The Last Punisher: A SEAL Team THREE Sniper's True Account of the Battle of Ramadi (26 page)

We reached the four-story apartment complex a little after 0200. A couple of machine gunners pushed past the front door and picked up security at the end of the building while the point shooters fanned out to cover all threats high and low. Chris moved up to the front door with an entry team of Jundis. One of them quietly cut the lock on the door, and the Jundis began their clearance.

The front doorway opened up into a lobby from which hallways jutted out on each side and stairs sat straight ahead. We cleared through the entire ground floor, avoiding the littered refuse from an apartment community that had obviously deserted in a hurry. The assault train flowed stealthily through the crevices and hallways, passing updates quietly over comms. It took almost fifteen minutes to clear the fifty-room structure.

Tony posted a team of Jundis in the foyer, and the snipers headed for the roof to begin the hunt. With plenty of space to set up and a view of multiple intersections, choosing the angles that provided the best return on investment was crucial. It’s not like fishing, where you can get up and move if you’re not catching. Once the loopholes are blown, that’s your real estate.

Chris and Tony decided to split sniper assets and utilize the roof and the third floor. Spaz and Squirrel took the real estate to the north. The view to the west was limited by a morass of dilapidated buildings and zigzagging streets. We left a few machine gunners and EOD Nick to pick up that angle. Chris, Marc, and I found a room on the third deck with a window looking toward a big intersection with Baseline Road three hundred meters southeast. The view gave us a wide field of fire into muj country and the intersection where the Marines had been ambushed with the triple-stack IED. The window had some bars and curtains, and we set up in the darkness several feet back.

Tony and a few other guys set up in the adjoining room looking straight east, and the rest of the platoon filled in positions to the west and north. The north side of the building was physically adjoined to a market whose roof aligned perfectly with the second floor of the complex.

“Have a little trouble with your GPS tonight, Legend?” I said to Chris.

“Safe in, safe out, Dauber.”

“Home, home on the range . . . Legend,” Marc said.

“It wasn’t my best performance,” Chris said. “But I got us here in one piece. Don’t bitch.”

Marc and I smirked at each other. He was right.

Chris took the first shift on the gun as the twilight opened on the horizon. Marc and I set up in the back corners of the room, shedding our body armor and lying on our backs, trying not to melt in the suffocating staleness of the hot air inside the building. The daytime temperature was averaging about 120 around that time, and the nights didn’t give much relief, especially with the lack of airflow in the city. In that type of environment, you can’t really cool yourself down. All you can do is drink water and try not to think about how miserable the heat is. I felt like a hound chained to a post with no relief from the elements.

Around 1100, the muj said good morning with machine guns and a few RPGs. Lying on my back sipping water, I watched apathetically as the rounds came in, hitting the wall above and behind me. I rolled over toward the corner of the room and kept sipping as I slipped into my armor and kit. I’d been shot at so many times that I was pretty tuned in to the drill. If nobody’s hit, and you don’t have a vantage point to engage, there’s not much you can do but take cover.

I low-crawled toward Marc’s room, knocking my own piss bottle over in the process. I found him wide-eyed with a HOLY FUCK! look on his face. An entire belt of PKC fire had impacted right around him. The enemy fire wasn’t
super-intense, but it was sustained in a way that kept our heads down for a while. Chris, who had been a few rooms away checking on the other snipers, wiggled on up next to me. “Isn’t this great?!” he said.

“You bet,” replied Marc. “Time to unleash some BTF on them.”

I gave Marc a wink.

The machine guns on the rooftop opened up. I looked up and then at Marc. I gave Chris a tap and bolted out and up the stairs to the rooftop. Staying low, I hurried to the roof’s east wall, looked over, and saw a bunch of muj scurrying like cockroaches down on the street. Biggles was on a sniper rifle. His Mk 48 sat just next to him. “Biggles, let me use your gun!” I said, grabbing it hurriedly as I put my M4 down. I ran and planted my shoulder on the wall before popping up to spray some 7.62 music down on the corner. The heavy bolt had slammed home, but there was no round seated on the feed tray, no primer to strike, no chain reaction that sends some American lead toward the enemy. Basically, the gun malfunctioned.

