The Last Punisher: A SEAL Team THREE Sniper's True Account of the Battle of Ramadi (5 page)

We also learned a lot of civilian medicine, and I spent a month on rotation in Jacksonville, Florida, at Shands Jacksonville, a level 1 trauma center. As I helped treat car accident victims, gunshot wounds, and drug overdoses, I began to picture myself in combat, practicing what I’d learned. Elbow deep in a body cavity, I could feel my resolve fortifying like armor.

I finished 18D in January 2005, and it was finally time to get to a platoon. It was time to pick our billets and the SEALs who graduated bickered over what was available. I had graduated the highest and could have picked first, but some of the other guys had family ties and reasons to want to go to either coast. I wanted to go to a Team on the West Coast but not enough to deprive somebody of proximity to his family. I let the three guys with preferences pick, and then it came down to my roommate, Sean, and me. There was a spot on each coast, and we both wanted San Diego.

We decided to flip a coin.

I won and got my pick. By a sheer stroke of luck, I was headed to SEAL Team THREE.

“Do your job.”

—Bill Belichick

I
MAY BE THE
only SEAL to have ever driven up to the Team on his first day in a minivan. I was twenty-three, fresh out of Special Operations combat medic school, and driving my parents’ hand-me-down Chevy Venture. It wasn’t exactly cool by Teamguy standards, and it’s very possible that I hold this unique distinction because no other newguy has ever been stupid or masochistic enough to essentially paint a target on his forehead by driving Mommy’s minivan to meet a bunch of guys who kill people for a living. Eventually, I figured the only thing to do was make it cooler, so some buddies and I spray-painted it flat black with flames on the hood, iron crosses on the hubcaps, and “Polish Pride” across the body. We called it the “Murder Van.”

Most of SEAL Team THREE was deployed in Iraq and Asia when I checked in to Charlie Platoon in January 2005. My main objective at that point was to avoid any unwanted attention from the few nondeployed Teamguys whose boredom might bring on any number of sadistic hazing rituals. Of course, as the saying goes, “no battle plan ever
survives contact with the enemy.” Teamguys never need an excuse to haze newguys, but showing up in that van ended up being the metaphorical equivalent of putting on a pair of pork-chop drawers and jumping into the lion’s den.

I had a 0730 muster to make. I faked nonchalance as I followed the flow of personnel to the back of our headquarters building, trying my best to be inconspicuous.

Unfortunately, my height, my blond hair, and being the only one of some seventy-five sailors in dress uniform made camouflaging difficult. As the others mustered by platoon, I slid in among the techs to listen to the brief.

When the command master chief was finished, I was about to attempt a hasty retreat. “Hold it, newguy,” somebody called out behind me. I froze.

“C’mere, newguy,” somebody joined in. I turned around. Most of the Team had scattered, but about a dozen Teamguys stuck around to size me up. I waited. One of the guys, with Oakley shades and a smile like the Cheshire cat, jerked his head to the right.

“Let’s see what you got,” he said, motioning to the pull-up bar at the base of the steps. “Give me twenty-five.”

“Roger,” I said. One of my BUD/S instructors had warned me to show up in shape, because there would be a test. I could do twenty-five pull-ups no problem, but I’d never done them in my dress blues.

I hopped up and grasped the bar, quickly counting out my twenty-five. When I completed the set, I hopped back down and scanned the small crowd. A couple of them gave me short nods before turning to begin their days of work. I stood alone at the pull-up bar.

On my second day in the Team, I drove the van to work again and braced myself for another day of team building. When I met my platoon chief, he was wearing a blue UDT/SEAL instructor shirt
with the sleeves rolled up, green shorts, and freshly spit-shined jungle boots. A gruff Italian-American from New Hampshire, Tony (of course his name was Tony) wore his jet-black hair greased back like a cliché. His vast experience as a Frogman spanned eight combat deployments, and he had all the tattoos to prove it. A spiderweb tatt splayed out from his right elbow, eventually giving way to at least two other ink jobs on the same arm. On his forearm was a trident and the word
frogman.
He looked me up and down with a disapproving scowl. Then he grunted and kind of jerked his head toward his office as if to say, “Follow me, newguy.” I sat down for the first of many one-way conversations with Tony. When he finally spoke, his New England roots announced themselves in his thick, clam-chowda accent.

