Latest / UK Column Radio / Outsourcing Morality- Blackwater And Beyond—with Morgan Lerette

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Outsourcing Morality- Blackwater And Beyond—with Morgan Lerette · UK Column Radio

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Hello, I'm Charles Mallett and this is an interview for UK Column. There'll
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be notes and links below this interview at ukcolumn dot org. Now today I'm
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going to be speaking to Morgan Theurett, who served in the United States Air
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Force and Army, and most notably as a private military contractor in Iraq for
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Blackwater. Morgan has recently published a book called Guns Girls and greed about his
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experiences in Iraq some twenty years ago. I'm very very pleased to have him
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on the program today, and there's much to get through, but I think
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what we'll start with Morgan is for most people that the name Blackwater will bring
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up all sorts of connotations and thoughts effectively after the event. And so I
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suppose the question on a lot of people's lips might be why and on earth
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would you have wanted to join Blackwater in the first place. Well, and
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that's a fair question. Thanks for having me on. When when I joined
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Blackwater in two thousand and four, it was well before all the negative connotations
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happened with Blackwater. So the one thing that did happen before was the contractors
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got hanged on the bridge in Fallujah in two thousand and four, so it
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was equally as insane to join Blackwater because of that as opposed to what happened
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later in two thousand and seven. But honestly, it is twenty three years
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old. It was so much money. It was five hundred and fifty dollars
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a day, and you go over there and you get to go get your
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adventure right. So it's the best of both worlds. You get paid and
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you get to have really cool stories that you can write a book about later.
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Yeah. I mean, having read the book, which is fantastic,
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very very candid insight into exactly what did go on and reporting the adventures of
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others as well, one does come away with it with an extraordinary insights into
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exactly what it is that that did happen. But just with your perspective,
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as it is not just talk us through your in effect your voyage from the
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Air Force into in effect a sort of civilian yet military organization, and what
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that transition was like, not just for you but the people around you.
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Yeah, so it was really I wish I could sit there and say that
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I had this grand life plan. I've just kind of fallen face first into
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one opportunity after another. So when I was in the Air Force, I
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met these former Special Operations guys and they said, Hey, we're all going
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to go work for Blackwater. And I was like, oh, if you
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guys have fun. Those guys just got hanged in Fallujah. You kind of
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know where that's going to go. And I was not going to go work
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for Blackwater at all. What I was not Special Operations. I was not
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nearly as cool as I thought, you know, you needed to be to
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become a Blackwater operator. And two, it just seemed like they was way
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too much risk, like the amount of money didn't really matter. But Blackwater
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was so young back in those days that they would literally bring people into Moyok,
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North Carolina, where they would train Blackwater people, and they'd say,
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who do you know that we can call? So that's how I got dragged
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into it. As my buddy went over there, he got into a training
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class and he said, Hey, call Morgan. So five am I got
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a call from a random number out in Virginia and they said, hey,
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this is you know, Tyler from Blackwater. You want to come join?
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And I was like, I'm tired. I don't have much else going on
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right now, so why the heck not. But a lot of people joined
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Blackwater because you have to look at the paradigm of combat before this. So
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unless you were in Somalia in nineteen ninety three or you were in Desert Storm
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in nineteen ninety one, you had a lot of people that spent about ten
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years in the military getting trained to do military stuff. Right, you've joined
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the military, you want to go over there blow stuff up, and you
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want to get combat, and then you don't. This gave individuals an opportunity
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who were special operations rangers, you know, Navy seals. All those guys
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that had trained and trained and trained and got out of the military never got
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to actually do what they trained for, and it gave them opportunity to go
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over there make a crap ton of money as well as like finally get the
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combat operations that they were hoping for. And that's kind of the story of
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the book is it's a bunch of guys coming together with a job that nobody
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really knows how to do. It was a brand new type of security arrangement
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and how do you get that done? And every day was just a learning
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experience and it was also just an absolute melee. You rate, specifically in
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the book about the contract that Blackwater had secured, which I think I'm right
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in saying was the Worldwide Personal Protective Service. And in effect, as I
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understand it, they secured the contract, but because of the effective sort of
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skilled death facaid, the manning or the staffing of that was going to be
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a problem. And you write about it, and indeed the sort of State
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Department security clearent So you just talk us through that side of it, the
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sort of the recruitment and the clearance and the standards that needed to be met,
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and how you perceived that. Yeah. So in two thousand and four,
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when Paul Brimmer left Iraq, we essentially gave the state of Iraq over
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to the introm Iraqi government. The US and all the coalition partners did not
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want to be seen as individuals that were occupiers, right. That was a
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big concern back in the fourth So as soon as it went to the Iraqi
5:39
government, it became a diplomatic mission and not a combat mission in the eyes
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of almost all the governments that were there. Now. The problem is is
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that the State Department had a protective service, but it probably only had a
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handful of individuals that had actually done it, and they hadn't done it in
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an active combat zone. So that's where Blackwater jumped in. Black Water had
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people that were already trained in combat operations, you know, shoot, move,
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communicate, be able to do all that cool combat stuff, and then
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you can go in and learn how to actually protect a diplomat the way that
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the State Department would train their own people, and after two three weeks of
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that, be able to just go directly into a combat zone to start protecting
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these diplomats. And what the diplomats did if you recalled. We had like
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the big Debathification, so all the military, all the government was all taken
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out of their positions of power because they were Bath Party members under Saddam Hussein.
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And now you had to train the new Iraqi government how to run stuff
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day to day operations, pick up garbage, you know, how how do
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you set up a stock market, how do you run an airport. They
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had a huge deficit. So the people that we protected were the ones that
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would go over and kind of train these people how to do stuff. And
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of course you can't get from you know, nice comfortable not going to get
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shot at point A to point B without having had a bunch of knuckle draggers
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like me driving you around and making sure that you're going to make it there
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safely. So that's really where Blackwater got the contract. And then when they
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got the contract, there's only so many Navy seals that you can that you
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can find right that have already gotten out. So people like me started getting
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random calls saying, hey, you did Security forces, which is military police
7:19
for the Air Force. Can you come over here? Can you pass the
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can you pass the security clearance? Can you pass the you know, the
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weapons qualifications, the physical fitness tests, all those things, and if you
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could do that, they would have you on a plane literally the next day
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going into Bagdad, Iraq. Yeah, it was insane, It sounds it,
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and I would everyone listening to read you know more about it in the
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book because it is. It is eyewatering. And I want to come back
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to a lot of that, specifically on the diplomats, the people that Blackwater
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had had the contract for protecting. It might be difficult to make a general
7:57
view, but what was your opinion of their capable on that work ethic and
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the success or otherwise that they were having whilst they were actually at the at
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the interface with the Iraqis. Diplomats and military members are not cut of the
8:11
same cloth for the most part. You know, that's a general thought,
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but a lot of the diplomats come from these really good schools, you know,
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the Harvard's, the Toughts universities, all those fancy ones, and they
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the way they see the world is just not the same way as somebody that
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has gone through a military paradigm. So military people, you go out there,
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you know, you engage the enemy, you make sure that you can
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you can complete your mission. Diplomats really want to lead with diplomacy, right,
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They want to lead with hey, we can help you do this,
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and you guys can do all these amazing things. So it was it was
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always like a headbutting between the two where we would say, hey, we're
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going to get you to point A to point B safely, and then we
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end up smashing into a car, that car flies off onto you know,
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into another few vehicles, and the diplomat goes, well, why'd you do
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that? Why do you have to do that. It's like, because we're
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trying to like save your life, We're trying to make sure that you're protected.
