The Last Punisher: A SEAL Team THREE Sniper's True Account of the Battle of Ramadi (13 page)

A week or two after I worked triage for the IED attack, we got another mission to roll up a bomb maker in southwest Ramadi. A few weeks in country and I was settling into a battle rhythm. We had about fifteen ops behind us and plenty more ahead. My combat mindset was evolving. War, like anything else, is a routine, a matter of muscle memory. Get an op, prepare, execute. Anxiety became less of a factor. Hatred for the enemy and his cowardly tactics grew.

We were all amped to go after another bomb maker and hopefully have an impact on deterring the IED threat. The area we were headed into had a high concentration of insurgent activity, and nobody had ever pushed through and cleared it. Our target was a compound with a cluster of homes, which we were to clear one by one. It was another early morning op. We almost always operated under the cover of darkness. With our night-vision capabilities, we owned the night. Unless they were planting bombs, the muj mostly operated in daylight, when they could blend in with the local Iraqis.

We launched later than usual, leaving around three in the morning, which meant we’d be operating in daylight within a few hours. For direct-action missions, we usually launched no later than 2 a.m. so we could be back before sunup. With our full SEAL platoon and about twelve Jundis, we had about thirty guys. Movement to the objective took approximately forty-five minutes. As usual, we established security around the compound with our vehicles and foot-patrolled up to the main objective. The streets were narrow, with low-hanging wires everywhere. It was only May, but the temperature at night was already in the nineties. As was often the problem, the humidity fogged
up my protective lenses and began to screw with the view through my night-vision goggles. I decided to stow the Oakleys in a cargo pocket.

Chris Kyle led the patrol. Chris had straggled into Iraq a couple weeks late after the main element and had missed our push over to Corregidor. It was good to have him back in the lead. We reached our first target, set in security on the door to the building, and called up the breach team. Bob came up, set a strip charge on the door, and then signaled for us to get to the minimum safe distance. When Bob blew the breach, the deafening blast cued us to assault. The noise and confusion caused by the explosion provide a tactical advantage. Anyone who might be inside is temporarily stunned while we move in with extreme violence of action. Dust and debris filled the air around us as we lurched forward and funneled through the door in standard fashion. We cleared through the entire building with zero resistance. We left some Jundis to detain the women and children on-site and to conduct the sensitive site exploitation (SSE) phase—basically a thorough search to collect as much intel as possible—and moved to the next house. The second house was more of the same. We called in the Jundis to search and moved on.

In the third house, there was a surprise waiting for us.

It was a walled-in structure and a lot tighter space to operate than the previous buildings. We’d been operating for several hours with the same level of intensity we always applied, and I could feel myself wearing down a little as the sun started creeping up toward the horizon. We stacked, breached, and went. The building had two stories, and we cleared all the way through, finding nothing. The last place to clear was the roof. We figured the muj had heard us hitting the other houses and were holed up on the roof waiting for us. I expected to rush into a swarm of insurgents, eager to be martyred in a violent last stand on the rooftop.

Here we go,
I thought, my jaw clenched.
Whoever’s up there knows we’re
coming and is ready for us.
My heart was racing, adrenaline surging. I got the signal from Jeremy and passed it to Bob. I was ready for hell on the other side of the door. We spilled onto the roof berserker-style, ready to cut down anything in our path.

Goats. The entire rooftop was swimming with goats.

A meandering horde of gray and white livestock was bleating lazily in a way that almost felt like taunting, as if the insurgents were pranking us.

“What the fuck?” Jeremy said.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I said.

“Well, there’s something you don’t see every day,” Bob said.

We all just looked at each other and laughed. Only in Ramadi.

We were all pretty spent and ready to get out of there. Being in bad-guy territory in the daylight was never smart. Luke called in the Jundis to search, and we all started gathering whatever intel we could find. We found computer parts, cell phones, a bunch of CDs, and Iraqi dinars (money). The place was rife with all the signs of being a muj house, except for the muj. We stuffed several trash bags full of the valuable items and headed out to the vehicles.

