The Last Punisher: A SEAL Team THREE Sniper's True Account of the Battle of Ramadi (28 page)

“Gimme that wooden dowel,” I said to Marc, pointing to a three-
foot stick. I took a sheet and tightened it around the dowel like the base for a torch head. I drew some eyes, a nose, and a smile on it and then put some sunglasses on it. I finished it off with my helmet.

“Looks like a head, right?” I said. “Let’s see what this does.”

I named him Wilson. I hoisted Wilson up and kind of crawled back and forth, goading our enemy to shoot at him and entertaining myself and my brothers. To tweak that famous quote from Rick James, boredom is a helluva drug. Nobody shot at Wilson, but after a minute, I kind of smartened up. I looked at the wall and realized that it was only a few inches thick and the right weapon and concentration of fire could quickly render the whole situation very unfunny. They didn’t have to get a head shot. A well-aimed RPG could really fuck me up.
Man, this is a dumb idea,
I thought, pulling my dummy down and putting my helmet back on. I settled back into a tactical mindset and sat down next to Marc.

“This is kind of a waste,” I said. “I hope the guys on that presence patrol did all right.”

“Right? This machine gun is aching to run.”

“I hear ya.”

Tony told us they had called in the quick reaction force, and the Army sent a bunch of armored vehicles to pick them up. Fortunately, no one was hit. We stayed the rest of the day without incident and patrolled back that evening.

Pepper was in front of me as we walked back. I watched him and I could tell he was smoked. His cammies were soaked through with sweat, and he walked pretty heavily. At one point, Marc gave him a pull from his CamelBak. Pepper looked like a man who was severely dehydrated. I knew that feeling well, and I kept an eye on him. At an intersection, he walked off the sidewalk to cross the street. As he looked back toward me, he must have caught his boot on a rock or some rubble, because he fell flat on his face. I saw him go plank—from a straight 90 degrees to a 180 in a heartbeat. He hit the ground hard
right in the middle of the street. I saw it and realized he was probably as bad off as I had suspected.
He’s gonna need an IV,
I thought. Pepper was a Big Tough Frogman for sure and got right back on his feet, but the rousting began immediately. The rest of the patrol back, the chatter over comms was merciless.

When we got back to COP Falcon, I looked around at our guys. They looked beat to shit. Despite our messing with Pepper, his condition was understandable. We were all smoked. Jonny and I gave Pepper an IV and we got him on a convoy back to Sharkbase for some more hydration. The rest of us went to our SEAL house on the COP to trade stories about what had gone down. When I walked in, the smell of man-ass, stale sweat, and spent meal packs hit me hard. Disgusting. The rest of the newguys were already sitting around bullshitting. I slid my helmet under my cot and plopped down. Biff was in the corner, still sweating balls with the fan on him.

“You hear what happened to Biff?” Marc asked.

“No, dude. I just hooked Pepper up with some IV awesomeness.” I looked at Biff. He looked haggard and exhausted with a fuck-all look. “Biff, what happened, man?”

“Not again . . .” he said, exhaling deeply and kind of shaking his head. He paused for a second. “I got shot in the fucking head, man. After we strongpointed the building, I got to the roof, and when I peeked over the wall a round nailed me right in the NVG mount. Knocked me on my fucking ass. I just saw this huge flash of light. Fucking rung my bell. Fucking pissed me off. I was so pissed I jumped up and went cyclic. Unloaded about two hundred rounds over the wall and somehow forgot to shoot the gun right-handed.” He lifted his right bicep. It was burned black. Biff was a natural southpaw, and the Mk 48 isn’t built for lefties. The ejection port spits brass out the right side of the gun, and Biff had managed to spit two hundred rounds of burning-hot brass straight into his bicep without skipping a beat.

Combat rage is a helluva drug, too.

“That’s
pretty fucking gnarly, man,” I said.

“Yeah, bro, too close for my comfort,” Biff replied. “Ralphie also took a few rounds off his armor.”

“Shit’s getting pretty close, man,” Jonny said. “I mean, we lost a Jundi the other day, and another one got injured. There was that close call with the IED house, and now Biff takes one to the helmet. We’re hanging out there like dog’s balls.” A small squad from Charlie Platoon had gone on an op a few days before with a group of Jundis. They’d taken fire and two Jundis had been hit, one of them mortally.

