The Last Punisher: A SEAL Team THREE Sniper's True Account of the Battle of Ramadi (27 page)

Spaz and I followed Tony and Chris to the wrought-iron gate forty meters ahead. I shined my IR light through the gate’s bars at the stairwell below and the market entrance. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Spaz walking several feet to my right. He turned around and looked at me.

Then he took another step and disappeared straight down in a blur.

On our night vision, the market’s stone roofs and fabric shade structures at the edges read the same. Spaz mistook a shade structure for rooftop. He fell right through and twenty feet down into the middle of the market.

“Fuck!” I said in a hushed tone. This was very bad.

Chris rushed over to see what happened. He could see Spaz lying motionless below. I opened the gate and rushed down the stairs toward the gate that opened into the market. It was locked. A chain and padlock taunted me. “What the fuck, dude!” I whisper-yelled toward Spaz. No answer.

“I need bolt cutters,” I said into comms.

“They’re in the rear of the platoon,” Tony said. “It’s gonna be a minute.”

“Check. Tell them to hurry.”

I stared at Spaz’s motionless body just ten feet from me.

“Spaz, you all right?” I said, still trying to whisper loudly enough to where he’d hear me. “Spaz, you all right?”

Everyone on the rooftop fanned out and held security on every conceivable avenue of attack, but nobody could see into the market. If any bad guys were in it, nobody in the platoon could see or shoot them. The 155 mm round was in the back of my mind. The muj were out there, not too far away, waiting for us to exit the building. We couldn’t afford to alert them.

“Spaz! You all right? Spaz??”

After what felt like an eternity, the bolt cutters came up from the
back of the platoon. Uncle Bob cut the lock, but we still couldn’t open the gate.
Fuck, this is not good,
I thought. There were about a thousand ways this could go south.

“Spaz, you okay??” I heard a groan, and my ears perked up. Then I saw him move. Moving is good—alive and he’s not paralyzed.

“Spaz, you all right?” Bob hissed at him. He sat up and slowly came into consciousness, taking stock of his situation and groaning painfully. “Spaz, come open the gate. We need you to unlock the gate, bro,” Bob coaxed.

He stood awkwardly, keeping his right arm hung motionless by his side. The impact had been so powerful it broke off the buttstock of his gun. It lay on the ground where he had been. His rifle dangled awkwardly from his shoulder and the three-point sling it was clipped to. He hobbled over slowly and worked the gate with his left hand until it finally opened.

The squad quickly fanned out into the market and set security while I assessed Spaz. If he hadn’t been wearing his helmet, there’s a good chance that fall would have killed him. He’d landed on his right elbow, which was completely messed up. I ripped his cammie sleeve open and saw that his elbow was swollen, but not grossly disfigured. Not much to do two miles from the COP. I slung it up as best I could and got him ready to move.

“Daubah,” said Tony, “carry his fahkin’ gun and watch his fahkin’ back for Chrissake.” We took off.

After just a few steps Spaz said, “Gimme that fucking shit,” gesturing to his gun. “I’m not a pussy.” Maybe he didn’t want to look like a pussy, or maybe he just didn’t want a newguy carrying his gun for him on an op. Spaz’s attitude toward the newguys had not eased even months into the deployment. Either way, he had decided I wasn’t carrying his gun back to the COP. I handed the gun over silently and stayed close to him for the patrol back.

Behind the entire platoon, still on the rooftop of the apartment
complex, Nick and Justin dropped a quarter block of C4 with a five-minute timed fuse down onto the 155 round. The C4 was a disruption device for the IED. Nick and Justin wanted to leave nothing salvageable for the muj. It took just a few minutes for the platoon to skirt the market and circle back west toward Falcon. We were well on our way home when the C4 blew.

The walk back was uneventful, and the Legend found a new route, applying the old-school safe-in, safe-out mantra and taking no chances with a potential ambush. At Falcon, we sent Spaz back to Camp Ramadi to have his arm looked at. Then it was time to wait around for the next big mission. We headed into our BTF building and started peeling off our gear.

“That one was close,” I said to Jonny.

“You bet,” he replied back.

“You bet,” echoed Biggles. “Luckily Nick and Justin were on point. It’s about time EOD proves its use,” he said with a smile.

