 Dine Corp? No matter.

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, whatever you want to call it, divisions, which were different contracts for different organizations. And 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 to OGA? 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 Garbottalion, 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 an active duty before going into the garden. I'd been to Bosnia and and then some things. For me it seemed like the best fit that was kind of proposed to me was was the whips contract and besides that I didn't really know anything other than that. So yeah. 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. So 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 getting it. Was there any cup of sales pitch at all, or did they? No, not really. Nothing. I was so on board with anything. I just wanted to get over there. I didn't give a shit.

I felt like I was missing out, especially having the MOSI that 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 next point, when you go past Mozul and you're up in Kurdistan, you can see just the differences between Northern Iraq and Southern Iraq. It's like, why can't this be mirrored south of here? What is the bifurcation? Yeah. I can definitely see that. can't this be mirrored south of here? What is the bifurcation? Yeah, I can definitely see that. And you know, continuing on with the mission to service to the country, I just wasn't ready to hang it up.

I was debating on a reenlisting or if Blackwater didn't work out, I wasn't going to continue just that little pitilet 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 and 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 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 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 turning like when you guys got there? How many different, you know, how many guys were in the course? And 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 his DS class 14 or 15. I went through some of the very earliest classes they had, because they were running them like every week, every two weeks. So, you had like three or four classes still going through as I was going. Later on, we had to go back and recall on 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 in Ralph, all 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 before or you get the window where I'll see you 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, like the Seeker service moves off of the formations to move principles around what 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 at that end? Was it months? Was it a year, was it? No, weeks. In my case, it was weeks. And when I initially got over to Mooyock, North Carolina, that's where the Blackwater Training was, I was just impressed by the facility

because it's thousands of acres with long-range, it's thousands of acres with long range, shoot ranges and you know CQB houses. There's a driving track. There's I mean everything you can imagine 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, you know, 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, 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 gonna be our mission overseas 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. OK, so it's like what, 30% nutrition rate?

Yeah. Yeah, the nutrition 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 had never done this kind of stuff before and he really helped me and And I learned a lot from that man. I mean, he had been over there, you know, walking the box for years and back then. So he knew exactly what he was talking about and he gave me a lot of tips that kept me alive when I was over there. And um, 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 and 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. So it was awesome. They just showed us a lot of holdoffs. I had done a lot of dialing.

You know? DTM is designated marksman. Yes, that's right. So that was the most fun I think I've ever had. We just shot a lot. And those guys had been all over the world as a sniper and they were very helpful. It was really cool 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. I would speak. They filled me with knowledge and sent me over there. A lot of things they showed me, you know, kept us alive. You know, when I was a DDM, the things they showed me, it worked, kept us alive. You know, when I was at DBM, the things they showed me, it worked, you know, in a real world situation. So, it was awesome. Yeah, I share a lot of the similar sentiments.

I was 25, 26, maybe when I went to Mooyah, and was just completely blown away by the professionalism at every turn. I mean, from the chow hall 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 had 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 in that principle, period. However, it works out that principle 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 years, almost as long as I'd been alive. And I think he sensed that I was willing to learn and I was a cultural 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? Yes, 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 Would you talking plates? You're talking armored plates. You're you're literally Putting yourself with your the sponge between you the threat and the principal. Yeah, okay Blackwater has had a bad rap for a long time and I remember when I was in the Seal of 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, it was, we're hiring Walmart security guards. That's the kind of shit I was hearing. And then when I actually showed up from my vetting, it was a state-of-the-art facility.

It was like nothing I'd ever seen before. And all my time in the SEAL teams, I had never seen anything that's state-of-the-art. And we used it a lot. We would fly in from the teams right down, because, you know, Moiox 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 was the fact that it wasn't, there weren't no fucking Walmart security guards working there. And so I kind of want to walk through, and this just once again, open forum. What was it like day one when you showed up to training at Blackwater?

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 the if I remember correctly. You get 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 court was like a joke. After, you know, what we did. And it was like a mile and a half runs, instead of three, you did some sit-ups, some 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, 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 wrong. Do it this way. It brings a whole different mental aspect to it because it's one of those things

that showed the former window or hour, whichever. And so, you know, it was, that portion of it was just a mental game as far as having to get through it. So the first thing was the physical fitness test. Right. Which was... 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 21 year old kid. So I showed up at the airport

and they were supposed to be somebody there to pick me up. This is the day before training, 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, I'm kind of reconsidering it, maybe this is a sign, maybe I shouldn't go, because this is right after the four black water guys got hung up on the bridge. So he said, listen, get a hotel, go tomorrow, do the training, everything's gonna be all right. So of course, everybody else was already at the classroom, and somebody picked me up at the hotel, brought me over there, and they had already done like a physical exam, you know, like checking you over.

Oh, they were giving physicals, was a tough thing. Yeah, well, for in my case. And the shark you. 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 just said, all right, well, drop your pants.

We gotta do a hernia check. Literally, like right in front of everybody, gotta do a hernia check. Literally like right in front of everybody, she did the hernia check and I'm like, okay, well, welcome to Blackwater, I guess. I was so embarrassed. But yeah, after I got over that, Hor will 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 hundred 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 a qual on M4, you got a 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 and back down and they did an excellent job as far as vetting you know the weapons the weapons quality, 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 fitness, shoot balls? Yes Paul? Yeah same. Get to the hotel and it was really almost like a conveyor belt for lack of a better term. I've just you know you hit the 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, it passed

failure. And then one thing I will say that later on, I know Evan and I both had to go back for a recoil because the State Department brought in two or three grenade launchers. And originally, when we went through, they were, you know, not authorized. And then they, you know, 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 WPPS2 qualification, which was just basically a 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 Connick's Box Town the last time I went there and so you know black water 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 toward you just drive.

They actually had people bump you with cars and you learned how to ram through, push through, learn how to pit people. But 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, is they had simulated IEDs along the side of the road. So you'd be driving and here it would be projected up, but here an explosion would happen.

And then you went into your medical stuff behind it. And so it was good stuff. So when you guys showed up, it was physical fitness, weapons, how many weapons and exactly what weapons systems were just pass fail. There was no instruction, correct? It was no instruction. Here's the weapons system, here's the qualification. You got one shot.

It was the clock. Fuck it up, you're out. Clock nine millimeter, it was the M4. It was the Saul 249. It was the 240, I don't know, Bravo I think, we had golfs in the core, 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, 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 that 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 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, 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, prepare to get the hell out of here. Yeah, even with the PT test. There were some guys that that didn't pass the PT test. I was like, wait a minute. The medical training was good too. didn't pass the PT test. I was like, what are these? 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 you could, they're simulating that you're driving down a road and I rack 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 you're pretending they're on you know whatever mission in Iraq moving down, 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 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 the 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 they so it was a process how many days did it take to get through the weapons call on a PT test? I don't recall. Yeah, 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 way, you would lose somebody. If somebody was good at PT, maybe 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 altogether was vetting slash training? I think the certificate says 164 hours so I don't know how many days it was broke down to. I want to say it was 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 valuations. Yes.

It's not even really, it doesn't even sound like it's really training. It's more, they want to see how you react in certain scenarios and their value. They're constantly evaluating. And then you had the peer evaluation too. Yeah, that was a name of relations. Yeah. Then you had the peer evaluation too. So you guys have peer evaluation? If you're or slide and 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 I'd send them home. And then the training blocks were CQB which is close quarters battle let's just talk about that specific 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 each unit has their own type of CQB they do. Whether you got a man high, man low,

around the corner, different things. And 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, and if you couldn't keep up or perform, it was 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, you know, the lower part of their leg and for people that don't know, when you flag somebody's basically you're pointing your weapon at something

that you don't intend to shoot. So that's if it's just for a split second. Yeah. Just want to reiterate that. So if I'm holding the 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, safety violations, that was a serious thing. Yeah, at a Dustin's point, not to step on your neck, 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 guests from Marsauk, you had guests 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 operate 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 Marsauk guys, as the Green Bray, as the Cag guys, you know, the Rangers, and then, you know, and then when you throw soft and unconventional and conventional together, then it gets even trickier. So that's no easy task at all because everybody has a different way of doing that. And so, 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 taking hostage, you would have to go in and extract that principal 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 they if the team can't make it out to the vehicles what they're gonna do Is they're gonna go find a hard point and they're gonna hold that hard point and basically put shooters 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 in 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 teams Alamoed 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 it up and get them and then clear back down on the way back out. So I mean It was real life. You know it wasn't just how you're gonna do this to check this box. It's hey You know whenever you get to your team you're going to do this to check this box. It's how, 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 is TST stand for? Tactical support team. Okay. It's quick react force. All it is is QRF and most of our vehicles had

the 2,240s, one in the front, one in the back, except for one that just had a teacup on the top, which was 1,240. How long was the CQB portion and how how complex did it get where they thrown in live role players on that as well with hostage scenarios? It was. 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 a tax on principle. 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 one 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 though. It's they've got the upper hand for sure the instructors know that Area like the back of their hands. So it was awesome. It was great training. How about the driving? Awesome. For sure. Yeah, that was probably the funnest part. Yeah, get you to do a pit maneuver on a BMW is something like you don't get to do every day. Yeah, 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 opened your eyes to what you're gonna 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 toward you get an L shape 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 ago.

