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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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July 30th,
2007 - For Abducted Guards, Iraq Wasn’t Just About Money News article by the Washington Post |
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For Abducted Guards, Iraq
Wasn’t Just About Money Diverse Motives Drew Men To Chaotic, Perilous Work By Steve Fainaru Washington Post July 30, 2007 On Main Supply Route Tampa,
Iraq - Surrounded by darkness, an AK-47 at his side, Jonathon Cote considered
his future from the driver's seat of a black Chevy Avalanche hurtling through
southern Iraq early last November. Months earlier, Cote had
been a reluctant accounting major at the University of Florida, a popular
23-year-old freshman who'd enrolled after four years in the Army. Cote
pledged Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity and collected $5 covers at a bar called
the Whiskey Room. He drove a red Yamaha R1 motorcycle around campus until one
evening he did a wheelie and was arrested for drunk driving. Broke and despondent, Cote
spoke to an Army buddy, who told him he could make $7,000 a month protecting
supply convoys in Iraq. On his days off, his friend told him, he'd get to go
jet-skiing on the Persian Gulf. Cote was concerned that he might lose his
Florida driver's license, but in Iraq he would pilot a company "gun
truck" with a belt-fed machine gun mounted in back. "Basically I was
looking for a feeling that I didn't have, and this job provided that,"
Cote said, his iPod set to shuffle as he steered his truck through the soft
Iraqi night. "It's a distraction from the DUI, how I couldn't find a
degree that I liked in college. And then there's the money. I have $30,000,
and I'm going back to school with a plan." "Life-threatening
situations straighten you up fast," he said. He had already announced his
intention to return home on his U.S. voice mail and had picked a new major,
exercise physiology. On Nov. 16, Cote's plan was
undone by the realities of Iraq. Driving their gun trucks along the same
stretch of highway where he had sketched his future, he and four colleagues
from Crescent Security Group, a small private firm, were ambushed and taken hostage.
The status of the four Americans and one Austrian, 25-year-old Bert
Nussbaumer of Vienna, is unknown. Cote's 24th birthday passed Feb. 11. His
drunk-driving case was dismissed after the seizure. Two weeks before the attack,
the four Americans spoke at length to a Washington Post reporter traveling
with them in Iraq. Together, their stories describe the diverse motivations
of the private security guards whose numbers have proliferated since the
start of the war, with tens of thousands of armed civilians taking on some of
the most dangerous tasks. All four missing Americans
are military veterans; two - Cote and Joshua Munns, a 24-year-old former
Marine from Redding, Calif. - did combat tours in Iraq. Their comments reveal
men acutely aware of their vulnerability, yet driven by life choices that
transcend mercenary stereotypes. To a man, they said they had come to Iraq
for fast money. But they were also lured by the camaraderie they had known in
the military, the continuous rush of adrenaline, the opportunity to see
history unfold and the chance to escape mundane lives back home. "This is me, okay? This
is me," said John Young, who led the Crescent team that was ambushed and
is among the missing. Young, 44, of Lee's Summit, Mo., is 5-foot-8 and thin,
with a shaved head, blond mustache and piercing blue eyes. After leaving the
Army in 1991, he worked as a carpenter in a family business before joining
Crescent in 2005. He has a 15-year-old daughter, Jasmyn, and a 19-year-old
son, John Robert. Young had decided to keep
returning to Iraq, even after a bullet took a chunk out of the collar of his
armored vest and threw him into the steering wheel as he escorted a convoy
through Baghdad one afternoon. The tattered vest that saved
him was displayed on a wooden table in a conference room at Crescent's Kuwait
City offices. "I want to have a
normal life - I always have - but I've always known that I'm not that kind of
person," Young said. "I've spent an entire
lifetime trying to explain it to myself. I mean, my children are a big thing
to me. I'm not saying I'm the best dad in the world, but I love my children.
