The Last Punisher: A SEAL Team THREE Sniper's True Account of the Battle of Ramadi (30 page)

“Fuck, dude,” I said, exhaling and scanning the surrounding streets. The walking was a good sign, but I felt powerless.

The officers went back and forth over inter-squad comms, trying to figure out our next move while the rest of us kept the watch. Biggles getting hit had us all uneasy and hyperalert. He was the first Teamguy to be seriously wounded in our platoon.

We had practiced man-down drills until we puked. Everyone
knew what to do and when to do it. The drills had etched themselves into our muscle memory just like clearing rooms. But there’s no practice that prepares you to see your buddy’s face half removed from an enemy round. In moments like that, you push everything else aside and stick to what you know. Read and react. Muscle memory and training. We took positions on our building’s second floor, trying to stay clear of the windows while scanning the streets below for an enemy soul to extinguish.

Finally, we got the plan. Chris’s squad, now missing Biggles and Jonny, would absorb several of the Jundis and lead the patrol back to Falcon. Squad 2 would follow behind with Tony and me picking up the rear-security mission.

The Jundis could feel the tension. They had come to understand the brotherhood we all shared. Biggles was loved by everyone in the platoon. The tough bastard had a smart-ass joke for every occasion, and we all leaned on his ability to make the best of any situation. When he got saddled with all the shitty jobs, he did them without question because that was his style. Everybody knew how hard he worked to get through BUD/S, and when he got wounded, it scraped us raw. The Jundis saw a side of rage from the platoon they had never seen before. They were squirrelly, like nervous horses, ready to stampede.

Luke announced the first squad’s departure, and Chris stepped off to lead them into the fray, absorbing half the Jundis into his squad. Squad 2 and the rest linked up behind them, and Tony and I covered their six, picking up an exhausting Frogman-peel rhythm while the patrol pushed hard toward Falcon. With Tony set, I’d check my flank, turn inboard, and sprint past him to the next covered position and call “Set.” The leapfrogging kept us running the entire way back. We struggled to keep up with the fast-moving patrol and even lost contact from the main element as Chris took a left into some side streets toward Baseline. We were running our own version of the Mogadishu Mile from
Black Hawk Down.
Before we knew what had happened, it was just the two of us, running our asses off through muj country.

“Whe’ the fack did they go?” Tony said, panting as he ran past me.

My adrenaline surged as I knelt at a corner, heart pounding out of my chest. Tony called “Set” fifty meters past me. I turned reflexively to check my flank and peel. As if on cue, a muj materialized out of a door in the alley directly in my line of fire thirty yards out. He had a manicured chinstrap beard and blue shirt, and he was running with an RPG raised in the same fuck-all-banzai manner that seemed to be a muj calling card. He was obviously excited, thinking he had the jump on us, but I turned mechanically and found him perfectly placed in my EOTech reticle. His eyes ballooned up wide in surprised horror as he saw me lock on to him. He knew he was dead. I didn’t even have to think. As he fumbled to react, I fired two shots into his dumbstruck face, putting him to rest with a perfect double tap to the T-box. With his brain stem likely severed, his knees buckled under him, and his torso folded down onto his legs in a perfect child’s-pose—ass up, head down like he was praying. I scanned the area and locked on to the compound the muj had come from. I grabbed a frag grenade, pulled the pin, and chucked it over the wall before peeling toward Tony. “He’s down,” I panted as I sprinted past him.

“Nice shootin’, Dauba’!” Tony said. His compliment took a moment to register as I continued to scan for threats. No sarcastic overtone, no wiseass admonishment. Just a compliment.

“Slow it down, point,” Tony said over comms to let Chris know they were pulling too far ahead of us. He pulled the pin on a smoke grenade and lodged the spoon under his boot. He stepped off the grenade, cleared his flank, and peeled as smoke billowed up behind us. “Pop smoke, Dauba’,” Tony said as he ran past. With Tony set, I popped a smoke grenade and peeled as we made the last turn onto Baseline. Tony threw one last smoke after mine, and we ran harder to
catch up to our guys. We headed south at the end of the block and saw the Jundis. We turned down Baseline and had a full view of the platoon. The Bradleys and Abrams had set a corridor for us, and the platoon funneled into their perimeter.