Yeah, three or four days. 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're done. Medical?

Yeah, you had to do 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 then like, okay, you're good, but they want to make sure that you're sound of mine

before you continue. What I was what I was getting at that's good to know but what I was getting at is the medical training the T-Triple C. Do they how in depth do 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 up on 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 cash kind of thing. So they had really awesome props like they had

arms that were amputated that would pump out liquid and stuff. So we hadn't seen anything like it in the military. So 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're 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 used the stuff that didn't make sense, right? And so I think it was just, by the time I got there, I was the last one in, by the time I got there, it had evolved into something that was just amazing.

Everybody talked about how well the training was. I've never heard anybody say that it wasn't good training. 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 that they were taking out Was there any more training that did they get be a final exercise or that was the attack sound principle?

Yeah, I'm about the scenario and like Paul said Yeah, I heard that. I'm about the scenario. And like Paul said, once you finish the vetting and your 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, the vehicle maneuvering, you go to the rifle range, a lot more than I wouldn't 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? I think that was one of the portions that they've really went in detail with because that like I said, there's nothing, there's not really many units in the 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 what you guys definitely. Yeah, I mean, that's what I was saying earlier is we didn't do any of this stuff in the Marine Corps. We never learned how to walk formation, how to, you know, stand on the doors and wait till everybody's set. And when you're running a three-car motorcade, you gotta think you've got shooters that are in the front or in the backseat of each vehicle.

You've got shooters that are in the backseat of the other vehicle. And everybody's gotta 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 the machine gun to moving a principle around that was the only portion that really wasn't bedding 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, cracking the door, opening the door, whatever terminology. And then they open the principle with 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 on the back, and at least one guy on each side of them sometimes two guys on each side and Everybody in there's got a sector a job to do the AIC the person is the agent in charge what AIC means He's gonna be right behind the principal and so he's within arm reach to where if something happens his job is the reach up and grab him by the collar of the shirt. And then just taking 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 principle, 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 onsite 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 the mess up you're out. In the end, yeah it was. It was. But during the training itself, it was training.

I remember 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 of people home during that portion. They're like, look, we've told you this many times, if you don't form this movement the way you're supposed to, you're out. And a couple guys just, they couldn't grasp it for 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're gonna 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, you are the one that is shot, not the principal. So you're

stepping in front of any danger, you're taking that round, you're, you're killing whoever's trying to kill your principal. It's all about getting him back safe, you know, 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. So that's what we did. This is all throughout the entire vetting, slash training. They're 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 keep up out. So you guys all got through it. And what happened then? Did you give you a contract? I know for me, I got through my graduated vetting course. 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 when we first got there, Donacore and Blackwater shared the contract 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 our 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 And they were dropping J-Dams, they were, you know, IEDs, you could see the tracers around skipping.

And I mean, it was wild. Just back in those days, I mean, it was full on. They were going hard out there. 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 ask for. So I remember when I got over there, they put me, they assigned me to a team and I met with a 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 advanced 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 into 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 grave site 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 watched the scientists take up the dirt with a tractor first and then each step of the process,

they got smaller, smaller tools until they're like using brushes and uncovering all these skeletons. So you would see what I soon would be a woman with a small baby skeleton with bullet hole in the skull. It was a shocking moment for me, but it kind of validated why I was over there. And it made the mission even more important because it was this historic thing. You know, we took Saddam on a 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 100. 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 gonna put you in a different place or move you somewhere else. I don't think these people knew they were gonna to get marched out in the middle of the desert and 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 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 Hillin' the Jeff is I went out with a team of, I guess it was the same scientists or different ones that were looking for masquerades 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 Whips 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 around to the head and they flew him back to the cash 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 in 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, 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 Vineyard 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. 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? 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, you know? Like we would have died. There was like 19 or 20 of us. And the Apache helicopter, 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 heronbone so that more effective filter 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 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, in 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 shooting at the fifth story. And then I can just picture in my mind, dudes got me in his crosshairs like I'm about to get shot, right? And then all of a sudden, a patchy just flies overhead and it puts a hellfire missile in got me in his crosshairs like I'm about to get shot right. And then all 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. I don't know who that Apache pilot was but I'm thankful man because he definitely saved us that day. And so we we fought for about three and a half hours and we finally recovered our brothers' remains and I found out that it was a 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 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 uh yeah it was the worst day of my life man for sure was this the gentleman you were telling me who's twin brother was also flying? yes so he landed in the middle of this gun battle and just walked over as we were loading our brothers' 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 burden and he gets out. He wanted to see that it was his brother and then as soon as he's seen, it was his brother he got back up and then they started laying down suppressant 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's worse than I'm off for sure. So, um, yes, so, we graduated. They called us East Fire and said, uh, if you're still standing, uh, you made it, um,

you're deploying. And, uh, so it was probably a month after that I guess I deployed. And I show up to Bagdad and he said that they needed bodies in Krakook, which is in Northern or 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 was some some Kiwi New Zealand security forces there, but for the most part in that region it was it was pretty quiet. In other words, when there were town we would go to Soleimania, we would take off our kit because it was such a welcoming

environment. They really wanted us there and 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 bagged at. And once Dinecourt took over that contract, we were all moved down the Baghdad and set up as an advanced team for Ambassador Clilizad. We operated from that point as an APD Green, Ambassador Protection Detail Green. We were the advanced element for him. at that time, I was not part of Raven 2-3, but January 23rd to Nick's point is, that's one of the bracelets that we all wear because it was a horrible day. Shane Stanfield, which was the first gunner he talked about was the first Heel O'Gunner that was met with around and then all of us were listening to the radio while they were

out. We were in suburban, we weren't in fighting platform, so we were really kind of handicapped. But every one of us staged, and we're ready to move it at any given moment. And there was almost just a line of suburban 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 moments 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 in part of my language, but they're one of them 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 the infamy for my lifetime. How many, when you guys got into

country and you were all in bagged out at the man camp, how many, how many state department contractors live there? I think it was a 600 capacity man camp. 600 state department contractors. Now, you got to think there's

people rotating in and out. Basically, Monday through Friday, they're running flyouts, 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, the US to Jordan, from Jordan you would fly into Baghdad. From Baghdad, you'd be picked up by another Blackwater element that was called the teamhouse. 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 had no idea. But you... I know we had 2016 out of Baghdad, if I'm not mistaken, there was 2016. 2016, how many people on a team? What, 19, 20? Cause 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 outline sites like Hilla up there where he was at and then you had some just different locations. And so, there was a bunch of, they called 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, we guys flying into biop. Yes, yeah, take him around Irish Which was the most dangerous road?

What it's long as I know that to be honest with you though, yeah, we got hit on there, but it's when we ran down high for street that you're almost guaranteed to get hit. Everybody talks about by being a bad place, but I'll tell you right now that every time that we made a run down high for street, it's, I was there for the final number two, three when they stood up the team. I was already doing I was there for the final number two, three 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 or something one day by IPs, our 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 Catalyst Runs down that and yeah, we'd get hit at once while Bob, but it wasn't like some of the other roads. But really? 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 the 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 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 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 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, like, 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 a mountain, bring it back and that's what it is. And you're 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 of months. And when I came back, they were going to assign me to the ambassador detail, the ambassador's

detail. So I wasn't real keen on that. I didn't really want to go to the ambassador's details. So 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 so much, the interlayer of security. So you're never really on the front lines, so to speak. So I kind of put up a little bit of a fight to 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 on 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? What? 20 man team, 19 man team.

I'll say this, there's 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 reach out to us and everything else, I'm like, who is this? Because when it's been so long and two over there, it was just so many of us that were there. It's like, oh, I know that dude buys 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 tight-knit group. You know every dude on there because you're going in and out of

the red zone and Baghdad and so like like I said whenever We started up to three. I was one of the founding members of it and 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 ERV or follow, or no, you were in the follow with me. Okay. So Paul was in the follow with me.