I tossed a trash bag onto the back of Big Zev and was about to hoist myself up when I heard the roar of a diesel engine and the screech of tires in the distance. My hold on Big Zev slackened as I went for my weapon and turned toward the noise. A city bus came screaming around a corner. Our radios came alive with the call: “MUJ BUS! MUJ BUS! FOUR O’CLOCK!” It was barreling toward us like an angry bull.
You’ve got to be kidding me,
I thought.
These dudes are about to get chewed the fuck up.
There we were, some of the most highly trained and best-equipped warriors in the world, and we were being chased down by a bunch of muj who’d just hijacked a scene from
Speed.
I shook off the sheer absurdity of what was happening and calmly raised my M4 to my shoulder.

The bus screeched to a halt about two hundred yards out, and several muj piled out and ran toward us with AK-47s and RPGs. They may not have been tactical, but they were prepared.

“Heads down! Heads down!” Guy yelled from behind Big Zev’s .50 above us in the turret. Often stuck in the TOC, Guy loved an opportunity to get his war on, and he didn’t hesitate when the opportunity presented itself. We all got low as he trained the gun on the bus and opened up with a vengeance, unleashing a deafening stream of hot metal just a few feet over our heads. When you’re behind the .50, the explosive chug-chug-chug rhythm is loud, but the decibel level is tolerable. Being just a few feet below and in front of it is a completely different story. The concussive blasts of each thumb-sized round leaving the barrel at a muzzle velocity of 2,900 feet per second make your head rattle like someone slamming two frying pans together with your skull in between. To say it’s an uncomfortable feeling is a gross understatement.

We all stayed low, creeping away from Guy’s line of fire and over Big Zev’s sidewalls to join in the turkey shoot. “Muj bus!” had been the only order and we didn’t need another one. It was read and react. Instinctively, we fanned out on line and engaged. The whole thing was too absurd to process while it was happening. It reminded me of the scene in
Star Wars
when Han Solo takes off running in a kamikaze charge after a few Stormtroopers on the Death Star, only to turn a corner into a horde of enemy waiting to blast him. The main difference between that and our scenario was that Stormtroopers couldn’t hit water if they fell off a boat.

SEALs, on the other hand, are not Stormtroopers, and even my Jundis could hit a muj bus.

The .50 gunner from the Humvee opposite Big Zev on the other side of the street unleashed holy hell on the muj bus, and I saw pops of sparks and little flames erupting all over it as both our .50 gunners ripped it to shreds with a steady stream of red-hot metal. The
guys who made it off the bus didn’t get far. I imagined what it must have been like for the muj, screeching around the corner, all amped up, chanting God is great, ready to surprise and kill some Americans, only to find themselves staring down a platoon of heavily armed SEALs ready to settle the score through an awesome display of superior American firepower.

We were finally getting an outlet for all our built-up aggression. For once, we had a stand-up fight. An incredibly lopsided fight, but a fight nonetheless. Every one of us poured hate into that bus and the handful of insurgents who managed to get outside just in time to catch a hail of bullets and crumple in a bloody heap. I fired at the bus, at the insurgents, and at anything hostile coming from that doomed vehicle of death. I’d heard the old cliché so many times: like shooting fish in a barrel. Now I’d seen it firsthand. The barrage lasted about two minutes, and when it was done, there was broken glass and carnage all around and inside the smoking bus, now peppered liberally with hundreds of holes, giving it a spongelike appearance. The call to cease fire came over the radio, and all of us just sat there for a moment, waiting for anything to move. Nothing did. We looked around at each other, and everyone began to laugh.

“Dude, did that just fucking happen?” I said, to no one in particular.

“That was some Highway of Death shit right there,” the Legend said.

“I don’t know what to call it, but it was fucking awesome,” Guy said.

Bob, who’d been closest to the .50-cal, yelled, “What the fuck’d you say? I can’t hear shit!”

