Heavy Metal Mercenary

Wolf Weiss is behind the wheel of the black GMC Yukon, speed-weaving through rush-hour traffic in Baghdad. He's headed for the border with Kuwait, 340 miles to the south, and he intends to keep "hard" -- that is, make instantly and absolutely clear to anyone who is thinking about wasting us that they will be wasted first. The vehicle is an arsenal on wheels. It's loaded with shoulder-launched anti-tank rockets, fragmentation grenades that have a "kill radius" of five meters and a box bolted to the hump between the seats that contains 2,000 rounds of ammunition. Weiss, a thirty-six-year-old American, has an AKS-47 slung over his shoulder with parachute cord, which he uses to leverage the weapon when he needs to shoot and steer at the same time. Next to him is a British-trained Nepalese Gurkha named Kedar, who has his own AK pointed out the passenger-side window. His job is to guard our right flank, from two o'clock to five o'clock. Next to me in the back is an Iraqi in tan combat gear who goes by "D" -- as in, "Don't be alarmed if D here starts to fire over your head" -- and behind us is our follow-on vehicle, a gray Yukon driven by an American named Scott, which has a belt-fed, fully automatic machine gun capable of firing 700 rounds a minute pointed out the back window.

"Locked, cocked and ready to rock!" Scott shouts to Weiss over the radio. As he guns the Yukon through the crowded streets, Weiss views the drivers all around us not as fellow motorists but as potential terrorists -- and we are their target. The director of a private security company that escorts supply convoys between cities and ferries clients to work, Weiss is a private gun for hire, part of the vast and growing army of for-profit contractors who are providing much of the firepower in Iraq. There are now an estimated 20,000 "operators" or "shooters," as they're known on the ground, making corporate soldiers the second-largest contingent in Iraq after the American military. For better or worse, these private military contractors have become an integral part of the occupation, the only force available to protect workers and officials as they attempt to rebuild schools and restore power. By government estimates, the for-profit militias could wind up costing American taxpayers more than $4 billion - a quarter of the cost budgeted for reconstruction. "A lot of people are calling us private armies -- and that's basically what we are," says Weiss. "This is not a security company. This is a paramilitary force."

Some of the private warriors sport such neat haircuts and tidy polo shirts that they look, at first, more like golf pros than gunslingers. Wolf Weiss, as his name suggests, is not the polo-shirt sort. He wears his body armor, and his bravado, at all times. He is not tall -- only five feet eight -- but his barrel chest is bursting out of his black bulletproof vest. His dark, crinkly hair, which hangs halfway down his back, is pulled back in a braid. His left bicep features a long, curling tattoo of a panther; the right displays a smaller one of the Grim Reaper playing the guitar. Beneath his vest, covering every inch of his back, is a tattoo that Weiss considers "a good representation of myself and my ideals in a nutshell" -- a full-color, full-face rendering of a wolf about to pounce. "If you look into the eyeball," he tells me later, "you'll see a hunter with his hands up." Sure enough, in one of the gleaming oracular pools, there is a tiny reflection of a predator, helpless in the knowledge that he has become the prey.

"The wolf is obviously me," Weiss says. "The man in the eyeball is Evil." As he drives, Weiss keeps changing lanes abruptly, cutting off other drivers in a high-octane dash for the desert. "Speed is security," he likes to say. If anyone evil manages to get close enough to look in on us, the first thing he sees will not be faces but muzzles poised to fire. So when a car pulls alongside the Yukon, Weiss floors it and swerves away. "Kedar, get him!" he yells. "Get him!"

Kedar swings his weapon around and trains it on the car. The driver takes the hint and immediately peels off.

Other contractors, especially the British, view such shows of force as unnecessary and insanely provocative. Treating everyone as hostile, they say, helps make people hostile: The more you point your weapons at innocent civilians, the harder it is to convince them that you're only here to help. Then again, Wolf isn't violating any industry standards, because for all practical purposes there are no industry standards. Anyone willing to carry a gun in Iraq can have a job in Iraq -- and those hired as shooters know that no matter how crazy or dangerous they act, they can almost certainly get a job with another company. "They didn't check crap," one operator told me in disgust after a prospective employer didn't even bother to verify his credentials. "They hired me over the phone and had me on a plane the next day." As a Special Forces veteran, Weiss is considered a Tier One operator -- someone with extensive experience in combat and overseas deployments. But many private contractors are drawn from what some call the Bubba Tier, guys who have worked as small-town cops or prison guards. The demand for private security in Iraq is so high that the supply simply doesn't matter.