The knit 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 meeting people I don't know if this still holds true today, but I remember here in Prince say that Blackwater is the only I remember here in Prince say that Blackwater is the only private military contracting company that never lost a principal. Is that, do you guys know that's still true to this? I believe that is true.

It's true. And the figures, I'm not exactly sure 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. and we never lost a principle, not even a principle 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 and bloody year of the entire war. They said that in 2007 there was an average of 180 engagements from insurgents a day,

and 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's 43 contractors and whatever, a lot of it was on the WPPS contract because we was running Baghdad every day. And you know know where the other ones are at I'm not real sure but you know it's 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 yeah in this so it was the most effective protection unit in the entire world and that was with some standards that were put down from the state 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 and high profile convoys and black suburban and big, 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 principle. That's incredible. 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 opt-empo of what you guys were face and want you all met. 1.5 km de Rue de la Cicada Alright guys, we're back from the break. You guys have just all met. You're a part of Raven 2, 3 now. And so I want to kind of go over, like I said earlier, the opt-empo of kind of what your

day-to-day life was and 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 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 had to, you had to engage a threat directly. Be it in the engine of the vehicle or the driver or 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 it was followed to a tee. I think we probably threw more water bottles than anything.

And a lot of times, it wasn't even necessarily a thread. It was somebody just not paying attention. Or it was someone in a car that was pulling out in a 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? Yeah. So that was the first

thing they would see. Second thing would be vocal. Yeah, and third thing would be water bottles. 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 if the thread keeps coming you can raise your weapon and then if it continues to come you can put around 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 TOROLO because that's probably the most common vehicle, 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 they 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

or I'm gonna be neutralized but if it is a car bomb you guys have to protect your boys and as I'm going to be neutralized. But if it is a car bomb, you guys have to protect your boys. And as I'm talking, there's 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 convoy, 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 suburban, 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-bed 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 web cams 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 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. And so obviously the farther you are, the weaker the blast wave gets, and that happens 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 user 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. say that for the audience who hasn't experienced 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 Department said 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 US Department of State. It was not the military. it wasn't black water, it was US 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 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 loudly. Another thing in regards to the rules of engagement, 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 black water. 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 wouldn't think about that. If somebody asked you who do you work for because you did something messed up you're gonna tell him hey man I worked work for triple canopy. You're gonna be like oh no. I work for black water That's a good take it 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 black water during that time everybody thought which trigger Trigger happy, but you got think, how much was actually us versus how much was other companies that were doing things

that instead of saying, hey, I'm down a core, 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 Prince had once in an interview that our percentage of our ratio between actually engaging a target and disengaging and getting out of the area was a single digit.

It's less than one half of 1%. Yeah, I mean the percentage is just real. 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 are 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 fire fights 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. Now, the way that worked is there was three TST teams. You had two, two, two, three, and two, six.

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're off. We're all in the gym, we're all doing this and that, we got to 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 got five teams running in this part of Baghdad. You 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 in like 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 done fight happening and people need support, you're not there to do surveillance surveillance reconnaissance. The, the, the, what I want to say, traditional PSD work. You're there for when shit 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 that is like say the venue was a high threat venue and so the PSD team was worried, you know, a raffles and departures is usually when they would get hit, you know, when they were 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 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 forced them. So the insurgents would be like, oh, these guys got back up. 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, they expected to be extremely bad. That's right. Okay So kind of moving on to you know day-to-day operations

Which we kind of you know covered in a nutshell, but I want to kind of give like what the deployments were like and 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 PSD 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 progress as late worse in Iraq because of different situations on the ground, I think we were getting an engagement

a few times a week, especially towards the summer of 2007, leading up to the sensitive that happened, we were going out multiple, multiple times a week. On top of that, with the rocket attacks, the mortar attacks, we were talking downstairs earlier about the TCNs who worked in the kitchen in the chow.

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 and in the back of the bear cat. We were taking them to the cache. And so it was, I don't know, it was almost layer upon layer and it was Zucka. 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 any more 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 they were getting sharp. Back in the old days, you'd hear a 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 off, 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 It wasn't anymore. Oh, that's nice one just went. It was time to hit bunkers and get behind sandbags because I mean, they were raining on his 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, uh, forgive me, I don't recall the name, Cretus, something. Cretusia rocket. Cretusia 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 toward we could take him to the cache and the next ball he started coming in. Instead of the medics leaving, they hunkered down over the top of this guy and we were still receiving rockets and mortars.

When that guy got hit, somebody kicked in his door and They thought he's dead because he had shit coming out of the eye Well, 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're getting hit hard from all angles. I'm talking just getting the shit kicked out of us. I remember when I was there in O5,

I picked in pretty routine and it was every night. And then bullets were coming through the con-ex box, you know, just be asleep and I'm like, especially when I saw her getting that. 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. You 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 2-3 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 some of the engagements that you guys got in leading up to 16th September. So you wanna 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 VINU at Central Rail and that one of the DDMs has been shot. And so as we were driving up, we noticed the Iraqi Army is engaged in 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. Black water 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 and to his hip. So he actually lived though and they got him to the cache. And again, you know, the the air assets they, one of 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 probably 25 minute engagement there and it was taken 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 on the gun. And I remember it was taken 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 back the barricade, you know. The barricade is almost like a brink 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 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 Iraq, the Army, and gauging 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 we 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 it was 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 we had a, what I was talking about when the team halimos up, they had a guy jump across the fence and pop a few rounds or something and 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 the 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 AT4s and a 50-cal. And then Apache's 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 a, it's not just the, 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. Let's get some ammo! No more! Get the gun! I'll be speaking to you. Get the right point! Take the head out! Get anybody's sticking the head out!

What are you doing? Alright. Go! Get the gun out! Got it! Got it! No! Get the gun out! I'm going to get you. I'm going to get you. I'm going to get you.

I'm going to get you. I'm going to get you. I'm going to get you. I'm going to get you. I'm going to get you. I'm going to get you. I'm going to get you. I'm going to get you.

I'm going to get you. I'm going to get you. I'm going to get you. to Взбрак! I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going to be in the fire, I'm going they see in the movies of a 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 fired before you can actually hit him. It's hard to hit the end of a barrel just 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 were 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 leave, we can disengage. Were you guys able to communicate with the Apache's or was that military community? We didn't have cons with them.

What the way that we 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 could communicate, but we had no direct columns with military.

I will say that any time we got into a major engagement though, the Apache's were there within minutes. Like those guys were spot on. Whoever, like I said, I don't know who those Apache pilots were, but they saved our lives more times than I can count. Like I would be dead until it wasn't for those guys. So thank you. If you see this.

We appreciate you, Joe. Save the rarer. On you see this, we appreciate you. Save the rest. On that specific firefight, me and Dustin kind of had a close call. We were telling you about earlier. As we were rolling out, we both kind of experienced something weird at the same time. And we didn't really realize that at the moment. But we were 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 out. And my initial thought just popped in my head. I thought he got shot. I thought it was a blood because it was warm liquid on the back of my neck. So I just went like this.

And it was clear. And I went about my business. And 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 in the follow vehicle and he said oh it was it was me and he said hey you guys almost got shot so Around or multiple rounds must have came through This case of waters that we had on the top of the trucks and they exploded on a back of it each of our necks So you're talking not that far behind me a water box disintegrated. 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 piece them out of us, motorcade together. You know, like, you rarely had the same truck. I get it last for a while and it would take damage. And then by the time you started work the next day, they would have your replacement. Like they were just, we had some great mechanics.

I've worked. I've never seen them not working. Like they were always in there fixing something. And I did it in the light shed on the elevator. I think we're awesome. I think we lost what four vehicles. I think the EFPs and IEDs and stuff like that told is I know two that just got mangled. And now I mean they get shot but it wouldn't really do nothing to them, but the EFP's would, wouldn't mind going.

Were you guys ever hit with the IEDs or EFP's or car bombs? I was on Hava, I don't know if it was a grenade or IED. I'm pretty sure it was a grenade. I know we got hit in with one, but I don't think two, three 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 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 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. Take a puff or what? But he lost his arm behind it. And then another one with an EFP. Yeah. Another FP 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 dam barrel of the 240 was bent like this because I Don't know if that vehicle taunting and 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 a blast like that, but our sister teams did. They got smarter as time went on with those EFPs as well. Because they started using one of my temperature controlled deton, to trigger the EFP. So that when,

instead of like a remote dead, like a garage door opener or a cell phone or whatever the hell they were using that day, his vehicles will come by. They would pick up the temperature of the engine and that would set 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 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, it's time went on.