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So it's I think it's good to have government organizations that have these different
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ideas and these different paradigms to have a government working correctly. But injecting that
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much diplomacy into an active combat zone that early into combat was probably a net
9:26
negative. And you could see it with the diplomats. You could see when
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we first got there, they always wanted to go out. They always wanted
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to go get out into the red zone, go help. We did the
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regime crime stuff for the trials for Saddam Hussein and chemic quality, like let's
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get out there, let's get this evidence, let's move it. And then
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as people started dying and they started realizing, you know, you get rockets
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raining down on you and there's a car bomb right outside of the green zone,
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they were a little less excited to go out when it was real life.
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So it was always just we worked on their schedule. But some days
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you would go out run three, four or five times, and some days
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you would just sit around and do nothing for two, three four days at
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a time. Again, that comes across in the book. I'm going to
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quote back to you a section that you relate from your well, the Welcome
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to Blackwater text, which states the risks include, among other things, and
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without limitations, the undersigned being shot permanently, maimed, and or killed by
10:28
a firearm or munitions falling from an aircraft or helicopter, sniper fire, landmine,
10:33
artillery fire, rocket propelled grenade, truck or car bomb, earthquake or
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other natural disaster, poisoning, civil uprising, terrorist activity, hand to hand
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combat or disease, etc. Killed or maimed while passenger in a helicopter or
10:48
other aircraft, suffering hearing loss, eye injury or loss, inhalation or contact
10:54
with biological or chemical weapons, whether airborne or not, and or flying debris,
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et cetera. I don't know if you can remember precisely your emotions when
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you read that for the first time, but but I think you know the
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audience will be fascinated for you to sort of go back in time and just
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describe in a way how much of that came to pass and how it affected
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you and all of those that you were with. I mean, who wouldn't
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want to sign up for that? You wrote it, read it so eloquently.
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It's interesting because looking back, that is the business part of private security
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that you're reading, right, You sign a contract and they give you all
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these things that are like, you can't hold us liable if you know your
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leg gets chopped off. A lot of that stuff came to pass, not
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for me particularly, but you can read about it in the book where we
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had nine contractors die in April two thousand and four, and these are your
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friends, like these are the people that we would drink beer with, eat
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lunch with on a daily basis. There were a number of people that were
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injured that we were out there next to the burn pits. You know that's
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all the rage. Now you're sitting there just soaking in all those toxins that
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they were burning. Almost all of that stuff actually came true for people within
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Blackwater at one point to the other. Now, the irony of it is,
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you sign this contract and when you get home there is no va,
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there's no like, there's no department that goes and helps contractors. So you
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put yourself in the exact same harms way, and people say, yeah,
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well you made a lot more money than the soldiers, and they're right,
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so we did it willingly. But when you look at all those things that
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happen and the effects that they have long term, there is no support system
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for contractors, and what you're seeing now is the contractor paradigm has not It
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is not shrunk very much. They've just figured out different ways to do it
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right. There's contractors in Syria, there in the Ukraine, They're over in
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Israel, well, anywhere where there's a hotspot, there's private military contractors that
13:03
are over there training the local forces. So we also have them at the
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US Mexico border, which I don't know how much your listeners are familiar with,
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but there's just a huge influx of migrants coming through the border, and
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instead of having government agencies, they are sending private military contractors down there to
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do some of that work. So you get done contracting, it's just you.
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It's just you and your thoughts, so all those same thoughts you have
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as a soldier that goes overseas. You come home and you don't come back
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with your buddies. It's just you, and you're seeing the high suicide rates
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among contractors. PTSD rates are like just astronomical for contractors because they're over there
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year after year after year because that's how they make their living, and then
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come home and nobody cares. They say, oh, well, you were
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just a contractor. So it's a very weird space to be. If I
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could go back when I was signing the contract and look at somebody and say,
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you're signing this contract, the first thing I would tell them is don't
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do it, absolutely, don't do it. Really Wow, Yeah, I
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mean there's a lot of that. I was sort of going to come on
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too, and in particular, like you say, the sort of support,
14:16
the after service support as it were, I mean, in the United Kingdom,
14:20
there's still a very strong feeling that even enforces veterans are not being looked
14:26
after correctly and exactly the period that you identified that that time which was in
14:31
effect a quiet period of just training and people just wanted to get into the
14:37
thick of it. But obviously, as you describe, on the private side,
14:43
absolutely no sort of care given to those afterwards. Is that something that
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you've seen change at all over the intervening twenty years? Are people? Is
14:50
there any sort of program that people that private military contractors are offered in terms
14:56
of sort of decompressed and decompressional rec management tool and management to any of that.
15:01
I mean, thankfully there's a Facebook page where you can go on and
15:05
you can complain but that's about it. And you know, I make a
15:11
joke about it, but that really is the support system as a bunch of
15:13
guys on Facebook and if somebody says I'm having a bad day, and they
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can go in and say, hey, give me a call or something along
15:20
those lines. But there is no support system. Now. Thankfully a lot
15:24
of us were prior service. There are VA resources for those that were prior
15:28
service, but if you can't tie that back to your time in the service,
15:33
the VA is not going to take care of you for your time when
15:35
you were over there as a contractor. So it hasn't gotten any better,
15:41
biting stretch of the imagination, and people that have left contracting are still having
15:46
a hard time. Right. You don't have you, you don't have your
15:48
paycheck that's coming in, you don't have like your friends that are around.