“Lacz,” he said, “you’re a newguy; you’re meant to be seen not heard. Keep your gear and department squared away, always carry a pencil and paper, and shut the fuck up. Just get your ass to work, and I’ll keep you busy. Ya got it?”

“I got it, Chief,” I said enthusiastically.

“Good. Now get the fuck out of my office.”

Tony was a genuine break-glass-in-case-of-war kind of guy, and I looked up to him from the moment I met him. As I walked out of his office to start my day of team building, I felt good knowing Tony was my platoon chief.

Over the next couple of weeks, my fellow newguys trickled in. There’s safety in numbers, and every time I showed up at the Team and another newguy had checked in, I felt a little better about my chances of surviving the day without any major incidents. Plus, I was a little longer out of BUD/S than most of them. Jonny came directly from 18D, but the others came straight out of SQT. That didn’t really mean shit in the platoon, but it was a small victory for me mentally.

Eventually, we had a group of four newguys at the bottom of Charlie’s totem pole.

Besides me, there were Jonny, Biff, and Biggles. Jonny was a Korean
kid from Los Angeles and the platoon’s other corpsman. He was also a sniper. He was only about five foot seven, but he was compact and had been a strong high school swimmer, which helped him out in BUD/S. He once told me that his attitude toward BUD/S and most of the newguy shit we had thrown at us was just to keep his head down and complete the task, and never to worry about coming in first. It was actually a pretty effective mindset to have. In BUD/S, I saw a lot of “the best” athletes quit. Guys like Jonny who could just steadily grind it out survived.

Biff was a newguy machine gunner from a couple of BUD/S classes behind me. Like Jonny, he grew up in Southern California and got his nickname from his doppelgänger Biff Tannen. Unlike the character from
Back to the Future,
our Biff was actually likable. He’d been a standout wide receiver at the College of the Canyons, and SEAL training had only built upon his sheer physicality. Biff had a quiet reserve to him but could unleash fury on the turn of a dime.

Ryan Job was also a machine gunner and the funniest guy in our platoon. A doughy white kid from Washington State, Ryan had a baby face that seemed to be perpetually smiling. When he checked into our platoon in San Diego, he wasn’t exactly chiseled out of granite. By SEAL standards, he was big and jiggly, so I stuck him with the nickname Biggles. His early days in the platoon were rough. He was consistently last on all our platoon runs and just wasn’t in the kind of shape that was expected. Our OIC and platoon chief pulled him aside to deliver an ultimatum: “Tighten the fuck up, or beat feet out of this platoon.” Ryan took it as his come-to-Jesus moment. He turned around and worked out harder than anybody else in the platoon and got himself up to speed. He took a lot of crap from everybody during work-up, but the fact that he was always locked on with everything he did, coupled with his knack for self-deprecating humor, made it hard not to love him.

In March, Tony sent me to Military Freefall Course in Otay Lakes, outside San Diego, where I learned that higher altitudes didn’t make jumping out of airplanes any more pleasant for me. For three weeks, I learned how to jump with a team of other operators in order to insert into a combat zone. We learned to jump on oxygen, with gear, with a rifle, at night, and at various altitudes.

By early April, SEAL Team THREE had returned from deployment. I showed up for work one morning in PT gear and walked into the platoon space, a common area that housed a couple of computers, a whiteboard, a couch, and anything any of the guys thought might add “character” to the walls. Chris Kyle and Jeremy were on the couch. We’d never met, but I knew who they were because I’d recently been given the newguy task of unloading all the older guys’ gear when they returned from deployment. Chris had just returned to the States after his second deployment to Iraq. Chris’s first combat tour during the initial invasion in 2003 was, arguably, a warm-up for the extraordinary kill counts that came during his two tours in the Sunni Triangle in 2004 and 2006. After the Battle of Fallujah in November 2004, Chris’s reputation as one of the deadliest snipers in the world was just starting to spread through the Teams. “The Legend” wasn’t a household name back then, and in the Teams he was still known as Tex. Not exactly the most original nickname ever given to a Texas cowboy raised on rifles and rodeo, but Teamguy nicknames aren’t exactly a science. Chris’s freckled complexion and ginger hair told me he was a Scotsman, which told me fighting was in his blood. The alpha-male-sizing-up-the-competition look he gave me told me the hazing was not far off, but I played it cool and confident—sustained eye contact, standing tall, ready for anything. He slowly raised an empty soda can and spit dip juice into it apathetically.

“Dauber,”
he said lazily with his Texas drawl. “We’re gonna call you Dauber, newguy.”