And so I just want to, you know, put that out there. That reminded me of what happened that day, because we got, you know, AARs and debriefed on any incident that had to do with any, 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 stock traffic and waived 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 them set it up. The cops were probably the ones that actually set it up, but they blew our guys up.

It 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 therm out the vehicle all within a matter of seconds, because seconds count at that point. So 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

sanitize the vehicle. All we did was hook up to the vehicle and drag it out. I mean, they were squared away. Yeah, they would use ID's to initiate the ambushes and they would hide them and trash bags, cars, concrete, T walls, curbs, whatever they could, whatever would just blend in. And then it got, it got so ridiculous. You'd see a trash bag on the side of the road it was, I said it out to the road. It was a day that's too triggers.

Yes, to have a problem with that. I see a trash on the side of the road. That animals, I mean, just anything that they could put on me. Bodies. Yeah. Yeah. Everything. So, I mean, you know, it's, I think the next one was 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. 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, Omanaut City Hall. And 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 was discussed an earlier is when they asked 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. And maybe in the very tail end gun 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 a case 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 the shoot a burst into where those guys were in that particular one I'd have been hitting all kinds of traffic and everything else around and that's where Nick came into play is

I said over the radio. I'm like, hey man. I got a problem back here Can you take care of it and he he took care of the issue. And so I'll let somebody else go into the rest of the house. 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. There's been

to machine gun school and done everything like that. I fully understand what that weapon does. And so 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, whatever 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 an optic. 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 240 for me is a small weapon. I'm used to 50 cows and mark not teens. 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. It was, I meant that it's not a problem. 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. saying it's, I understand what that thing's capable of. Yeah. Yeah, it's as best as I remember, the principal was hard pointed and we pulled up and if memory served me well, it was almost immediate.

It wasn't a pause. It was as soon as the driver put the vehicles in park or maybe they may even put it in park yet We were just we just kind of settled into our 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. We I mean, you're not gonna stand up against that and had that opened up on us, we, I mean, you're not going to stand up against that. A dish could just be the Russian version of the 50 kill. 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 a 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 out 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, I 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. Yeah but that one didn't last too long.

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 in our motorcade. That's what we would do a lot of times. We would, once the PSD team had the principal loaded, we would just put him in our package. So we have two vehicles in front. We've 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 ambushed 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. 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 got out of the suburban to try to clear traffic and, you know, fortunately we got out of there, but. Yeah. What was your guys' relationship with the principals with the State Department? We didn't know them.

We didn't know them. We didn't have a clue who it was, who they were, what they were doing or anything else. Never worked with the same one. Now sometimes. When we was on PSD, yes, but on the tactical teams. No, no, so, you can. No clue who they were or anything.

It didn't matter. 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 were on a, you know, that's my only experience with the principal because I was on the, I was on two, three 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 advanced team for Ambassador Khalil Azadi, he seemed to really have a lot of respect for us because he... I'm not going to speak for the man, but he, I think, he really understood what it was in that environment, because he had 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 that or by any means any of that,

but just given my very limited interaction with him, he really seemed to respect us and to care about us. There wasn't a disconnect there at all. That's good. What were you guys getting fed and tell it all? Did you get any intel, everything's Bolo lists, anything? Every morning. Every morning.

Bolo lists for the audiences be on the lookout for blank, whatever. Why Kia Opel always was on the bus. Why Kia? I mean, like you said earlier, the Toyota, it was Kia's Toyota motorcycle. Motorcycles. Taxis. Taxis. Long ago, Trunks.

Yeah, ambulance. They always stole ambulances and blew those up too. Oh, that was the first thing we saw that one day. That was our last day. I remember seeing that thing. They get over at, there we go. Every, every morning you guys were getting an intel dump and who was giving that to? Was it me? Yeah. Are intel analysts? Was she, she was black water? You know, where she was getting the intel from? Was it military? I don't see. I don't see. I don't see. I don't see. power. I assume all those all those assets had a like

he said earlier they had a talk and they would all share it we didn't we didn't know we never went to the talk but the way the way that we were we were informed is 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've got to go down the same streets normally around the same time all the time. So you're just a huge rolling target. One of the biggest needs too for like coordinating intelligences. 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 fires and never friendly. How well did you guys know the city? They were great from backwards. Core he knew it like the back of his hands. Yeah very well. Yeah, a hard tactical commander. He was, he had a 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 them around, you might get lost. But yeah, we knew this. We dropped 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, the drive into 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 and fly him back out. Is there anything specific you guys want to cover before we move in to September 16th? There was also the the dark 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 Hillar out. It was halfway between Hillar and Baghdad.

So they were flying, they were taking guys further 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's 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 crashed 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 greensome, 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. Say, it was amazing that,

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 was doing. Well, he was my neighbor, actually. I knew the man and he was a Vietnam error pilot. We had like Vietnam error aircraft. We had hewies and we had little birds.

And the hewie, 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 this crew always lives like everybody like he knew how to crash land. Like 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 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 gonna 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 mineswikened 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 patchies 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 it was Lieutenant and a sergeant as who I talked to and another guy on our team talked. 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 patchy's gained elevation again. They started pulling their weapons back out and they started engaging us and thenfought broke out and then somewhere in the middle of that the mechanic showed up and then they started helping us engage and then the patches they I guess they

were asking for permission to use Hellfars. And we eventually got the Apache logs later, and they laid down a lot of ordinance, like they blew up a couple of 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 mechanics, took the sense of this stuff off the bird, and we loaded back up. Hopefully 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. 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 hurt, 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 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 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 you know, Baghdad, but like that, Baghdad was like the Wild West of...

What was it about a month prior to that the carbon went off underneath the square and blew up 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. And it was sold as if it were a deposit circle in Washington, DC. It was rivers of blood. When we went out there, it was like, you know how you hear that term, 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 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 he actually drove his car underneath. There was like a tunnel that went underneath it. And the people were milling about that circle

and he detonated it and it just blew people to pieces man. And we had drove through there and it was insane. Still being repaired that day. Yeah. And all those months later, September, like they were still repairing it. The tunnel wasn't open yet, I don't believe. Bill Coffield 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, 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. The patch is on station. And when patches come in, it's a game changer. You don't want to jack with a fly and 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 say it one more quick break when we come back we'll get into the September 16th. 1,5kg Alright guys, so September 16th, 2007, what's known as the Blackwater Masker, Raven 23 incident. I want to get each and every one of your 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 got hit by a B-Bid. As we rolled out, we

rolled through Checkpoint-12. We ended up in Neser 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, or usually they were at specific locations, like guard posts and stuff,

but there was a heavy presence. 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 VBIT had actually exploded outside their venue. So what they were going to do, they were gonna load up the principal and they were gonna travel through Nistra Square. And so we were just gonna facilitate a fast route for them to get back into the greens zone.

Then we were gonna put them in our package and drive into the greens zone, right? So we had been there for maybe 15 seconds, maybe 30 seconds at the most, and we started taking income and 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 fire fire broke out, 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 is 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 impacts on the side of our vehicle. And so I was like, man, we're hit. I just knew we were gonna die.

And so I heard the machine gunners engaging and eventually the firefights ceased. And it was probably maybe two or three minutes of backing forth between us and the enemy. And then the shift lead calls for a towout, 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 strapped 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 ravened for the initial attack it 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 the eastward square back to the green zone.

And so that was two separate fire fights? 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 greens, and they were taking income in 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 VBID and have the PSD team drive through Newstra Square because that was the most direct route back to the green zone. There was a huge water truck and a bus, like a big city bus, and they were gonna just block off that intersection.

So the PSD team would be trapped in there and then they were gonna kidnap the principal. That's how I feel about it, but they didn't expect guys with machine guns, up armored vehicles, the roll end of 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.

That was it. Do you have any idea how many people are engaging you? I saw, personally, I saw two people engaging me. I saw two Iraqi cops engaging. 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 it was really something that was not normal and everybody knew that that something was wrong and so as we pulled in to the square it was again as we got settled it seemed to be almost immediate as far as income and fire. And at the same time, there was the white vehicle that was pulling out of a stop traffic. And everybody, including Iraqi witnesses, said that it was what they thought was an apparent and so on in the thought process of preserving the team and engaging a legitimate threat that thought for me was to stop that V-bit. 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, which was disengaged and not able to start anymore, I heard Corey Wayne Scott say over the radio, command turret gunner take up six because it 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 toe out and that's when I witnessed other threats trying to engage when I thought it was dusted. And so we got the toe 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 dust and say, I don't have a clear threat. I don't have a clear target. And he didn't pop smoke. And we would move back.