“Well, no one makes fun of a dog with large balls,” Biggles replied.

“Like the one that was humping your leg the other night at Sharkbase,” Marc replied.

We all laughed. Cutting up with my brothers never got old.

*
 A roughly four-square-mile area in Baghdad that housed the Coalition Provisional Authority. It was heavily fortified and one of the safest military bases in Iraq.

“The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.”

—Phil Jackson

I
RECALL A PARTICULAR
hazing incident during work-up in Niland, California. I’d gotten myself completely taped up from head to foot by the older guys and dumped into a rack. No newguy is ever thrilled with this situation: getting bum-rushed, tackled, and wrapped in duct tape is one of the most uncomfortable, and most common, hazing rituals Teamguys have. They left me there.

I lay there, alone and pissed off, while they went back to their drinking. A few minutes later, the Legend crept in to make sure I was okay. He didn’t untape me, but he asked me in his Texas drawl, “Hey, buddy, you okay? Just checkin’ on ya.” I grunted an assent and he crept back out of the room, chuckling his unmistakable laugh. That was just like Chris. He’d never want anything to happen to any of his guys, but he sure wasn’t going to let us out of paying our dues, either.

I waited there for about an hour until they came back for me. I
ripped off the yards of tape and acknowledged, begrudgingly, that no matter what kind of shit we pull on each other, we’re still family.

Biff had the look of a desperate man. Teamguys aren’t prone to panic, but it’s fair to say he was freaking out a little after we wrapped up the op brief for another mission with the Marines up around Firecracker. Everybody was jacked up and ready to hit it, but Biff was nearly at his breaking point. As a radio operator in the Teams, he was responsible for a highly sensitive piece of gear called the KYK-13, and at the moment we were supposed to launch into the fray, Biff had to report that he was unable to say with any certainty where the cryptographic key loader for his radio was. He had lost the device that kept our comms secure.

I quickly understood why Biff had looked so pale and worried. The KYK-13, although mostly outdated now, is a device the National Security Agency developed for the transfer and loading of cryptographic keys for our long-range radios. In enemy hands, the little metal box with its crude knobs and switches could have some pretty hefty implications for our operational security within Ramadi and pretty much all of CENTCOM. The likelihood that the muj would be able to use the KYK was low, but the potential for disaster was still there should it fall into the wrong hands.

Our priorities immediately shifted. Without the KYK, we couldn’t launch for the scheduled operation. We communicated our situation up the chain, and finding the KYK became our new mission. We started on Sharkbase, searching our compound thoroughly. Nothing. Tony took Biff aside like a disappointed father.

“All right, where do you think it is, Biff? When was the last time
you know you had it?” Tony asked like a parent asking a child who’d lost his favorite blanket.

“Falcon,” Biff said. “I had it when we were on Falcon.”

We all jumped into the vehicles and headed down to COP Falcon. Rolling down Sunset, I thought about how awful it would be if our forced audible literally blew up in our faces. I felt sorry for Biff, who had situated himself firmly atop the shit lists of many people, including himself. We were being pushed so hard that nobody was unaffected. At this point, anybody could have lost a piece of gear.

This was a platoon issue, and I just hoped we could find the KYK. At COP Falcon, the gate guard pulled back the concertina wire to let our convoy pass, and we zipped into the parking lot, quickly mustering up to search the COP. We gently ransacked our SEAL house and found nothing. Then we combed around the entire compound, looking for a six-inch olive-drab rectangle in the middle of the night. Nothing.

“I honestly cannot remember where it was,” Biff said after Tony returned to his interrogation. “I might have put it on the roof of the truck and forgotten it there.”

“So it could be pretty much anywhere between here and Sharkbase?”

“Well, it would probably fall off early.”

Luke decided we would take a small foot patrol up Sunset and look for the KYK along the road we’d taken back to Sharkbase about twenty-four hours earlier. The odds of finding it weren’t good, but the stakes were too high not to try. Patrolling up a heavily IED’d road at night was, to put it lightly, less than ideal, and Luke picked Chris, me, and Marc to accompany him on the tiny four-man patrol. The group’s small size would optimize our stealth and speed. The plan was to patrol north on Sunset for about a mile and then turn back. If we got into trouble along the way, we’d call in the rest of the platoon as a quick reaction force.

