Originally Posted by Figment
Blackwater has been known for this sort of thing since at the very least the second year of the US-coalition presence in Iraq. There are a lot of vids like this with the humvee type driving and ramming and (especially to a bystander) seemingly wanton destruction. Blackwater's personnel has been repeatedly and consistently accused of arbitrary and irresponsible behaviour, while being free from prosecution. It's a bit like if police were above the law in the US, or if prison guards do not have rules to abide by. Meanwhile they're also far more expensive than the regular army (as usual with mercs).
|
I worked for two separate PMCs when I got out of the Army, both companies sent me back downrange. None of them were Blackwater. Blackwater was a bunch of thugs - not even SF/SEALs would join them, after a certain point, unless they needed a quick burst of cash. Blackwater has a reputation in the community of hiring any dipshit with a DD-214 (your bye-bye paperwork). A majority of their contractors are ex-fobbits and idiot grunts with an axe to grind. And not to make a personal dig but a lot of them were former Marines. They also reportedly took in people regardless of what their discharge said, so long as it wasn't Bad Conduct or Dishonourable. That's why there was a break-away company that took some of the best lessons learned from Blackwater, and left the dregs to deal with the fallout.
The thing you have to remember, and this is no way an excuse, is that PMC operators are doing shit that the average soldier cannot do. They're doing a lot of bodyguard shit, as opposed to standing guard duty on a tower or running foot patrols in fields. Those bodyguard details are serious shit - you're not guarding some infantry colonel - you're guarding a high-level official who's worth a billion dollars (figure of speech). These are usually one-in-a-million people who are high-value targets. If they die, you're seriously fucked. So they take a no-holds-barred approach.
Lessons learned from being a grunt on the ground also taught PMCs, as Warborn pointed out, that you don't sit around and lollygag waiting for a local to get his car out of the way. Locals quickly learned, unfortunately the hard way, to stay the fuck away from any military or PMC convoy. They get rammed if they don't. Not good on building relations with the locals, but let me tell you something, Figment: your car getting rammed is a lot less violent than the shit that you get from the Taliban. As it turns out, locals generally tend to accept this behaviour as the lesser of two evils - at least in Afghanistan. And in case you're tempted to get all high and mighty, let me tell you one single story of Taliban behaviour. The Taliban (not al'Qaida) had a habit of coming into a village in the middle of the night and busting into a local's house. They'd make the father or the son swear an oath of allegiance. Then to prove it, that "recruit" would have to put a female family member in the oven and hold the door shut until the person was dead. I heard an elder say, once, he could accept the burden of Coalition roughness if it meant keeping the Taliban at bay.
On a personal note, most PMC operators view it as a matter of pride to conduct themselves professionally. For every Blackwater machine-gun monkey you hear about, there are a thousand quiet professionals that you DON'T hear about, doing their job and doing it well. Painting them all with the same brush is like saying every Dutchman is a stoned deviant sex addict just because of a red light district.