The Last Punisher: A SEAL Team THREE Sniper's True Account of the Battle of Ramadi (25 page)

I didn’t see him before I felt the heat of the first ten rounds come screaming down K Street toward the patrol. A military-age male with a PKC nosed out at our twelve o’clock position and delivered a healthy dose of lead. For all my daytime-op acuity and muscle memory, I somehow earned an enemy ambush at the exact moment I was passing by the huge wall around the mosque. I had no cover or concealment, aside from some skinny telephone poles about thirty yards away and a
shit creek of human waste three feet to my right. Diving into raw sewage for cover was not an option in my mind.

EOD Nick and Squirrel opened up with their guns immediately at the patrol’s twelve o’clock position as a second muj with a machine gun opened up from another mosque 150 yards away. The rounds whipped the air around me with a furious snap-snap-snap-snap-snap-snap-snap-snap.

Incoming fire is one thing Hollywood always messes up. When you’re firing it with your weapon, it’s a loud bang. When it’s coming at you, however, it snaps like a bullwhip. Nick and Squirrel dumped rounds at the enemy as the rest of the patrol sucked into the surroundings like ticks on a deer. The unmistakable concussion of an RPG impact reverberated from the wall to my left. I had no choice but to seek cover from the telephone pole, melting into the microterrain as best I could and scanning the adjacent rooftop for possible threats.

A few yards away, Ralphie stood pressed against the side of a building. He called for a center peel and then pointed to me. “You!” he yelled loudly, making eye contact. “Strongpoint that fucking building!” He pointed to a building directly across the twenty-meter-wide, PKC-wall-of-lead-saturated K Street. We needed to get off the X (point of contact), out of the fire, and attempt to secure a building to lock down a fighting position in a strongpoint. Ralphie had realized the coordinated attack and understood the gravity of the firefight. If we didn’t get into a building and suppress the effective enemy fire, we were screwed. Chucky and I had the rear of the patrol locked down; we just needed to find a building that worked.

The withering enemy fire continued from down K Street. Squirrel dumped the rest of his magazine and sprinted down the side of the road opposite to me. Biff picked up his field of fire with a steady fifty-round burst toward the enemy. The telephone pole that I was tucked into tight provided little cover. Several of my squad were between
me and the muj engaging us. I needed the peel to move so that I could start shooting, too.

Just as I was about to get up to move, EOD Nick ran past me. He sprinted toward the rear of our patrol on my side of the street, his faded yellow Asolo hiking boots tearing up a wake of dust behind him. Suddenly one boot connected with the other and launched him skidding into shit creek. As he flew face-first toward the river of shit and wastewater, he held his rifle skyward in the high port position. I stepped away from the last place of cover with a smirk and made a mental note to compliment him on his exceptional muzzle discipline. I saw his face as he emerged from his fecal predicament, his web gear smeared with shit, and could already predict that he would not appreciate my sarcasm.

I had to sprint forty yards across the street. Another burst from the muj’s PKC came down the street, sending the unmistakable bullwhip sound right above my bean. As I ran, I thought about Nick going face-first into raw sewage and laughed out loud. Sometimes you need to throw your nuts in your back pocket and move. Nick’s stumble brought some comic relief to the tense situation. Inadvertently, Nick had managed to distract me from the enemy onslaught that snapped and crackled on either side of me. I sprinted across the road toward our strongpoint with a point to make my 225-pound frame as small as possible while Chucky peeled in behind me. He ran past me and continued on to the door of the compound while I stopped and held security on the second-story balconies and windows of the building behind the eight-foot-high, heavily graffitied wall.

We needed to get in fast, so Chucky decided to kick in the metal door. He delivered the kick with gusto, his right boot high in the air when it connected with and opened the door. He was so enthusiastic that Chucky, who’s about 220 sans gear and about 280 with it, fell flat on his back from the shift in his center of gravity and the weight
of his ruck. He lay there, faceup on the little ramp that led to his blue, sheet-metal nemesis. I saw my opening. I moved quickly to the doorway, eager to get inside and clear. I laughed audibly and made sure to make eye contact with Chucky before stepping on his chest plate on my way inside.

