The Last Punisher: A SEAL Team THREE Sniper's True Account of the Battle of Ramadi (24 page)

“Crispin, you motherfucker, I busted my ass through that house and didn’t shoot anyone, but you sit in the truck and kill eight dudes?”

“You never go out on ops, and the one time you do, a bunch of muj jump in front of your fifty-cal.”

“That’s how it’s done, boys,” Crispin said.

“Bitch, you physically can’t even walk on ops because you’re so damn old.”

We were all cracking up and giving Crispin an endless barrage of giddy shit-talk when Tony shouted into the radio, “Lock it the fuck up!”

Our comms went quiet for about thirty seconds, and then guys started disguising their voices:

“Fucking Crispin.”

“Old man ain’t lost a step since ’Nam!”

“Or WW Two.”

“I guess the Mailman delivered.”

“Yeah, I wish the post office was that fucking efficient!”

The solid two minutes of salty Teamguy ridicule tapered off. The rhythmic sound of the diesel engines, the occasional “Tails up” call from Tony, and Chris’s directions took over. I looked over at Bob as he peered out through the ballistic glass of the vehicle. I leaned my head back and dozed off.

The hilarious irony of the whole situation had us all laughing our asses off because nobody had yet had a chance to really think about what had gone down. The muj Crispin mowed down were about to lay waste to our patrol. If they had gotten set up and initiated an ambush with a well-aimed RPG in that fatal funnel, our patrol would have ended much differently. When Crispin got his BTF moment, he rose to the occasion, lining up and knocking down a whole squad of muj like he was shooting bottles at a carnival. He probably saved a bunch of our lives that night, and for his actions, Crispin earned the Bronze Star.

The convoy ambled lazily up to the Prisoner Detention Facility on Camp Ramadi, full of men content with a successful night’s work. I couldn’t resist taking one more potshot at Crispin.

“Putting that bicycle back up for another twenty years, Doc?” I asked. “Maybe next time you deploy I’ll have a kid in the Teams and you’ll have a couple new hips. You’ll be killing muj in your seventies.”

Doc stepped down out of the truck and nodded toward my pants. “Maybe,” he said. “Looks like you’re good to go in that department.” Doc grabbed his gear and walked off while the rest of the squad howled. In the excitement, I’d forgotten about my blown-out crotch and my fully exposed nuts.

I gave in and laughed, too. The old man got me.

But he still had to get the mail.

“In battle it is the cowards who run the most risk; bravery is a rampart of defense.”

—Sallust

W
ITHOUT FAIL, ANYTIME
I visit a classroom to talk about my experiences in the SEAL Teams, a hand shoots up and a child asks me, “Were you ever afraid?”

I always give the same answer:

“All the time.”

Anyone who tells you he was in the kind of shit we were in and was not afraid is either lying or has something wrong with his head. Fear is your basic human response to a dangerous situation; it activates your fight-or-flight mechanism. There’s a complicated physiological explanation I could give you, but the point is that fear is your friend. It lets you know to wake up and pay attention.

Fear is not the enemy. I did not want to die in Iraq, so naturally situations that presented the possibility of being shot, blown up, or otherwise injured scared me. Fear was a given. It was one of many emotions I experienced there, in addition to fury, exhilaration, relief,
delight, despair, and apathy. Fearlessness wasn’t necessary, and fear is not the polar opposite of courage. What mattered was how we managed that fear in order to overcome it. It was what we did in spite of it.

Sitting on the edge of his rack in our tent on Sharkbase, Marc Lee looked perturbed. After four months of living and working together nearly constantly, I’d gotten pretty good at reading him. You eat, sleep, sweat, and kick ass right next to somebody for that long, you’re going to figure him out. We newguys had the nonverbal communication down. We transmitted information in silent subtleties: the eye-roll, the eyebrow raise, the what-the-fuck brow. It’s not exactly a secret language. The cues mean pretty much what you’d expect, and Marc’s were no exception. If anything, his spoke a little louder than the rest of the newguys’. He was the kind of dude who always seemed to tell it like it was, and for that, everybody respected him.

“I talked to Guy,” he murmured.

“About what?”

“About that shit we discussed the other night.”

I was picking up what Marc was putting down. “These daytime presence patrols ain’t what we’re supposed to be doing,” he said. “Figured somebody should say something. Running us ragged all night is one thing, bro, but having us walk down the street in muj country in the middle of the day? That’s not how we’re supposed to do business. Not exactly what we trained up for.”