As the offending driver falls back, Weiss tells me he has never actually fired at anyone for menacing him in traffic. But he did shoot out someone's engine once, and though he is somber about it, he has killed Iraqis in the course of four firefights, give or take, during the past year. His own marketing material, a poster-size photo of Wolf and the eight-man team of "wolverines" he commands, spells out his credo: protect the weak, defend the innocent, strike down thine enemies and vanquish all evil by the right hand of god. strength and honor to all who live by the code of the warrior.

In the SUV, a CD is blaring a crazy soundtrack to go with the crazy moving picture outside the windows. "What is that?" I howl above the music. "Judas Priest!" Wolf howls back. "Screaming for Vengeance!"

The whole idea of venge-ance is very big with Weiss, and it has been for a very long time. "My father was assassinated when I was eleven," he tells me. "He was found with over seventy percent of his bones broken, shot twice at point-blank range in the back of the head, wrapped up in a blanket with a yellow ribbon and a bow tie and then put in the back of his Rolls-Royce." Weiss says this in an almost neutral tone, as if he's stating where he went to high school.

He springs this on me just as things are starting to feel slightly less weird. We have made it out of Baghdad and traveled a few miles south on the MSR (Main Supply Route) Tampa, which runs the length of Iraq, from Kuwait to Turkey. Thanks to the abundance of improvised explosive devices that are planted along it, this particular stretch of the MSR is known as IED Alley. At the moment, though, it feels deceptively serene. There are fewer cars on the road here than in the city, and the setting sun is bathing the Iraqi desert in a gentle glow. Weiss has popped another CD into the dashboard player. Actually, it is his CD. When he isn't a hired gun, Weiss is a rock musician, albeit one with the sensibilities of a hired gun: The album is called Code of the Warrior, and he wrote almost all of the songs himself. It sounds sort of like M?tley Cr?e, if Motley Crue were a bunch of gung-ho patriots trained to kill men with their bare hands. As each song comes up, Weiss explains what it is about. "911" is about 9/11. "Rising Son" is about -- well, actually, it's for -- his son. "The Wheel Goes 'Round," he says, is about confronting the killers of his father. Vic Weiss, a sports promoter and businessman, was murdered in 1979. He was a charismatic player who liked to flash diamond rings and Rolexes. According to the Los Angeles Times, the elder Weiss "privately rubbed shoulders with criminals, ran up huge debts on sports betting and skimmed off the top of laundered money he delivered to mobsters." His murder, although widely presumed to have been a Mafia execution, has never been solved.

It might seem far too simplistic to say that Wolf's whole life is about confronting his father's killers -- but that's pretty much how he puts it himself. "That's what definitely fueled and spawned my hatred for evil," he says. It also fueled and spawned his development as a self-described "no-good two-bit son-of-a-bitch asshole drug addict." When Wolf enlisted in the Marine Corps at eighteen, it was partly because he wanted to clean up his act. It was also because he intended to acquire the strength and the skills necessary to bring his father's killers to justice. In the course of almost fourteen years in the Marines, he served as a hostage rescuer, a combat diver, a free-fall parachutist and a scout sniper. At one point he even started "actively planning" to hunt down his father's killers, but his mother talked him out of it over dinner at a Chinese restaurant. He eventually let his father's death go, got married, had three kids and gave the Lord center stage in his life. ("I am not afraid of dying," he tells me. "To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.") But that doesn't mean he settled down. In 1999, six years short of qualifying for full retirement, Weiss quit the Marines.

"Why are you doing this?" his commanding officer asked. "Nobody does this."

"Sir," Weiss replied, "I am going to be a rock & roll star."

It didn't work out that way. Weiss supported himself as a tattoo artist while he booked gigs and sold tickets and produced his own album -- but he didn't like the pressure to compromise his artistic vision. "Because I was unwilling to change for the corporate machine known as the music industry, the business of arms continues to call me back," he says. So when American forces invaded Iraq last year, Weiss decided to fall back on his old skills. "There's only a few things in this world I can do really, really well," he says. "War is one."

Night has fallen, and we are driving through the desert. Actually, it feels more like we're bouncing through it. We have hit a seventy-kilometer stretch that Wolf calls the I-70, but it's no highway. The route is mostly a car-killing patchwork of ruts and pebbles and dust. Strips of gravel alternate with sand traps. Every now and then, to obscure the Yukon, Weiss drops down onto something that he calls the "low road." No self-respecting city park would label it a path.

