Morgan Lerette didn’t join the military out of some deep patriotic calling. He joined the Air National Guard in 1999 because his grandfather, a World War II veteran, told him the Air Force had the best food. It’s the kind of detail that sounds like a joke — until September 11th happened two years later, and a decision made half-jokingly turned into three deployments, a stint with the private military contracting firm Blackwater, and a second career as an Army Intelligence officer.
Morgan’s path took him from basic training at Lackland Air Force Base to the opening days of the Iraq ground offensive, where his unit stood up one of the first American airbases in the country with no running water and MREs for weeks at a time. But it was his next chapter that most people find hard to believe: at 23 years old, he left the Air Guard to work for Blackwater, the private security firm that became infamous during the Iraq War. For roughly $500 a day, Morgan spent months in Baghdad’s Green Zone protecting U.S. diplomats and dignitaries — including a memorable, mosquito-plagued night guarding then-Ambassador John Bolton, and a chance encounter with Iraq’s sitting president over breakfast.
The work came with almost no oversight. Morgan describes an environment with no clearly defined rules of engagement, constant rocket and mortar fire, and a growing sense of disillusionment that crept in the longer he stayed. He’s candid about the toll it took — the anger, the anxiety, and what he now recognizes as PTSD — and about the choices he made to walk away, rebuild, and eventually go back into uniform as an Army officer, deploying to Iraq two more times before getting out as a captain in 2011.
Today, Morgan is a husband, a father of two, and the author of a memoir about his time with Blackwater — a book that didn’t exactly make him popular with some of his former colleagues. In this episode, he talks candidly about what the private military contracting industry looks like today, why he thinks the U.S. keeps losing wars it never defined “winning” for, and how he found a new sense of purpose in the ordinary, unglamorous work of raising a family. It’s a story about war, money, and what actually happens when you come home from both.
Listen to the full conversation anywhere you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.