in December out pedaling my bike in the snow, carrying a baseball bat because I didn’t have a gun yet, but eventually I moved up to a pellet gun. I grew up in suburban Michigan and learned to trap muskrats and raccoons as a kid, so you’d see me at 5 a.m. RECOIL: What was your first introduction to firearms?Įrik Prince: My dad’s dad died when he was 13 during the Great Depression, so he worked his ass off to support the family and was never much of an outdoorsman. We sat down with him to talk guns, geopolitics, and PMCs. According to Reuters, he’s also been pitching the idea of a force comprising 5,000 private military contractors (PMC) to overthrow the Maduro regime in Venezuela, which reportedly has failed to gain traction in the Trump administration. Recently, he’s been back in the news, publicly espousing a strategy for Afghanistan, which relies heavily on a small contractor force to bring an end to the conflict.
Instead, he quietly said, “Best job I ever had,” as the two parted company.įollowing the sale of Blackwater in 2009, Prince moved his operations to the Gulf States and minimized his visibility in the U.S. If anyone had reason to resent the globe-trotting venture capitalist, the man who had given his legs while a Blackwater contractor would be a good candidate. A 30-ish double amputee ambled up on prosthetic legs, shook Prince’s hand, and for the next five minutes the two of them cracked jokes, bullsh*tted, and reminisced, while Prince’s staff glanced nervously at their watches, anxious about missing the next appointment. We first encountered Prince at SHOT Show in January 2019, when he was signing copies of his autobiography. It wasn’t, but hey, why let facts get in the way of the narrative? Somewhere between the characters of Hank Rearden and Mephistopheles lies the real Erik Prince, and in order to divine which end of that spectrum someone falls, it’s usually a good idea to observe what they do, rather than rely on what they say. To others, he’s a war profiteer, single-handedly responsible for the deaths of 17 civilians in Nisour Square in Iraq, and whose company was supposedly banned from doing business in that country because of it. To some, he’s the epitome of the hard-charging capitalist, finding solutions to problems where big government failed miserably. It’s hard to find a person with a neutral opinion of Erik Prince.
Photos by RECOM Actual – Rutsen Eagle and Katherine Kirchner
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