Halliburton's Army: How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized the Way America Makes War

301 Pages·2009·1.22 MB·English

by  Pratap Chatterjee

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HALLIBURTON’S ARMY
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Also by Pratap Chatterjee
Iraq, Inc.: A Profitable Occupation
The Earth Brokers: Power, Politics and World Development
Nether Time
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HALLIBURTON’S
ARMY
(cid:2)
How a Well-Connected Texas Oil Company
Revolutionized the Way America Makes War
PRATAP CHATTERJEE
New York
www.nationbooks.org
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Copyright © 2009 by Pratap Chatterjee
Published by Nation Books
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
116 East 16th Street, 8th Floor
New York, NY 10003
Nation Books is a co-publishing venture of the Nation Institute and the
Perseus Books Group.
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of
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Design and typesetting by Cynthia Young.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chatterjee, Pratap.
Halliburton’s army : the long, strange tale of a private, profitable
and out-of-control Texas oil company / Pratap Chatterjee.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-56858-392-1 (alk. paper)
1. Halliburton Company—History. 2. Petroleum products—
Texas—History. I. Title.
TN872.Z6H353 2009
956.7044'31—dc22
2008045876
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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To the cooks, cleaners, truck drivers,
and construction workers who make up
Halliburton’s army, as well as the whistle-blowers
who came forward to tell this story.
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CONTENTS
Introduction: A Revolution in Military Affairs, ix
Part 1
1 Riding the Catfish to Anaconda, 3
2 Early Days of Brown & Root, 15
3 Brothers in Arms: Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, 22
4 Cheney at the Helm, 41
5 The Birth of LOGCAP, 51
Part 2
6 Supporting the War on Terror, 69
7 Operation Restore Iraqi Oil (RIO), 80
8 Corruption in Kuwait, 109
9 Camp Anaconda, 139
10 Keep on Truckin’, 158
Part 3
11 The Whistle-blowers, 181
12 Investigation and Punishment, 198
Conclusion: Revisiting the Revolution in Military Affairs, 212
Notes, 225
Acknowledgments, 263
Index, 269
vii
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INTRODUCTION
A Revolution in Military Affairs
Early on the morning of March 18, 2008, some four thousand raucous U.S.
troops gathered at Holt Stadium on Logistical Supply Area (LSA) Anaconda, a
giant U.S. military base located a little more than forty miles northwest of
Baghdad near the town of Balad.1 Named after the giant Amazonian river
snake that is known for coiling its body around its victim and choking it to
death, LSA Anaconda is really a small U.S. town in the middle of Iraq that
houses the central command for all its military supply operations in the coun-
try. The soldiers who were gathered that cool spring morning were just a small
fraction of the thirty thousand troops and contractors who work on the base.2
Some soldiers sat perched on top of the Humvees and Stryker fighting vehi-
cles while others waved flags and chanted “USA, USA” when Brigadier General
Gregory Couch, the commanding general of the 316th Expeditionary Sustain-
ment Command, introduced the surprise guest who would mark the fifth an-
niversary of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Surrounded by plainclothes bodyguards, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney
strode in from the back of the stadium to meet and greet the troops, pin a
Bronze Star on Staff Sergeant Shane Lindsey from Greenville, Texas, and Spe-
cialist Veronica Alfaro of Modesto, California, and give a speech. “The work
that goes on at Balad and at Camp Anaconda, around the clock, seven days a
week, is absolutely critical to the mission that America has undertaken here,”
he told the cheering soldiers. “Balad is one of the busiest airports anywhere,
and it’s the main staging area for the massive logistical operations we need in
this theater.”3
After the event, Cheney was ushered into one of the four major dining fa-
cilities on the base where he helped himself at a hot breakfast buffet to bacon,
sausage, eggs, and hash browns and took a seat next to Shubra Bhattacharya-
Jones, an Asian American lieutenant in the U.S. Army and others at a special
ix