The Last Punisher: A SEAL Team THREE Sniper's True Account of the Battle of Ramadi (36 page)

“Well, it looks like that’s where the Navy needs my skills,” I replied sarcastically.

Chris replied with his generous cackle. “Dauber, I’m LPO of Delta Platoon. We’re going back to Iraq and I could use a shit-hot corpsman. I have tons of newguys, as you can see. Besides, we could use another bruiser to help with the hazing.”

I smiled. “Well, what are you thinking?”

“Easy day. Wind off the Pacific just moved your name over to Delta,”
he said as he moved the magnet. “Bro won’t care. Besides, there are more muj to shoot in Iraq.”

I gave him a sheepish grin. He was right. There was a lot of work left to do in Iraq, and it was work I was born to. I wasn’t a man who would lie awake at night haunted by anything I’d seen or done. For me, it was as simple as finding that bad man.

“Consider it done,” I said. Chris nodded.

“Let’s go bury Mikey.”

I tossed him the can and the flask as we headed down to his Suburban.

The silence was clean, and a soft onshore breeze blanketed the sunshine-painted slopes of Fort Rosecrans. There wasn’t a sound to be heard except the rhythmic thud of fist hitting wood. I had my trident in my hand.

I took a step forward toward the casket. I kept my eyes forward on Guy in front of me. As he saluted and moved off, I walked up. I gazed down on the trident-encased wooden coffin. The amount of gold pinned to it made it look like a shield, sending Mikey Monsoor off one last time. The EOD pin caught my eye. I thought back to when Nick saved our ass. Task Unit Bruiser was successful because of the men. I looked for an open spot for my bird.

I placed my trident on his casket and delivered three sharp hits with my fist. I stepped back, breathed, and saluted. I walked slowly back to the formation.

As I stood at attention, I watched the procession of Frogmen lined up to do the same. They were men, fathers, brothers, friends, killers, and above all else, Teammates. They were there to send a brother off. I couldn’t picture myself anywhere else than among this family.

I quickly brushed away a tear that hung on my eyelid. I caught myself.
I looked back at the dwindling procession of Teamguys and gritted my teeth. I looked around to my right and left, surrounded by brothers. Pain is temporary. Death is fleeting. The glory of a warrior lasts forever.

The service ended and I walked back among the silence and the headstones. I glanced down at my chest, at my row of ribbons and jump wings. Three tiny holes in the wool of my blouse were all that was left of the bird I’d worn to the funeral. But the scar on my chest remained.

T
HE SUN BEGAN
to rise over the water. I knew she hadn’t believed me the night before when I told her I’d be there, bright and early, to pick her up and take her surfing. But I had showed up. Reliability is important. I wasn’t sure how she would react when I showed up driving the “Murder Van,” blacked out with flames on the hood. I was taking chances.

I’d been through much worse and stayed cool as a cucumber. One hundred and twenty pounds of woman shouldn’t make me nervous. Yet I sat on a longboard in the Pacific Ocean in Imperial Beach, California, across from one I’d only just met two days before, and I felt an unfamiliar anxiety. I wasn’t really uncomfortable, but I guess you could call it a nervous excitement. Her older sister was a friend of mine and had walked her into my garage on Thursday afternoon. I’d been finding excuses to run into her since then. Her name was Lindsey.

We straddled our boards, riding the tide, feeling each other out. I could smell the fear rolling off her. She’d had a hell of a time getting
past the surf zone in an ill-fitting wetsuit I hijacked from the Team, trying to navigate the first board she’d ever used. The water was rough, but I let her figure it out. She was from Florida: How could she not surf? I wanted to see if she’d give up, and she hadn’t. I respected that. Even if all it got us was a chance to sit there in the open water, her face only barely masking her terror.

I took a deep breath and looked into her eyes. They were so blue they were almost clear. She squared her jaw and looked back at me, defiantly. She was scared, but not of me. I grinned.

I wanted to touch her, so I grabbed her foot and pulled her board closer. I felt that nervous excitement ramping up again, so we sat there in a contented silence, my hand cradling her foot as it dangled over her board.

It was Saturday. If I let her go, she’d fly back to Florida on Tuesday and my life would go back to normal.

If I let her go.

Around us, the sounds of a sleepy Southern California town grew louder as the sun rose over the water and the rest of our lives.