"At night, you're not going to see the threat," says Wolf. "A lot of times you won't even hear it. You have to key in on flashes in the desert." Turning some knobs on a box on the dashboard, Weiss shines an eerily roving spotlight on the surrounding dunes. He doesn't expect to see any terrorists -- they prefer to make their attacks closer to the cities where they are based -- but there are plenty of other wild cards: tire-punching spikes left by insurgents, people driving with no headlights, dust storms, dead camels. Experienced vets such as Weiss can make as much as $20,000 a month as private contractors -- fifteen times what they'd get in the military. "Guys like me don't come cheap," Wolf says. The pay is so lucrative, U.S. troops are eagerly defecting to the for-profit ranks; a manager at one company told me he never goes through a military checkpoint without soldiers asking him for his business card. But Weiss is quick to insist that he and other hired guns aren't mercenaries in the traditional sense. In fact, he confides, he sometimes performs "sensitive" government missions for free, out of loyalty to the United States, handling jobs the military would rather distance itself from. "I trust my country and I trust my flag," he says. "I trust that they're making the right decision, even if I don't understand it."

The high pay can come at a high price. For-profit militias are often rushed into hostile territory without adequate training and with no reliable means to identify, let alone communicate with, the various militaries on the ground here -- the Iraqi police, the civil-defense corps, other security companies. "There's been twice when we almost got lit right up by a .50-caliber machine gun from our own countrymen," Weiss says. "Our own people don't always know who we are." So far, at least eighty contractors have been killed in action -- suffering more casualties than any U.S. ally. The most notorious deaths occurred in March, when four contractors with Blackwater Security were killed and mutilated in Fallujah, prompting an American siege of the city.

"Iraq is the biggest marketplace in the short history of the privatized military industry," says P.W. Singer, the national security fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of Corporate Warriors. "Private militaries are playing a pivotal role in warfare to an extent not seen since the advent of the mass nation-state armies in the Napoleonic age."

The boom has happened so quickly -- and with so little oversight -- that the Pentagon can't reliably count the private troops in Iraq, let alone monitor their conduct. For-profit contractors are pretty much making up the rules of engagement as they go along -- and breaking them, too. Weiss recalls one rainy winter night right after he arrived in Iraq. The company team, which was then led by another director, had headed north with a large convoy of trucks. Along the way, Weiss says, the boss kept lighting into the truck drivers for no good reason. When they finally reached their destination, Weiss got a frantic call from his superior, who needed a first-aid kit. Weiss rushed over with it, only to find that the director had stabbed one of the drivers in the heart. "I did keep the guy from bleeding out," he says. The director was arrested, Weiss adds, but never wound up serving time for the assault.

When we reach Talil Air Base, near Nasiriyah, Weiss stops to fuel up. Because he never knows when he will have to "e and e" -- escape and evade attack -- he never passes up a chance to fill the tank. In the early days of the invasion, before reliable fuel drops were set up, there were times when Weiss simply commandeered gas stations at gunpoint and took what he needed, terrifying the Iraqi civilians who had been waiting in line all night. "It makes you feel bad when you basically assault a gas station, secure the perimeter and just barge your way right in front of the line," he says. "But you need the fuel, you got to fill it up, you know?" To make amends, Weiss would throw money out the window before speeding off.

Weiss takes me around to the second Yukon to have a look at the "rear security." Under Coalition regulations, the belt-fed machine gun perched in the back is supposed to be off-limits to private security companies. So are many of the other weapons in the SUV, including the shoulder-launched rockets and the fragmentation grenades. "I need to match the firepower that is out there," Weiss says with a shrug. He declines to tell me exactly where he gets his weapons, but it is not hard to guess. Many, if not most, security companies buy their weapons on the black market, providing cash to the same arms dealers who supply the Iraqi insurgents who are killing American soldiers, to say nothing of the mafias that are killing average Iraqis and the religious militias that are getting ready to kill one another. Operators know that a Kurdish arms trader with an SUV full of high-quality, value-for-money armaments is just a phone call away. An American contractor named Ken Walker bought some AKs in a hotel parking lot in Kurdistan but allows that obtaining rocket-propelled grenades would have been no problem. "It's easier to get an RPG than a receipt," he told me with a laugh. It's as if Coalition authorities had banned all recreational drug use in Iraq -- and then paid enormous sums to private contractors to identify and enrich all the drug suppliers they could find. I once spent an afternoon in one of the wealthiest parts of Baghdad visiting a prosperous arms dealer who basically was running an all-day, all-night implements-of-destruction sale out of his house. Outside, there was a line of cars waiting for deliveries, which the man's pre-adolescent son was carrying out to the customers like groceries. The phone was ringing so incessantly with fresh orders that the arms dealer finally took it off the hook.