Everybody laughed, and Luke called over the radio, giving the order to move out. The truck rumbled to life as we all sat back on Big Zev’s sandbags, smiling with a mixture of satisfaction and incredulity. Riding back to Sharkbase in silence, I remembered stories
about the initial invasion of Iraq in 2003, and how the Iraqi soldiers and Fedayeen fighters would sometimes roll up to the fight in school buses. Muj buses were apparently a thing in Iraq . . . a very ill-advised thing. The whole absurd tactic made me think of my favorite passage from George C. Scott’s classic opening monologue in
Patton.
The film was a regular fixture for our platoon in Iraq. We watched it religiously during our downtime and frequently quoted Patton’s opening speech to his troops:

Now, we have the finest food and equipment, the best spirit, and the best men in the world. You know, by God, I actually pity those poor bastards we’re going up against. By God, I do. We’re not just going to shoot the bastards. We’re going to cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We’re going to murder those lousy Hun bastards by the bushel.

Muj bus. Our first bushel. I couldn’t help but grin. I preferred it when the mass casualties were on the enemy’s side.

“Aim towards enemy.”

—instruction printed on U.S. rocket launcher

S
EVERAL YEARS AGO,
I was out in the surf near the Imperial Beach Pier with KPM early one Saturday morning. I was riding my longboard and trying to wash away my hangover. When the surf was good, it was chest to head high and I spent many of the weekend mornings I wasn’t away on a training trip in the same spot.

As I went down the line on a clean head-high wave, the set closed out and I jumped off my board. When I popped up to the surface to grab it, I felt a sharp stinging pain in my right cheek and grabbed at my face. Something was tugging at me. I’d been hooked by one of the fishermen on the pier and was getting tangled in the line. I could feel the weights and bait swirling in the water around me.

My board was being pulled toward the shore and yanked me underwater by the ankle. I didn’t know what else to do, so I grabbed as much line as I could and wrapped it around my hands to protect my face. With both of my hands literally tied, my board pulled me under each time it got tossed by the churn of the surf zone. It took me several
large gulps of air and submersions, and several attempts before I finally bit through the line and cut myself loose.

I made my way back to shore with a fishhook in my face and my board still lashed to my ankle. Onshore, I untied the shrimp and weights from the line, then packed up to head home so I could cut the barb off the hook and push it the rest of the way through and out of my face.

At the time, I never thought much about how lucky I’d been to get out of that situation so quickly and without a real injury. I never considered that it could have hooked my eye. Some things just happen the way they happen. They make good stories to tell over beers later, but dwelling on them too much is an effort that yields no profit.

Our target was a couple of compounds in a rural area north of Ramadi. We took a big convoy up Route Mobile to a farming area north of the Euphrates. The land was flat and well irrigated with green fields, hedgerows, and date palms. The vehicles dropped us off a few klicks out, and we patrolled on foot to our objective, following the mud-soaked drainage ditches, which provided some cover and concealment as we went. As usual, it was hot and humid, and the mosquitos were savage. Walking with night-vision goggles over slippery or uneven terrain can be a challenge, and Bob, who was usually a stickler for noise discipline, kept slipping and falling on his ass, making a racket as he went. I snickered loudly, which was my way of letting him know each misstep he made was noticed, and he was going to hear about it later. “Get your shit together, Bob,” I’d tell him. Newguys have to exploit whatever opportunities we get to give back some of the shit the older guys give.

After about forty minutes, we arrived on target. At our waypoint,
I took my place in the front of the formation for the patrol to the compound. Our security element covered all avenues of approach as four of us ran up and stacked against the compound’s eight-foot wall.

Time to go,
I thought, preparing to lead the way over the wall. I remembered the Jundis on my first op and the loud banging of their AK-47s against the ladder as they scaled the wall. There would be none of that tonight. The wall was about twelve inches wide, and I hoisted myself onto it with ease. I straddled and hugged the top of it momentarily, keeping a low profile and then swinging my other leg over and dropping down. With all my gear, I must have weighed at least 275 pounds. My left foot hit the ground first.

At least, my left foot was supposed to hit the ground.

Instead, it came down hard on a long nail, which punched through the sole of my Oakley boot, punctured the bottom of my foot, and proceeded right on through my whole foot until it was poking through the top as if to say, “Hey, Dauber, fuck you!”