The Last Punisher: A SEAL Team THREE Sniper's True Account of the Battle of Ramadi (16 page)

After the call to prayer, the usual action began on the streets. When a family doesn’t come out of their house in the morning, their neighbors know something’s going on. The body language on the
street was a whole lot of combat rubbernecking. The neighborhood women out dumping their dishwater—or whatever it is they dump in the road—were looking at our building. Reading the nonverbal cues, I filled in the dialogue as the women conversed: “Why hasn’t Hiba or Muhammad come out of their house this morning? They’re always outside.” Of course, they know it’s because the Americans are there.

I saw several peekers—muj surveilling our position—and cars kept driving up to the intersection, dropping one military-age male and then picking up another. Everything I saw through my scope looked shady. Everything does when you’re operating in the enemy’s den. After a while, the bustle died down and everything got quiet. People started evaporating from the street. That’s when I knew something was about to go down.

It happened quickly. An RPG slammed into the wall of the house near Dale’s position. The intense blast rattled my teeth and set off an intense ringing in my ears. The concussion rang my bell and threw me off for a second or two before I could scan for the source of the fire. Bullets snapped and cracked all around me. I could hear the machine gun, and then I’d feel the rounds cracking like a bullwhip repeatedly next to my head. Rounds were chewing up the window in front of me. My heart was pounding out of my chest as I tried to decide if I wanted to hold position or take cover. In a few short seconds, I’d gone from feeling like a zoo patron watching the animals in their cage to being the main attraction.

I lurched to my left and pulled my Mk 11 with me, sliding headfirst into the corner of the room to my ten o’clock, hoping the wall was thick enough to stop 7.62 rounds. At almost the exact instant I dove away, a burst of rounds came in and stitched up the chair I’d been sitting in.

If I hadn’t dove away, I’d be dead.

“Dauber, you good?” Luke called from the other room.

“I’m good! Still here!”

I waited for the opportunity to return fire, but I was pinned down. Before I could really think about how close I’d just come to dying, an RPG hit the side of the window and exploded—another earsplitting, heart-shaking blast. The deafening concussion felt like it sucked the air out of the room. After a couple of seconds, I looked up at the mangled hole where the window was and just lay there for a while. Being pinned down means the enemy’s effective fire is suppressing all activity. There was nothing I could do. Rounds snapped and splintered the masonry all around. It was not a feeling I was used to, and I didn’t like it. My instinct was to try to get back up and return fire, but the rounds kept coming in, intense and steady. All I could do was keep my head down and wait.

Luke low-crawled through the hallway to check on me; he was buttoned up as always with his helmet and body armor fixed tight.

“Dauber, what’s going on?”

I pointed to the window, the table, the chair.

“I think I got shot at,” I said, trying to laugh at the escape-and-evasion drill I’d just run against the Grim Reaper.

“All right. Well, get after it,” Luke said.

“Roger that,” I said. “Glad that fucking RPG didn’t come into the room.”

Bob managed to move around and get a clear shot out a window to return fire, and after about ten minutes, it all died down. I took another moment to acknowledge that I’d almost gotten seriously fucked up, and then I pushed it away. The rounds that shredded the table and chair I was sitting in had come incredibly close, and I found myself wondering,
How close is close? Close
was the answer I gave myself.
But almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades,
I thought, remembering another of our favorite mantras.

I can’t imagine what guys in World War II had to endure when all they could do was sit in their fighting holes and wait out artillery barrages.
Ramadi wasn’t the European Theater, but there is a learning process a warrior has to go through in order to be consistently effective in combat. Even a Big Tough Frogman has to know when to take cover. You can’t always hang your nuts out there. Sometimes you just need to live to fight another day. I thought about the sign from my early days in Iraq:
COMPLACENCY KILLS
. I hated to admit it, but a creeping complacency had set in. I thought about the contrast between the high I felt after the hostage rescue a week earlier and nearly dying in my hide site.

I slowly put my Red Sox cap back in my pack. I’d begun donning it in favor of my helmet on some of the overwatches. Begrudgingly, I acknowledged to myself that the chocolate-chip “B” hat, while cool, wasn’t going to provide any protection to my dome here in muj country. I cinched the chinstrap on my helmet and put my web gear back on. I had gotten into the habit of sitting in the hide site slick because it was so damn hot. Oh well. The gear was going back on. I was willing to melt before I’d be caught with my pants down again. I’d keep my gear tight and be ready to grab everything and run at any time. Ramadi was not going to kill me. I would not let it. I got up and cautiously packed a dip. I moved the table, then moved the chair over and got back on the gun because that’s what Frogmen do.