There is nothing funny about a firefight in the street, but watching your buddy land like an upside-down turtle going into a compound door does provide a little levity.

If somebody falls on an assault, your job is to get in that door. Speed and surprise are critical, so you do whatever is necessary to get in, even if that means stepping on your buddy’s chest.

I began to clear the courtyard by myself as Chucky staggered to his feet and fell in behind me. The Jundis flooded toward our building in pulsatile bounds and into the courtyard with its protective walls. The rest of the element stayed in the street to deal with the contact from the mosque and the end of the street. Chucky and I moved past a car in the open courtyard and the Jundis joined the train before we entered the house. In the first room, a scared-looking man got in my way, and I threw him into a corner with the rest of the residents, already cowering. No weapon. The Jundis reflexively took to the business of restraining them as Chucky and I continued moving through the house and quickly got to the rooftop.

We could see the firefight developing on the street below, and the last of our guys were coming across K Street to strongpoint on our position. As far as I could see, we had no casualties, and so I settled into my God-mode POV, scanning the mosque and adjacent streets below for targets. Chucky engaged the far end of the alley where the contact had originated.

About two hundred yards out, I saw a single muj try to flank us. He carried an AK-47 with an olive-drab weapons holder slung on his shoulder.

I took a knee and steadied my M4, using the three-foot wall as a
stable shooting platform. I put the dot of my optic sight center-mass with a slight lead to compensate for his movement.

Exhale.

Pause.

I fired three shots and the target crumbled. It was like poking a puck into an empty net from just outside the goalie crease.

“Chucky, got one. He’s down, two hundred yards,” I said as I went back to scanning.

“Roger. Reloading.”

Chucky knelt behind the wall and pulled out another hundred-round box of ammo for his gun. I picked up his suppressive fire toward the mosque and street as gunmen darted behind points of cover.

With Chucky back in the mix and his Pig keeping heads down, we held on the rooftop until all enemy fire stopped. I watched as Ralphie entered the compound hollering “Last man!” to Marc Lee at the entrance of our building. After a brief lull, our sister squad on J Street came under fire. Like clockwork, they executed the same type of strongpoint drill and took no casualties.

On the rooftop, Chucky, Marc, Squirrel, and I had a great vantage point from our two-story building. To our north, Squad 2 was 150 yards away locking down J Street and parts of Baseline. To our south, the mosque was silent. To our west, and the origin of the contact, no one moved. I trained my sights back to the muj I had shot—still no movement.

I looked to my right and left. All of us were covered with sweat and dust. Thankfully, EOD Nick had kept himself and his shit-covered clothes downstairs instead of coming up to the rooftop. No one spoke, but all heads moved on a swivel, the Punisher skulls visible on each helmet. We waited in silence for our next movement, soaking up the experience.

Ralphie got on the horn with Squad 2 and determined a coordinated linkup on K Street. The Army was sending Bradleys and Abrams
tanks to support the patrol back. Squad 2 would set security on the ground and leave the Legend and Biggles up on the roof. Our squad would patrol up and together, and we would make our way back to COP Falcon.

I looked over at Marc and Chucky as I tightened my helmet strap and loaded a fresh mag.

“Well,” Marc said.

“Mission success,” I replied drily. “We patrolled to contact.”

“Lighten up, boys. Charlie one, muj zero this go-round,” Chucky said.

Marc laughed. “I’m sure Nick enjoyed this op.”

“It could always be worse,” I replied.

Back at Falcon, I noticed Jonny sitting on his cot next to Biggles, Biff, and Marc. Jonny had been running point for his squad when a muj machine gunner had let loose on him, pinning him down for a few minutes. He was damn lucky to get out of it without getting shot.

“Fuck,” Jonny said with a look of disbelief. “That was gnarly . . . and not in a good way.”

“It was,” replied Biggles as he started twisting his hair in his habitual way.

I packed a dip and stared at the wall.

“It could be worse,” I said. “Nick literally ate shit when we started our center peel.”

The tension quickly faded as Marc Lee began recounting the story of EOD Nick. I grabbed a few boxes of 5.56 mm ammo. I relaxed back onto my cot, jamming rounds into the empty magazines, listening to the description of Nick’s face and rhetorical questioning of why is Jonny point if he can’t see.