15:52
You don't have anybody to really talk to. And let's be honest, the
15:56
cost of going and talking to a therapist or something is pretty steep. And
16:02
a lot of these people are like stubborn, like me, Oh, I
16:06
can figure it out. I figured out all this other stuff. I've been
16:07
in more situations and then until the point that it reaches a crescendo, they
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can't figure it out, and something bad ultimately happens. Yeah, and I
16:18
think that well, I mean certainly that comes across strongly sort of in the
16:22
latter parts of your book. Just to go back a bit and talk about
16:26
the times that people obviously did form very close relationships on the ground in your
16:30
case in Iraq, talk to me about the Green Zone and the sort of
16:38
phenomenon of its existence and what went on within that environment and all the different
16:45
operators within that place, and indeed the way that people were able to conduct
16:49
themselves, which I think will be probably quite surprising. You might want to
16:55
spare some of the details, but just an overall in a view of the
17:00
Green Zone and exactly what role it played in, you know, the whole
17:04
piece for you, for Blackwaters, and for all the other agencies involved.
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Yeah. So the Green Zone was really the nucleus of US operations in Iraq,
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and it was supposed to be this utopian society where the Iraqis and the
17:21
you know, the the US forces all lived together. We had the big
17:23
embassy, which was Saddam's Palace, had a beautiful pool behind it. That's
17:27
where a lot of shenanigans went on, but there was. It was it
17:33
was ill thought out because it wasn't a big green zone. It wasn't just
17:37
big you know, mish mosh. It was like all these different compounds within
17:41
it. All of them are walled off, and even if you went into
17:45
the embassy you would see that. Right, you have the CIA over here,
17:48
other intelligence agencies, the Department of Defense. They would all kind of
17:52
wall themselves off, and then you had the local population that was moving in
17:56
and out of the green Zone on a regular basis. So I think it
18:00
was within like the first two months I was there, they had moved enough
18:04
bombs into the green zone to blow up one of the local markets. So
18:08
they blow up a market, they blew up one of the one of the
18:14
local restaurants where the diplomats would go and hang out to do some of their
18:18
meetings. So there was no way of keeping things separated. But the green
18:23
zone was also where you could you could party, you could get alcohol,
18:26
you could get steroids, you could get they had they had a nightclub underneath
18:32
the hotel where you could go and you could hang out at this nightclub and
18:34
dance around like you were just a normal human and a normal place. So
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it was a very if you could take all the crazy things from college and
18:45
put them all together. Right, you have your people that are really really
18:49
focused on studying, and then you have your people that are only there at
18:53
a party, and then you have your in between. That was the Green
18:56
Zone with you know, frat parties on one side and then on the other
18:59
side people that are trying to create policies to move Iraq forward. Is a
19:04
sovereign country and I the movie Green Zone. I actually finally watched that thing.
19:11
It was quite a bit more accurate than I thought, because if you
19:14
didn't live it, you you just have no idea. The best thing about
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the Green Zone, though, is the pool was right behind the import and
19:22
the chow hall where we ate everything was right there by the door, so
19:26
you could sneak into the embassy after you've been drinking for four or five hours
19:30
and steal all the pop tarts on the way to your on the way to
19:33
your hoots, so you could lay down. So it positive for me.
19:37
If you're if you're waging a war, I would say it's probably not the
19:41
best way to try to do it. You know what I was going to
19:42
ask about was really the blurring of the lines between well, I suppose military,
19:51
civilian, diplomatic, you know, other agencies, intelligence agencies and whatnot,
19:56
having in effect everybody there in one melting and obviously notwithstanding what you're saying
20:00
about separate compounds, but was there that sense that the relationships between the different
20:08
agencies were perhaps compromised because of that? Yeah, well, I mean we
20:14
all hated each other. The military hated the private contractors because we'd get drunk
20:19
at the pool and then they'd have to send the MPs out and be like,
20:22
hey, guys, time to go home. It's like, well,
20:25
can you get a dui over in Iraq? I don't even know should I
20:27
drive my suburban or should I? Should I walk home? But there was
20:33
always like a fight of who was going to get the credit for what was
20:38
going right. Nobody ever wanted the credit for what was going wrong, but
20:41
you could see it at the pool where you're hanging out with all these different
20:47
agencies and military people, and the military people did not like the agencies or
20:51
the contractors because we didn't have to play by the rules. So military guy
20:55
would come up and say, hey, you're not allowed to have a loaded
20:57
weapon. In here, and I'd be like, yeah, I can because
21:00
I had this fancy w on my badge, which meant that I could.
21:03
I could walk around with a loaded weapon. But nobody knew what the other
21:07
one was doing. Even if you look at our operations, if we were
21:12
driving to northern Baghdad to move evidence for Saddam Hussein's trial, we never told
21:18
the army where we were going, when we were going, how we were
21:22
going to get there, what routes we were taking. If you lost radio
21:25
communication, there was no savior. It was just you and the twelve people
21:30
and your diplomat. You just had to make sure that that person was alive
21:33
in again, so you couldn't go into Baghdad and not run into each other.
21:41
And I hear these stories all the time from military members say, oh,
21:44
I remember you guys, we shot at you. And I said,
21:45
well, you guys are terrible aims because you guys didn't Hitty and the os.
21:48
But it would happen all the time. We would just be driving and
21:52
we'd come up on the back of a convoy, British convoy, an American
21:56
convoy, another PMC convoy, and it was just havoc on the road.
22:00
Because that's what you want to do. You want to control the road so
22:04
that you can protect yourself as much as possible. I think anybody with any
22:08
experience of government departments or indeed military departments will know that in fighting and being
22:14
at longheads is very much par for the course. But did you were you
22:18
aware of the system you described as being designed to work like that, as
22:23
in there was a deliberate separation with no overlap or sort of shared communications network
22:30
or is that just the way that people decided that they wanted to play it.
22:34
Oh? No, everybody was just making up their own rules. I
22:38
mean it goes all the way back to the invasion of the war that was
22:41
not terribly well designed. There was no there was no after we do combat
22:47
operations, what's happened or what happens. So everybody just kind of grabbed their
22:51
own little piece of land, put their own base on it, and said,
22:53
Okay, I'm going to operate out of this. And the same thing
22:56
happened when we gave over the government to Iraq. The Iraqi government is everybody
23:03
was going to play by their own rules. Everybody was going to try to
23:04
take credit for where they could a lot of people in the military did not
23:08
want to be there. I mean, why would you. I mean,
23:11
maybe the dysentery is really good, it's taken ocembic. But a lot of
23:18
the agency people would volunteer to go over there, so they for them,
23:22
it was a career booster for your you know, E one, e two,
23:25
your lower enlisted guys. It was just a slog, and it was
23:27
a year long slog. And you would see these people coming in and out
23:33
for three months and they're talking about how great they're doing and how amazing it
23:37
is. And you know, you spread that out, you extend that runway
23:40
to a year, and anybody that was on the ground could see that it
23:45
was not going well. But every time you had the news on, they
23:48
would talk about, Oh, how great it's going, and it's amazing.
23:51
I remember I was on a phone call and this is in the book.