Nick couldn’t help but smile. He knew that one was too close for comfort.

“Muj had their shit locked with that one,” Nick said. “But seriously, can we critique Marc’s accuracy with the sniper rifle?”

The banter quickly enveloped the crew. It felt good to be back at COP Falcon in one piece, despite Spaz’s lawn dart impression from twenty feet up. Fortunately, he suffered only a large contusion and bursitis from the fall.

If EOD Nick and Justin hadn’t discovered the IED before leaving the rooftop, the massive bomb likely would have killed us all. In the world of Special Operations, there is no extra weight. Each individual serves a crucial purpose that adds to the team’s effectiveness. The EOD guys in our platoon were worth their weight in gold, day in and day out. Nick and Justin did their job well, and they literally saved all our lives in that apartment complex. We treated Nick like the hero he was.

After a while, my thoughts drifted to how the muj had kept our heads down while planting the IED. Those motherfuckers.

Jonny looked at me. “I don’t give a fuck,” he said coldly, seeming to read my mind.

“I don’t give a fuck, either.”

Our enemy deserved no quarter.

“When snatched from the jaws of death, tooth marks are to be expected.”

—Hal Story

H
ELL WEEK IS
secured on Friday morning in a scene of quiet reverence. My class came over a berm on the beach and face-to-face with an American flag flapping in the wind. As we stopped and surrounded it, the commanding officer of BUD/S got on the bullhorn and announced we were secured, congratulating us on our accomplishment.

We slapped each other on the backs, took knees, and waited to hear the words of encouragement from each of the instructors and officers who had gathered to see us secured. I was well past the point of exhaustion and their words began to trail away, but I fixed my eyes firmly on Old Glory, and she did not waver.

I carried an American flag on every patrol in Ramadi. The Stars and Stripes always stayed close to my heart, folded neatly and stored in my
body armor between the hard and soft plates. Carrying the flag into battle is a centuries-old tradition whose formal origins were mostly abandoned with the evolution of warfare in the twentieth century. Our National Ensign still flies today in war zones above all military bases and outposts, but Old Glory goes out into the fray only when someone carries her into battle as a reminder of what we’re fighting for. Pilots often carry flags with them on bombing runs or other missions. I don’t doubt that other troops in Iraq carried our flag close to their hearts like I did. As service members, we are stewards of the flag and everything it symbolizes, and you never know when you’re going to need to fly the colors high in combat. For that reason, I carried my flag as if it were a required piece of gear. I was never sure how or when I might need it. After four months in country, I figured I’d probably end up flying it over Sharkbase for a day and then fold it up and give it to my parents or something.

Little did I know, Ramadi would provide a much better use.

The head shed had decided to hybridize our ops. Instead of just splitting the platoon into two squads and patrolling to contact during the day, they sent one patrol on a sniper overwatch to provide cover for the other squad’s presence patrol. The plan was that when the squad patrolled to contact, the overwatch element would light up the muj, engaging them. I was in the overwatch squad with Luke, Chris, Tony, Jeremy, Marc, Biggles, Rex, Spaz, and augmentees from SEAL Team EIGHT. The op tempo in Baghdad wasn’t optimizing EIGHT’s skill sets, so they came to Ramadi to bolster our operations. The platoon from EIGHT was solid, and they blended well into our day-to-day operations.

Willie was EIGHT’s main sniper. Like Marc, he also looked Iraqi and caught a lot of jokes to that effect. He had a few kills and was known for catching an unlucky stray round in the back inside the Green Zone
*
in Baghdad. The stray bullet’s force was minimized by its
long trajectory, but it lodged in the meat of Willie’s back for a superficial wound. The docs pulled it out, and Willie went back to work.

We took a building just north of Baseline about a mile east of COP Falcon. It was a nice corner house a few hundred meters west of the apartment complex where EOD Nick had saved us all from an inglorious demise. It provided a limited view of J and K Streets across Baseline to the south and a nice long view down the streets to the east, north, and back toward Falcon to the west. With 360-degree coverage, our sniper ambush was set to catch any muj trying to get the jump on our patrol.

