The Last Punisher: A SEAL Team THREE Sniper's True Account of the Battle of Ramadi (4 page)

I quickly found brothers. Meat eaters sense each other. Boat crews are chosen by height, and mine was the six tallest men in 245. As such, we probably should have been the slowest, but Tim Martin pushed us to keep up the pace. Tim was a physical freak of nature from Wisconsin with unreal speed and a persistent positive attitude. No matter how shitty the evolution, he’d flash the same wide, goofy grin and utter some encouragement. His constant reminders that “you got this” got me through more than one of the coldest moments of Hell Week.

When we got fatigued and hypothermic, we turned to Matz. He was a quiet New Englander from New Hampshire with dark hair and a
darker sense of humor. During the worst moments, he would unleash some pseudophilosophical babble to distract us. We laughed, when normal people would probably cry. It fed us. BUD/S is the beginning of a bond forged by adversity and strengthened by sacrifice.

The first eight-week phase of BUD/S is an endless physical conditioning exercise and is easily the toughest of the phases. It’s push-ups and flutter kicks as infinite as the Coronado Beach sand and as constant as the cold and wet that gets blasted by waves and hoses and seeps into your bones and drenches your spirit in discomfort and misery. It’s sleep deprivation and log PT and sadistic instructors determined to weed out those who don’t belong. It’s beach runs and calves on fire and instructors who keep running you faster to try to make you quit. It’s two-mile ocean swims and time limits and unforgiving currents and was-that-a-fucking-shark moments. It’s timed obstacle courses and artillery simulators and looking out for your brothers and your brothers looking out for you. It’s carrying a 110-pound rubber raft over your head with five other guys until your arms burn and quiver and buckle and then digging deeper and hoisting it up again. It’s throwing your boat in the ocean and cherishing the fleeting moment of relief before jumping inside and paddling out past the breakers and back with an impossible time limit looming. It’s your instructor saying you didn’t make it back in time and that this time around the beach you have to load your boat with sand. It’s the constant reminder that “it pays to be a winner.” It’s the sun setting after a day that started before sunrise and the cold creeping in and the painful awareness that this is just the beginning.

BUD/S wasn’t JV soccer or club rugby. The stakes were far higher than they’d ever been for me, and I continuously pushed myself past my limits. For the first time in my life, I wanted something so badly I was willing to give everything I had and more. When we had timed runs, I was a fixture on the “Goon Squad,” which is an honor reserved for guys who miss cutoff times. Every time I was “gooned” for running
too slowly, I took my punishment and came back for more. I suffered through the extra flutter kicks, surf torture, and the perpetual chafing from wet sand sticking to every inch of you. I kept my head down and pushed on, fed by the knowledge that every man who rang the Bell and quit was weaker than I was.

A few weeks into training, the United States invaded Iraq. The fact that we were at war on two fronts weighed heavily on my mind. “There’s a war going on right now, and I’m stuck here teaching you motherfuckers,” Instructor Torsen yelled at my boat crew during Hell Week. “You can’t even hold up a boat!” It made me dig deeper. Whenever a guy rang the Bell to quit, it reinforced my resolve and motivation. I was always mentally separating myself from the guys who didn’t make it. They had been worried about getting through BUD/S. I was worrying about getting to a platoon and into combat.

Hell Week is week four of First Phase, and it’s designed to be one prolonged period of stress, in every sense of the word. From the moment breakout starts on Sunday night to when the class is secured on Friday afternoon, students are put through constant physical, mental, and emotional stress, all on an accumulated three hours of sleep through the course of the week.

Breakout is chaos. As darkness falls, instructors light fires in trash cans, shoot overhead, and begin the week of yelling that continues mercilessly while the students scramble to complete tasks in times designed to be unreachable.

My Hell Week was in April. A couple of days in, we were cold, wet, and miserable, and my boat team had pitched our boat up on the beach to block the hail and rain while we ate Meals, Ready to Eat (MREs). One of our instructors, Dale, stood over me and watched as I tried to eat cold jambalaya from a green rectangular pouch that I struggled to open with my hypothermia-blue hands. My entire body jackhammered with violent shivers. Every inch of me was miserably
chafed and sore. At that moment, cold jambalaya was my happy place, and Dale knew it. He grabbed a paddle, scooped up a little mountain of sand, and poured it into my jambalaya. Imagine the most ruthless kick to the dick possible. That’s what Dale’s paddle full of sand felt like. Choking down the sandy jambalaya was brutal, but I can say with certainty that having eaten it made that first bite of pizza on Friday morning better than it would have been if I hadn’t.

