The Last Punisher: A SEAL Team THREE Sniper's True Account of the Battle of Ramadi (20 page)

By seven in the morning, I had begun to develop a gnarly case of swamp ass. Marc had come by a few minutes before, and the reading on his Suunto watch said 119 degrees. Some people will tell you desert
heat is dry heat. My ass on that four-story building would tell you those people are full of shit. Despite the heat, I had a view of about 1,200 meters in which to engage, and I was feeling pretty good about our position. Chris and I had set up a wood pallet to perch on and added some prayer rugs for support. I had a poncho liner strung overhead to block the sun and provide some protection for my Polack skin. Being in the middle of Indian country, I expected to get the jump on some unsuspecting muj. I was ready for some work.

The morning call to prayer sounded angry. It took me back to SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) school, where I sat caged up in a box, listening to similar music, looking forward to being in this position. The street was a normal beehive of activity, but I’d seen nothing of interest since the sun breached the horizon. My focus hadn’t flinched since I lased my reference points, checked my dope card, and packed a chaw. Behind the gun, a focused mind equals success. Boredom is the main cause of missed opportunity. Like in deer hunting, any subtle movement on my part might catch my prey’s eye. My pool of Copenhagen spit began to threaten my prayer rug, but I ignored it. I remained fixed, scanning the street from near to far.

Then I saw him.

He was only two hundred yards away, and my scope provided a crystal-clear view. A middle-aged man with short, graying black hair, a widow’s peak, and a thin beard walked out of his compound and locked the gate behind him. A crude satchel sagged awkwardly over his brown man-dress as he ambled my way.

“You got him, Dauber?” Chris asked.

I grunted an assent. He slid the satchel around to his front. The clear imprint of a 155 mm artillery round was unmistakable as I repositioned the cheek weld on my Mk 11. I felt the epinephrine pump through my arteries and hit the receptor sites like a freight train.

Ride the lightning.

Whether it’s your first, third, or seventeenth kill, the excitement
never fades. I controlled my breathing. The external temperature seemed to climb with my heart rate as he approached a hole in the middle of the road about 120 yards in front of me. The reticle began to settle as he crouched at the hole, pulled the IED out of the satchel, and dropped it in the hole.

As a professional warrior—a steward of the American flag—you operate under a strict set of guidelines. My rules of engagement were clear. Hostile action or hostile intent were the behaviors for which I could kill an insurgent. The presentation of the artillery round left no doubt. I felt the switch as my breathing deepened and my heart slowed even more. I felt every muscle in my body relax as I tightened the slack in the match-grade trigger of my Mk 11. The muj stood, looking up in my direction, and from behind a pair of binoculars, Chris said, “Dump him.”

I hit my respiratory pause as the hammer dropping caught me by surprise. The bullet barked out of the rifle at 2,900 feet per second, tearing through the man’s solar plexus. The kick from a suppressed Mk 11 is virtually nonexistent, so my reticle never left the target.

Snipers often talk about seeing the “pink mist” when we shoot someone. Pink mist is the spray of blood and matter exiting your target when your round impacts. This shot was definitely a pink-mist moment. I saw everything. His body buckled violently like a bear trap slamming shut. It looked almost like he kissed his toes before going down hard in a heap. I felt my senses go into overdrive as the adrenaline began to fire through my arteries again, and I immediately scanned for more targets. It was an easy shot. A blind man could have made it using a toilet paper roll as a scope. Regardless, it was a good kill and a great way to start our day on four-story.

It was a testament to our tactics and our ability to predict the enemy’s response to our huge incursion into their territory. Knowing they couldn’t mount a serious attack against COP Falcon’s perimeter and a bunch of tanks and Bradleys, the muj settled for mining the
areas just outside the COP’s perimeter and trying to prevent the Army from pressing deeper into the district. The muj expected to see new American patrols pushing through the streets very soon. They were on a mission to mine the roads as much as possible, so stifling those efforts was pure satisfaction as a sniper. Each guy that I killed lessened the probability that an American soldier would be killed or maimed on patrol. I’ve seen the carnage from a 155 mm round that finds an American patrol. Preventing that outcome was incredibly rewarding. Knowing you’re literally protecting somebody else in that way is a feeling unmatched by any other.