I want to see my daughter get married. I want to see my son graduate. I want
normal things in life. But I'm not normal." The conversations took place
in the cabs of the Crescent gun trucks as the guards drove through the Iraqi
desert; during long waits before they crossed the sand-choked Kuwait-Iraq
border; at Popeyes, T.G.I. Friday's and other Kuwait City restaurants that
reminded them of home; and in their spare, dormitory-style rooms, filled with
video game players and televisions and family pictures, where they passed
time between missions. At the time of the
kidnapping, Crescent had 17 Western employees, from the United States,
Britain, Chile, Austria and New Zealand, according to Franco Picco, the
company's managing partner. Paul Chapman, Picco's deputy, said Crescent
received roughly 600 job applications from abroad each month. The company closed down
within months of the attack. "To me, this is a
prestigious job," Cote said before the ambush and seizure. "There's only a certain
percentage of people who are doing this. It's like a hidden, secret part of
the war, and if I could be part of that hidden, secret thing, it would be
cool, you know? It's kind of like being part of history. People are gonna be
like, 'Oh, man, remember the war? Where were you?' I was here. I was
here." 'It's Not the Getting Hit
Part That Bothers Me' Crescent operated out of a
quiet sandstone villa in Kuwait City, across the street from a mosque. The
guards lived in rooms with wireless Internet, twin beds, wooden desks and
concrete floors. Before dawn, as the Muslim call to prayer echoed through the
courtyard, the men, clad in khakis and black shirts with a white Crescent
logo, climbed into their trucks to make the one-hour drive to Iraq. After reaching Camp
Navistar, a border staging base, the men fueled their vehicles, then waited
in a dirt lot in the heat for clearance to cross into Iraq. The constant
rumble of Humvees, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and tractor-trailers filled the
air with dust and the stench of diesel fumes. The wait could last for hours. "I haven't been home in
four months," said Paul Reuben, a former Marine, as he waited at the
border one morning. Reuben turned 40 eight days
after he was seized. He stands 6-foot-4, weighs 260 pounds and smiles almost
continuously, his beard and gentle manner giving him the look of an
overstuffed teddy bear. Reuben has a twin brother, Patrick, a Minneapolis
police officer, twin 16-old-daughters, Bree Anne and Casey Nicole, and a
16-year-old stepson, Terrell. He resigned from the St. Louis Park, Minn.,
police department in 2003 after a drunk-driving arrest. Reuben said he
applied online for private security jobs and was hired immediately. Waiting at the staging base,
Reuben said he was exhausted from having worked "72 or 73 days
straight" and jittery from fending off constant attacks. Two weeks
earlier, he'd thought he heard fireworks while driving through Basra, a city
racked by militia-fueled violence, but quickly realized the explosions were a
volley of rocket-propelled grenades aimed at his convoy. "The RPG attacks were
the scariest thing I've ever seen," he said. Reuben went back and forth
about whether to stay on. He weighed the risk and time away from his family
against the cash, which never seemed to be enough, and the appeal of the
warrior lifestyle. "I kind of like doing
it. I enjoy it," he said, smiling. "I'm getting caught up on some
bills and stuff like that. And I heard they're coming out with that new Dodge
Challenger in 2008. I want that." "I can't handle
monotony," said Munns, the young former Marine who is also missing.
"I gotta have something that shocks my system so I know I'm still
alive." Munns is tall and lanky,
with an air of military discipline and close-cropped brown hair that fluffs
into an Afro when he doesn't cut it. A meticulously scripted tattoo encircles
his left forearm: "The unwanted, doing the unforgivable, for the
ungrateful." The tattoo was the motto of his Marine sniper platoon,
which fought in the 2004 assault on Fallujah. "It's us doing the
dirty work for the rest of our society who don't really care about us,"
he said. Munns left the Marines in
2005 and said he immediately regretted his decision. He spent a year
installing swimming pools for Viking Pools of Redding but still worked half
as hard as he did in the military. He had applied to reenlist in the Marines
when the Crescent job came along. The job fulfilled Munns's
need for excitement, he said. It also helped him and his fiancee, Jackie
Shaw, buy a three-level fixer-upper in Redding that he dreamed of renovating
himself. At the time of the attack, the house purchase was in progress. The culture of private
security was different from the brotherhood Munns had known in the Marines.