I recalled a conversation we newguys had held during a routine game of Halo on Xbox a few nights before. I couldn’t recall who had first brought up the topic, but we had all agreed that daytime presence patrols with Iraqi Jundis weren’t exactly the type of business we had planned, or trained for, for that matter, to conduct in Ramadi. The general
consensus among us was that we were already crushing the enemy. Why put ourselves in a vulnerable position with some new job?

“Yeah, man, it’s bullshit. I don’t like it, either. So what did Guy say?” I asked.

“He said he’d talk to Jocko about it.”

Jocko was our task unit commander, and his job was to keep us in the business of staying employed. Fortunately, laziness wasn’t commonplace in the Teams and we were always willing to work. When Jocko and our other officers sat in on the Army’s morning briefings at COP Falcon or Camp Ramadi, they looked for ways to add value to whatever the Army was doing—employment opportunities. The HVT missions, DAs, and sniper overwatches weren’t exactly drying up like the banks of the Euphrates toward the end of July, but Jocko and the officers had decided to feed their combat addiction with any ops they could get for us, even nonconventional ones. What little free time we had they used to plug us into the big-Army rotation around the COP. Charlie Platoon’s success was becoming addictive, and the higher the body count rose, the more the leadership wanted to add to it, no matter the risk.

As a newguy in the Teams, you generally do whatever you’re told, and if you don’t like something, you just suck it up and do it anyway. But when we got word we were going to start doing daytime patrols with the Army, the general attitude among the newguys and some of the other platoon members turned pretty sour. In Ramadi, the tactic for conducting a presence patrol was pretty straightforward. Basically, we were supposed to walk down the street in the middle of the day until somebody shot at us. Then, we would try to kill them. If we needed help killing them, we would call in the Army.

“Well, I’m sure we’ll hear something back soon,” I said aimlessly.

“Yeah,” said Marc.

“It’s all right, bro. I’m sure the bullshit will figure itself out,” I replied. “Teams and shit.”

Sunset was green on the morning of our first daytime presence patrol, and I rode in the turret of Snake Eyes (Vehicle 1) on the convoy from Sharkbase to Falcon. We had picked up the Jundis prior to our departure and the convoy meandered through the serpentine barriers of Camp Ramadi.

I waved to the guard as we lurched forward from the line of departure.

What the hell?

I was at a loss for words since the op brief earlier that morning. Guy’s request to rethink our strategy hadn’t made a dent in the new mission outline. Charlie Platoon was being volunteered to do presence patrols in and around COP Falcon with Jundis, in an attempt to reinforce to the local populace that we were here to stay.

I didn’t like it. A SEAL’s biggest advantage is surprise. For months we’d experienced tremendous success kicking down doors and rolling up bad guys in the middle of the night, swift and deadly. We’d laid up quietly on Ramadi’s rooftops, picking off IED planters and peekers who threatened our Army and Marine brothers and sisters. In both types of scenario, we controlled the action. There is none of that on a presence patrol. I angrily packed a Copenhagen as the convoy rolled out onto Michigan. I pursed my face tight and sent a giant juicer down into the cab.
Fucking presence patrols.

The drive was uneventful, and as we snaked through the serpentine arrangement of Jersey barriers at the COP’s entrance, I looked down at the Army guard holding back the razor wire to let us through and gave him a nod. He nodded back.
At least they don’t have us pulling guard duty,
I thought. We parked our vehicles at the Shit Creek Welcome Center, and then the officers headed off for their meeting of the minds or whatever it is they do while the rest of us went looking for
chow. We found a field-mess setup of green mermite containers full of Salisbury steak with peas and gravy.

Biggles looked down disapprovingly at the containers that held the grade-F, prison-quality food. “Only the best, for the best.”

“Biggles, man,” Marc said, between mouthfuls, “I don’t know what we’d do without you.”

“Well,” Biggles said, “for one thing, you’d have to cradle two machine guns with them giant biceps, Marc.”

“If you got ’em, use ’em. If you don’t got ’em, hit the gym.”

I chuckled along with Biggles, Jonny, and Biff.

Jonny looked around. “A misallocation of resources if I’ve ever seen one,” he said.

