The Last Punisher: A SEAL Team THREE Sniper's True Account of the Battle of Ramadi (11 page)

“Yup,” I said again. These kids were pretty green. They didn’t know I was probably just as new. I noticed how much bulkier they looked than I did in my low-profile body armor under my Rhodesian vest.

“Damn, dude,” said the other one. “Is that a Nightforce? That’s a sweet scope. And a Mk 11? You guys get all the good shit.”

I turned my head to him for a moment and smirked good-naturedly. “Yeah, man, it’s pretty nice,” I said. I didn’t tell him that my weapon was actually a bit of a sore spot for me. I had attended Army Sniper School instead of Naval Special Warfare (NSW) Sniper School. It just happened to be where a spot was available when they needed to send me. Because of that, however, the Teams didn’t see me fit for a full sniper suite and only outfitted me with an Mk 11. It’s a great gun, but it was a constant reminder that I had something to prove when we were heading out on an overwatch op and I saw the other snipers choose their weapons while I picked up the only one available to me. I had to earn my .30-cal sniper rifle with blood. Honestly, it made me
appreciate it that much more when I returned to Iraq in 2008 for my second deployment with the full sniper suite.

I probably should have been thankful just to have a rifle to myself. We spent a lot of time in an area just north of Ramadi, working with a group of Army National Guard soldiers in farm country. The Army cats were from Kentucky, and their Appalachian accents were so thick, you practically needed a translator to understand anything they said. They were a bunch of good old boys who were eager to take the fight to the enemy. We ran sniper ops with them, overwatching a medical clinic that had fallen into muj hands. Coalition forces had been taking a lot of fire from the clinic, and our orders were to kill anyone who presented as a combatant.

Every SEAL sniper had a sniper rifle, but the Kentucky cats had one gun, which they would rotate every time somebody got a kill. When their gun rotated into the hands of their first sergeant, he was hesitant to shoot anyone and ended up keeping the gun for an excruciatingly long period. This greatly frustrated the young guns, who were eager to engage the enemy. I felt their pain.

“So what’s going on this morning?” I asked. “Any action out there?”

“Nothing so far,” said the first soldier. He gave me a SITREP of the area, which turned into idle banter that I tuned out. I knew a target wouldn’t present itself willingly. I would have to be vigilant. The minutes began to slip by quickly. My heart beat steady through my blouse. I packed a dip of Copenhagen to settle the nerves.

About an hour into the watch, the alleyways started buzzing with activity. The afternoon call to prayer seemed to set the locals free. I saw women with kids, goatherds corralling one or two of their animals here or there, and the occasional vehicle moving down the canal road. I gathered intel as I waited.

I stood and watched, my rifle about chest level set up on a high
table in front of me. With my boots firmly planted a couple of feet apart and my waist slightly bent, I kept my eye on my scope and waited.

Two hours into the hunt, my target appeared as the sun began to move behind the buildings. As I peered out from the crack in the bulletproof glass, he moved from the back of the alley and paused in a doorway, staring in our direction. I felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck. He was wearing a blue shirt, black Adidas pants, and leather sandals. His clothes were covered in a thin coat of dust. I watched him back behind a wall momentarily as I checked my lased reference points, fixed objects that I knew the distance of. I had my dope dialed in at three hundred yards, which left plenty of room to hold on a target that was near or far from that position. My target disappeared behind a wall three hundred yards out.

Suddenly, he scurried across the alleyway from my left to right. He had nothing in his hands. My 22x scope left no room for error. Although his behavior had insurgent written all over it, the rules of engagement (ROE) were clear: without the clear presentation of a weapon, IED, or other threat to coalition forces, I couldn’t shoot him. Looking shady wasn’t enough. He hugged tight in a doorway, gazing in our direction, and I watched his face as the sun caught the sweat. It shined bright and dripped toward his angry beard. Again, he sucked into a doorway and out of my sight. I readjusted my cheek weld and spat a fresh shot of Copenhagen onto the table. The Army guys began to notice me tracking the guy. Their chatter trailed off into silence in the tower. My own breath and the hammer of my heart rushing blood to my brain were the only sounds to breach the stillness.

