by Damien Lewis
I knew I had to nip this in the bud, for the Americans would have about as much time for this as we did. The question was, how? I had decided to treat the recruits firmly, but with respect, for I knew how stubborn and prideful Arab males can be. In the British and American military you shout and scream at new recruits and it’s all part of the accepted training, but if I did so with these guys they’d simply walk off the job. They might need the work and the money, but they were capable of taking offense at the smallest thing.
I tried explaining to the recruits that their key role was to protect the Americans at the Embassy, for that was who they worked for. Strictly speaking, the Benghazi Mission was a Consulate, but that distinction was lost on my recruits, and most of us who worked there referred to it as the “Embassy.” They took a while to get what I was saying. They were getting paid by Blue Mountain, so what were the Americans to do with any of it? they asked me. I tried a different tack. I tried explaining that the U.S. Embassy in Benghazi was actually a slice of American soil.
“Guys, the Libyan Embassy in London—that’s part of Libya; it’s Libyan territory. Likewise, the U.S. Embassy here in Benghazi is part of America.”
Several of them shook their heads. “No, no—it cannot be.”
“But this is Libya,” said another.
“Libya is Libyan territory,” another said.
“Yes, guys, I know,” I explained, “but the U.S. Embassy here in Benghazi is American soil. I know it sounds a bit odd, but that’s how it is.”
I explained that I was their boss, but since I worked for the Americans, that made the Americans their big boss. Next I explained that both their American and British bosses wouldn’t appreciate comments of a racist nature. I tried explaining how it was wrong to call people “stupid” and “dumb” just because they were black. I tried explaining how everyone was equal, no matter what his or her skin color.
“No, no, but that’s just Sahad,” the guards objected.
“We only say those things ’cause he’s black.”
“Sahad doesn’t mind—he knows he’s stupid.”
The very concept of racial equality seemed utterly lost on them.
I decided for now to let it lie, at least until I’d taught them the basics of what was in the State Department contract. I started off with timekeeping. I tried explaining how vital punctuality was, especially when serving in a guard force. If everyone turned up half an hour late for their shift, the whole rotation would be unworkable.
“No, no,” they objected. “Is not like that. If we are all half an hour late, everything just starts half an hour later.”
You couldn’t fault their logic.
I told them that punctuality was still key, and it was either my way or the highway. Whoever turned up late I’d start to dock their pay, and I’d give the money to the guard they’d kept waiting. Cash talked with these guys, and I didn’t just want them turning up on time for payday.
I moved on to vehicle and body checks. All vehicles were to be stopped at the barrier, and the underside searched with a mirror on a stick. The guard on the barrier was to start at one corner and go all around the vehicle, checking for explosives. That done, they were to ask everyone to dismount and they’d search the vehicle’s interior. That included under the hood and in the trunk, and they were to search for concealed weapons as much as they were for bombs.
They’d search individual visitors in the classic airport style—making them assume a star shape and patting them down. They’d start with the arms, work their way down the body, and finish with the legs. Dan and I rigged up some dummy bombs, and we hid them in Tom’s Chrysler, setting the recruits the task of finding them. We did the same for body searches, Dan or I hiding a weapon on our person and telling the guys to find it.
The highlight of the training so far proved to be first aid. I explained that what they were about to learn might save the lives of their children, or even a stranger on the street. I taught them how the body holds eight pints of blood, and that simply by stopping someone from bleeding you could save their life. I demonstrated how applying a simple tourniquet—a strap that fastens around a damaged limb to stem the flow of blood—could stop them bleeding out. I explained how I’d once seen a female U.S. Marine with all her limbs blown off from an IED, but how the tourniquets applied to each limb had kept her alive. They loved it that something as simple as that could magically save someone.