23:55
I'm talking to my aunt and there's this huge car bomb that blows up,
23:59
like right outside the thing, and my Aunt's like, oh, how's it
24:00
going. Like like I'm just hanging out over there doing the daily stuff,
24:04
getting my milk and cereal and you know, going out to the local walmart,
24:11
and it's like it's it's fine because what they were seeing back home just
24:15
wasn't the case on the ground. And I think we did that for twenty
24:18
years. We did the same thing in Afghanistan for twenty plus years, and
24:22
you see how it turns out when when you're sitting there lying to yourself and
24:25
lying to the populace that's funding it for that long. Yeah, I think
24:29
we'll come back to the sort of distorted picture of reality that was broadcast back
24:33
to certainly into the West. You've spoken about the in effect, the sort
24:37
of the absence of rules and you know, scant regard for laws and practices,
24:42
and that just talk me through from the Blackwater point of view, taught
24:48
me through your your training, but also specifically with regard to rules of engagement
24:52
and how you were exposed to or at least asked to treat the law on
25:00
conflict and that side debate. The short answer is that there was no training
25:06
on the rules of engagement the large the laws bank of armed conflict. Now
25:11
a lot of us are prior military, prior police officers. Like the morality
25:17
compass still pointed North, we weren't going to go out there and just try
25:19
to recavoc on everybody to do it. I'm not saying there weren't people that
25:22
did, but I think you have that in the military the same way you
25:26
have it with contractors, the same way that you have it with different agencies.
25:29
So this is where it gets really really gray. Whose jurisdiction do you
25:34
fall unders a private military contract? So you're outside the wire, which means
25:38
you're theoretically governed by the laws of Iraq because you're in Iraq, but you're
25:45
not governed by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the military legal system.
25:49
Whose laws are you actually governed by, Like you can't be governed by the
25:55
state laws, you know, back in Arizona or Texas or wherever you're at.
25:59
And I think that politicians have made a conscious decision to not define that,
26:07
because if you define it and something bad happens, it says, well,
26:10
who was doing oversight on this, Who was the person or the agency
26:14
that said, we did this contract, We made sure that they were trained
26:17
to do X, and they did Y, and that's on us and it's
26:21
on that individual. So it was really just every day, if you had
26:26
to do something that you didn't necessarily like, could you go and put your
26:30
head on your pillow and say, hey, I did the right thing or
26:33
could you not? I wish I could say that they sat us down and
26:37
told us that these are all the rules of engagement. But in four car
26:41
bombs were all the rage, and you served every car over there is white
26:48
with like orange doors on it. So you go and you get your intel
26:51
brief and they say, hey, we have an intelligence assessment that says that
26:55
there's a car bomb and it's in a car with white on the front and
26:59
orange on the doors. That's every car and bag. So what do you
27:03
do when a car like that is screaming up on you? Do you engage
27:06
that car? You have a very important person that's in the vehicle with you.
27:11
It could be a US senator, it could be the ambassador to Iraq,
27:15
Like, how do you react to that? And there is no right
27:18
answer because if you engage it, you could get in trouble. If you
27:21
don't engage it, it could blow you up and kill everybody. So you
27:25
just kind of figured out how you could get your pillow or your head on
27:26
your pillow at night sleep. I think that's really well articulated, and that
27:30
gives an insight into the incredibly difficult sort of second by second decision making process
27:34
that people have to go through on the ground all the time. Just to
27:41
sort of tease that out a bit further. Did it come up as a
27:45
talking point within Blackwater? And that's part of the question. The other thing
27:49
is you're just talking about intelligence, access to intelligence on which you could base
27:56
these sorts of decisions. How did that work? Especially being a long military
28:00
on other agencies. So we did have access to like the big intelligence system
28:07
over in the US embassy, so its military, it was the agency stuff,
28:11
and you could go in there and get like an intelligence summary, like
28:17
what's happening, where the bomb's happening. You could do if you're probably not
28:22
familiar with it. But there's this big wheel and they put the days of
28:25
the week, and they put the months of the day, and it'll say,
28:26
hey, there's bombs that are going off here, here, and here,
28:30
and these are the days that are doing it. So you can kind
28:30
of see where there's patterns. But there was no regular intelligence thing that came
28:37
to our email and said, hey, by the way, if you go
28:40
down Hyphas Street today. There were seventeen Iranians that were moved into there,
28:44
and they're part of the Republican Guard. There was none of that, So
28:47
it was really just us using that intel to decide how we were going to
28:51
drive the roads and where we were going to drive, without a whole lot
28:55
of you know, actual in depth ideas of what was actually happening on the
29:00
ground, and just quickly because I mean you may not have necessarily a bearing
29:06
on it, but I know, after this phase of your life, you
29:08
then went back, you went into the army and served in army intelligence.
29:12
Did you ever deal with private military contractors in that job? I mean I
29:18
dealt with private military contractors about as much as I dealt with the army when
29:22
I was a private military contractor. So they would come into the base and
29:27
I would be like, what the heck are these guys doing in my area
29:30
of operation? Like why are they here? And I would go over there
29:34
and talk to him and they say, oh, yeah, I'm picking up
29:37
a dog for this guy, and then I'm going to drive it over to
29:40
it. It was the same thing in nine and ten when we were kind
29:44
of winding down the war, and from an intelligence officer perspective, it was
29:48
extremely frustrating because it's not that difficult, and it's both ways for the army
29:56
to reach out to the PMCs and or the PMCs to reach out to the
29:59
military, but they don't really want to, like that's that's extra work,
30:03
and you know what, I can use that time to go work out or
30:06
I can you know, walk to the pizza inn or the burger king if
30:08
you're lucky enough to be right there. So yeah, it's it's frustrating on
30:12
both sides, but neither side actually cares enough to try to bridge that gap.
30:18
Yeah, I think I think that will resonate with the with the military
30:21
and xt military audience that UK column has. I mean, the constant refrain
30:26
about learning the lessons and then absolutely refusing to learn them by passing them on
30:30
or indeed talking to anybody about them. Just going back to the bigger picture
30:34
stuff, because you do, you know, you do write, particularly towards
30:37
the end of the book, more about the rebuilding of Iraq and clearly a
30:45
very serious subject, having had time to think about and reflect on it from
30:51
what you saw on the ground. Do you think if we sort of perhaps
30:56
separate the issue of whether there was any need for anyone to be there in
31:00
the first place, but the fact that it hot happened and people were there.
31:04
Do you think there's a way in which things could have been done differently
31:07
for a different or better outcome. No, And the reason is is that
31:14
you have the Sunnis and the Shiahs in the Kurds all within a single state.
