The Other Army

By DANIEL BERGNER
Published: August 14, 2005

When Matt Mann needed to buy armored vehicles, he phoned his brother-in-law, Ken Rooke.
Rooke didn't know the first thing about bullet-resistant windows or grenade-resistant floors, but he wasn't 100 percent unqualified to do the buying. At least he knew something about cars. At a speedway in North Carolina, he once called races for a local radio station. He was the closest Mann could come to an expert

Mann, a retired U.S. Army Special Operations master sergeant in his late 40's, needed the vehicles quickly. And he needed guns. It was early last year, and the company he and two partners created, Triple Canopy, had just won government contracts to guard 13 Coalition Provisional Authority headquarters throughout Iraq. (The renewable six-month
deals were worth, in all, about $90 million.) The C.P.A. was the governing body of the American-led military occupation. Triple Canopy -- not the American military -- would be protecting it. So would other companies. With the insurgency spiking, the job of keeping C.P.A. compounds from being overrun, and of keeping the architects of the occupation from being killed, had been privatized.

Yet when Triple Canopy was hired, it scarcely existed. Mann and one of his partners, Tom Katis, an old friend from Special Forces, talked after 9/11 about starting a business that might somehow address the threat of terrorism. They thought they might use their military backgrounds to train government agencies in anti-terrorism techniques. On a Special Forces exercise in Central America (both men were, at that point, in the National Guard, Mann having moved on from the regular Army to work as a civil engineer and Katis having graduated from Yale and begun a career in banking), they dreamed of their unborn enterprise under the jungle foliage -- the layered jungle canopy from which they took their name.

They didn't have much else. They were a name, a notion, when they heard about the C.P.A. security work and started bidding for the contracts. With money borrowed from family and friends, they began hiring former Army colleagues on the chance that the company might somehow succeed. They had little but résumés to give them hope. The résumés, though, were impressive. Mann spent six years with the Army's Delta Force, its most selective, most keenly trained and most secretive unit, and he recruited retired Delta operators. He is an irrepressible man with full, close-cropped gray hair, blue eyes and a radiant smile, and as he told me about Triple Canopy's early days, he recalled his disbelief at the men who were drawn to the company. ''He wants to work for me?'' he said he thought, over and over. But his modesty went only so far. ''Rock stars like to work with rock stars,'' he said. The ex-Delta soldiers, heavily decorated and with all kinds of combat and clandestine experience, kept signing on.

''We were the squirrel trying to get a nut,'' Al Buford, an early employee and Delta veteran, remembered about the company's initial prospects for work. And when they were hired to protect well over half of the C.P.A.'s sites in Iraq, and to escort C.P.A. officials along the country's lethal roads, ''we had a whole truckload of nuts dumped down on us.''

So the call went out to Mann's brother-in-law, Ken Rooke. ''I'm a gearhead,'' Rooke told me. ''But we were shooting from the hip on this thing. I never felt competent in what I was doing.''
''With the war going,'' he continued, there were no new armored vehicles to be had. He searched the Internet, made countless calls and bought a set of armored Mercedes sedans that once belonged to the sultan of Brunei before they were rented out to rappers. He replaced the stylish spoke wheels, and he put on run-flat tires, so the vehicles could be driven out of ambushes even after the tires had been blasted by gunfire. He learned how to ship his makeshift fleet to Iraq.
For guns, too, Triple Canopy had to make do. Transporting firearms from the United States required legal documents that the company couldn't wait for; instead, in Iraq, it got Department of Defense permission to visit the dumping grounds of captured enemy munitions. The company took mounds of AK-47's and culled all that were operable.

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Daniel Bergner, a contributing writer, is the author of ''In the Land of Magic Soldiers

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Defence & Arms

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