Death of a Contractor

Now, at thirty, Ryan seemed to be trying to repeat a version of his father's life. He had three kids of his own, two with his ex-wife and another with an ex-girlfriend, and had already been in and out of the Air Force, where he had studied Arabic, Chinese and Spanish with military intelligence. But he had trouble sticking with anything for long. After leaving the service, he worked as a bartender, a clerk at a comic-book store and a manager at a computer company in Texas. He wanted to be a writer, or maybe design video games -- but he couldn't quite figure out how to get started. He was desperate to find some direction in life, and Iraq seemed like the perfect opportunity. When he heard about Ultra Services from his father, he wrote to Dawkins, who quickly hired him as logistics and services manager.

Manelick arrived in Iraq in late June brimming with idealism. He was excited about being part of something bigger than himself, about making his mark on the world. "My job is to find Iraqi people to help us build stuff in Iraq," he wrote to his friends and family. "When I find them, we build, and don't stop until there are no more jobs. So I am basically the King of the Grunts!" The work, he added, "is going to be exciting. We get to assist in building up a Third World economy."

What Manelick discovered in Iraq, however, was something new in the history of warfare: a privatized crusade. Thirteen years earlier, during the first Gulf campaign, there had been 100 military personnel for every civilian contractor in the field. This time, there are almost as many contractors as troops. Of the first $87 billion allocated for the war in 2003, the U.S. Army estimates that fully one-third was spent on contracts to private companies like Ultra Services. By the time Manelick arrived, the place was already crawling with all manner of idealists and patriots, cowboy operators and canny profit mongers, eager for a piece of the action.

The action wasn't hard to find. The U.S. military was handing out contracts as fast as it could, tens of millions of dollars with barely any oversight. Procurement for the 4th Infantry Division -- the Army outfit that became a major source of business for Ultra Services -- was handled by a single contracting office in Tikrit. There were just two officers in charge of the allocations, and they were responsible for covering the needs of 20,000 soldiers. That meant finding private contractors who could supply housing units, latrines, weapon slings, floodlights, lumber, video games, office furniture, the works. In the six months that Ryan Manelick was in Iraq, the two officers handed out somewhere between $60 million and $80 million in contracts.

Manelick slept in the company's office in Baghdad or at a room at the Al Majalis, a hotel that cost him six dollars a night. He found a group of expats to get drunk with. He water-skied the Tigris and got to know some Iraqi families; he joked about marrying an Iraqi girl and settling down there. But as far as business went, Manelick considered Ultra Services a complete disaster. Dawkins, he told friends, treated him like a dog from the start. After weeks on the road, going from military base to military base outside the Green Zone, Manelick had yet to be paid.

"Life royally sucks here," Ryan wrote to his father, who was also being courted by Dawkins to join the company. "My advice is that John is full of shit for the most part. He needs to become better organized before you go out on a limb doing business with him. I am basically 'trapped' here. I have been hit in the head with a crane and knocked unconscious, am in the middle of a royal cluster-fuck of a contract that has been ass end up since the beginning (John), and have had my computer stolen with everything important to me on it. I fucking give up. Get me out of here. NOW!"

He was lonely and overworked, and he blamed it on Dawkins. "I do the dirty work," Manelick wrote in an August e-mail to Amanda Sprang, his father's girlfriend, who was also considering coming to Iraq to work for Ultra Services. "Listen to me. Keep your dealings with him to a minimum. He is a liar. Plain and simple. He hides the facts, and I don't want a business partner or boss that is so slippery and unethical."

Manelick had been in Iraq for less than two months, but he was already plotting to break away from Dawkins and start his own company. He talked less about idealistic notions of helping Iraqis -- now he wanted to make the big money, and he began dreaming up grand, unrealistic schemes. "Ryan had all these plans," says Richard Galustian, a contractor who befriended Manelick in Iraq, "and he could talk about them forever -- he was a wonderful talker. But he had no idea how to make them work, or how far out of his league they were." Manelick wrote to his father about the two of them starting their own security outfit, assuring him that if they acted fast there was a $100 million contract for force protection and security training he was sure they could get. The plans were far removed from reality -- he wanted to build a company from nothing and compete with giant corporations like Bechtel or Halliburton in a matter of months -- but what was real was his intense desire to break away from Dawkins and start something new.

Dawkins, for his part, had his own problems with Manelick. He thought Ryan played it far too fast and loose, driving an SUV with untinted windows, wearing Ray-Bans and a goatee, doing nothing to fit in. Dawkins himself was a stickler about personal security. Without the protection of U.S. forces, private contractors were on their own, and Dawkins was particularly adept at slipping into the shadows. In Iraq, he wore tinted contact lenses to make his light-blue eyes look brown, dyed his skin darker, grew an Iraqi-style mustache, wore kaffiyehs and robes. He drove an armored BMW with tinted windows that he claimed had once been a vehicle in Saddam's personal fleet, and he slept in the homes of Iraqi families. He trusted no one, except for his bodyguard, Omar Taleb, an official in the Iraqi police and a former helicopter pilot in the Iraqi Air Force.