And we're driving down the right side of the road, butting hood back going towards the IZ. There were people up on rooftops of apartment buildings that were watching us clearly. 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, piled off my kit and my flight suit to check for holes. But I was good. And the white was the the Kia. And the white Kia, were you being engaged

by threats when the white kill was headed your way? As I recall, it was called the same time. It all happened at the same time. It was definitely, it appeared to be a coordinated attack. And that same car, if I remember right, was on the boat all this that morning. That same car was on the beer. There was a beer on the lookoutout for the white kev for a possible. A baby. Yeah.

Would all you say that? Yes. Were there any other ass nuts in there? Did you guys have air? Did you have drones? Were as milled there? So there was a drone. I think Nick can speak a little better to 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, air didn't engage at all. Air, the helicopters. The gun fight it pretty much dissipated by then. And the drone was already on station from the Vibid that had gone off for just a couple

minutes earlier. Correct. As I was already up in the air by the time you guys even rolled out at checkpoint 12. Yes. So I was the driver of the command vehicle, the third vehicle of the convoy. So we rolled out rolled into Nesor 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 in 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 key 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 deterg 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 it a couple of times and I looked over the team leader to my right and I said, hey, Hoss, 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 in a behind a force field Yes, it does protect about

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. So 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. It was a life or death moment. The team leader kind of snapped me out of my driver mode because the vehicle was obviously disabled from incoming rounds. He told me to open the door so he could engage. 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 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 gonna start and it was just... No, no way. Yeah, it was a waste of time. So he told me they'll open the door again and that's when we both engaged. I saw an IP that was kind of behind a fighting position. There was like some sandbags and he was actively shooting at the convoy. So I shot in his direction, neutralized the threat, and shot 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 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. 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 Comma Boy, backs up the fall of vehicle, covers, provides cover for the side of the threat.

They hook up the tow strap and then they tell you out. So on the way back, I do remember guys calling on the radio that were 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 just we got pulled back to the green zone, fighting the vehicle the whole time. And that was it.

It was a relatively minor engagement and the big scheme of things. It's serious anytime you discharge your weapon, but the amount of fire fights that we had been in and the weeks leading up to that. In comparison, it was relatively minor engagement in my opinion. Well, 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 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 neutralize 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 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 uh 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. There was, 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, you know, they said it was acting irrational or it, 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. You know, I'm not just gonnaed 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. You know, I'm not just gonna throw it. So as we're 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 tow out 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 in my kevlar. And so I had a big ol' pop knot on my chin and it landed in the bend 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 Nomak suits like 12, 15, hundred 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 gonna open up I had 400 rounds linked together and if I wanted to be malicious I wouldn't have had a one linked up. I had all kinds of ammo in the truck too. So I had plenty ammo if I wanted to be malicious and 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 remember 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 feel 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 D'You Know? Was everybody? No. It would have been... I think there was like seven. Seven us about it. Seven out of the nut, then 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 lead vehicle and the follow vehicle would be what, it was a good distance.

So what the people in the the lead in the second vehicle or 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 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 port hole 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 that 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%. The Kia did get pretty close as well.

As far as the IP's 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. There wasn't you guys. There's actually two other shooters besides us that engage the Kia. And one was dropped for lack of evidence because nobody saw him

shot. He's the one that said in his warm 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's also in a there was a Army engagement also happening at the exact same time plus your engagement. So that's three fire fights within five mile radius correct and showed up there was already a drone on station who was filming footage and he had two black water little birds on station

as well out there. So you get back, does you guys think anything of it? 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 it going. No. When we got back, the main concern was getting ready in case we had to go back out. Yeah, 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, because there was still other teams out there on the venue. And remember this, there was a 180, there was an average of 180 engagements a day in the year At what point did you guys get indicted? Well, 2009. 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 and AAR. And when you do the whoever shot supposed to turn the statement into the detail leaders, and then the detail leaders walk that to the embassy. And as soon as we got back in, we was eating eating chow and they started looping a video from the tower over and over on CNN. A video of your guys as firefight. A video was already... A video of CNN. After.

After. After. 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-load our vehicles to make sure that we're ready to go back out. I got my burns treated. We went back in, we were eating lunch in case we had the roll again, and my whole team is sitting at a table. And there's the big old school TV, this back there in the back, big square one. And it's on CNN. What 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 of 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 a few minutes after the after the firefight itself and so the thing that struck me out 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 guaranteed statements. It says, I declare underneath the penalty of pargery that this can't be used against me, as long as I tell the truth, and whatever the statement is. I don't remember the exact heading. I'm sure one of those can be found 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 US, 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 that investigation is going to happen. And so he gives a statement. Well,

happened. 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 internal man in person. And then I know that we went back like three other times. And there was people that said that they didn't shoot and that caused a lot of friction because there was a good age 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 putting, pointing a 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 do these rounds come from? It's like I don't know dude. I don't want to tell you and so After we all did our statements and we kept going back and forth in between the embassy and the man camp and entering 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, 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 him down to this. 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

could you call them the shooters, they called everybody over there. And the way they were interviewing everybody, there was definitely something a little different about that, 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 and investigate.

I'm like, you know what, 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 black water. 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 gotta come back. They're gonna 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 say quick break and then we'll get into what happened in court. Alright guys, so now it's 2009, two years past the actual incident, Nazar Square, and you're just now getting indicted, correct? A 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 injured. 21 if I'm not mistaken. Something good. 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. It a, it a, it a circle,

a major traffic circle, the middle of Baghdad, but they didn't show up for three weeks after the incident. And, 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 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. And 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 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. That was the first time where I caught word of that because in my mind, no one did

anything wrong out there. And I was gonna fight and prove that I was innocent. And I sure as hell wasn't gonna 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 and combat and People getting medals of honor for jumping on grenades and in his case He's actually the 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 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 they 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 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 acting. You know, it's all right.

We got a mission to do. You need to be 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 Dustin said, subpar. But my main problem is what he did when he came back to the States. So I just wanna 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 say that he flipped and this this investigation and the

courts, there's so much shit 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 a belief, five different FBI thrillers. That's right. Initially, he said that he was taking enemy fire. He stuck with that part of the story until, I think, like, 2014. He just 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 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 taking at that exact location that he had maintained that he was receiving enemy fire from. Pictures of Wakana, brass. AK-47 showcasing were scattered at the exact location that he said he was taking fire from. And 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 account. Both counts were like 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 place that I said I took fire from. It's not just him saying that he took far 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 I'll be shot. I've never read a statement.

But I can tell you for sure where the AK shells were, is where I took far from. 100%. And there are photos of The shells at the exact location where you guys said that you took fire from yes And then he reversed a statement we've made a plea deal with the government Saying that oh, 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 infiltrated by Iranian influence Soleimani so

You guys got to hold me out here with 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 autopsy is 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 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 the AK-47 than our weapon systems. So they lost those rounds. They never brought them back to the States. They 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 approve and 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? Yes, 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 in, 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 should delete that. That's right. They've got pictures of us.

There's still photos of us setting 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 a 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 of the vehicle that had to be towed out. So you can see all the radiator fluid, the big wet spot on the ground.

So there was a 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, that's good point. U.S. Army Captain took photos of the documented 762 shell casings. He reported to the FBI that Iraqis were cleaning the shell casings

from the exact spot they took the fire from. That's, 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, 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. 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 set up fire that. This shows that somebody was shooting at us.

And then the next pictures that they took, those showcases are gone. It's AK brass. And our judge said, well, it's old brass. How can the judge determine if it's old Chinese Russian, whatever it is, ammo that's been stored in the 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 got 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 was 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 security. 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 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 556 rounds or shell casings on the ground. Oh, you know Let's let's show all this and on this video and send it to CNN or oh there's magazines over here there's a 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 I got thrown out? It was about a year, so we got and dieted, 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 gonna push this trial, and we're gonna make you fucking prove that we're guilty and if not you got to leave us to fucking alone because we at this point a couple years has passed or a year and a half we were already tired of dealing

with this you know we like we said in the very very beginning the firefight was not a major engagement and as it ballooned from there and got media attention and just got, you know, exaggerated, we were just exhausted from this whole process and we just wanted to resolve. 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 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.

