26 January 2007

Little Birds



I was going to write about something else this cold morning. It is seventeen out, but blowing fiercely. They tell me it will feel like three degrees, and I can feel the cold draft from the crannies on the windows.

I'm surprised that the killings in the pet market did not surprise me. A guy in Baghdad walked into the bazaar and put down a box with a bird in it. He walked away. People were curious. The looked at the little bird, leaning in, and then the box blew up, killing them.

That is the essence of life in anarchy. This particular slaughter of civilians should not be called war. That offends me as a professional. This is cruel and cynical and casual all at once, and unworthy of the profession of arms.

The President has been roundly lambasted for his proposal to boost, temporarily, the number of troops in Baghdad. He is hoping that they can secure the city and then hand it off, and no one seems to have a great deal of confidence that it will work.

It is more along the lines of the grand gesture, which would be acceptable if those that are going to die appreciate it.

I have been thinking about that a lot. I was trying to shut down the computer the other night when an IM box popped up on the screen from a person I know who is coming home- probably in Europe by now, and safe.

There was another in the message queue that was not so sanguine.

It has been a hard couple weeks in the Green Zone. As we argue about troops strengths here, the conflict has imposed its own imperative. There are around 100,000 civilian contractors in the war zone, almost doubling the effective strength of the uniformed presence.

A significant slug of them are civilian security “consultants” from a dozen firms that have sprung up to meet the need for hard-eyed men with guns. They are needed.

The e-mail informed me that there had been a trip to an impromptu morgue to say goodbye to some civilian dead from the Blackwater International concern, formed in 1997 by billionaire former SEAL Erik Prince. I talked to him last year. He has cold eyes, and they looked through me.

His people, mostly former special operations military folks, have been providing bodyguard services since the beginning in Iraq. Blackwater won a $21 million contract to protect U.S. Ambassador Paul Bremer, who ran the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq until June 2004. The company still guards U.S. State Department personnel in Iraq.

You recall the day that things seemed to pivot and change in Iraq. On March 31, 2004, four Blackwater contractors were ambushed while escorting empty trucks to pick up kitchen equipment at a base west of Fallujah. They were all murdered, and a mob set their cars on fire and hung parts of the bodies from a bridge.

There were five bodies in the morgue at this particular moment in January, 2007. The Ambassador was there, grim faced, to pay tribute to those who keep him safe. He touched the bodies of the slain, each one of them.

The facts are as chaotic as the event. Blackwater operates a fleet of tiny but lethal helicopters called “Little Birds.” Old timers know them as special operations versions of the OH-6A LOACH from Vietnam. They bristle with guns, and because of their agility, are used for fire support and insertion and extraction of people in trouble.

The four-man crew in one helicopter was killed, and the gunner in the second was killed by ground fire. The crash set off a five-hour firefight during which helicopters swarmed over Baghdad and fired at least one Hellfire missile into the streets below.

Someone said at least four of the victims had gunshot wounds to the head, which means they died on the ground. The authorities don't know who the attackers were at the moment, but they suspect Shi'a. Perhaps it was the Jaish al Mahdi (JAM), though many of these groups look the same.

Those were the Blackwater casualties last week.

Unity Resources Group, a British company chartered out of Dubai and operating in Iraq since 2002 ,lost three men, a Hungarian, a Croat and an Iraqi, defending a young woman named Andrea “Andi” Parhamovich. She was from Perry, Ohio, and like so many of the dead, had not seen her thirtieth birthday.

She got whacked minutes after leaving the headquarters of a prominent Sunni Arab political party, where she had been teaching a class on democracy. She worked for the National Democratic Institute, headed up by former Secretary of State Madeline Albright.

Her sedan was transiting Yarmouk, a largely Sunni area west of the Tigris River where the security situation has been declining in recent months.

Andi was a tough cookie, even if she looked a little like a Valley Girl. She mocked death, which in my experience is something only the young can do, and not with impunity.

Last November, they found two Vehicle-Borne Improvised Explosive Devices (VBIEDs) in front of the building where she lived in the Green Zone in Baghdad. She got bored waiting for them to be cleared, and then led ten American men back to her building while mortars rained down.

Last week death called for her. There were maybe thirty attackers who used rocket-propelled grenades and assault rifles to close on the car. During the firefight, the Unity contractors tried to escape, fought back, then called for reinforcements from other private security contractors, who responded.

They were not in time. When the attackers could not get Andi out of the BMW, they threw hand-grenades under the car. When the response people secured the site, it took a while to discern where her remains were in the wreckage.

That is the nature of these butchers, who operate under the swarm of helicopters. They entice with little birds, and kill. They machine gun young women on the streets. They care only for death, and perhaps the surge will help them to be with it. If that is the case, I am all for it.

Andi's boyfriend, Newsweek Correspondent Michael Hastings, was pretty shook up, as you can imagine. He said he was going to propose to her next month, on a Valentine's Day break from the war zone in Paris.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsoctra.com

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