I learned why Teamguys love the phrase “If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” BUD/S is mostly a mental challenge. It’s not just being cold and tired. It’s being cold and tired and mentally preparing yourself to do it continuously with no end in sight, while in competition with a bunch of other men, while still more men who have already been through these tasks taunt and berate you. It’s intimidating. I watched my roommate ring out before the 50-meter underwater swim, just because he got psyched out. I don’t think it was the actual swim, which any of us were physically capable of. It was the entire environment. You have to attack BUD/S, or BUD/S will eat you.

In Second Phase, I suffered a back injury and was rolled back to Class 246 after a brief recovery period. I found a new group of brothers: Tanner, B-Dub, Mikey, Maro, Bito, Gilby, Biggs, KPM, and Clark, aka Billy, among others. For seventeen weeks, we toiled through evolution after evolution on the Obstacle Course, in the pool, and in the sands of Coronado. “The Shady Squad” (as we called ourselves) was motley to say the least. We came from every corner of the United States and ranged from five foot six to my six foot three, from a fresh-faced nineteen-year-old to a ripe old thirty. We illustrated the Teams’ most basic truth perfectly: there is no physical trait or indicator for success in BUD/S or becoming a SEAL. Of the more than two hundred men who began with Class 246, forty-four made it through all three phases to graduate. On paper, our differences were vast, but our most vital commonality was the innate resilience and tenacious spirit
that a warrior is born with and must cultivate. We learned to recognize it in ourselves and in each other. We learned to call each other brother, and together we made it through.

On graduation day, we mustered early on the beach for our final run with our commanding officer. Our CO was tall and wiry with brown hair and a matching mustache. He was an old-school Frogman and hard as woodpecker lips. He could have easily run most of us into the ground if he’d wanted to. Instead, he led us on a leisurely three-mile run under the rising sun on Coronado Beach, stopping periodically to deliver a thoroughly inspiring oration about the history and legacy of Naval Special Warfare. He told us that we were now part of a proud tradition of elite warriors and a brotherhood that goes back to World War II, from the Navy’s original Frogmen to Underwater Demolition Teams to SEALs. I felt every bit of what I’d earned with those forty-three other men.

Later, I stood in dress blues, formed up on the Grinder where I’d started on day one more than six months earlier. My mom, dad, and two younger brothers watched my graduation ceremony with proud astonishment. The only thing I’d ever cared enough to give all of myself to was the Teams. I guess they just hadn’t seen that coming. My final day at BUD/S remains one of the most satisfying days of my life.

Graduating from BUD/S is a major accomplishment, but it isn’t even close to the end of the road to becoming a SEAL. Checking that graduation box is mostly a mental thing because the worst of the physical torture is over.

From BUD/S I headed to Basic Airborne Jump School at Fort Benning, Georgia, in January 2004. While it’s not an elite training course by any stretch of the imagination, Airborne School wasn’t exactly enjoyable, either. Some guys love jumping out of airplanes. I am
not that guy. Nonetheless, I got my basic-airborne qualification and moved on to SEAL Qualification Training (SQT) in February 2004.

SQT is the four-month course where SEALs start learning the myriad skills and tactics that make them elite special operators. At SQT I learned mission planning and intelligence gathering, communications, reconnaissance, ocean and land navigation, and about a million other things. I did day and nighttime static-line jumps, chased a Zodiac boat out the back of a C-130 airplane and into the ocean, fast-roped from hovering helicopters, and dangled like a dog’s balls beneath a helo for Special Insertion/Extraction (SPIE) rigging. I trained with and qualified on the best weapons systems in the world, from the M4 to the Mk 48 to the 84 mm Carl Gustav recoilless rifle. I practiced patrolling, stalking, and military demolition, and learned how to improvise booby traps. And I got a heavy dose of combat conditioning during intense live-fire exercises designed to simulate combat and the fog of war. By the end of SQT, I was officially a SEAL, and I finally felt ready to join a platoon.