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 in my country. Let's go to trial and get this resolved.

So it was about a year after the indictment that we were filing, doing the final preparations for trial 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 and we all went home. The hearing for that, all the misconduct that the prosecution was doing, that took a couple weeks. But our lawyers 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 I got a call from my lawyer. And 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 get an email. If I was overseas because I lived in Columbia 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, and I thought I was totally cleared and here we are in 2021 we just barely resolve this. I Don't really understand why they hammered you guys, you know at the beginning I mean, I kind of I know now 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 IraqiBodyCount.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 I want to say it was around 10 people total that was reported to the US Embassy before everybody got a hold of it. It 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, uh, Kareem. Faris. Yeah. How did he idea 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 and Iraq. So, immediately after, he was the guy that was in charge of gathering evidence, gathering up supposed witnesses, organizing statements, and 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 and that time frame and pick them up off the street So he had none of that all he had was 556 and he had 203 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're all very similar. And one of the things that he did to speed up his investigation was he basically made 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. And in my mind, that was basically promoting people to go down there and make a claim to get possible payment from the US Embassy or some other benefit from the United States as far as asylum or what is that in the commercials that they will be paid? I'm not sure it was in there, but I think it was implied. And there was one particular witness that said 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. Mm-hmm. Put down on paper what I tell you and That same police chief said hey if black order of pay is 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 or 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. And 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 US government finding 762 by 39 shells The US attorney assistant US attorney hid those photos that you were talking about assistant US attorney hid those photos that you were talking about for seven years of the shell casings at the I think believe 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 assistant US attorney side was that the first indictment? Yes, the No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, Yes. The, no, no. No, that was the second indictment.

But the judge said that it was a harmless error. And that's how he rolled 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 gunman 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 know it was very exciting. It's footage of that. Yep. Yep, this says that there was an actual video from pilot. But then there was 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 it 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 the Washington, DC to testify in front of a grand jury, and he could

do it, stay in the nice hotel and take a picture in front of the White House. 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. It was 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 move 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 pardon 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 case, the first time you guys got indicted, the case was dismissed for all for you. Ridgeway flipped, he said, you guys weren't taking incoming fire, they didn't find enough evidence

to convict you, 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 reundited for the second time? How much time it passed? It took about two years to reundit us. So you guys were, you thought everything was fine for two years. Then Biden comes on TV and what happens? Right. 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 gonna go on with my life and put this behind me. And it was about a week later, a lesson a week later, somebody sent me a link 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 gonna 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. Alright, so the first case got dismissed. You guys are free. Then Joe Biden comes out.

He announces he's going to re-indite you again and this is where it gets extremely complicated. What I like to do is bring in an expert, Gina Keating, the investigative journalist has been following this for six to 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. Alright, 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. So I just want to say thank you for coming down here and helping us out to get this stuff scored 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 was incredible and it was really hard to find anything

that informative that wasn't typical media bullshit. So it really helped me put this whole thing together. Thank you. 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 is I just want you to know I'm a liberal.

Yeah. And what you actually I think is great because it brings a new light to this and it shows that regardless of what everybody sees in the media today, there are things that Democrats and Republicans can come together on for the greater good. And 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 would have ever went 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, 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. But before we kind of dive into the nitty-gritty stuff that happened in court and all the evidence with holding, how did you get involved in this whole thing? That's a really kind of funny story.

I'll tell you the whole thing and you know you can keep it in or not. I had this shitsu named Jessica Simpson who is 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 she dragged a newspaper in. And she'd 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 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, and he would read it. And one of the times that he dragged the paper in,

it was the story of the Raven 23 guys getting sentenced in 2015, and he saw Dustin Hurd Hertz' 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 he did this. And he was really upset about it.

And obviously on a investigative reporter, and he said, you've got was really upset about it. And obviously on 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'm not touching this. But he kept bugging me about it.

And a few months later when we went to back to his hometown, Allnie, Texas, we met Stacy Herd, Dustin's dad, and my boyfriend pushed me, you know, 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've won one 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 wasn't sure, and about the 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 gonna go and visit these guys in prison. And if they are good guys, and I feel comfortable with this, then I'm gonna take this and try to get some coverage for it or write something.

I didn't know what I was gonna 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, like it was April, I heard about it sometime in that same April, I heard about it, sometime in that same timeframe, like days after they got sentenced,

because we saw it in the paper. 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. Yeah. And gave damn near six years of your career to get these guys. 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. They were monsters, they were war criminals, and all this stuff.

So it seemed like a real losing battle. And in fact, I had 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 couldn't interest anyone in it. 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 were trying to figure out, you know, what can we do? 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, 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. Damn. Well, let's move right into it.

So, I'm going to 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 Genus 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 forward. You can go to the description and download the documents yourself and we'll be splicing videos and of evidence throughout the interview. So I'm going to let you pick it off. Okay.

So just to talk about how, you know, the 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 a Nureel 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, you know, 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 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, or 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 were that they were threatening to do was kick all of our troops out of the country. This is in 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 Exxon mobile. 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 Green Duries trying to come up with a theory of how you can put these guys in prison for 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 ten 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. you 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 in any U.S. trial to testify. There was a, 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 I'm sure it's 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 Nasser 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'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. He was a Clinton appointee, and he looked at the case and he said, no. You know, 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 describe, you know, 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 in Matt Murphy and some of these other guys, to change their stories and do pleadials that it took that long to re-indite 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 media because that applied to defense-related contractors. D-O-D contractors. Exactly. But the black water was working for the department of state.

They were protecting diplomats. That was what their job was. 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 Meija. Now they argued, no, that's not right. We shouldn't have to be charged under that. We should just have civilian, you know, 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 an army convoy that got hit and so they saved active duty service members' lives and they used that against them so that they could try them under Misha. Right, so no good deed goes unpunished. I mean they did that a lot. There were several

leading up to the Nisur Square incident. They were called out a lot to support the army. That just makes it even more galling that they're out there doing an active duty combat mission, not just protecting diplomats and they get hammered for that. It was 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're kind of covered. But um, it was three, don't forget it was three trials. So we had the 2014 trial, all of them were convicted.

And then they went to the appellate court and the appellate court said, okay, Nick Slatton should be tried separately. And so he gets a new trial. And these other guys need to be resentenced 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 in one time and the jury found a 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, were resentents. So it just, 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 It 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 Was had convinced himself that this guy that Nick was guilty and and it kind of verbalized in that I'm going to find out that you're lying. And so Nick takes polygraph, he asks us the polygraph, and the guy apologizes to him saying,

you didn't do this. Oh yeah. I mean, that polygraph was kind of like the last desperate act because 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 Slow and every other team member on Raven 23 said Paul Slow did it. Paul Slow made four sworn statements. I'm the one who shot the Kia driver. Everybody said, Paul Slow 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 and 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 Slow 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 Slao saying, I shot it in all the Swords 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. So how did they just, because 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 onto 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 they had taken contact, they were receiving fire and that it was self-defense. Then Ridgeway changes a story. How did, to wear that they 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, 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 Urbine was through the case out, to when they brought it back, and this other judge named Judge Lambert took it over,

they simply decided, okay, we're going to go to a grand jury and instead of letting people testify, the witnesses testified 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 Ridgeway who testified ended up testifying against the guys. So those witnesses felt like okay I'm gonna be railroaded. I might as well just fall in line here. That was the decision that Ridgeway apparently met made because he didn't know that you know there were shell casings that were found. There were photographs that 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 is, 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 from 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 Lambert, Royce Lambert, 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 make it caught not bringing in evidence that the defense eventually found out about. He 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 and 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 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 had this hard landing and he realizes, ha ha, nothing was happening. 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 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 victim's bodies. There were no autopsies performed in this case. None. And so here you have this major case with not one single autopsy performed. So how are you how are you proud of that? You know that you're putting these veterans in prison with no evidence whatsoever. 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 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 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 there were photographs taken right after the incident. Within minutes of Raven 23 exiting Nisser Square, there was an army captain named Peter Deckero, who was at a base right near Nisser Square and he heard the gunshots and came out with

a camera 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 casing. So Decorow 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 this pictures by chance? Yes, I do. Well, we'll put them on screen here real quick. OK, and we also have, at the time, Army investigators went to the square and took video of this. So we also have a 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 right, 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 Prascusian'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. So that was the first two in that, in the first trial. Just before we move on with the, for everybody listening, the white key was it did wind up being two innocent people. Exactly. But the other thing that Peter Deckero, the Captain 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 a 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 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

that's their tactics. They load up a car nine times out of ten, it's a white carola or a white Kia. Yeah. And there's signs everywhere, they went through the use 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's maybe 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 earlier. 20 minutes for 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 Deckero also believed that it was a car bomb. So, you know, I mean, you So, you know, I mean, the thing is, the standard for self-defense was met. Yeah.