Chris’s Texas drawl snapped me out of the zone.

“Why didn’t you keyhole his eye?”

In my head, I said,
Are you fucking kidding me? The guy’s dead. I just killed a terrorist. It doesn’t matter where I shot him. He’s fucking dead.
In reality, my grin flattened a little. What else could I expect from the Legend? Any other person making that comment would have drawn a snarky response from my twenty-four-year-old invincible ass. But Chris’s acumen as a sniper was well established. I took his comment as a reminder to not get cocky. My rationale had been that center mass was less risky than a head shot, but Chris’s words reminded me that there was always a tougher shot and there would be plenty more opportunities to take them.

I watched the muj’s buddies as they threw ropes out from behind a wall, trying to get the dead man to grab on. Finally they came out with a white flag and collected up the body.

This exchange always killed me. They’re collecting a muj, but they’re muj, too. Because they have a white flag and no weapons, I have to watch through my scope and let them live. I have to do this knowing they would not extend me the same courtesy. Later, they will try to kill me. I will try to kill them first.

I sat on the gun for about another hour. I felt good, and my mind wandered to thoughts of newguy glory: I have three kills behind the gun—more
than any other newguy. I just smoked this dude on J Street. This is going to be a great hideout. At about eight in the morning, I switched out with Chris on the gun and kicked back to take a nice rest and revel in the glory of my sweet kill.

Chris was on the gun for about an hour before he shot a guy. When he shot the second one a few minutes later, I was lying on my back, sweating buckets. I told myself maybe Chris was somehow bullshitting me on the second one. I rolled over and grabbed the binoculars and watched Chris’s sector for a while. After a few minutes, a muj with an AK-47 darted across the street at about three hundred yards. Chris shot him effortlessly. Every time I heard Chris take another shot and kill a muj, I’d think,
Fuck. Another one, really?
It’s frustrating as a Teamguy because your competitive edge kicks in and you want to know how anyone can be that lucky. You want to be the one on the gun.

“Do you have a fucking AK painted on your reticle or something, you lucky bastard?” I asked sarcastically.

“Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful, Dauber.”

I just shook my head and grabbed an empty water bottle to piss into. When I was done, I tightened the lid and set the bottle next to two others, noticing the distinct progression in color from dark yellow, to even darker yellow, to amber. It was easily more than 120 degrees, and it was time to check on the guys in my capacity as a medic. The piss-bottle spectrum played out similarly at every position. Everybody looked beat down by the sun.
These guys are so dehydrated right now,
I thought. I told Luke we needed a water resupply if we were going to keep killing bodies on the rooftop.

Luke selected Marc, me, and Biff for a hasty resupply mission. At around eleven, we patrolled four hundred meters back to the COP, leapfrogging the whole way. We eagerly pounded two bottles of water each before filling a 120-gallon white cooler with ice and water. Then the four of us ran it back to four-story, heaving the awkward beast
along through the streets, hoping speed would make up for our tactical disadvantage of being a patrol of only four and carrying a loaded ice chest through Ramadi in broad daylight.

Two of our boys waited at the door and two more popped out to hold security as we fumbled up to the building, running inside and dumping the chest heavily on the ground. We smiled as we sat catching our breath for a moment. The guys who were not on watch started trickling downstairs to grab cold waters. I grabbed several and delivered them to some of my guys on the roof. I set a couple of bottles next to Chris.

“You get any more?” I asked.

“A few,” he said. “I counted ten total.”

Four hours on the gun, and Chris had ten kills. I had one. Jonny had one, too. I just shook my head.

“Well, get your ass out of the way. It’s my turn.”

Chris and I had agreed to just leave his bolt-action .30-cal in place because switching out rifles was a hassle. We were about the same size, so our eye relief and shoulders matched up on the gun. From noon to two, I didn’t see much. I took a shot at a guy at around eight hundred meters and missed. The midafternoon heat was brutal, and I was frustrated, so I gave the gun to Chris a little after two. He spent the next three hours behind the gun and shot at least seven more muj.