Chucky and Bob were engaging effectively with the Pigs to my left as Ned, our third officer, and Jeremy fired 40 mm rounds down on the south side of the wall. I ducked down behind the wall and applied immediate action: charge the weapon, safe it, open feed-tray cover, sweep the linkage, load the belt of ammo, seat the round, slam home the cover, and switch to fire. I jumped back up from behind the wall, letting loose and missing some muj about 250 meters out. I burned through the first hundred-round drum, shooting the bushes and cars the muj disappeared behind. Then I popped the feed tray, swept the links, loaded a new drum, slammed the cover, and popped up again. A small camera on EOD Nick’s helmet recorded the scene as I let loose with about another fifty rounds on the muj positions. Looking through my ACOG scope, I couldn’t confirm any dead guys, but nobody was moving from behind the bushes or cars I’d lit up.

“Dauber,
great shooting, man,” Biggles said. “Glad you were able to get that weapon system up and running in time to almost shoot some of the bad guys.”

“Nice malfunction there, Dauber,” said Chucky. “Too bad you missed the turkey shoot.”

“You shoot a machine gun like a corpsman, Daubs,” Uncle Bob joked.

Chucky and Bob got after it. They had their guns talking to each other in a perfect my-turn-your-turn rhythm. EOD Nick and Justin took sporadic shots here and there, and Ned continued to launch golden eggs in the general direction of any hostile movement. We all enjoyed the opportunity to pour out some aggression, and I stayed up top for a while, shooting at the enemy in anger, messing around, cracking jokes, and talking shit.

“Guys, check this out,” said EOD Nick. He pointed to the wall behind his position. Just above the bedroll he’d been using as a pillow, a gang of bullet holes sat staring at us. Some of the muj machine-gun fire had come through the rooftop wall and impacted just above Nick’s head.

Just another day in Ramadi.

One of the best parts about being a newguy, which always sucks, is that you have other newguys to suffer beside, to laugh off the type of stuff most people only ever have to consider in abstract terms. An old salty operator once said, “Men, it only sucks while you’re doing it,” and I eventually grew to understand that those words are about glory bought by suffering.

After thirty minutes, the enemy fire was suppressed. I crawled toward the rooftop exit and headed back to my sniper position. Marc was on the gun, and Chris was laid out on his back, spitting sunflower seeds listlessly into the space around him. Chris was notorious for just not having any fucks to give about where his spent seeds landed. He wouldn’t
even turn his head or make any effort to steer the trajectory of the shells spewing out of his mouth. He was just like the rest of us—dirty men doing dirty work, killing bad people. He spat a seed lazily, and it did sort of a backflip and landed on the Punisher skull painted on his armor. He made no effort to remove it. I shook my head in mock disapproval. Fucking Legend.

“Hey,” Marc said from behind Chris’s .30-cal, “I’ve got a peeker, three hundred yards.”

“Well, you know the deal,” Chris said. “Three strikes, you’re out.”

“He’s kind of moving around in the same area and looking up toward our position,” Marc said. “I think he’s peeking.”

“Well, is he or isn’t he?” said the Legend. “How many times has he peeked?”

“I think that was seven or eight,” Marc said.

“Well, send him to Allah,” Chris said sluggishly.

“Lights out,” I said. “Dump him.”

Marc closed his left eye and looked back through the scope. He aimed center-mass, exhaled into his natural respiratory pause, and pulled the slack out of the trigger. The bullet exploded out of the barrel and hit lower than Marc had intended, tearing through the man’s intestines and turning his insides into a mangled mess of poisoned flesh. He flopped down hard in a heap.

“Nice, Marc,” I said, moving to pat him on the back. It was his first kill.

“Nice job, Marc,” Chris said.

Marc stared through the scope, scanning for a moment before he opened both eyes and said, “Dude, that was cool,” in a voice just above a whisper.

“It’s about time you got on the board, Marc,” Chris said. “It’s fuckin’ July after all.”

“Yeah, maybe I’ll catch up to your numbers now, Legend.”

Chris turned and gave me a look that said not a chance in hell, newguy.

“Marc, you’ve got one more confirmed kill than a lot of guys in the platoon, but you’re about seventy behind Chris,” I said. “I wouldn’t bet on catching him.”

Luke came into the room and said, “Whatta ya got?”

“Military-aged male peeker at three hundred yards. Gave him about eight chances before I shot him.”

Chris and I confirmed Marc’s account.

“Roger that,” Luke said and then walked out.