I demonstrated the tourniquets that the guard force would have in their medical kits—a tough canvas strap with a rod that twists to tighten it, and a clasp to hold the rod in place. I got them to practice on each other. I got them to do simple mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and CPR—using the hands to pump the chest of a victim of a heart attack, to try to keep oxygenated blood circulating. I kept it simple, the idea being that they could keep someone alive long enough for Dan or me or Lee to get to them.
The State Department contract also stipulated that we had to teach health and safety, like wearing protective goggles when at work. These guys had just lived through a civil war and a revolution, and needless to say, health and safety was completely lost on them. They stared at me like I’d beamed myself down from planet Zog.
“Don’t worry about it too much,” I told them. “Health ’n’ safety—it’s all a load of bollocks.”
They didn’t really get the joke. Like most Libyans, they weren’t big into humor and they were totally not into sarcasm. If you tried yanking a Libyan guy’s chain, he’d very likely mistake it for deliberate nastiness on your part and you’d quickly make an enemy. Libyan males were all about front, respect, and not losing face.
But I did find a way to make them lighten up. I’d pick up an Arabic word they used and slip it into the training. Perhaps it was my pronunciation, but it had them in fits of laughter. They loved it that I could speak even my level of broken Arabic, and they kept trying to get me to teach them English swear words. Dan swore like the proverbial trooper, and most of his curses were so obscure that the recruits had never heard of them, not even in the movies.
“What does wanker mean, Mr. Michael?” they’d ask.
No one could pronounce my first name, Morgan, so I’d become Michael to the guards. Libyans tended to call you “Mr.” plus your first name, so “Mr. John” if you were called John Smith.
“Where the hell did you hear that?” I’d counter, knowing full well it had to be Dan.
Oddly enough, there are almost no curses in Welsh, my first language. If you want to swear in Welsh you actually have to use an English word. As a result it doesn’t come very naturally to a Welsh-speaker to be swearing all the time.
In addition to my broken Arabic, the guards loved it that I was growing a beard. As with Muslim males the world over, no self-respecting Libyan man would be seen without a beard. In their eyes, my growing one meant that I was showing respect for their culture. I was used to this from Iraq and Afghanistan. Afghans in particular would see you with a beard, stroke their own, and say, “Good, good.”
Apart from forging some common ground with the recruits, I had a secondary reason for growing one. With a beard and a good suntan most Libyans would mistake me for a swarthy Lebanese, and there were hordes of Lebanese businessmen and traders in Benghazi. Living outside of the Embassy we had to venture onto the streets for food, stationery, equipment, whatever. I wanted to be able to blend in. I spoke enough Arabic to get by, and I wanted the fewest people possible to know I was a Westerner.
On my first few trips downtown I’d taken Tom with me, and I’d learned how to get around the streets on foot without turning many heads. The city struck me as being horrendously busy, but apart from the militia who seemed to be on every street corner, it wasn’t as if the place was awash with guns. For a country fresh out of a revolution there were very few weapons to be seen.
But every now and then I’d come across a black-flagged militia vehicle parked on a street corner, the gunmen eyeing the passing pedestrians and vehicles. I wore a bas
eball cap to shade my eyes—as many Libyan males do—and I’d keep my head well down. But all it would take was one of those Shariah Brigade guys to challenge me verbally, and my cover would be blown. They’d know immediately that I was a Westerner, which had to make me fair game, the Shariah Brigade being so closely allied to Al Qaeda.
Every time I came across them my mind would flip to the Embassy, barely thirty minutes away by car. There we had at least one high-value target (HVT), as far as Al Qaeda would see it—the female diplomat at the Mission. Right now there was only one individual who would stand and fight to protect her: Lee. And on scores of Benghazi road junctions you could find a half a dozen Shariah fighters, complete with AK-47 assault rifles, RPGs, and with 12.7mm DShK heavy machine guns mounted in the rear of their Toyota pickups.