At the last intersection before the COP, I popped up and ran all the way back to the Jersey barrier at Falcon’s entrance. I turned and planted, holding until Tony ran past me. “Last man,” he called. I checked my flank and turned reflexively. Just beyond the Jersey barrier, a tank sat with its turret pointing straight over my shoulder. I was too wasted physically from the run back to feel stupid.

I tried to laugh as I walked past the tank, but its thick exhaust overwhelmed me. While the rest of the platoon had jogged back to the COP, it felt like Tony and I covered the mile-plus in about four minutes. The patrol melted into a blur of adrenaline and distorted time. Trying to catch my breath, I swallowed a big gulp of tank fumes. My head felt like a roasting tomato that was ready to burst. The ingestion of tank exhaust fused with a wave of thoughts that sent my body autonomic: Biggles getting shot, the platoon’s collective gasp, sprinting in bounds, shooting the muj, chucking grenades, my body on fire with adrenaline.

I bent over to puke.

After a few heaves, I stood up and composed myself. I took a swig of water and threw in a dip. I looked at Tony. He looked about as smoked as I was, but I could tell his thoughts were on something other than himself. Like the rest of us, his focus had turned back to Biggles. Tony said nothing as he walked past me and headed into our tactical operations center with the officers. The rest of us plopped down in front of our SEAL house and tried to process everything without the adrenaline blur. Marc sat next to me on the ledge. Chris sat near the door with Biff and Squirrel, and everyone else sprawled out on the grass nearby. Nobody spoke. Most of us were lost in our thoughts,
staring down at the ground or closing our eyes to try to rest. I had never seen our guys that way before. We were all waiting for word on Biggles’s condition.

Biggles.
Ryan.
The pulse of the platoon, the eternal smart-ass, the mad-shitter. Biggles, the newguy who dared to mad-dog our task unit commander—a mixed martial arts enthusiast—and got choked out for our amusement. He was fearless and hilarious—a great friend and an all-around Big Tough Frogman. All of us were lost in thought, but Chris seemed especially crushed. The Legend, hard as he was, was very compassionate and had a soft spot for newguys, especially Biggles. He got up, walked inside the SEAL house, grabbed some boxes of ammo, and vacantly began to reload his mags. He acted on reflex, like his body was working to get his mind off Biggles and back into the war.

“All right,” I mumbled to myself, getting up to follow Chris’s lead. Inside the house, I grabbed another grenade and several boxes of ammo and then returned to my stoop with Marc. I handed him a couple hundred rounds of linked ammo for his gun and started jamming my mags.

“Jesus,” Marc said.

“I know,” I said, pushing a round down. “This fucking sucks.”

“Fuck,” Marc said listlessly, shaking his head in disbelief.

Fifteen minutes later, Tony, Luke, and the other officers came out of the TOC and approached the platoon for a brief.

“Biggles took a frag to the right side of his face,” Luke said. “The round hit the wall, skipped off the feed tray of the Pig, then hit him. The good news is he’s alive and stable. They’re taking him to Charlie Med, and from there, he’ll fly to Balad and then on to Germany. Remember, he’s alive. Now, ISR kept eyes on the area after we left, and they say the muj are scurrying around all over the place. We think we know which building Biggles was shot from, and we’re going back in with the Bradleys to get some payback. It’s time to finish what we started.”

Marc and I looked at each other. As I looked around the platoon, I saw a lot of guys looking down or furrowing their brows. The tension was palpable. The close calls had already caught up with us, and we were about to double down on our hornet’s-nest gamble. No one was especially eager to go back out, but we just sort of grudgingly acknowledged the order.

After a moment, Chris and Tony got up to get their gear together. They started jamming mags and retaping grenades. The rest of us followed their lead.

One more run.

“Never take counsel of your fears.”

—Stonewall Jackson

I
REMEMBER BEING ABOUT
five years old and staring at the kerosene stove in my parents’ basement. “Don’t touch that,” my mom warned me repeatedly. “It’s very hot.” I know I heard her: she must have told me a hundred times not to touch the stove. Still, I wanted to see for myself, so I held my hand out to the side of it.

She was right. It hurt.

I don’t know why I had to touch it again, but it was like I just wanted to see what would happen to me if I defied her warning. I held my hand out again, this time longer. It burned me and I screamed.