He said he reserved his loyalty for his two closest friends, Cote and Mike
Skora, an Army veteran from Chicago. The three guards had made a pact, half
in jest: They would take their own lives or shoot each other to avoid being
captured. "I'd take a bullet for
them," Munns said of Cote and Skora. "The rest of these people, I
probably wouldn't." Munns turned to Cote one
morning as they prepared to cross the border. "It's not the getting hit
part that bothers me," he said. "It's the getting lost and getting
hung from a bridge part." Cote chuckled. 'I'd Go Home and I'd Feel Empty' Jonathon Cote has a boy's
face and cornerback's build, the result of weightlifting and a joyless diet
of salads without dressing and canned peaches that he kept stacked in his
closet. He wore T-shirts and extravagantly torn jeans as he strolled through
Kuwait City's malls, drawing glances amid men in starched white robes and
women in black abayas. His older brother
Christopher called Jonathon an "extrovert in the extreme," a
sensitive thrill-seeker who craves speed and adventure. The son of a Marine,
Jon Cote was born in Long Beach, Calif., and went to high school in suburban
Buffalo, N.Y.; for kicks, he and his brother would tether a snowboard to a
car and ride it through a foot of snow. In Kuwait City, Cote
exercised at a local gym, then spent hours in a backroom shop watching a
jeweler painstakingly craft a ring for his mother's birthday. Driving through
Baghdad, he'd roll down the windows and turn up the music on his stereo,
rocking in his seat with some of Crescent's Iraqi guards. "You don't
have to worry about much if you're having a good time," he said. Cote's friends and family
laughed when they heard he was majoring in accounting at Florida. "It
was like an oxymoron: Jon the accountant," Chris said. Cote said he hated most of
his four years in the Army. He disdained authority. College life suited him
better, at least at first. People were drawn to the freshman with combat
experience; even the seniors looked up to him. But Cote said he felt
disoriented, caught between the disciplined world he had left behind in the
military and a new one that seemed shallow in comparison. Cote had also done
a tour in Afghanistan. He once remarked to Chris that it seemed as if he had
lived two lifetimes compared with the students around him. "I was like
this fun, energetic kid who made everybody laugh and made everybody have a
good time," he said. "But on the inside I was torn apart. I didn't
know how to deal with it. So I'd go out to a party and have an awesome time,
and then I'd go home and I'd feel empty. And I'd be like, 'Why do I feel this
way? What ... is wrong with me?' " The drunk-driving arrest was
merely the last straw, Cote said. "I was ashamed of what I did. And I
couldn't pay for school, I couldn't pay for my apartment. I didn't want to
deal with not being able to drive. I had to get a job, and the job I was
going to get was probably going to be working in a bar and dealing with all
these college people and their bull." Cote had kept in touch with
Skora, his old squad leader in the 82nd Airborne. After leaving the military,
Skora, 35, had applied online for private security jobs. Within a month, he
was in Iraq with another now-defunct security firm. He later moved to
Crescent. Cote was reluctant to leave
school, but he looked at the security job as a chance to straighten out his
life. "It basically gave me
an opportunity to run away from my problems," he said. "So I just
left." 'And the Screams. ... It Rips Your Heart Out' Cote soon discovered there
was no time for jet-skiing. The work was constant, and
he developed a love-hate relationship with his job. For the first time since
entering college, he believed he was involved in something meaningful. "Without us, who knows
what would happen to the drivers and the cargo?" he said. He felt no
guilt about the money. "The war is here. I didn't start it. If I could
do it for my country, why couldn't I come over here and make a little
money?" But the work was relentless,
and more dangerous than he'd imagined. "That's the worst part about this
job: There's no time to think about yourself. Sometimes you should take a
step back and take it all in and be like, 'What am I really here for? Why am
I really doing this? Is it really worth it?' You go out, you get hit and come
back, you go out and get hit and come back. You just become numb, and you
just do it." Cote said he was
increasingly repulsed by what he saw on Iraq's dangerous roads. Last August,
he was sent out with a Crescent team to pick up the remains of an Iraqi guard
who had been killed in a bombing. The body had been taken to Tallil Air Base,
about three hours north of the border. The temperature in southern Iraq that
day was close to 120 degrees. The military handed over the
body in a metal coffin filled with ice. "They were really apologetic
because they didn't know which end was up or the bottom or whatever,"
Cote said. Crescent guards met the
man's family beneath an overpass outside Basra; it was too dangerous for them
to enter the city. As Cote helped strap the coffin to the roof of an
orange-and-white sedan, the man's brother screamed the dead guard's name,
Basheer, over and over, the name echoing beneath the overpass as he beat his
fists against his chest. Cote was suddenly stricken:
The coffin had a drip valve that was positioned directly over the windshield.