I had never heard of the affable blond oaf that Bill Fagerbakke played on the nineties sitcom
Coach
, but Chris ignored my confused look as he turned to our platoon’s lead petty officer and pointed.

“Tell me newguy doesn’t look like Dauber from
Coach
,” he said.

They say you never get a second chance to make a first impression. Apparently, Chris’s first impression of me was that I was big, blond, and dumb.

“Definitely,” Jeremy said, smiling. “Big goofy-looking fucker. He’s a Dauber for sure.”

As lead petty officer, Jeremy was the second-ranking enlisted leader in our platoon. His job was to marshal the sled dogs—keep us all focused and operating at peak performance. Jeremy was from Ohio and had made rank quickly in the Teams. We were his third platoon, and his attention to detail kept our motley crew on point. I learned quickly that the only thing more impressive than his ability to herd cats was his pop culture acumen.

With Jeremy’s blessing, Chris’s nickname stuck, and I was Dauber from then on.

Some of the biggest proponents of team building were the guys least removed from their status as newguys. Shedding newguy status requires having completed at least one deployment, and Chucky, Squirrel, Spaz, and Rex had all just checked that box. Our head shed called them the Sister’s Kids, as a nod to the movie
Tombstone
. I quickly learned that the Sister’s Kids weren’t about to let our current class of newguys avoid the miserable indoctrination rituals they’d endured.

Chucky was a pipe hitter from Wisconsin. As a breacher and machine gunner, he had a natural affinity for breaking stuff. Whether it was a heavily fortified door on a hostile target or a punk-ass high
on liquid courage at the bar, Chucky could deliver the appropriate amount of force to neutralize a target. He had picked up the nickname “Titties” in BUD/S, but it was used in the way you might call the guy who weighs three hundred pounds “Tiny.” Chucky was over six feet tall and built like a brick wall. He was anything but mammary. Squirrel, our secondary point man, was from Northern California and more than capable when it came to getting us in and out of tight spots. Unlike Chucky, Squirrel had earned a nickname based on his physical appearance. He was one of the smallest guys in the platoon, but in combat, he was as lethal as brass knuckles on a soft skull.

Rex was our comms guy and primary radioman. He was a great operator with an incredible gift for multitasking in a firefight. He could maintain comms with our OIC, air assets, ground forces in the area, and our TOC, all while shooting at the enemy. He was a fearless operator with machinelike efficiency.

The last of the Sister’s Kids was Spaz. Like Chris, Spaz was a ginger and an effective sniper (like I said, fighting’s in their blood). Spaz’s approach to hazing newguys was harsher than most of his peers, and we newguys thought it was a little overkill at times. It took me an entire combat deployment and numerous confirmed kills to graduate from newguy status, and for the nearly two years I spent as a newguy, Spaz never cut me any slack. It wasn’t until I graduated out of Charlie Platoon and onto my second platoon with my own group of meats to torture that I understood it. The team building kept us sharp. It wasn’t personal, and we bonded over it.

Getting a spot in Sniper School was one of those right-place-right-time things. Tony looked up at me from his paperwork one morning in the platoon space and asked, “Dauba’, can you fuckin’ shoot?”

“Roger that, Chief,” I answered.

“Good. Pack your shit. You’re going to Army Sniper School.”

And with that, it was settled.

Being a SEAL at Fort Benning was a welcome change to being a newguy at the Team. The Army guys hadn’t met many Teamguys before, and they treated my buddy Jordo and me like we were rock stars. Jordo was a fellow newguy and 18D medic at Team THREE from another platoon. He was a surfer from California and we used to hang out a lot outside of work, drinking too much and looking for good waves. Our first night there, we decided to go out and get hammered. We took a Ranger named Matt and a couple of other soldiers with us out in Columbus, Georgia, and didn’t come home until an hour before our mandatory PT test the next morning. I set my alarm and crashed out, hoping to get about thirty minutes of sleep.

I woke up to the sound of the alarm and immediately regretted the decision to drink myself into oblivion the night before. I threw on my PT gear and tried to wake Jordo, but he was out cold in the bottom rack. I grabbed him by the shoulders and shook. Nothing. I slapped him. Still nothing. Finally, I punched him in the leg. He groaned, but didn’t wake up. I shrugged and punched him again. This time, he began to stir. I dug through his bag and found his gear. I threw it at him and ushered him along as quickly as I could.