Marc joined me in the room.

“Damn, bro, muj lit this place the fuck up,” he said.

“Yeah, apparently they can actually shoot,” I said. “Who knew?”

“I guess every dog has its day, brother,” he said. “Maybe this was God’s way of saying, ‘Don’t get cocky.’ ”

It stayed quiet for the rest of our time in the hide, and Marc and I talked a lot. Something he said stuck with me. We had done some training at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas before deployment. We all got hammered and hit the casino one night, and Marc went on an epic tear on the blackjack table. For a while it seemed like he couldn’t
lose, and every time the dealer started putting cards out, Marc would yell, “Everybody’s a winner!” and we’d all yell and backslap.

“Maybe this shit’s like Vegas,” he said. “Sometimes you’re flush. Sometimes you’re bust.”

“Truth,” I said.

You have to know when to hit and when to stand.

“The mind ought sometimes to be diverted that it may return to better thinking.”

—Phaedrus

O
VER THE COURSE
of an operator’s career, he learns to carry a wide range of gear, tools, and miscellanea. Ammo, rucksacks, rockets, downed men, you name it. He trains for every conceivable combat scenario and learns to adjust to those real-world situations no instructor could ever have imagined. He carries the tools of his trade: his weapons and his instinct.

Preparation is not reserved solely for work, however, and it habitually drifts off-duty and encompasses all aspects of a newguy’s life. In Charlie Platoon, Biggles was awarded an extra piece of essential gear to be carried on him at all times: Laser, a four-foot-tall teddy bear.

I was relieved I wasn’t chosen to carry the giant stuffed bear. So were the rest of the newguys. Biggles, however, embraced his companion and made him a part of all daily activities. He even took a rucksack frame and made a backpack for Laser so he could carry the bear
around like an oversize toddler. When Biggles brought Laser along with him to the bars, no one could deny the favor he did us by providing a giant plush icebreaker. Laser was guaranteed to attract some attention. Biggles may not have had a choice about carrying Laser, but he owned it. And loved it.

We were at a bar when some chick asked Biggles what he was doing with a stuffed animal. He told her he was a Frogman.

“I still don’t get why you’re carrying a bear,” she said.

“Girl,” he responded, “you wouldn’t believe the shit we have to carry.”

Throughout the Battle of Ramadi, when wounded Iraqi police officers were taken to Ramadi General Hospital, members of Al Qaeda in Iraq cut their heads off. The Geneva Conventions stipulate that hospitals “may in no circumstances be the object of attack, but shall at all times be respected and protected by the parties to the conflict.” The muj didn’t care much for the laws of war, nor the laws of man. Throughout Ramadi, they were carrying out savage acts of brutality. The enemy we fought literally chained handicapped people to walls in basements or sawed off the heads of Iraqis who supported coalition forces, and they had been using the seven-story hospital just south of the Euphrates to treat their wounded and to fire on American forces in the area.

By late June, the Marines were pushing farther north, and they wanted sniper support for their operations to wrest the hospital from the insurgents and secure the surrounding area. Our mission was to conduct a forty-eight-hour sniper overwatch just north of the hospital. The most direct route to our target was via riverine insertion from the
Euphrates. This was a welcome change for us. We’re Frogmen, after all, and there are no IEDs in the Euphrates.

We launched out of Camp Hurricane Point, a Marine base butted up in a corner of northwest Ramadi where the Euphrates meets the Habbaniyah Canal. The Marines had a Small Unit Riverine Craft unit, and we hitched a ride with them to our drop-off point. As I boarded what looked like a big camouflaged banana raft, I wondered,
Where the fuck are the Navy SWCC boat guys? Aren’t they the special riverine unit of Surface Warfare Combatant Crafts that are supposed to take me to war? Why are the Marines driving me around?
Then again, I didn’t complain. I liked working with the Marines.

“You’re a former water taxi, Nick. Hop in there and drive us to the op,” I said to EOD Nick as we watched the boats being loaded into the canal.

“Fuck you, Dauber,” EOD Nick replied.

“Leave him alone, Dauber,” Jonny cut in. “He’s a tech now. He gets sensitive.”