Anyone who’s ever been under fire from a DShK—as I have, in Afghanistan—knows how fearsome the weapon is. More commonly known as the Dushka—the Russian word for “sweetie”—there is nothing sweet or gentle about it. It is the equivalent of our own Browning .50-caliber heavy machine gun. It has a distinctive deep, throaty boom, and the rounds can cut through trees and walls and blow your head or your limbs clean off.
It didn’t take a genius to figure out what would happen if a handful of those Shariah gun trucks hit the Embassy. My newly trained and unarmed guard force would be facing several dozen fighters armed to the teeth. A couple of RPG rounds would be enough to blast the unreinforced steel gates off their hinges, at which point the gun trucks would be inside the compound, tearing the villas to pieces with 12.7mm armor-piercing cannon shells.
Against all of that there would be Lee, with an M4 assault rifle, plus Dan and me—and that’s if we could get there in time. The very idea of it was chilling. Somehow, there seemed to be a total disconnect here in Benghazi between the actual threat level and the State Department’s assessment and preparedness for it.
The only other thing we could hope to rely on was intelligence—that somehow we’d get early warning of an impending attack. The best intelligence is human intelligence—“HUMINT”—and that was the other reason I sought to forge a bond with my guards. Each of them was a potential source of HUMINT, as was Tom. If I could bring them suitably on our side, maybe one of the guards would pick up on an impending attack and pass us a timely warning.
If that happened we’d have to evacuate the Embassy immediately, for there was no way we could mount a proper defense, and certainly not against the kind of forces the bad guys could muster. I figured we’d get everyone to the airport and from there out of Libya, via whatever flight was going to somewhere a degree less menacing than here, which was pretty much just about anywhere.
The other trick I deployed to win the guards over was religion. One day I asked them why I never saw them praying much. I started talking about what it says in the Koran about the importance of prayers five times a day. I told the guys if they needed to break the training to pray it was fine by me.
“How do you know about this?” one of them asked.
I told them how I’d worked all over the Islamic world, and how I had many, many friends who were Muslims—especially in Afghanistan. Over time they’d taught me about their beliefs and that had made me curious—and so I had read the Koran. The guards were amazed that a Westerner might have read it. I had to explain that it was available in translation, so I’d been able to do so in English.
I told them what I’d learned about the life of the Prophet Muhammad—how he had lived in caves in the desert before riding into battle twice on his horse to win heroic victories. I told them about the hajj, the pilgrimage to Islam’s holiest sites in Saudi Arabia—one that all Muslims are supposed to complete before they die. I told them that I’d been to Saudi Arabia at the time of the hajj, so although I wasn’t a Muslim, still I was doing better than most of them!
The idea of a white-eye foreigner and unbeliever like me having been at the hajj, when none of them had yet managed to complete it, really tickled their fancy. Only Tom seemed unsettled and disconcerted by what I was saying.
“Why do you know so much about this?” he asked. “Why do you need to know it? Why does it even interest you?”
“I work in Muslim countries and need to know and respect what their people believe in. That’s why I read the Koran. You’ve read it, obviously?”
Tom didn’t answer.
Amazingly, a lot of Muslim males haven’t read the Koran, especially if Arabic isn’t their first language. Strict believers maintain that the Koran should be read only in Arabic, or else the true meaning of Muhammad’s words as written down by him are lost. This puts off a lot of Muslims, for they can’t read it in a language they can understand, and that’s for those who can actually read.
I wondered what might lie behind Tom’s apparent uneasiness with me. I suspected a large part of it was that he was the guard force commander and wanted to appear like the big man in front of “his” guards. I figured I’d have to try not to cast too heavy a shadow, for Tom was the only guy we had whose English was good enough to fulfill that part of the contract.
I turned next to what was the core of the guard force training—self-defense and weapons skills. I was acutely aware that most Arab men tend to think they’re Sylvester Stallone when it comes to fighting—and especially hand-to-hand combat. I warned the new recruits that this was training only, and the idea was not to hurt anyone. I knew it was vital not to get into the whole disrespect thing by making any of them look stupid.