Seven years later, my wife, Lindsey, wished me luck over a poor connection and I ended the phone call. I took a breath, remembered my preparation, and headed into the dingy building. It had been chosen by the set designer for its resemblance to the many compounds the Punishers had taken down in Ramadi. For filming purposes, this compound was supposed to be the one where Marc Lee lost his life.

I crouched low, looking at the ground of the dusty floor of the old Moroccan hotel. My helmet was fastened tight, my med bag was on my back, my heater was at my side, and the smell of sweat permeated the room. I took a long, deep breath to relax my heart rate. I focused my gaze out into the set as Bradley Cooper’s eyes caught mine, snapping me out of my quiet meditation. The last shot of the Moroccan
filming session, otherwise known as the “martini shot,” was about to commence. I guess the idea is you wrap shooting after the “martini shot” and head out for a well-deserved drink.

I scanned the rest of the room. Eastwood, Cooper, Lorenz, Lazar, Bernstein. I took another deep breath.
Better not whiff on this, Dauber,
I thought to myself.
How the hell did I even get here?

This is Lindsey’s fault,
I thought, laughing. She was the one who had fired off the email to the screenwriter Jason Hall in 2012 when she found out
American Sniper
would be a movie. Always protective of us Frogmen, Lindsey focused on this theme: “Please don’t mess this up.” Despite not knowing me during my Ramadi deployment, Lindsey knew the bond I had shared with the men of Task Unit Bruiser. When Jason wrote back and asked for guidance, she’d nervously approached me, afraid to admit what she’d done without my knowledge.

I gave the Legend a call in September 2012. I caught him up on what Lindsey had done and told him that Hall had wanted to speak with me to get more perspective on Ramadi, sniping, and Chris.

He gave his signature cackle.

“Sure, Dauber. Jason is Hollywood for sure. I don’t have a problem at all. Let’s make it happen.”

Communicating with Jason was almost daily until February 1, 2013, when he finished the first draft of the screenplay. On February 2, I called him to deliver the terrible news of Chris’s death.

It all seemed so far away now: traveling to Dallas to be with the Kyle family, inviting Jason and introducing him to my Teammates, carrying Chris’s casket as I had Marc’s and then Ryan’s.

A year later, I found myself in the Malpaso Productions office, face-to-face with Clint Eastwood, rattling off everything I knew about Iraq, Ramadi, Chris Kyle, and my experiences in the Teams. He listened calmly. Little did I know, our conversation was an interview.

Apparently, I did well, because twenty-four hours later I found myself on the range with an old friend and fellow Frogman named
Rick, teaching a novice Philadelphia kid how to shoot like a West Texas gunslinger who had done it all his life. Fortunately, Bradley was a natural and easily sent some brotherly love to head-sized targets at four hundred meters. Midway through the first day he inquired casually, “Ever think about playing yourself in the movie?” I was intrigued.

Lindsey and I filmed the auditions on my iPhone and sent them into the casting director. Two days later, he called and offered me the role in his best Eastwood impression: “Boy’s damn good, get him a job.”

“No fucking way,” I said.

“You bet, Dauber. Great job. We’ll get you set up with costume. Plan on coming to L.A. this week and you’ll be in Morocco in two weeks.”

Cooper looked at the monitor, then back down at me. I could sense his encouragement—
Let it roll, Dauber.
I closed my eyes again and envisioned the dirty two-story structure in Ramadi. The heat, the smoke, the smell, the visceral balance between here and gone. I thought about Marc, Chris, Biggles, Clark, and Mike. Our struggles were being captured on film, and I wrestled with a desire to protect Marc and our last day together and a need to show them what Marc had done for them. I swallowed the beginning stages of a knot and found solace in my breathing.

A tall figure in a camo boonie hat stepped forward. He looked down and asked in a quiet voice, “All set, Kevin?”

I looked up at Clint and smiled.

“You got it, boss.”

“Well, all right then. Let’s make this picture.”

He stepped back behind the camera and Bradley drifted to his right. In quiet reverence, Clint whispered, “Action.”