We newguys had zero authority over anyone in the platoon, but we made damn sure to give the support guys shit any chance we got. Nick was a good sport and always gave it right back.

“Go watch Charlie Sheen’s
Navy SEALs
and keep telling yourself you’re cool. I’ve got some work to do.”

The SWCC guys are always there in the movies, but they apparently forgot to deploy to Iraq with us. So we rode banana rafts with the Marines.

The boats had a hard time getting out of Hurricane Point because the Euphrates’s current was ripping. Eventually, the swirling current gave way to the straining hum of the engines, and we motored into the easterly flow toward our objective. The boats put out only a small wake as we slowly cut the oven-hot air, mosquito infested and miserably sticky like a Florida swamp in the summer. It was a short fifteen-minute
cruise to our insertion point. Both boats nosed up to a small opening in the thick reeds and vegetation on the bank. I felt like I was in the Mekong Delta. I finally felt like an old-school Frogman, coming up out of the water. Check that box.

We hurried off and set security, and the boats quickly moved off to do some recon and false insertions. We stayed on the banks, motionless, listening to the frogs, and getting consistently more pissed off at the mutant mosquitos that bit us as we sat there pouring sweat. Finally, we got the signal to move.

Our target was a compound just forty yards up from the bank. We planned to use it as a staging point for our recon and eventual assault on the hospital. It had a huge wall around it, and there were three large houses.

We sent Squirrel over the eight-foot wall. Once on top, he discovered an eighteen-foot drop to the ground on the other side. “Oh shit,” he muttered before climbing back over. He went back up with a rope, and we waited to climb over one by one. With the whole platoon waiting, I noticed how dead quiet it was. A fat mosquito buzzed up for a hearty drink of hot blood. Talk about terrorists.

Squirrel secured the rope and nimbly got up, over, and down the wall.
Fucking midgets,
I thought. Chris was next and did not move with the same dexterity and spring. A snicker came from someone on security as the old man disappeared from view. Each man slowly but quietly made his trip. We pressed through the open field to the large three-story house on the west side of the compound, lasers lighting up every dark space and open window.

We cleared through the three houses as quietly as possible, finding them completely empty. They were three-story structures with about fifteen fully furnished rooms in each. Most important, the two outside houses had air-conditioning, which meant we were really in the lap of luxury. My squad took up positions in the westernmost house. As we snooped around the house looking for the best spots to set up in, Biggles’s
guts announced pretty loudly the need to evacuate themselves ASAP.

“That fucking chili mac from the chow hall was a bad choice. I think it’s trying to murder me,” he whispered to me. “I gotta shit.”

“Take your disgusting ass far away from me. I’m setting up here,” I said, gesturing to the room I’d picked on the second floor looking west. “Whatever’s going on in there sounds heinous.”

Biggles had a reputation in the platoon as a serial shitter. He liked to leave little surprises in unexpected nooks and crannies of the buildings we operated from. He got a kick out of his self-appointed role as our resident shit-bomber. A few minutes after he disappeared, Tony was setting up in the room next to mine when he growled, “Whaat the faahhhkk? What the faahhkk is that smell?” I laughed hard, knowing Biggles had struck again. He’d quietly marked his territory right next to where Tony set up, blasting a disgusting chili-mac turd on the ledge in front of one of the windows. Biggles sat in the corner laughing and said nothing. The mad shitter strikes again.

I rolled out my foam mat, which stretched from my head to my thighs. It was about two in the morning, and I took off my web gear and body armor. We own the night, and the risk of attack was relatively low. I grabbed a few water bottles from my ruck and set them next to my mat. I pounded one and packed a dip. Then I drained another into my CamelBak so I’d have a piss bottle when the time came. In order to be effective behind the gun, the less time away from it, the better. The extra bottle prevented a trip to the head mid-hunt. I lay down on my mattress and arranged my trio of bottles strategically. From left to right: dip spitter, water, piss bottle. These are important details. You don’t ever want to confuse the wrong bottle in these situations. Dale made that mistake when we first landed in Ramadi. I lay there, sucking up the air-conditioning while Chris took first watch. We traded time on the gun until the sun came up, sleeping during off hours. By six I was back on the gun, watching the rising sun spread out
over our sector as the call to prayer stirred the city to life. Critiquing the singing voice of the muezzins at the morning call had become a favorite pastime.