And they should never have been tried. They shouldn't have. Anyway, so... And as we talked earlier, these guys only come out. They only leave the green zone if there's an engagement and they need to... 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. 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 an army drone flying over the scene at the time of this incident and

they managed to find out about the footage that offense 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 they did, did, fence asks 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, we repurpose this. But if it's repurposed, then why is the beginning and the end still there in the middle, in the middle, scorned? They have talked into these guys. They had this drone footage,

actually had them rolling out to Nasser 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 had 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 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 Ferris Karim, was known to US intelligence as a potential terrorist. He was allegedly selling information about American troop movements to the botter corps and the Mmodi 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 US 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 or two he had 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. So, and nothing was shared about these people to anyone until Nick Slatton's second trial. So, 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. Damn good. Maybe we'll get to see him someday, but. Maybe. Okay, so that's one. Let's see, where were we?

Those were the two, all the biggies, but there were more. I mean, there were so many more things that they did. Oh, let's talk about the Dart mission. 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 had this, he was like an Iraqi serial killer who had this tactic where he would go into these engagements and purposely shoot somebody innocent so that he could convince the rest of the people

around him to just set off a massacre. That was their theory, was that he hated Iraqi so much, that he had these different engagements where 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 for murder. 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 Nussar 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 ordinance 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 ceases on this and because the defense has no record of this incident, they completely reconstruct it to to be guess what? Blackwater rolls up and Nick Slatton says to his buddies Jeremy Ridgeway and Matt Murphy Hey guys, I'm gonna just shoot somebody you just follow my lead and he gives him a wink and a nod

And that's what the prosecutor 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 Ridgeway's original testimony from this, which described 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 their first and Nick's Latin sets off this massacre by shooting an unarmed guy in an apartment building.

And Nick 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 dark 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 Ridgeway 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 dark mission in Nick's trial. And how these prosecutors are not in jail or disfard, I don't know, because I can't think of anything that spells subordinate 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 Dustin? Yeah. So when they were trying to get the guys to plead because they knew that they had no case, they sent agents to Nick's house, to his family farm, to try to question him 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? 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 mobile contracts coming up.

So the SOFA agreement is the status of forces agreement. And 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 a December of 2009, I think, is when we were supposed to start withdrawing with the... It was, you know, we're going to have to check this, but it was actually 2011 for the Sofer 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 and this you're talking about, like, what happened 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 was very hard for me, being a Democrat to talk critically about the Obama administration and Joe Biden, because what I saw in these diplomatic cables was really troubling to me. So at the time, if you, if everybody remembers, Hillary Clinton 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. We could not have prosecuted the war without contractors. And the contractors were exactly the same people, in most cases, as the troops. So to put this blame on contractors,

I found really pretty repugnant. 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, Nureel 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. We 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 Sofah 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 we're 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.

Obama and Biden needed that agreement side 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 black water 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, excuse me, for the violence in Kisur involving blackwater employees in 2007. The United States is determined, 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. Fasmin. You're welcome, sir. My pleasure, I know you.

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, Nareal 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 rendite, 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 Bill Cofield, Evans attorney, he said that the sofa agreement

was signed the very next week. Yeah, I'm sure that's probably true. There was no hiccup with the sofa agreement, so that tells you, you know, tells you everything you need to know. Yeah. What was going on? I was a little confused, what was going on with the X-On mobile contracts at that time.

That was something that was mentioned in one of the very first cables. And when I looked at those, I, Paul Slouse lawyer is the one who found those. And he gave them to me. And I called Robert Ford, who was the charge-defer 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 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 Nasser Square was in their contract. They followed the contract. So I can't really speak anymore to the Exxon mobile part, but the fact that he included

it as the third paragraph of all the fallout of 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. 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 Matt and 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 black water logo. That is something they could not escape. They could not escape the

association with black water and I think that that's why it was so easy to convict them in Washington DC. I think that if 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 and War in Washington, DC that they were never gonna get a fair trial because of him. Damn. Did he jump in and help at all?

That's something you would have to ask the guys about. I think that probably, you know, 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 in his former federal prosecutor and a former Jag and I said, how much do you think this case costs the government? And he said, oh, $50 million, easy. 50, they spent $50 million, easy. 50, 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 Nasser Square. I mean, collected evidence, think about that. Think about how expensive that is. Well, for the 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 who, whose relatives said that they were in the Sur Square around that time that same day, but they never came home.

They never found any bodies and they were accused of what's 17, killing 17 and looming 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 news stories that were filed from Baghdad that day. And I also looked at the government, the Iraqi government statement about the incident. Okay, don't forget there were three major incidents that day involving contractors and

American soldiers, right? Shootouts. Okay, so when I looked at... Within just a few miles of each other, we're not even talking all of Baghdad. Exactly. 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. 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, the American government is running ads on Iraqi TV asking anybody who might have had something to do with the NISRA 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.

Well, what was in those ads? Was there a reward? Well, there was a compensation. It was a phone number and just a call for anybody to come forward. But by this time, it was very well known that the U.S. 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 Nasser 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 dead gob, or a shot car, or a dead family member, and there's never seems to be any proof.

Yeah, I mean, you can't blame these people. I mean, their society was completely upended by this war. I do everything I could to get money as well. But when you're prosecuting people and taking away their liberty and 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

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 DC 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 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 a 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 that in 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 US 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 see that's the worst massacre in Iraq history.

That is complete bullshit. It is a total lie. There were somewhere between 868 to 1326 deaths of civilian bystanders by US-led coalition forces in 2007. So I mean, and that includes 88 children, okay? So to say that this was the worst massacre in Iraq, in the history of the Iraq war, isn't 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. The worst massacre in the entire war. Yeah, right.

And at that time was, what years were they putting that out? Two. Well, up to 2007. Right. So, four years, they were one and an oh 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. But of the body count for the NISR 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 good at.

Yeah. 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 is 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, Nick was talking to Jeremy Ridgeway back in the green zone and they were discussing where they had taken enemy fire. And Ridgeway went to back to the State Department and said, hey, you know, Nick's Latin saw gunman 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 Ridgeway. So he was kind of a dangerous witness. Oh, good. 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 Lawyer says about the prosecution. They were just vindictive. And they wanted to re-indite 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 charging 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. 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 turn me down. And 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 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 in 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 who it was you,

but the case got renamed the Biden for. 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

Mike knew someone who was very close to the White House Council's office under President Trump. And that was how we helped get the pardon packet that had already been filed by Paul Slouse lawyer kind of helped move it along a little. 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 together, and he got Kristen Slough on Laura Ingram's show. And so very slowly, we started to get traction. David French, from the National Review, wrote a really wonderful, well-research, well-thought-out article about why these guys needed to be pardoned.

And it had extra meaning because he was a Jagan. 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, guess what had to do with the election. But also, just because we also wanted to send a message to Joe Biden that this isn't right what you

did, 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 you 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 would 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 black water and because of the association with the Iraq war and because they were contractors, no one will look below the surface of this story. contractors, no one will look below the surface of this story. This is a real shame that it doesn't seem like anybody will look below the surface on any media, any more. 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, one last question. I understand at least why the US 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 Ridgeway, 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 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 Nisar 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 Ridgeway. And my theory about this is that Jeremy Ridgeway 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 gonna be Ridgeway and he knew it. So the government worked on him a lot. And then they also remember we're 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 decarrow reports and the decarrow photographs that they didn't turn over to the defense. So Jeremy Ridgeway 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. 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 gunman.

Well, I can tell you just about everybody that's been on this show has 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, 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, you know, 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 prosecutors 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 Bettswinkus, 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 too. Bucket, let's throw it in. Yeah. Well, Jean, I just wanna 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 of whatever we just did, an hour and a half to our 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, don't know what a cable is. That is a government email essentially. 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, but. Yeah, that's, I really want that to get as much attention as possible, because that will tell everybody the story of it. So it's Raven 23, presumption of guilt, is the name of the podcast. And if you wanna 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 are all in that file down there.