Teams and shit . . . Teams and shit.

“Problem solving is hunting. It is savage pleasure and we are born to it.”

—Thomas Harris

I
WENT TO AN
all-boys Catholic high school in a quiet central Connecticut town. I was not the wildest kid, nor the tamest—in many ways I was your typical teenage boy. Our sleepy town didn’t offer much in the way of weekend entertainment, so my buddies and I spent a lot of time driving the back roads, waiting for graduation.

We were in my buddy’s SUV late one Saturday night when he hit a deer. He pulled over quickly to assess the damage to his car, which was considerable, but I wanted to check on the animal.

A large doe lay in the road. She was alive, but badly hurt. At least two of her legs were broken, and it looked like her back was, too. She wasn’t going to make it. “What do we do?” my friend asked. “Call the cops?” I shook my head.

“Nah,” I said. I pulled out my pocketknife and knelt by the deer. My younger brother got out of the car and stood over me, nervously
shifting his weight. Before he could speak, I sank the blade into the doe’s neck and slit its throat.

We waited while it died, making sure she was done before we climbed back in the vehicle and headed for home in silence. Finally, my buddy spoke. “Why the fuck did you do that?”

I shrugged. “Somebody had to.”

By mid-July, Ramadi was effectively in a coalition rear-naked chokehold. The Army and Marines were pressing the western third of the city while the 1st Battalion of the Army’s 502nd Infantry Regiment closed in from the east. The tightening vise concentrated the muj in the beaten zone between. The summer of 2006 brought the fight for Ramadi deep into the bowels of the city, where the Punishers pressed the offense.

About two miles east of COP Falcon and just north of Baseline Road, a triple-stack IED had killed another four Marines. Seeking to disrupt muj operations in the area, our leaders coordinated a sniper overwatch operation at an abandoned four-story apartment complex a few hundred meters from the site of the IED attack. Nothing puts fear in the enemy more than a smile you can feel from a mile. The mission was a full-platoon op—all sixteen Teamguys, our two EOD techs, a couple of straphangers, and about a half-dozen Jundis.

Charlie Platoon stepped off at 2300 from Falcon, and all the newguys were glad to be operating in the darkness where we belonged. I looked around me at my brothers: Rex to my front, Marc Lee behind me. Having been on so many patrols together, we could read each other’s thoughts through night vision. Everybody looked tuned in to the environment—alert and ready for anything.
This is what we’re meant to do,
I thought.
Silent and deadly.
We own the night. My senses were sharp.

The Legend took his place as point man in our dual-column formation. Our route took us through the tightly packed neighborhoods north of Baseline—an endless patchwork of Iraqi residences, narrow streets, and dark alleyways. The houses and their yards provided plenty of cover and shadows, but a maze of poorly constructed hovels, shanties, and marketplaces allowed no direct route. The target building was just two miles away, but Chris had to stop several times and recheck his GPS. The buildings made it difficult to acquire satellite connections. It didn’t matter how diligent you were with a map, how thorough your recon, or how lucky you were. A dog in the road or someone looking out their window could blow your cover. We moved like a bloated accordion in the stifling heat, covering about a mile and a half in two hours.

Half the fun is getting there.

Chris was a great navigator. I’d never really seen him get lost, but he once let a padlocked fence kick his ass after navigating into it during a big reconnaissance exercise back in the States. We easily could have all just climbed over, but Chris was dying to use the new lockpicking skills he’d learned in secret-squirrel school. He pulled out his lockpicking kit, turned his nods on fine focus, and spent about twenty-five minutes failing to pick the lock. Someone finally put him out of his misery and cut the lock with bolt cutters. Because Chris was the Legend, we always offered him no quarter when he stumbled or had difficulty. Chris loved being the Legend, but in those moments where his fallibility was laid bare, he just kind of bore it. Teamguys have to get their shots where we can, and Chris was no exception. He was going to take some shots when we got to the target. I looked toward the tail end of our patrol at Tony pulling up the rear security. Tony was something of a comfort to me there in the back. He was always ready, holding
his gun tight, looking around, scanning for threats and his next point of cover, looking behind him every five seconds in true Frogman fashion.