I showed them simple wrist-lock techniques, in slow motion. I used Tom as my dummy, locking him into moves that forced him onto the ground. The trainees loved it, but in truth I didn’t think they’d ever have much cause to use such holds—for if the bad guys did attack, they were more than likely to come for us with grenades and guns.
One morning I was demonstrating a hold on Tom when he swung around and tried to grab me in a vicious headlock. I twisted free, kicked his legs out from under him, and he slammed into the ground. He was a big guy, up near three hundred pounds, and to hit the ground with that kind of mass must have hurt. He lay there groaning. I warned everyone that that was what happened if you messed around. It was a good lesson to have got in early.
Once I’d made sure Tom was all right, I took him to one side. I asked him what the hell he thought he was playing at.
He glared at me. “I’m sick and tired of you making me look stupid and weak in front of the others.”
“Don’t be silly. Next time you can demonstrate the holds on me, if you like. But don’t ever mess around like that, ’cause I’ve made you look really stupid now, haven’t I?”
“Well, why can’t I have a better title, instead of guard force commander?” Tom demanded. “Can’t I be security manager or something?”
“No, Tom, you can’t,” I replied, with infinite patience, “because the security manager is either Dan or me.”
From now on Tom got to demonstrate all the holds on me, after which I hoped his Arab pride would be satisfied.
The final thing I had to teach the guard recruits was use of the one weapon the State Department contract did allow them to carry—the extendable steel baton. The baton was like a short metal club that could be flicked out to full, baseball-bat-like length. I taught them never to go in halfhearted with the baton, for if they did, it could be used against them and it could injure or kill.
If they were up against someone who was unarmed, they were to go for a knee or an elbow—which would stop the attacker, but not prove fatal. If their opponent was armed they were to go for the “red areas”—the head, chest (the heart area), and the groin. If you hit a guy properly in any of the red areas he was going down.
This raised the issue of what would happen if one of the guards killed someone. More often than not in Libya, such cases would be settled without recourse to the law. Tribe would meet with tribe, and the family of the deceased would be offered blood money as compensation. But if it happened at the Embassy and it went to the
police, the guards feared they might end up in jail.
I tried explaining that what happened at the Embassy happened on American soil, so it wasn’t going to be dealt with under Libyan law, or tribal practice for that matter. But still they didn’t seem convinced. I agreed to double-check with Lee, and next time I ran into him at the Embassy I raised the issue.
“Semper fi, mate,” I greeted him.
“Semper fi. How’s it goin’, brother?”
Lee was a totally positive, hardworking professional and I’d never once heard him moan about things. He’d never stated the obvious—that he hated this posting and couldn’t wait to get himself gone. But it was obvious that he was counting down the days, and I could tell he was close to being totally finished.
“Listen, mate, I’ve got one for you,” I ventured. “If someone comes at one of my guards with a knife or a club, are they free to go for the red areas?”
“Yeah, that’s exactly what we want,” Lee confirmed. “If they injure someone we’ll deal with it from there on in. Tell your guys that they will be looked after.”
“Cheers, mate, appreciate it.”
“Say, how’re the new guards shapin’ up, anyways?”
“They’re hardly Arnie Schwarzenegger, but they’ll do.”
Lee grinned. “Good to go, brother.” He paused. “So, you know I’m almost done?”
I nodded. “We’ll be sad to lose you, mate, but I’m on my way out, too, remember?”
Lee was a couple of days short of leaving, and I was scheduled to be here less than a week more. My training task was pretty much done, and if truth be told I was looking forward to getting out of there almost as much as Lee.
“We got three replacement RSOs comin’ in,” Lee continued. He explained that he’d sent it “up the chain” that there was a desperate need for more security staff and physical protection measures, for the Benghazi Mission was wide open to attack. “Maybe that’s why they’re sendin’ three new RSOs, instead of only one. And hey, you know what—the head RSO, she’s a woman. So what d’you think of that?”