Son of a bitch.

“You know I hate you, right?” I said as Chris got up to switch out again.

“I know, Dauber. I’d hate me, too.” He sat up and slapped me on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, son. Someday your balls will drop.”

Fucking Teamguys.

It was about five o’clock, and I was determined to find another target. I had to wait about an hour before a peeker obliged me. Peekers usually
leave no doubt as to their hostile intent, but hostile intent is always more of an ethical hurdle for a sniper than clear-cut hostile action like the behavior for which I’d killed the man placing the IED. When you watch a peeker, in the back of your mind you’re thinking,
If this isn’t justified, I could really fuck myself.
Every shot has to be a good target, so you never shoot until you’re sure. A curious little kid looking around a building after hearing gunfire nearby looks very different from a military-age male between sixteen and fifty trying to collect information. When somebody nervously creeps their eyes around a corner while talking into a cell phone, they’re usually gathering and reporting information on American positions. Insurgents often used cell phones to coordinate attacks, so seeing peekers with phones always made us especially cautious. If someone was gathering intel on our position, we could shoot them. Those were our rules of engagement. The first peek around a corner is a try. A second peek confirms, and a third peek gets a round in the face.

At four hundred meters out I could see into a small courtyard with a couple bushes and some pillars on the front porch of a house. Behind the pillars, a bearded, black-haired man dressed in the standard muj attire of Adidas track pants and T-shirt was looking around one of the pillars with a cell phone pressed to his ear. I saw him look up in our direction, thinking we couldn’t see him. He pulled back behind the pillar for a moment and then looked out again, still talking into the cell phone held to his ear. I thought,
He’s either calling in our position to a mortar team, or he’s working with another group to pull off a coordinated attack.
He disappeared momentarily and then looked out one last time, cocking his head and stretching his neck while holding the phone away from his ear. I settled my crosshairs just a little high at the top of his head, accounting for the 100-meter difference between my scope’s elevation setting (300 meters) and the actual distance (400 meters).

Then I hit him.

The round tore through his right cheekbone and practically took his face off. I didn’t see him fall because the kick from the .30-cal knocked my sight picture off, but I quickly tracked back on him in time to watch him buckle and fall on the sidewalk. Justin was looking out with binoculars through the loophole to my right.

“Can I get a witness from the congregation, Justin,” I said to Justin. I didn’t want to wake Chris. He hadn’t slept since we landed to start our foot patrol to COP Falcon.

“Yeah, I got him,” he replied. “He’s fucking dead on the sidewalk. I think he looks better with that face-lift you gave him.”

I cycled the bolt on the gun. I picked up the brass and put it in my pocket with the shell casing from the layup shot earlier. Easy money. I was feeling good again, and I went back to scanning for targets. We spent the entire day on that rooftop, dealing death. When we finally packed up to leave, Chris, Jonny, and I had racked up twenty-three kills.

“Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best; it removes all that is base. . . . Duty is the essence of manhood.” I thought about the quote from General Patton as I continued to scan the street for the rest of the evening. Whether the Legend thought my nuts had dropped or not was the least of my worries. I was in combat and that’s all that mattered to me. I thought about the poor sons of bitches back in their college dorms, playing video games about the stuff we were doing on a daily basis. College felt like a lifetime ago and I wasn’t looking back.

I was feeling extremely satisfied as we patrolled back to COP Falcon in the dark that night. Soldiers and vehicles distributed HESCO and Jersey barriers around the perimeter of the burgeoning COP as we approached, and about a block away from our main entry point, a wrecker truck was hooking up a mangled MRAP, still smoking from the IED blast that had chewed up its entire front end. The troop compartment with its V-shaped hull had worked like it was supposed to
and deflected the blast away, protecting the soldiers inside. Nevertheless, the sight put a damper on the high I was feeling after a windfall day. I really did not want to die from an IED blast. One bad day is all it takes. When we walked inside the building we’d secured the night before, the Army was filling sandbags, the most basic defense we had against blasts. I gave Marc and Biggles a what-the-fuck look. We dropped our rucks and started moving sandbags upstairs. War never sleeps.