Free Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of theWar on Terror by Erik Prince Page B

season. He was studious because he was expected to be, and hardworking because he needed to be. At age thirteen, Dad took a job at the local Chrysler-Plymouth dealership that paid him forty cents an hour. He devouredeverything there was to know about cars—how to take them apart, how to diagnose problems, how to sell them. Three years later, he was running the dealership whenever the owner was away.
    Dad supported his family, and saved enough money to put himself through college. An engineering major at Michigan Technological University, he earned a Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) scholarship and soon served two years as an Air Force photoreconnaissance officer at bases in South Carolina and Colorado. He returned to Holland after his service and took a job as a die caster at the local Buss Machine Works, working his way up to chief engineer. He married a lovely young schoolteacher named Elsa Zweip, whom he’d met while waterskiing on summer break two years earlier. Soon my oldest sister, Elisabeth, was born. Then came Eileen and Emily. I was born in the summer of 1969.
    In 1965, Buss was sold. During that transition, Dad gathered two coworkers, remortgaged the house, and borrowed $10,000 from his mother. He was convinced that nearby manufacturers would soon need to perform their own in-house die casting. He had clever ideas about how to answer that call—for which he can thank my mother, and the opera. Dad found their date nights at Opera Grand Rapids so interminably boring, he spent the whole time pondering novel designs for die-casting machines. Amid a forest of competitors, with his finances overextended thanks to a growing family at home and his aging mother’s nest egg at risk, he struck out to create Prince Manufacturing .
    A staff of six labored around the clock to construct the six-hundred-ton die-casting machines. A few months after its founding, Prince filled its first order for Honeywell International, which needed a pair of the machines to manufacture military ordnance. Soon, Honeywell returned for three more. Then fifteen. Then General Motors started buying them, manufacturing each of its new engine blocks with Prince machines. Everyone at the company saw the hard work paying off. “If my employees are part of the game, if they desire to know what the game plan is, they will be part of itssuccess,” my father said. “People win games because they have the group working together.”
    The size of the machines grew as the orders did: In January 1969 GM demanded a sixteen-hundred-ton die caster to manufacture aluminum transmission cases. Sixteen-hour workdays became eighteen-hour workdays. For my father, filling even the most outlandish order was about more than business. It was about even more than
losing
the business. It was pride. “If you have high expectations for your own life, you have to put those same expectations into your work,” he said. And seven months later, Prince Manufacturing had the die caster in place and operational at GM’s factory.
    Soon he was diversifying, and Prince Manufacturing was growing into Prince Corporation. Dad’s company was no longer just manufacturing machines to make machines, but creating products of its own. In 1972, he invented a lighted mirror sun visor for Cadillac—an accent so ubiquitous today, it’s hard to imagine a time when cars didn’t have them. Prince then began designing interior consoles for cars—then dashboard cup holders, movable armrests, a digital compass/thermometer, programmable garage door openers. My father could envision whole new industries to create. David Swietlik , then Chrysler’s procurement manager for large cars, once told
Forbes
magazine, “Prince comes in saying, ‘You don’t know you want this yet.’”
    The Big Three automakers loved that my father backed his research and development with his own funds; if prototypes failed, he took on all the losses. The approach made him relentless and tactical; every mistake