Our breachers blew four loopholes in the four-foot wall. Marc and I set up on the rooftop looking east. We had a good angle looking down the road about four hundred yards. Willie was one floor down, directly below us looking out a window to the south. Chris looked east through a loophole on the roof, and Tony had a loophole looking north.

In addition to the augmentees from EIGHT, our task unit chief, Pepper, joined us on the op. He was a well-seasoned Frogman from Texas with several deployments under his belt who added to the wealth of experience of our enlisted leadership. Pepper was a mobility and tactics guru whose sound advice, as an ordnance rep, I sought frequently. He was a legend at Team THREE for his role in the initial invasion of Iraq and the charge into Baghdad. He covered the west. I shaded myself with my poncho liner tied to some rebar protruding from the roof’s wall, and Marc and I started our rotation on my Mk 11.

As usual, we didn’t see much of anything during the night, and the morning was mostly uneventful. Around eleven, we got the call on comms that the other squad had launched its presence patrol from Falcon. A few minutes later, a single shot rang out from Willie’s position downstairs.

“Willie, what are you shooting at?” Tony called over comms.

“Some guy,” Willie replied. “Looks like muj.”

“Well, did you hit him?”

“No.”

“Well, why not?”

“Well, he’s just standing around looking shady, so I sent a warning shot over his head.”

“What the fuck?!” Tony barked. “You’re a fucking sniper! You don’t fire warning shots!”

Marc and I burst out laughing. A fucking warning shot.

“Really, Willie?” Chris said over comms. “Is that how they do it on the East Coast? You Team EIGHT guys send warning shots?”

“Yeah, Willie, great idea, man,” Luke said. “Give away our position for a warning shot.”

Willie didn’t need any more critiquing; he got the point.

“Roger that,” Willie replied sheepishly.

It took a while for our presence patrol to make their way down J Street and patrol to contact, but when the contact came it came with a vengeance. The muj opened up on the patrol with what sounded like an insane amount of fire. I heard AKs, PKCs, and RPGs going off like Armageddon a few blocks to the southwest.

“Jesus Christ,” Tony said. “Anybody got a line of sight on that contact?”

Nobody did. We couldn’t engage.

“Well, shit,” Chris said. “What do we do now?”

“I’ve got a flag in my body armor,” I said.

“Well, shit yes, let’s run it up. Draw some attention away from that patrol.” Chris got off his gun and crawled over to my position. I took the flag out of my body armor while Chris found a big aluminum pole. He grabbed the flag and tied it to the pole.

“Let’s fucking hoist it,” he said.

Marc pulled out his little video camera and started filming the historic event while Jeremy joined Chris and me as we hoisted the flag up, flying it high on the rooftop in the middle of muj country.
We all crouched there beaming over what had to be one of the most America-fuck-yeah moves in the entire war.

“We just Iwo Jima’d this shit,” Chris said, crouching behind the wall with a shit-eating grin. AP photographer Joe Rosenthal’s famous photo of U.S. Marines raising the flag on the summit of Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima is among the most iconic photos ever produced. The image is seared into the American consciousness as a symbol of our unbreakable will and fighting spirit. We Punishers felt it was completely appropriate to fly Old Glory high above an enemy stronghold in the same tradition of so many proud American warriors whose legacy we inherited.

It took a few seconds for the muj to catch on, but when they saw the flag, they responded accordingly. Our game had worked. To say we drew their fire is an understatement. We drew their wrath. The muj unloaded hate at our building, and I’ve never felt so good about taking intense enemy fire.

Our guys on the ground had reacted perfectly when they took contact. They strongpointed a building, and one of the guys saw our flag and managed to take a picture of it when the muj turned their attention our way. From our building, we still couldn’t see our attackers, so we just stayed low and waited. After a while, the fire died down. We took the flag down, and I folded it back up and stowed it between my plates. I carried that flag throughout the rest of the deployment and all the way back home. Eventually, I framed it with a little engraving summarizing the story of our Iwo Jima reenactment, and gave it to my parents as a Christmas gift.

Our Iwo Jima stunt had all of us feeling confident, and Tony decided to commemorate the occasion by tagging the rooftop wall: “Charlie Platoon 100, Savages 0.” Our feeling of invincibility was at its height. We took pictures of Tony’s tag and dreamed up more ways to entertain ourselves with the monotony of war.