Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror by Erik Prince Read Free Book Online

surgery, then chemotherapy and radiation. We were told her long blond hair—which I had come to know in photos, even before I’d actually met her—wouldn’t make it through the treatments. Joan and I visited a salon in Beverly Hills, where it was cut short. She cried. The stylist cried.
    By the morning of May 10, 1998, the predictions were coming true. Joan’s hair was falling out in handfuls. I’d flown back from Blackwater to spend the weekend in Michigan with her and the kids, and that Sunday morning, she asked me to shave off the rest of it. I can’t forget that date: It was Mother’s Day. That was the day I cried.

I learned to fly and to drive a boat while growing up in small-town Holland, Michigan, and had big dreams of attending the Naval Academy after high school. Here I am on the morning of my sixteenth birthday, after several solo flights—all before I got my automobile driver’s license.
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In 1965 my father, Edgar Prince, and six coworkers struck out on their own to create Prince Manufacturing, which initially manufactured die-casting machines. It soon became the largest employer in the town where I grew up.
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My excitement at enrolling in the Naval Academy (here with my mother, Elsa, and my father, Edgar) was short lived. I lasted only three semesters in Annapolis before my disillusionment with the culture there led me to Hillsdale College in Michigan.
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While a student at Hillsdale College, I became a rescue diver, an emergency medical technician, and, in 1989, joined the local fire department.
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Joan, my father, and I celebrated my commission upon graduation from Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1992.
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When we began building Blackwater it didn’t take many walks—like this stroll in 1997 with my daughter—through the muddy bog of the Great Dismal Swamp for the name of our future training center to become self-evident.
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For Al Clark (left) and me, as well as the other original members of the Blackwater team, scoping out the property in Moyock, North Carolina, often meant tangling with the local wildlife. Rattlesnakes like this were everywhere.
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I admired Ken Viera’s intensity from the moment I met him. He quickly made the transition from first-rate Special Operator to first-rate businessman and is shown here (left) escorting a leader of the FBI Hostage Response team during their first training event at Blackwater in 1998.
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Gary Jackson came to work for Blackwater in 1998 and quickly rose to the rank of company president. In 2006,
Fast Company
named him one of the fifty business leaders “writing the history of the next 10 years.”
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On the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp, Blackwater Training Center sat on a seven-thousand-acre campus complete with an airstrip, dozens of shooting ranges, a tactical driving track, a mock school building, a manmade lake, fighting cities, briefing facilities, floating ship simulators, a 350-seat dining hall, and lodging for four hundred. It was built to accommodate one thousand operators per day.
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During the building of Blackwater bears left claw marks on our utility poles, providing the inspiration for our logo. The logo went through a few cosmetic upgrades over the years, but the original elements—a bear paw inside of a crosshair—remained.
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Part of the Blackwater Baghdad State Department personal security team, whose mission it was to protect diplomats, dignitaries, and reconstruction officials.
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Prior to the beginning of Blackwater’s involvement in the War on Terror, Joan was fighting her own personal war against cancer. Here she is seen visiting the Holy Father John Paul II in May 2001, asking for his prayers while showing off her kids she loved so