So go check it out and Gina, thank you again. And if you have not heard of it, Netflix versus the world, which you produced. I wrote it and produced it. Yeah. I wrote it and produced it, I wrote it and produced it. A 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 fighter. 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 publicly 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 Pipeter Foundation is dedicated

defending the rights and freedoms of our men and women in uniform. The same rights and freedoms they risk 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 Pipeter 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 pipetherfoundation.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 got 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 nutter shock. It was like you're living in the days and whenever they put the cuffs on you're just like, oh shit, it just got real. How long? How long are you going away for? They up the Hany 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 it's 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 was pretty confident. 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 somebody looking at you, somebody smiling, give you a little indication of what they're about to tell you. 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, 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 charges 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 fucked. Because in our cases, myself, Dustin and Paul, we were charged with first with voluntary manslaughter. So 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, five, 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 black water and they had it was basically a trial against the name black water. Not if 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. What point did you realize that you were just being used for political gain? I don't know what would you say maybe a week into it. I told you all that. Yeah.

They're about to make it. 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, it was what the jury thinks.

And boy, it was I wrong. They slammed us on every count. Yeah, 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 open Evan said, it was close for us.

And so, Harlem Marshalls 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, with in light of the heavy sentences at the scary, we think that the defendantals came and got us escorted us to the back and had us up against the wall. They were if you know our pockets cut nurse you laces out. And it was it was a feeling of helplessness like I felt on January 23rd and there was

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 her wallets and belts and shoelaces and everything. I mean, it was handed her a water 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 DC County Jill. Thank you. That's And how you found out and it was off and dead? Yeah, absolutely. So we left DCGL into 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. They believed what they read and 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 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 them because like you was talking about being broken that is the most broken you will ever see a human being is when they are separated from society.

Like you just, that's about as low as you can get and 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. So, you know, I'm calling out to God. I'm like, you know, I didn't do this. What are you doing? And like, he answered, he said, you don't run this. I run this. I'm like, well, what am I supposed to do? And he said, love God and love your neighbor. And so that's what I started doing. I started just digging into his word and seeking his face every day. And so that's what I started doing. I started just digging into his word and seeking his face every day. And I saw many miracles that happened while I was locked up. You know, this is, 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, you know, eventually we were

pardoned by the president. It was a miracle. But like that road, eventually we were pardoned by the president. It was a miracle. But like 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 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 set on my bunk. Got my Bible and started reading it. 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 right because he was participating in it. So when the right team came in with their flash banger nades and their tear gas canisters, he got pulled out, so they took him to the hole. So after that they weren't being nice to us at all. They were starving us. They 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 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 and verse three, it says, surely he will save you from the foulard 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 other life sentence right. Like, what are you doing, God? Because you said, surely you will save me from the failure snare. I was like, that's where I'm at.

And I remember I boxed in the word failure Foulish, there. 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, slatting 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 of days later. They let us out of ourselves, finally. Call our family. I call 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 pardon the soldiers accused of work crimes. And it mentioned you by name. I was in the paper with Goulston and Goughler 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 like it happened. And then immediately my lawyer 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. 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 to advocate and 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. I guess 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 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. It's 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 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 life, murdering next 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 lot of sentence without a lot of 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, 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, 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 I had just a bit to Nick's experience as well as I called myself a Christian for a long time time. And I said that I knew Christ and that I followed them, 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, 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 Abanago and what they went through as innocent young men, there are tons of material just within 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 proof of miraculous providence and God's care. Well, John Celeste, not a 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 pardoned. And so however you guys want to kick this off, starting with you Paul. Okay. 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 my little girl and my wife back 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 gave me a second chance at life with them, with these three men.

Thank you, sir. Thank you. President Trump, we love you, man. Thank you, thank you so much. Like he said, it is like we're back from the dead, you know. We thank God and we thank you. We thank, 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 Spartan Tennessee anytime you come hanging out anytime you want.

We love you. Everybody down there loves you. You, man. 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 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. And I just want to is definitely you guys. 1,5kg When you guys came here, I said that I wanted to connect you with some people. I have a really good friend on the line here. He has my nose, his name is Eddie Gallagher. He wound up having a situation very similar to your guys. So, I wanted to introduce him right here.

I got him on the line. Eddie Gallagher. Eddie, what's up? What's going on? It's a pleasure. Wow. So Eddie runs the PiPitter Foundation and that whole foundation is,

you know, to kind of help guys like you. So Eddie, I'm just gonna turn it over to you, man. Hey, man, what's up, fellas? I can't tell you how awesome it is to see you guys here, especially at Sean's place, man. I can't imagine what you guys went through, man. I got a taste of what it is to have our government turn against you and sort of hang you out and drive, man. But honestly, it's an honor to be able to talk to you guys, man. I'm glad you guys came. It's platform to tell your side of the story. But I'm sorry, but I want to let you know, man, Sean, tell me that you guys are going to be on here.

We've been following everything that's been going on and are not probably the high-speed or down-patient. We authorize it and are eventually going for 10K for you guys and that one of our board members is also donated to $2500 on top of that. We also started a fundraising portal on our site for you guys to raise all the money you guys need to pay off your legal fees man. That's what our item now probably talks about man that's what police will be doing man but I'm stoked for you guys I can't wait to hear you guys' side of the story. Thank you brother. Thank you very much. Well that'll be linked in the description so if anybody wants to donate and there's gonna be a lot of people that want to donate,

the links below, you can donate to PyPeters Foundation. There's gonna be a portal, like Eddie said, for your guys' legal fees specifically. So, yeah, Eddie, you're the fucking man, dude. PyPeters. PyPeters.org, go there, and they'll be able to access it. Don't eat. We can't thank you enough.

We, I followed your story from inside the walls, man. It's, you know, it's awesome to be able to talk to you on this platform and be able to interact. Yeah, likewise. I, 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 in the court with your uniform on, with that big stack of ribbons and metals, it made me sick in my

stomach because you had handcuffs on. And I knew you didn't deserve that. 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 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, you truly test a 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 wanna to challenge you, but I need as a couple months to prepare, all right?

You can now look at what I've discussed that. All right. Hey, this ends May goes like wise 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 and 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 you guys side of the story. God bless you bro. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. Eddie. Thank you brother. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. Eddie. Thank you, brother.

Thank you, my man. I'll talk to you soon, man. Love you, bro. Love you, brother. Thank you. You too. Wow. God, it's awesome. Wow. He's a good dude. I was sitting here looking at the orange spots on the carpet. I'm like what the fuck those what Nerwala, you right? We guys are sputting that no, no, I'm pretty happy though. Yeah, it's awesome Cool coffee cup like Shark glass I thought you're gonna give us some gummy bears or something, you know, I've seen the podcast

I give you're gonna give us some gummy bears or something, you know, I've seen the podcast. I give you plenty of gummy bears, but I thought maybe that would be a little bit more special than Yeah, it's a little bit more special. It's a little bit more special. It's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special. It's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit more special than it's a little bit guys, you know, he's just a solid fucking war fighter who 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 wanna hook your boys up and same with you, Evan, and all you guys, you know. You know, one thing I'll say. 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 as staggered on which prison let who out. But I know that I talked to everybody directly thereafter. You know, it may take us a minute to get a hold

because of the number of situations. But you know one thing I can say about these three men sitting next to me is there's nobody had a other sitting next to because we rolled in together, we stood there, we took it like me and 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 on 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 we walked out together. the day we went in together and we walked out together. There's no and my family didn't understand. One day we were sitting inside the visitation room in FCI Memphis. I reached down and I pointed it to the floor. I said you see the 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'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 had turned my back on these men. I mean, I'm not even allowed to you. I wouldn't have, I would aid a bullet. I would have fucking something, drink myself to death.

But instead, I'm sitting here next to these men and I mean dude, I can't thank you all enough. Thank you, brother. Thank you. I'll have a day because of you three I'm confident that Yeah, you'll save me more times and 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 is you one. There's no doubt about that either. So for everybody that's watching, go to the piPetersFoundation.org and donate and give her to 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 wish all of you guys the best luck and God bless you. God bless you. Thank you, brother. Thank you, brother. Thank you, sir. God's speed. Thank you, Thank you brother. Thank you sir. Thank you. Cheers. The Bullwork Podcast focuses on political analysis and reporting without partisan loyalties.

Real sense of day job is sprinkled on our PTSD. So things are going well, I guess. Every Monday through Friday, Charlie Sykes speaks with guests about the latest stories from inside Washington and around the world. You document in a very compelling way. All of the positive things have come out of this, but it also feels like we have this massive hangover. No shouting or grandstanding, principles over partisanship, the Bullwork podcast, wherever you listen.