31:18
None of these sectarian groups like each other. They never have, they
31:25
never will. So the only way that we could have made it better is
31:30
if we would not have interjected ourselves for as long as we did. So
31:36
just kind of background, the Soonies and the Shias have been fighting since Muhammad
31:38
died on who could take over the Muslim religion. They are going to fight.
31:44
Saddam Hussein was a Sunni and he kept everybody in check, you know,
31:48
iron, iron fist, like horrible human, not giving him any credit,
31:52
but he kept all that stuff in check. As soon as he was
31:56
taken out of that equation, the Sunnis were like, we've got thirty forty
32:00
years of retribution that we want to get back, and it was going to
32:04
happen. So that's when three or four you had the kill squads going through
32:07
Baghdad. You had all of the neighborhoods that were separating themselves into soonees versus
32:14
Shias. You had the Kurds up north that essentially said if you go north
32:16
to kirk Cook, this is our country. Don't come And there's no way
32:21
that you're going to be able to take thousands of years of fighting and arguing
32:27
and come in there and give them a democracy. At some point, two
32:31
kids are going to sit there at the playground. They're going to argue and
32:35
they're going to fight at the bike rack. That's what was going to happen.
32:37
It didn't matter if we stayed there for two years or two hundred years.
32:39
It was always going to happen. And that's what you see right now.
32:43
You see the suns control of the government. I'm sorry she has controlled
32:47
the government. The Sunnies are pissed off about it because they had control for
32:51
so long. And then the Kurds just are trying to be up there saying
32:53
leave me alone. I have to fight Turkey because I want to create curve.
32:58
Standup, how do you how do you change that much history over the
33:02
course of the three years and say, eh, democracy is good. You
33:07
guys are really going to enjoy the heck out of this stuff. It's never
33:09
going to happen. And with that in mind, Would I be right in
33:14
thinking that that's that that sort of encapsulates your view on let's say, US
33:19
foreign policy all over the world, Oh, one hundred percent. We continue
33:24
to get ourselves in places where it's not going to change the outcome. And
33:30
if it's not going to change the outcome, then then why the heck are
33:32
we doing it? Why are we sacrificing you know, literal human beings,
33:37
people that have families and loved ones. And that's on the US side,
33:42
and it's on you know, you could say with the Ukrainians, the Russians,
33:45
these people have families and lives and you are literally decimating an entire generation
33:50
of that with that trauma, and the end is going to be the same
33:54
anyway, it's not going to change. So I think when we look at
33:59
diplomacy, we need to stop leading with PMCs because right now we're not putting
34:05
boots on the ground. It's not politically advantageous. So we leave with PMCs
34:08
and then it slowly gets built up and built up. Vietnam was the same
34:13
way. We started over there with advisors and then we built up, and
34:15
we built up, and we built up. We're not learning from history and
34:20
I don't think anybody would look at Vietnam and say, Wow, we really
34:22
went in there and gave them the heck out of that democracy and they enjoyed
34:24
it. So if we can't affect it, I think you just you just
34:30
have to let those kids fight at the bike rack and then afterwards usually they
34:34
shake hands and they're going to be okay. Yeah, I mean, I
34:36
think that's a that's a view that will resonate with the audience for sure.
34:42
You write about this again towards the end and you say US government agencies,
34:50
including PMCs, must be held to strict standards and accountability and combat zones,
34:54
just as US military forces are, as their conduct reflects US foreign policy and
35:00
national defense. I mean, that's a very cogent, sane statement. But
35:07
do you think it's one that is ever going to get through in Washington or
35:13
London or wherever else. No, because it's too easy to send private security
35:19
contractors over there right now, and it's everywhere. It's easier to send private
35:24
security contractors down to the US Mexico border to move unaccompanied minors throughout the United
35:31
States. It's easier to send them to Syria because if you put boots on
35:35
the ground and somebody dies or somebody gets hurt, it's going to be in
35:38
the news cycle for two, three four weeks. If you send a civilian
35:43
over there that signed up for it and is making more money, there's a
35:46
lot less sympathy for PMCs. So I would say two and a half months
35:51
ago there was some PMCs that died in Syria. It made the new cycle
35:54
for about three seconds. And then we had the US troops in Jordan where
36:00
they had the drone attack that ended up killing I think killed one and ended
36:04
up hurting a number of the other ones. And that was in the new
36:07
cycle for three four or five weeks because nobody knew that we had this base
36:12
in Jordan anyway. So it's going to be so much easier just to create
36:16
these bases with PMCs and kind of scattered military members among them, and if
36:22
somebody gets hurt, I mean, I hate to, you know, think
36:27
of this, but I think people up in Washington, d c. Are
36:29
sitting there playing paper rock scissors, like if there's an attack, hopefully they
36:32
just get a civilian instead of a military member, because it's not going to
36:36
look good for US. Absolutely, And talking about again about the sort of
36:39
hierarchical nature of all these of all these entities. Something that struck me was
36:45
the way in which you described people. I mean, you left you left
36:50
intelligence as a captain, and you wrote, I would say very damningly but
36:55
fairly accurately, obviously about about those of the rank of major above, describing
37:02
them as staff gods who contribute zero to the military. I think it'd be
37:08
really interesting for the audience is to understand where that, where that comes from,
37:13
and how it transfers, you know, across other spectrums, not just
37:19
the military. I mean, was there a level in Blackwater above which you've
37:22
considered that people were could be described as such or indeed you've seen it sort
37:28
of outside in the civilian world. Yeah, there's always that middle management piece
37:32
that tries to be more important than they are. Right in the military,
37:40
you're usually at the company greater below, all right, So if you're a
37:44
captain, you're going to be at the company level, you're probably going to
37:46
be doing combat operations. Once you make major, you're not doing any of
37:51
that stuff. What you are doing is you're going around and you're nitpicking people
37:54
on how they're doing stuff. Anybody that spent time in the military has dealt
38:00
with, like vehicle inspections, and there's this overweight you know, major that
38:06
comes out there and says, oh, your steering wheel was tilted a little
38:08
to the right. It needs to be in the middle. You're not adding
38:12
any value to anybody's life, especially in combat operations. And that's where a
38:17
lot of the Majors kind of found themselves as they were in this this middle
38:23
management rung where they didn't have it. Like, they weren't cool guys,
38:28
they weren't on the ground doing stuff, and they weren't decision makers. So
38:30
they just hung out there in that purgatory that misery. I kind of feel
38:34
bad for them, but not really because I didn't like any of them.
38:38
But you see that in corporate America, you see it in the different agencies.