“Careful, man,” Biggles said. “That’s a pretty big word. Don’t hurt yourself.”

“Shakespeare wasn’t Asian, Jonny. Stick to numbers,” Biff joined in.

“I get it,” I said, catching my fellow medic’s tone. “Patrolling until one of us gets a slug in the grill is a misallocation, but Mr. Muj wants to meet some virgins. I’d say we arrange the meeting.”

A round of distracted chuckles echoed through the group. I tried not to get too caught up bitching because I knew we all needed to get our heads in the game, but the unrest wasn’t unfounded. I wasn’t exactly thrilled about our new job. We were preparing to patrol down J and K Streets, the same place Chris, Jonny, and I had killed twenty-three bad guys in twenty-four hours. We’d have a sniper overwatch, but we’d be otherwise extremely exposed compared to the way we normally operated. I remembered a wise saying in the Teams: If the guys ain’t complaining, something is wrong. I tried to trust that since we were all complaining, we might be headed out to do the right thing.

Daytime ops require even more hypervigilance than nighttime ops. Because we own the night, you can be a lot more liberal with your movement then. In the daytime, moving from cover to cover was necessary.
Dauba’,
where the fahk you gonna go when you get shot at? Stick to cuvah.
Tony’s words echoed. If the enemy starts spraying, you want to have something to dive to. I rechecked my med bag and gear, making sure all systems were intact.

As our launch time drew nearer, I remembered Tony’s words during work-up. “This shit’ll keep you alive, Daubah,” he said with poker-face eyes. “Head on a fahking swivel,” he said in between Copenhagen spits. “And wear some fahking sunglasses. It makes you look fahking mean and the muj have no idea if yah lookin at ’em or naht.”

We huddled into the Teamguy annex of COP Falcon as we got the op brief a little before noon. The house reeked of body odor, Copenhagen, and the stale stench of dried sweat. The ventilation was poor at best. Ralphie would lead my element when the platoon split into two squads. Squad 1—my squad—was going to patrol east for about a mile down K Street while Squad 2 mirrored Squad 1’s movement a block south on J Street. We were going to patrol to contact, establish a strongpoint, and either kill the enemy or call the Army to help us kill the enemy or get us out of a jam if the situation called for it.
Get after it,
I reminded myself.

We launched around noon with Squirrel running point, Ralphie as OIC, followed by Marc, Biff running comms, EOD Nick, me, and Chucky in the rear. Sprinkled here and there in among us were a bunch of Jundis in their usual pirate outfits.

I felt a certain amount of pride in the Jersey barriers that had been erected on the western edge of COP Falcon as we started the patrol west down Baseline. COP Falcon had begun to take shape as the coalition footprint pressed into the moondust of southwestern Ramadi. We’d come a long way in the last month or so since Horse Teeth took one to the brain housing group. More work to be done.

The sun beat down on my neck as we passed the head count up to the front of the patrol. I flipped my collar up, readjusted my sling, and moved tactically to the doorjamb of the nearest building. I scanned
the rooftops of the uneven hodgepodge of Middle Eastern architecture. It was an insurgent’s advantage up in that network of wires, uneven walls, and clusterfuck. I scanned over my EOTech optic at the adjacent rooftop.

Head on a swivel.

The muscle memory Tony instilled during work-up took over as I moved with purpose from cover to cover, hugging doorjambs while scanning for my next position or strongpoint. I had to make sure Chucky and the Jundis could always see me. Line of sight in a daytime patrol is very important. I didn’t need another accidental discharge in my direction from the Jundis. We walked for about three-quarters of a mile, and I started to think maybe we would reach the end of K Street and turn back without a single muj trying to engage.

After we crossed a small intersection two-thirds of the way down the one-kilometer stretch of K Street, I could see the brick wall at the end. I patrolled on the right side of the street and realized the long wall shielded a mosque on our right side, two hundred meters up.
Fuck,
I thought. Mosques were terrible places to hang out by. The muj loved to hide out inside and attack coalition forces from within, knowing we got our asses chewed—or worse—for shooting at the religious buildings. I’d rather walk across shit creek than do a daytime presence patrol around a mosque in muj country. Squirrel looked back to assess the squad as he carefully sidestepped the giant pile of trash in front of him. That hum of expectation ran throughout the patrol.
It’s coming,
I thought, carefully scanning my sector.
Where are you, fucker?