Eight years after I fought elbow to elbow with men I called brothers in Ramadi, I waited anxiously in New York City with one of their widows. In a Warner Bros. screening room in Manhattan, I waited to watch
American Sniper
for the first time. The theater had a feeling like an old friend, but I was anxious. My knee tapped like a machine gun. Maya, Marc Lee’s widow, was next to me, as close as Marc had been in the moments before he was killed in Ramadi in 2006.

I took a deep breath.

I stared at the curtains covering the screen. The theater’s acoustics reminded me of a wake, and I wrestled with a feeling of apprehension. I thought about my fallen brothers: Chris, Marc, Ryan Job, Clark Schwedler, Darrik Benson, Mike Monsoor. They were all giants among men. We had actually lived the stories that were about to play out on-screen.

The warmth inside the theater was buffered by the chill I had from my walk down Avenue of the Americas in the rain. I am a creature of habit and never fail to prepare for anything. I had walked through this moment in my mind for months, but now it was real. Memories flooded my brain. I stared in silence as I tried to remember my preparation.

Sitting next to Maya, I thought of Marc and the last moments I’d spent with him in the morgue at Camp Ramadi. The image of Marc’s last gunfight and the brotherhood we shared played back in my mind. I relived the moments I spent treating Marc after he’d been shot, knowing I couldn’t save his life and then trying anyway.

The brotherhood we share as SEALs supersedes life. Marc’s gift, like that of Chris and Ryan, carried on long after he was gone. Marc gave me the gift of his family. I came to know Maya, his mother, and his brother more after Marc’s death. It’s never easy to convey to loved
ones the experiences we SEALs share in combat. Whether we choose to describe the details or not, our presence and fixture in the lives of our family members reinforce our commitment to the brotherhood.

You can always tell the way a man loves his wife by how much he talks about her; Marc worshipped Maya. Nearly nine years after those final moments I spent with Marc, I sat alone in the theater with the love of his life.

The opening of the curtain startled me back to the present. I blinked and swallowed the knot in my throat. The screen came alive, beckoning me into the story of our journey as warriors and stewards of the flag. My mind wandered to Ramadi in 2006, and an intense rush of emotions hit me hard, like a Coronado Beach wave in Hell Week. My heart began to slow and my breathing relaxed as the rumble of tracked vehicles filled the theater. The sounds and images of war took me back to the experiences that galvanized and shaped my life.

I remember the brotherhood.

Sometimes Ramadi feels like a lifetime ago. Many of the men I served with are dead now. I don’t know if they saw flashes of their lives before they went, but I know that when I go, if mine plays for me, Ramadi will be in it. For all the death we dealt in that city, I never felt more alive than when I ran with the Punishers through its angry streets.

A
BRAMS TANK
:
a well-armed, heavily armored battle tank. Its main armament is the M256A1 120 mm smoothbore gun, but it also has a .50-caliber machine gun and two 7.62 mm machine guns.

ANGLICO:
Air Naval Gunfire Liaison Companies; their mission: “To provide Marine Air-Ground Task Force (MAGTF) Commanders a liaison capability, with foreign area expertise, to plan, coordinate, and conduct terminal control of fires in support of joint, allied, and coalition forces.”

AOR:
area of responsibility; a predefined geographic region assigned to a combatant commander where he has the authority to plan and conduct combat operations.

APC:
armored personnel carrier; an armored fighting vehicle designed to transport personnel to the battlefield.

AQI:
Al Qaeda in Iraq; founded in April 2004 by Sunni extremist Abu al-Zarqawi; used vehicle-borne IEDs, kidnappings and beheadings, and suicide bombers as a means of attacking coalition forces and pressuring Iraqi civilians not to support the coalition effort.

ATPIAL
S
:
Advanced Target Pointer/Illuminator/Aiming Laser; small and lightweight aiming system with both visible and infrared aiming lasers and an infrared illuminator.

BDU
S
:
Battle Dress Uniform; standard camouflage uniform worn in combat situations by United States Armed Forces from the early 1980s to the mid-2000s.

B
LOOD CHIT
:
a small sheet of material carried on a service member into combat; depicts a U.S. flag and a statement in several languages that anyone who aids that service member will be rewarded.

B
RADLEY
F
IGHTING
V
EHICLE
:
an American fighting vehicle platform designed to transport ground troops while providing suppressive fire; armed with a 25 mm cannon, twin TOW missile launchers, and a 7.62 mm machine gun.