He peeked out from the doorway, and I adjusted the clarity of the focus on my scope, fighting the light distortion from the afternoon heat. Then I saw it; cradled in his arms was an AK-47. Unmistakable. This guy was now muj; a legitimate target.

I fought the elevated pulse in my temple. My breathing grew
heavier as I flicked off the safety on my rifle. Unconsciously, I worked through my points of performance and prepared. Suddenly, the insurgent bolted across the alley from right to left. I placed the second Mil-Dot on him at shoulder level, tracking him as he jogged, and smoothly squeezed the slack out of the trigger as I exhaled to my respiratory pause. The 7.62 round sprang from the rifle, and I barely noticed the recoil on my shoulder as I watched the reticle track the target. He fell face-first in a heap, his AK hitting the dirt and his feet kicking up behind him. The shot had torn through his upper torso and both his lungs. The gun cycled another round. The reticle continued to track the line, but no target followed.

My first kill.

“Fuck yeah!” the Army cats cheered.

I cracked a smile, staying on the gun and scanning for more targets. No time for celebration. I stayed fixed on the expired insurgent, waiting for further movement. There was none. He lay dead in the street as we braced in the tower for the retribution that never came.

The soldiers’ cackles and quiet cheers faded away as I focused on my breathing. The biggest point of failure usually comes after an epic high. I wasn’t about to drop a mag again. I was growing as an operator, but you can never get too big for the basics. They keep you in the fight for another day. I welcomed the warm air into my lungs as my breathing remained at a constant twelve breaths a minute. I suffered a temporary lapse of focus as I remembered the words of a Marine captain interviewed on CNN after the initial invasion of Iraq. The innocent reporter asked him what he felt after he shot a terrorist. The captain’s answer was simple: “Recoil.” A thin smile tugged at my lips. My Mk 11 was suppressed. I’d barely even felt that much.

Later, the insurgent’s friends would come collect him, waving white handkerchiefs and napkins. They’d scurry out of a doorway and pull his limp body out of the street, leaving nothing but a bloodstain and his AK-47.

That night I lay in my rack and thought about how easy it had been. The only thing I spent much time contemplating was that I wasn’t surprised by my lack of reaction. It was like taking a peek in a mirror to just make sure you still look the way you think you do. In this case, I did. I hadn’t expected to mind taking a life, and I didn’t. I was neither happy about it, nor sad, nor confused, nor angry. I was satisfied.

My entire life, I’d been taught that evil exists in the world. When training to become a SEAL, my instructors had reassured me that wearing a trident would provide me an opportunity to meet it. That afternoon, I’d looked at an evil man through my scope and known exactly what to do. I felt sure.

In the past, I used to chuckle when I heard a rumor that someone quit BUD/S because they “couldn’t handle the pressure of possibly taking a life.” I didn’t understand. If you volunteer yourself to do the business of doing bad things to bad people, you have to be prepared for the eventuality of being required to do it. Teamguys get paid to take the fight to the enemy. How I had handled my first enemy KIA was a reassurance that I had made the right decision to join the Teams.

I settled into a contented asleep, proud of a job well done. Many guys go through entire careers and never kill anybody. I’d been on the ground for two weeks as a newguy and had a clean kill.

I wanted another.

“War is hell, but that’s not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.”

—Tim O’Brien, “How to Tell a True War Story”

S
AN CLEMENTE ISLAND
is home to the last three weeks of BUD/S training. In these final weeks of Third Phase, students conduct numerous exercises combining the skills they’ve honed in the previous months, from patrolling to shooting to small unit tactics.

Our instructors put us through a timed stress course, the object of which was to move quickly from cover to cover and shoot steel targets. I held my M4 as if it were an extension of myself and moved smoothly through the first few targets, gaining confidence from the metallic
ping!
each time I hit one. When I came to a window, I took a knee and prepared to shoot at the next target.