38:45
Blackwater did not have it as much because that's the whole that's the whole
38:51
point to Blackwaters. We can do it a lot more efficient, we can
38:53
do it for cheaper, we can do it with a lot less people,
38:58
So there was much less middle management. However, there's still that distance in
39:05
between the people on the ground and the people that run the company or run
39:08
the operations or say this is my strategy. Eric Prince will sit there and
39:13
go on podcasts all day and talk about how great we were, the amazing
39:16
things that Blackwater did. He just wasn't on the ground with us. And
39:21
I'm not saying we didn't do some of those things, but he conveniently leaves
39:24
out a lot of the stuff that happened with pmc's not being regulated because his
39:30
whole push is we were more efficient. You have to find that balance between
39:34
regulation and efficiency or you're going to have I mean, essentially what we had
39:37
in Iraq and Afghanistan for years and years and years, where the generals are
39:44
hearing good news stories at all their briefings from all these kernels, and then
39:49
what's really happening on the ground is like, you know, hey, we
39:52
just had a guy that was wounded, we had a guy that died,
39:53
Like, we don't want to be here. This doesn't make any sense.
39:55
We haven't made any tangible progress on the ground. So there's no way to
40:02
actually fix it, is the problem. Unless you have the general that goes
40:07
down there and hangs out in a hum V for three weeks, and it's
40:10
got to be three weeks. Generals go down all the time and they say,
40:15
oh, I want to go on a combat operation, and they say
40:16
perfect, and they drive them out the front gate and they go to this
40:20
little place where they sell rugs. They say, look at how safe it
40:24
is. Well, for three weeks before that they literally cleared everything out to
40:28
make sure it was ul for safe. Generals CEOs they will never see the
40:34
ground perspective, because they have too many rungs of stupidity between them and the
40:38
people on the ground that are actually doing it. They'll make sure they don't
40:42
see it. I think that will ring true for everybody watching and listening,
40:46
and I think very well articulated. It reminds me of the publication on I
40:52
think it was New Year's Day this year of in the States, the Declaration
40:55
of Military Accountability. Is that something you're aware of? Put up written by
41:02
I think about two hundred and fifty serving and ex serving members of the armed
41:07
forces, essentially wanting to hold leadership to account. One of their strong themes
41:13
was the way that service personnel were treated over COVID vaccine mandates and effectively a
41:19
sort of dereliction of duty and the lack of welfare. I mean, whether
41:22
or not that's something you are aware of do you think that there's any way
41:27
in which ground can be made to sort of counter some of the negligence of
41:32
the leadership of the armed forces. Not until somebody puts their rank on the
41:37
table it says, I'm leaving if you keep doing this. In Afghanistan,
41:43
nobody would say that that exit was good. And it was. I mean,
41:47
there are people that try to spin it, but nobody can look at
41:51
that and say that was a positive. There was also no general, there
41:55
was no Joint chise of Staff member that put their rank on the table said
42:00
this is such a bad idea, I don't want to be a part of
42:01
it. Slide that over to the president. What happens is once you get
42:07
to that six, that kernel level and higher, you become more of a
42:10
politician than you become an actual ground leader. So all these people are looking
42:16
at their careers, they're looking at I don't want to give anybody bad news.
42:21
That's part of that middle management that makes it to where people don't understand
42:23
what's happening on the ground. Somebody needs to stand up and say I won't
42:29
do this anymore and get a big enough microphone to say this is why this
42:34
is a bad idea before anything will ever change. And I just don't think
42:39
the military has become such a political apparatus in the United States that I don't
42:45
think that there's anybody that's willing to do that. I think you absolutely right,
42:49
and it certainly looks that way. Just to change tax slightly, getting
42:52
to go back a bit, because you did allude to it somewhat in the
42:55
way that PMCs are continuing to be used all over the world, and that
43:00
just to look at others, and I mean you talked about Ukraine. What's
43:06
your take on the Wagner Group and the way that that's been sort of reported
43:12
and the actions of it and those around it. So the Wagner Group is
43:19
really kind of unique in that it is actually almost a branch of the military.
43:23
Now it is a rogue branch. It is the branch that can go
43:27
out and do their own stuff. Most PMCs do not have, like the
43:32
war material to be able to do their own operations. Right. It was
43:37
US, it was three suburbans and rifles and pistols and that was about it.
43:43
The Wagner Group, I mean, they have tanks, they have artillery.
43:45
They are a full scale unit that can go and they can take ground
43:51
and they can hold ground. So it is I mean from a Russian perspective,
43:57
it's a spectacular strategy because you can distance yourself from it and say,
44:01
oh, that was the Wagner group and they have you know, this leader
44:05
and he went rogue. And on the other hand, as you can say,
44:07
hey, guys, you know super secret, like go over there and
44:10
take that village, go go do whatever you need to do to get us
44:15
this strategic standpoint so that I can then go in there with my military forces
44:20
that are more regulated and be able to say, yes, we've got that.
44:23
So Wagner's definitely I think it's in a category of its own. But
44:29
I also think that if you continued down the PMC route and you continue to
44:34
allow them to get these military vehicles, these m wraps, these mamas,
44:38
the ones that are literally used in combat operations across the world, that I
44:45
wouldn't be shocked if you started seeing some of that. We could get.
44:49
We could get anti tanka or law rockets, the light anti take weapons we
44:53
could get. We could get two forty provos fifty cals. We didn't get
44:57
anything we wanted because we had booze. It's pretty easy to go over there
45:00
and say, hey, if you guys lose a fifty cal here's a Bible
45:02
of Jack Daniels. So it was happening kind of regardless, but we were
45:08
never going to be offensive in the way that the Wagner group was offensive.
45:12
Yeah, well, thank you for that. That's a really good sort of
45:15
comparison. And you know, it leads one on to clearly that what drives
45:20
all of it, which is money, the sort of endless supply of money
45:22
for all of this. Just you could just paint a picture of the how
45:28
it works, or how it did work when you were with Blackwater, and
45:30
whether anything's changed over the course of time. I suppose specifically between the United
45:36
States Administration and any private military contractor that it uses. How does that system
45:40
work. It is like a three to four arms length process. And I
45:46
call it the single serve Starbucks coffee cup of combat operations. And I'll explain
45:52
why. So what happens is the Department of State goes and they contract and
45:58
say we need a thousand people. Blackwater gets that contract. Blackwater then subcontracts
46:02
out to other companies. So it could have been Triple Canopy, it could
46:06
have been Aegis right, which was the big British PMC one, and each
46:09
one of them villa little part of that. And then underneath that you have
46:14
me, which is the private military contractor. So I am a independent contractor.