Marc looked back through the scope and watched the guy he’d shot, still alive and in a lot of pain, writhing around near the corner of the intersection, trying to get up and failing. He held his gut and tried to wiggle away, but his insides were too torn up to muster the core strength to move himself. This routine continued for about thirty minutes, and Marc just sat there watching the man’s suffering and slow death.

“That’s fucking gnarly, man,” Marc said solemnly.

I had to agree. It was pretty gnarly. The man’s guts drained slowly onto the street around him, and he tried to worm away toward safety or a quicker death, whichever he could manage. But he got nowhere and just kept not dying instead. “Fuck, man,” Marc said. “That’s gnarly. But they don’t give a fuck when they kill our dudes.”

“Amen,” I replied.

Marc took his first sniper kill a lot differently than I had. He remained fixed, staring at the shit show below. When the guy finally died, his muj buddies came out with white flags and pulled him back around the corner out of sight, a blood trail staining the ground as they dragged him away. Marc got off the gun and gave it over to me.

I don’t know if Marc had feelings about that kill. I do know that peekers were cogs in the evil machine we worked day in and day out to
dismantle. I shot them. The Legend shot them. Marc shot them. Peekers reported our movements and locations to other muj, who planted IEDs or engaged us outright. Peekers were a problem. The peekers had to go.

My shift was extremely uneventful. Not every minute on the gun is an action movie. When I finished my watch, I was in desperate need of a dip. I was notorious for running out of Copenhagen and bumming way more than is reasonable before even the most generous Teamguy will tell you to pound sand. You know you’ve hit rock bottom when your most reliable donors suddenly cut you off. I was always bumming Copenhagen off Chris, and apparently, I’d finally reached the point where Chris was fed up and tired of being taken advantage of. I had to find a new benefactor, one who wasn’t yet aware of my MO as a shameless dip moocher.

I headed back up to the roof and crawled over to Biggles.

“You’re out of dip, aren’t you?” he asked knowingly.

I nodded. “Yup.”

“You’re pretty hard up, aren’t you?”

“I’m asking you, and you chew Berry Blend. You know I’m a Copenhagen man.”

Biggles handed me his can of Berry Blend Skoal, and I scooped out a chaw and packed it in my lip, immediately regretting it. The Berry Blend tasted far worse than I remembered. I didn’t even make it back to my room before I dug it out of my lip and slung it to the ground. “Shit is fucking disgusting,” I said to myself. I knew I couldn’t let Biggles see the wasted dip. There were two things he loved dearly. One was his girlfriend Kelly, and the other was his Berry Blend Skoal.

Back in our room, I turned my attention to dinner. I pulled out my MRE of spaghetti and slipped the meal packet into the heating element. I poured some water in, folded the plastic container over, and set it down to cook.

At 2300, Tony told us to start breaking down our hide and sanitizing the area. “Muster in the lobby downstairs in thirty minutes.” We all tightened up our gear and packed away our trash. Everything we brought in always had to be packed out, shit bags and piss bottles the exception. When in muj country, we left those as a parting gift.

As everyone trickled down to the lobby, EOD Nick and Justin were on the roof, scanning our exfil route one last time for possible IEDs or other dangers. The streets were quiet, and Nick was about to call it all clear and head downstairs when he looked straight down at the front entrance of the complex. Sitting conspicuously against the front door was a big, fat 155 mm artillery round. Traceable from the stumpy phallus to some unseeable end across the street was a command wire, which a muj trigger team was, no doubt, eagerly waiting to detonate the moment we walked out the door.

“Luke, this is Nick,” he said over comms. “I’ve got a command-wired IED at the front door. Get everybody back upstairs.”

The muj had been pretty slick in planting it. The firefight earlier in the day had been a diversion. They kept our heads down while an IED team set the huge bomb.

Tony pulled the platoon back to the second floor and the north side of the complex, where the adjacent market’s rooftop butted up against the building. If we could get through the wall and onto the roof, there was a stairwell down to the market, where we could exit onto the street and into the darkness. First, we newguys had to bust through the wall.

Marc, Biggles, Jonny, Biff, and I took off our body armor and started hammering. After twenty minutes we had about a three-foot hole. We put our gear back on, and
Spaz and I followed Tony and the Legend out onto the roof, setting security for the guys who poured onto the roof behind us.