For some reason, I got frazzled. I’m a competitive guy, and once I
let myself think about my time and tried to beat the other guys, I was screwed. I overthought it and I couldn’t hit that steel to save my life. It took me completely resetting, changing the mag, taking a breath, and clearing my head to be able to hit that target and move on.

I never once choked like that in combat, and I think it’s because I wasn’t trying to beat the guys next to me; I was fighting for them. In Ramadi, our reasons for fighting had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with the responsibility you feel when another man trusts you with his life. And that made us the most dangerous men in the world.

On April 17, Al Qaeda forces led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi launched a series of attacks against American outposts all over the city, marking the official start of the second Battle of Ramadi. A suicide bomber drove a yellow dump truck up to the gate of Observation Post Virginia and detonated his thousand-pound payload. OP Virginia was on the south side of Route Michigan about a quarter mile from the eastern shore of the Euphrates. The massive explosion was the primer for a force of insurgents who attacked the outpost with small arms and rocket-propelled grenades. Marines from Lima Company, 3rd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, fought them off, killing dozens, with only a few Marines wounded. A week later, we found a muj propaganda video of the attack during a DA and watched it when we got back to Sharkbase. It included footage of Zarqawi himself planning the operation. Zarqawi was the brutal leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq and is said to be the executioner in the infamous AQI propaganda video showing the decapitation of American contractor Nick Berg in 2004. Zarqawi was the embodiment of the evil we were fighting in Iraq, and all of us would have given just about anything to put an end to him.

OP Virginia was just the beginning. The muj launched attacks on the Government Center, Snake Pit, and Camp Ramadi. It was a major enemy offensive, and the American brass was ready to strike back. The 1st Battalion of the 502nd Infantry Regiment was tasked to push through the Ma’Laab and clear the entire district of insurgent forces. It was a large-scale op for which the brass had estimated a casualty rate around 50 to 70 percent for coalition forces. Our mission was to act as force multipliers. We would occupy strategic positions and provide eyes on the battle space as forward observers and snipers. We had joint terminal attack controllers (JTACs) to coordinate direct air support and plenty of snipers to provide overwatch security. The overall objective was simple: root out and destroy the enemy. What this boiled down to for me as an E-5 shooter: target-rich environment.

In late April, we piled into some Army Cougars in the early morning hours and headed into the gauntlet. Our force was about four SEALs, six Jundis, and Adam, the Army sniper. I felt more cumbersome than usual because we’d prepared to be out in Indian country for an extended period. In addition to my regular load, I was carrying an Mk 46 Squad Automatic Weapon (a light, belt-fed machine gun) with one thousand rounds of ammunition, ten liters of water, and several MREs. I knew we were going into a dangerous area, so I was pretty buttoned up armor-wise. I once saw Tony leave for a two-day overwatch with nothing but two cans of Copenhagen and a liter of water. I admire Tony’s BTF credentials, but I’m a big guy. I have to eat.

We headed toward a soccer stadium a couple of miles west of Corregidor. It was a major landmark in the Ma’Laab and smack in the middle of muj land. The Army bomb techs we rolled with made several fake pauses along the way to our objective. This was an attempt to confuse any insurgents who might be watching and keep them off our trail. When we reached our real insertion point, we exited the vehicles and quickly found cover, inhabiting the shadows in the dimly lit streets. Everyone took a knee and waited for a signal.

Bryce from Delta Platoon was the patrol leader and our sniper for the mission. He was five foot seven with sandy blond hair and a hint of a midwestern accent. His unimposing stature belied his proficiency as an operator. Ramadi was his third deployment. He’d fought in the Battle of Fallujah with Chris Kyle, and nothing ever seemed to faze him. Bryce was the epitome of a quiet professional.

Bryce gave the signal for a tactical pause. As the dull roar of the vehicles’ engines faded into the distance, we all stayed as still and quiet as possible, scanning our surroundings. Heads on swivels, we waited. The area looked to me about like every other street in Ramadi. The effects of prolonged combat had scarred the urban landscape in every direction. There was broken glass and refuse all around us. Packed down like a camel, kneeling in silence for almost ten minutes, I thanked God for my knee pads. Finally, Bryce gave the signal to move.