46:21
So if anything happens, if I do anything stupid, it's Morgan,
46:25
and then it's Blackwater, and then it's the State Department, and then you
46:29
could go all the way up to Chain right. But it allows every single
46:32
part of them to say it wasn't me, it was that guy. It's
46:36
like the Spider Man meme where everybody's pointing at each other, except there's one
46:38
guy in the middle, and it's me. So that's why I say it's
46:43
like a single US Starbucks coffee cup, is they will use you until they
46:47
don't need you anymore. So you go, you grab your Starbucks, you
46:50
drink it, You leave like a third of it in there because it's cold
46:52
and gross, so you guys drink more tea over there. Not judging it's
46:55
not a big deal. But when you're done with that coffee cup, whether
47:00
there's coffee left in it or not, you just throw it away. And
47:04
that's kind of what the State Department did. If we don't need you we're
47:06
going to cut you if we don't. Like we had guys getting fired for
47:09
the dumbest stuff. We had a guy that got fired because he didn't want
47:12
to walk all the way to the bathroom and he peed on a fence,
47:15
and a State department guy saw him peeing on a fence and was like,
47:16
fire that guy. So it really allows them to flex personnel into a needed
47:27
area and then do whatever they want with that individual because there's no there's no
47:31
retribution. If you fire somebody who works for the State Department, it could
47:35
take you four or five six months to go through that process. Or you
47:38
can see that guy peeing on the fence and say get him out of here,
47:42
and he's gone. I like the analogy the cup of coffee. It
47:45
works very well. Now, just going back to your quote from the book,
47:51
which I think, will you know, really what does thought provoking?
47:54
Between the air Force, Blackwater and the army. I saw the evolution of
47:58
war from the ground defensive to the peak of the fighting to the drawdown.
48:02
I can't tell if we lost, but I know we didn't win now.
48:07
In and two and eleven, Julian Assan is regularly quoted saying of Afghanistan,
48:15
that the goal is an endless war and not a successful war. In light
48:21
of what you've just been describing, how do you see that statement and in
48:29
effect the future of the sort of the military industrial complex and what you've just
48:32
been describing. Yeah, I think Julian Assange is giving a little bit more
48:37
credit to the people than they deserve, because I don't think there's any intent
48:42
at all. I think what happens is and it's human nature. You go
48:45
and you make a bad investment, you bought bitcoin, Bitcoin plummets. What
48:52
do you do? You hang on to that bitcoin. Usually you'll kind of
48:55
invest more and say, oh, I hope it gets better. And that
49:00
was the succession of events in Iraq and Afghanistan. We went over there,
49:04
the initial goal of combat operations was done, and then it says, oh,
49:08
we were not really doing what we thought we would. Let's throw more
49:12
money at it, throw more people at it. Let's let's keep going because
49:15
we're on the right path. And it becomes this morality issue where US politicians
49:22
want to say, we did this, it was the right thing to do.
49:23
We're going to stick with it for as long as we possibly have to
49:27
in order for it to go until finally somebody comes in and says, no,
49:30
you got to cut your losses. So Julian Massage is right in that
49:36
there was no winning or losing of those wars. But I don't think that
49:39
there was enough forethought of anybody except oh, if we if we just do
49:45
more, if we just keep throwing more money at it, more people and
49:47
more you know, deaths and more, it's going to work out. And
49:52
it was never going to And what about the media in all of this?
49:55
What part I mean? You were just talking about how in effect in terms
49:59
of media coverage are insignificant. The deaths of anybody working for a PMC can
50:05
be or at least can be treated by the media. How do you see
50:08
the role of media in the conduct of you know, operations overseas well?
50:15
The media is only going to be as good as the information that they get
50:17
right, garbage in, garbage out data. So they're getting a lot of
50:22
their information from those politicians, from those generals, from those people that actually
50:27
aren't on the ground doing stuff, So they reported what they thought was accurate
50:31
until it becomes the same talking point over and over again, and somebody's got
50:36
to find a new angle for it. That's when I think you started seeing
50:39
an oh five oh six where the war stuff started getting some like negative connotations
50:45
associated with it. I think the media needs to dig below the initial talking
50:53
point that you see and say, what is going on with PMCs. I
50:59
I can't I can't fathom that these things aren't being reported on on a daily
51:05
basis. Hey, we're not putting boots on the ground, but we're still
51:07
putting American citizens over there that are dying and we're having to bring them home
51:10
in bodybags. Like they're still US citizens that are dying overseas for these different
51:16
wars. And it feels like the journalists are just kind of putting blinders on
51:22
right now because if it's not sensational, if it's not something that you can
51:27
report on in twenty four hours to forty eight hours, it's not worth putting
51:30
the time and effort in to identify why are these contracts still happening, how
51:35
much money is going to PMCs, Where is that money going, Like the
51:38
fact that you have a private military company on the US Mexico border that is
51:44
taking unaccompanied minors into the United States with very little if any documentation of who
51:52
they're dropping them off with are they related? Like I would be shocked that
51:55
these kids had any kind of birth certificate showing who they were. And then
52:00
what happens when one of these kids ends up dying or something bad happens,
52:05
what's going to happen? Who actually looked into that? And I'll tell you
52:08
it's not going to be the government agency. It's got to be a journalist.
52:10
At this point, they can literally dig down and say this kid went
52:15
from point A to point B, and then this is what happened. Whether
52:19
it's good or it's bad. Somebody needs to understand that we are outsourcing morality
52:23
at this point. We are outsourcing combat operations. We are outsourcing moving children,
52:30
we are outsourcing training other individuals, We're outsourcing police operations. These are
52:36
very morally poignant jobs that we are just getting to people and saying, hey,
52:44
you've got two weeks of training, come on in. That makes no
52:45
sense to me. Don't get me wrong, I made a lot of money
52:49
on it. I was very happy back back then. But now that I'm
52:52
older and I have kids, it seems ridiculous. Outsourcing morality, I think
52:57
is an excellent unbred to for all that you do describe and in fact,
53:02
specifically on the border issue. That is something that UK column does cover via
53:07
our US correspondent, so that will definitely inform parts of the future news cycle.
53:15
And what you've just said, I mean, what I would like to,
53:19
you know, sort of move towards ors to wind up with really is
53:22
just tell me about writing the book. You know, you've spoken a lot
53:25
about the lack of care or support that people who've gone chosen your path have
53:32
received. Obviously you've you've been on both sides of the fence, But just
53:38
describe the motivation for writing the book and the actual process by which you got
53:44
through it. I would imagine, looking at a lot of the subject matter,
53:47
it must have been either cathartic or traumatic to write, or perhaps both
53:52
at the same time. It was both. I think there was two reasons
53:59
to would write the book. Why was history is always done via pen,
54:04
not by a sword. Right, So when we look back at Iraq and
54:07
Afghanistan and the roles of PMCs have done. There are books out there.
54:12
They are written by Eric Prince, They're written by people that hate Erik Prince.