Water and blood trickled over the glass. "Just that kind of mental
picture, it's not something you want to have in your head," he said. "And the screams from
his family. It rips your heart out." Cote recalled looking at
Skora when he got back to Kuwait. "I don't know,
man," he said, shaking his head. "I don't know about this." But he decided to stay. 'I Still Feel Bad. I Wasn't There for Him.' On the eve of the
kidnapping, Cote stayed up all night with Skora at the Crescent villa,
talking excitedly about his plans to return home. He had set a date, Dec. 7,
just three weeks away. He planned to return to school in the spring. The next day, Skora wasn't
on the convoy. "I still feel bad," he said recently in Baghdad.
"I wasn't there for him." Crescent teams had made the
run nearly every day for months without incident. On Nov. 16, the guards
planned to lead a convoy of 37 tractor-trailers up Main Supply Route Tampa to
Tallil Air Base, then return to Kuwait. Cote shared the point
vehicle with Munns. They were the first to encounter the fake checkpoint
where the ambush occurred. Dozens of masked men, some in Iraqi police
uniforms, had set up a roadblock. They forced the guards from their vehicles
at gunpoint. In his eyewitness account,
Andy Foord, a British guard who was left behind, described Cote as initially
confused, believing that the attackers "were the police and they were
just checking our weapons serial numbers, weapons permits and licenses." Cote wasn't seen again until
Dec. 26, when the captors released a time-stamped video that had been shot
approximately two weeks after the ambush. The footage opened with an image of
the Koran and a map of Iraq, then this message: "The National Islamic
Resistance in Iraq: The Farqan (Quran) Brigades takes responsibility for the
kidnapping in Safwan, Basra." The Crescent hostages sat
cross-legged on the floor. Cote had the only visible injuries: His nose was
swollen, and red blotches could be seen on his face. "My name is Jonathon
Cote," he said, calmly. He wore a short-sleeved white T-shirt, gray
pants and socks. "I am 23, from Gainesville, Florida. I work for a
private security company. I am asking the American people to put pressure on
the government to leave Iraq to help me and my friends to get out of
here." The four other hostages
identified themselves and made similar statements. Reuben wore a tracksuit
with orange shoulder stripes. "I'm 39 years old, or 40; I'm not quite
sure of today's date," he said. "I'm from Buffalo, Minnesota. I'm
married. I have twin daughters - they're 16 - and I have a stepson that's
16." A second video, time-stamped
Dec. 21 and Dec. 22, was released Jan. 3. The hostages again called for the
removal of U.S. troops from Iraq. Since then, prayer vigils
have been held in Kansas City, Minneapolis, Gainesville and Clarence, N.Y.,
outside Buffalo. In Gainesville, Sigma Phi
Epsilon placed a 20-foot yellow ribbon on the front of its house. In Redding, Calif., Josh
Munns's new home deal fell through. There has been no
communication from the captors. Staff researcher Julie Tate
in Washington contributed to this report. External link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/29/AR2007072901111.html |