Most people assume that graduating from BUD/S must be the biggest accomplishment in a SEAL’s life, but it isn’t the one that we look forward to most. You don’t even get your trident after BUD/S. I relished the end of BUD/S like every other man because it meant no more surf torture, no more getting wet and sandy, no more log PT. But what I looked forward to more than anything was my graduation from SQT, when I would be a certified SEAL with a trident on my chest.

In those days, SQT graduation was a private affair in a hangar with only other Teamguys present. We had a formal ceremony with the awards and certificates doled out, and the CO of BUD/S and Command Master Chief Bro pinned each of us solemnly and welcomed us into the brotherhood we’d fought tooth and nail to join. In a similar fashion to the way he’d spoken to us on our final day of BUD/S, the CO delivered some words of wisdom. He told us we could wear the
trident, because we had earned that much. But we weren’t Frogmen yet. We weren’t Teamguys; not until we’d been tested and done what we’d trained for.

“There are SEALs, and then there are Frogmen,” he told us. “Today, you are all SEALs, but Frogmen are warriors. When you go downrange and do what you’re made to do, that’s when you will truly earn your bird.”

Later on at the drink-up, much more primitively, we were stripped bare from the waist up and our newly acquired tridents were stamped into our bare flesh, just over our hearts.

The older Teamguys who pinned us this second time meant something to each of us. My friend Mikey’s older brother tagged him. When it was my turn, Ty Woods approached me. Ty was my BUD/S instructor and had helped me get out of some trouble resulting from one of the bar fights I got in while under his care. He was smaller than me, but a true barrel-chested Frogman. He was the type to dole out a punishment with a vengeance and then turn around and slap you on the back a moment later. We stayed in touch for the duration of my career, and his fate on that rooftop in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012, at the hands of terrorists crushed me.

Before he pinned me, Ty looked me in the eye and I knew he was proud of me. That was what mattered. I wanted to make my brothers proud. We wore our tridents, protruding barbarically from our bleeding flesh, for the rest of the night.

I have a small scar from the pinning over my heart. As I grow older, the hair on my chest thickens, and the scar fades.

But it remains.

We were finally SEALs, but training wasn’t over. Truthfully, an operator never stops training. Our class had one more block of training
to conduct together before scattering to our respective platoons and starting careers in the Teams.

We spent three weeks in Kodiak, Alaska, learning the ins and outs of winter warfare. Everyone had heard a lot about this evolution because of the twenty-four hours we had to spend in pairs surviving after submerging ourselves completely in the frigid waters of the bay. We were told to grab our “Bolt Bags,” which contained a few bare necessities, and to jump in the water just long enough to fully submerge and then go out into the wilderness for the next twenty-four hours. As the saying goes, it’s the most fun you never want to have again.

On one of the last nights in Kodiak, I was camped with my squad of about ten guys when Matz had the watch. He shook me awake. “Lacz,” he hissed, “bear!”

“Bullshit,” I answered, still half-asleep.

“No bullshit,” he whispered. “Bear!”

I opened my eyes and looked in the direction he was pointing. Sure enough, a large grizzly sow was making her way into our camp. I sat up cautiously and began alerting the others. Bito had already climbed about fifteen feet up a tree and was tossing the bear our freeze-dried Mountain House meals.

“What the fuck,” I muttered. I grasped on to a branch and began climbing another tree nearby. I thought we were all safely in the limbs overhead when a flash went off. KPM, a Golden Gloves boxer from Philly, stood about ten feet from the bear with a disposable Kodak camera. He was frantically snapping pictures of her, pausing after each one to wind the film. The clicking sound of his thumb turning the little gear was audible even to me up in my tree. The sow stood up on her hind legs and KPM snapped one last shot before running away. He found a tree of his own and we all waited in silence while the bear rummaged through our camp for a few minutes and then wandered away.

“You’re fucking crazy,” I told KPM.

“Yo, Kev, but these are going to be awesome pictures,” he said.

Because my original military specialty was medical corpsman, I was sent to the Army’s 18D Special Operations Combat Medic School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. In July 2004, I classed up with my 18D peers, training alongside other members of the Special Operations community: Army Green Berets, Navy corpsmen assigned to Marine Recon, or Ranger medics. For six months, we learned tactical combat casualty care.