54:15
There needed to be a book written by the people that actually did it,
54:20
did the job nobody else was doing it, so hey, why the
54:22
heck not me? Second was every time I would tell a story about Blackwater,
54:28
And if you don't laugh when you read this book, like you may
54:32
need to go see a therapist. I mean, it was funny, and
54:35
that's what you do in combat, right, there are horrible things happening and
54:39
you just put humor on top of it to cope with it. So after
54:44
enough people finally told me, hey, these stories are hilarious and they're crazy.
54:47
I can't believe it actually happened. I just started putting pin to paper
54:51
to do it. I was hoping it was going to be cathartic. I
54:54
was hoping that I was going to be able to come to grips, you
54:57
know, with my mommy and daddy issues through Blackwater instance, my father.
55:00
I don't know what I was trying to get out of it, but it
55:04
ended up bringing up a bunch of crap that I had. I had buried
55:07
down into my little, my little jar that I didn't really want to open,
55:10
right, you know, somewhere my emotional jar. I don't know.
55:13
I haven't have to come cool term. But that's why with the book I
55:19
tried to give you what it was like, the good, the bad,
55:23
the emotional the anger, the frustration, like the tears, everything in the
55:29
book, because these are real people that are doing this stuff. When you
55:32
read a book about, you know, a politician writes a book. I
55:37
read Robert Gates's book and he was like, this soldier was missing his hand
55:43
and I went out to reach over and shake his hand, and I was
55:45
like, where's the emotion in that? Like, yes, he's losing a
55:47
hand, but where's the emotion of being able to say? I felt like
55:52
an idiot because I reached out my right hand when he was missing his.
55:57
And I thought about that for the next four hours. They put that stuff
56:00
in the books because they don't want to show the actual moral an emotional toll
56:05
that war takes out of people. So it was good and it was bad.
56:10
You you know, I got a little Catharsis out of it, and
56:13
then my wife friend it was like, oh my god, who'd I'm marry?
56:15
So, you know, fifty to fifty. Well, for what it's
56:19
worth, I think it is terrifically written. It is exactly as you described.
56:22
I mean, it's it's a NonStop, it's absolute wall to wall sort
56:27
of action. But the dialogue is fantastic and it's very poignant, very thoughtful.
56:31
I really would commend people to read it. But tell me now,
56:36
because you've been through all of this, you've had many I don't know if
56:42
demons is quite the right word, but you found yourself in some places that
56:46
have been mentally challenging to deal with, but you've obviously got on top of
56:52
that. You described yourself, I think, and I hope I'm current as
56:54
being sort of in corporate America. Now, how is that? How is
56:59
life there? All of these experiences? I mean, life is life is
57:04
easy. And it's not that life is easy, it's that I've had people
57:10
reach out to me on a number of occasions at work and say, why
57:13
aren't you stressing out? Why aren't you freaking out? And it's like,
57:15
because, like this is not that big of a deal. We'll get it
57:17
figured out. Like I can't control all this stuff, so why not just
57:22
let it kind of go through its paces. As an intel officer, it
57:27
was always the first intelligence report you get is always wrong. Wait for the
57:30
second, because the second is either going to confirm it or you're going to
57:32
get new intel that's wrong. So wait for the third, the same thing
57:37
in corporate America is like, just it's not that big of a deal.
57:40
It's not going to change our profit and loss statement. You know, I'm
57:45
not that high up, I'm not cool enough, I'm not the CEO.
57:47
But I mean, corporate America is kind of a hoot because on this at
57:51
the same time, when you really want to get something done, and that's
57:54
how you're trained, you have to take that step back and say, all
57:59
right, these aren't you know, my teammates over Blackwater, my military soldiers
58:01
or anything else. Like, you just have to let the process play out.
58:06
And I think I think that's a lot of soldiers get into the corporate
58:09
America landscape and they think, wow, is this it? Yeah, that's
58:14
it. You know what, Like you had cool experiences, you have cool
58:15
stories, write them down, but you know, make your money as much
58:20
as you can and enjoy your life. Now you've already done your cool stuff,
58:22
just soak it in. So that leads me into I think we'll probably
58:28
be a question to wrap it up with, which is you did say very
58:32
briefly your your sort of opinion on this, but if you were to talk
58:36
to school leavers now indeed your own children when the time is right, what
58:40
would you say to them about the possibility of joining any of the armed forces
58:45
or looking at the world of private military contracting or anything within that orbit.
58:52
I mean, if my kids wanted to join the military, they absolutely could
58:57
and would. I would not actively encourage them, But I think that after
59:04
years of war, I'm a little bit tainted because I don't see the paradigm
59:07
changing where war is going to actually have a start date. And if that's
59:14
the case, then we're just throwing young people into, you know, the
59:19
wood chipper hoping that it gets better. So I would let my kids know,
59:23
join the military, get as much out of it as it gets out
59:27
of you, and then move on from it. I would tell nobody to
59:31
go into PMCs because the legal liability that you have if something happens to that
59:37
kid or over in Syria or the Ukraine, you have no legal repercussions,
59:44
but the US government has a lot of your money that it will spend going
59:47
after you for as long as it needs to, and they've shown that.
59:51
So if you're going to go into the PMC world, get a liability insurance
59:55
coverage for about eight billion dollars and then go and see if the return on
1:00:00
investment actually comes back. Because it is, it is not a place where
1:00:07
they won't throw you to the walls like the moment that something bad happens.
1:00:12
I think that's a very poignant note upon which to end. So what I
1:00:17
will remind you of is that notes and links for this interview will be posted
1:00:22
below this at UK column dot org. If you are in a position to
1:00:27
support UK Column financially so that we can continue to produce excellent interviews with guests
1:00:34
such as Morgan Lorette, then please do so, and again you can find
1:00:37
details for that at UK column dot org. So it just remains for me
1:00:40
to thank very much Morgan Lourete for joining me for a UK Column interview.
1:00:45
Morgan, it's been absolutely fantastic. I think your insights will absolutely electrify the
1:00:52
audience. And also before you go, what I would like you to do
1:00:58
please is just tell the audience where we can find your material, any social
1:01:05
media presence, but also where do we go to buy or view your book,
1:01:09
Guns, Girls and Greed. Yeah, so it's available on audio and
1:01:15
kindle and everything on Amazon. So if you're if you like me and you
1:01:19
actually want the hardcover you can grab it there. You can track me down
1:01:22
on x on Instagram if it ever, if it ever comes back online at
1:01:30
Blackwater Dude one really cool name. I don't know if I can, if
1:01:34
I can back that up, but happy, happy to talk to anybody out
1:01:37
there, and thank you so much for having me on. It's been absolute
1:01:39
pleasure, a tool. Thank you very much indeed,