I don’t remember the pain, but I remember the mix of anger, concern, and disbelief on her face as she bandaged my hand. “Why would you do that?” she asked. “Why in the world would you go back and touch it again?”

It took a few minutes to flip our collective switch from demoralized to calculated blood rage. It’s a reflex as old as war: they kill yours; you kill more of theirs. As the Klingons say, “Revenge is a dish best served cold.”

Whatever went on in the TOC was decided by the head shed. Lord Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” came to mind: “Theirs not to reason why. Theirs but to do and die.” I’m certain Tennyson was talking about newguys with that stanza. Who were we to question an ancient reflex? Maybe it was finally time to have the stand-up fight we’d been wanting—to meet the muj on their own ground and hand them their asses. As Luke briefed the plan, Tony stood next to him, looking hard and mean as ever. Tony, the man who most epitomized the BTF persona, looked ready for a fight. He had the biggest combat balls in the platoon, and possibly at Team THREE, so if he was ready to get into the mix, I could make myself be, too. His deadpan visage at Luke’s side pushed my mind into offense mode as images from the previous hour flashed in my thoughts: Biggles, bloody and stumbling. His disfigured face. The muj whose face I made a hole. It was barely nine in the morning.

Looking back on the mission our head shed cooked up, I’ve often wondered what the statistical breakdown is of satisfying versus unsatisfying outcomes from a retaliation mission. Seems like a good research topic for a military historian.

How often does it work?

At the time, that type of quantitative calculus wasn’t a priority. We had business to handle.

A frontal assault. Violence of action. That was the plan. Luke broke down our new squad assignments, and the Punishers joined the mechanized
infantry. The Bradleys, with their ramps dropped like thirsty tongues, swallowed us up into chalks. Luke, Chucky, Biff, and EOD Nick joined Marc and me in the first track. Marc and I took the last two seats, mirroring each other just inside the vehicle’s mouth. As the ramp retracted with a hydraulic whine, I watched the shrinking geometry of morning light on Marc’s face. The ramp locked and sealed us in, and for a moment I felt the familiar threat of claustrophobia. I shook it off and looked around at my brothers. Biff sat to Marc’s right. EOD Nick was next to me. Chucky was near the driver and Luke opposite him. Marc and I locked wide eyes for a nonverbal conversation.
We’re really doing this. We’re going back out there.

Adrenaline electrified my cognitive reflex. I remember the mech grunts cranking heavy metal for the assault. The driver hit the throttle and tore out of Falcon, sending Marc and me into a hard lean on the back end. On my internal soundtrack, or maybe in real life, Metallica’s “Seek & Destroy” blared as we bounced around in the vehicle’s guts, tearing through the streets on our way toward payback. I closed my eyes for a moment and let the lyrics settle.

We’re scanning the scene in the city tonight.

We’re looking for you to start up a fight.

We went in fast. The Bradleys and tanks would soften the buildings before we assaulted through. “Soften” is a euphemism for the hate the Bradleys were going to spray from their 25 mm cannons at a rate of two hundred rounds per minute. Afterward, we would go in and take care of business. The concept was simple: the mech guys wound them, we go in and kill them. The short drive was just long enough to get me fully invested and then some. If you can’t get out of it, get into it. It was time to torch the nest.

Our track’s gunner opened up as we plowed toward the building. The cannon’s violent chug-chug-chug was soothing. It tied in with the
other Bradleys as they let loose. The rhythm of the barrage sounded like righteous destruction. An Abrams tank added to the music with a brutal DOOOOVV! Then another in close succession. The track’s ramp dropped, and Marc and I led the peel out of the back, button-hooking toward the building. We fell in behind another squad already assaulting into the burning compound. The softening had set everything ablaze. The flames from burning palm trees scorched the air as we ran toward the entrance. The front of our train entered the building while the rest of us held inside the compound walls. I knelt in the courtyard inferno and scanned anxiously for bad guys. The heat and chaos were constricting—our own collapsing gates of fire. Tony pressed the assault as the train pushed into the building. I followed Marc into the breach as the smoke began to billow around us.

The train had split as half pressed to the second deck and half continued clearance on the ground floor. I moved with Marc into the depths of the two-story structure and the smoke dissipated as we cleared to the back of the house. I came to the last room where the Legend prepared to make entry. I gave him the signal we were ready. The door opened. Two muj immediately sprang in opposite directions.