“The op’s simple,” Luke told us. “We’ll go up, walk the road, and come back. If we don’t see anything, we don’t see anything and that’s it.”

Chris took his usual spot on point for a dual-column formation. Luke was staggered ten meters behind on the opposite side of the street. I fell in behind Chris in the same crisscross pattern with Marc in tow with the big gun on rear security behind Luke. The poorly lit streets kept us cloaked in darkness, providing plenty of concealment as we moved slowly, scanning the cratered and debris-laden streets through night vision. Looking for a small green object in the all-green world of night vision is not ideal. Needles and haystacks come to mind. Regardless, you never know when you might get an opportunity to BTF.

Further complicating the already difficult task, we had to vigilantly keep an eye out for IEDs and other threats. I saw what looked like a command wire running into a crater.

I noticed a suspicious cluster of wires and signaled to Chris, alerting him to the potential IED. We stayed away from using comms around IEDs since the muj had perfected their booby-trap techniques. I didn’t want to detonate the fire team by ignorantly mistaking a command wire when it was a cell phone base station. That’s EOD’s job. Better safe than a grease spot in Ramadi.

I threw an IR ChemLight next to the spot, marking it for Dagger to sweep up when they came through. Then I saw another potential threat, and another. I marked them all until I ran out of IR ChemLights, trying to keep my distance at the same time. I stayed calm and completely tuned in to my surroundings.

The hasty patrol had me feeling alive. It was a nice change to get out of the conventional routine and do some real Frogman work. We had to walk this full patrol and do our best to find the lost KYK. If we didn’t find it, we’d turn around and that would be it. Losing a KYK is nothing to take lightly, but the risk-return ratio wasn’t going to hold together beyond the mission we were already running.

About halfway to the building where Chris had shot the two guys on the moped, he halted the patrol and took a knee. Carefully, he raised his M4 and lased a target about one hundred meters ahead.

“Hey, I got a guy moving with an AK, creeping around in the shadows,” Chris said over comms. “He’s moving west.”

“Bird-dog him,” Luke said. Marc and I didn’t need further instructions.

The hunt was on.

We popped up and moved to the shadows.

Chris ran up about twenty meters and knelt at the corner of a building, raising his M4 toward our muj prey. Luke popped up and bounded past Chris, twenty meters on the opposite side of the street. Marc and I followed. The four of us moved like an accordion.

“Military-aged male moving tactically with an AK. Turned west off Sunset, eight hundred meters from the COP,” Luke called back to Falcon, reporting our position to the platoon as we made our first turn in pursuit of our prey. We activated our IFF markers. We didn’t need the conventionals lighting our asses up like they had on the hospital op.

The Legend pressed our hasty stalk as we zigzagged methodically through the darkened city blocks to track and outmaneuver the muj. At every turn, Luke reported our position back to the platoon at Falcon. We played a game of read and react, responding to each other’s movements and picking up fields of fire reflexively. At each intersection, we flowed straight into our crossing drill, picking up security and then peeling back into columns and bounding ahead. Speed was vital as we mirrored the muj’s movement. He moved stealthily between city blocks and could have been on his way to any kind of attack on coalition forces.

Adrenaline fine-tuned my senses to every aspect of my surroundings. I thought more of noise discipline than of an ambush or IED attack as I ran over trash and debris. The thick darkness of the poorly lit
streets provided a tremendous advantage, and we stalked the muj for about four hundred meters, scurrying from shadow to shadow like a fox on a chicken farm. As we passed the faint, intermittent light from surrounding buildings, my heart rate spiked.

Our movement reminded me of
Call of Duty
on Xbox, like watching myself stalking in a first-person shooter. Hunting the guy with such efficiency amped me up. I just felt we were going to catch him and he had no idea what was coming. I could feel the unspoken competition between the four of us, urging us forward as we each willed ourselves to shoot first. As he moved on a street parallel to us, Chris pushed us ahead and led us into an alleyway to cut him off. The Legend took a knee and waited. Marc, Luke, and I did the same, picking up 360-degree security. As if on cue, the muj popped around the corner, moving straight toward Chris at less than one hundred yards. The Legend lined up his IR laser center-mass and dumped three rounds in a tight cluster. The suppressed shots in quick succession split the near silence of the white noise blowing off the Habbaniyah Canal to the west.