Once weiss and his team are fueled up, they head for the city of Basra, 115 miles away. When we reach the outskirts of the city, flares are rising and falling here and there, white and red in the night sky. Over their radio, Wolf and Scott begin to speculate about the fireworks. Have the British got some operation going on? Are the bad guys signaling one another? We head for the port, which is shut tight as a screw and quiet as death. Stopping the Yukon, Weiss contemplates the silence. "In all my time here, this is the first time I've seen this," he says, a slight edge of surprise in his voice. He honks the horn, honks it again. For several minutes, we sit, waiting. Then Weiss turns to the Iraqi gunman who has been riding beside me in the back seat -- carefully pulling a mask over his face whenever we ride through cities. "D," he orders, "do your switch. Make it quick."

This is a central moment in the operation. To avoid exposing himself as a collaborator, D needs to switch from his combat gear and put on a white dishdasha, transforming himself from a soldier of fortune into an ordinary Iraqi so he can sneak into the company's safe house in Basra undetected. But as D hops out of the car, a white BMW suddenly appears out of nowhere, a ghostly image in the pitch-black port.

"Go! Go!" Wolf and company bark at the car, weapons pointed.

The car does not budge. The men inside stare at us.

"Rooh!" I hear D cry out the Arabic translation, urgently and gutturally. "Rooh!"

Oh, my God, I think, we are going to waste these guys. Then I wonder what these men are doing, driving around the port at midnight. No, I think. These guys are going to waste us.

Mercifully, the white BMW peels off prior to the wasting of anyone. When D climbs back into the seat beside me, his head is wrapped in a tribal-looking scarf, no weapon to be seen. A few minutes later, we drop him off at the safe house and he slips into the street, just another ordinary Iraqi going about his business.

A little later, at the border, Weiss is obliged to unload all the weapons, legal and otherwise, from the SUV. Private contractors are forbidden to carry their weapons into Kuwait, and Wolf's men are met by a team of Iraqis, who collect the rockets and machine guns and grenades and run them back up to the safe house in Basra. We cross the border into Kuwait City. The team breaks up, and Weiss takes me home to his apartment to meet the wife and kids.

They're not exactly what I expected from a guy with a tattoo of a wolf on his back and an illegal arsenal in his SUV. While his wife, Kitt, makes French toast, his six-year-old daughter, Teresa, invites me to look at her turtles. "This is Mary," she says, pointing to the big one. There are five extremely little ones. Naming them is the responsibility of her younger brother Michael, who can't be bothered. He's busy eating cereal and watching Shrek.

"I try not to let the kids really know," says Kitt, an attractive, startlingly normal woman who pronounces herself "not worried" about her husband's job. "They know Dad goes to work, but they don't know the extent of what could happen." The phone rings, and Weiss answers it. He listens for a moment, then asks, "How many trucks did they hit?"

It's his boss. Three supply trucks coming down from Nasiriyah tonight were attacked right at the Kuwaiti border, in the town of Safwan, even though they were under the protection of soldiers from an American-allied military. One of the company's drivers was killed, two seriously wounded.

"Oh, no . . . you mean . . . with the glasses?" Weiss says. "They stabbed him in the head?"

Wolf's boss owns the company that was sending the supplies, and this is the third time in six weeks that one of his convoys has been hit. Like other suppliers, he has a clause in his contract: If his convoys keep getting ambushed while under military protection, he retains the right to send in his own security guys to help guard future transports. "The companies that own the cargo do not trust the military to run the convoys by themselves," says Weiss. To me, the idea that a military -- any military -- might need protection is mind-blowing. To Wolf, it's par for the course.

"The Coalition forces rotate every three to six months," he says. "That's just enough to get your feet wet, and you're gone. Some of these new guys have never been to Iraq, never pushed a convoy or anything else. In the last part of last year, who did they have running the show? National Guardsmen, reserve units, a lot of weekend warriors -- they were losing convoys left and right."

The next morning, Weiss reassembles his team and starts back to Baghdad. Just over the border, where the spaces are wide open, he has his men test their weapons by firing them out the windows of the SUVs. "Watch out for the desert people," he cautions. The sound of gunshots echoes in the air. Weiss had a convoy scheduled to run north this morning, but it has been canceled; there is unrest in Basra, and the client has decided that the road is just too dangerous. Since this leaves Weiss with nothing to transport but me, I offer to fly out of Kuwait City. He won't hear of it. He's making this run up to Baghdad for fun. He knows nothing is likely to happen -- but he also knows that anything could. "When you're getting shot at and returning fire, it's the same, regard-less of who you're working for -- the adrenaline, the chaos, the sheer horror at times," he says. "There's always a void to fill with me. I'm an adrenaline junkie of some kind."