The Last Punisher: A SEAL Team THREE Sniper's True Account of the Battle of Ramadi (7 page)

At the line of departure, I opened the feed tray cover on my Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW) and pulled some slack from the 200-round drum’s belt of ammunition. I laid the first round into place on the feed tray, slammed the cover shut, pulled the charging handle back, and checked the safety one more time. Locked and loaded. On the fortifications marking the base’s defensive edge, I saw a sign bearing the brand motto for the American service member at war:
COMPLACENCY KILLS
. Like “Just Do It” or “This Bud’s for You,” it was a simple call to action that’s supposed to stick in your brain and rattle around in the subconscious, directing your behavior toward a particular end. Buy Nike. Drink Budweiser.

Don’t get killed.

The success of any advertising campaign depends greatly upon the individual consumer’s willingness to accept its message. With less than a week on the ground in Iraq, I was picking up exactly what that sign was putting down. Four years of training just to get to the war. I came to find the enemy, not to have him find me. The maddening thing about being a Teamguy on a convoy op is that all the training and vigilance in the world might not matter against an IED. IEDs don’t care how much of a badass you are. If you’re one of the unlucky cats whose vehicle rolls over a pressure-plate detonator, it’s going to be a bad day for you. If their triggerman decides your vehicle is in the convoy’s sweet spot and presses a button at the moment you roll over the massive bomb he rigged and buried, it’s going to be a bad day for you. The thought of having one of those bad days and never getting a chance to fight really pissed me off. As a Frogman in combat, you want your chance to go toe-to-toe with the enemy—to shoot people. SEALs are dynamic. We’re thinking shooters. Our selection process is just long enough to weed out those who don’t have the warrior mindset. Teamguys all
have that mindset. It’s in our DNA. Getting blown up by an invisible bomb is no way for a Frogman to go. Complacency kills, but when you’re one of thirty vehicles in a convoy, hypervigilance is no match for the detached indifference of chance.

I tried to think about something else.

It was barely eight thirty in the morning, but with full gear, body armor, and helmet, it was miserable-hot inside our seven-ton flatbed. It was only April, and I was not looking forward to the summer. As we started out through the city, I got my first good look at our surroundings. Ramadi was full of two-, three-, and four-story buildings, most of them surrounded by eight-foot walls. Everything was brown. Brown and dirty. That about sums up how I saw Ramadi. There was sparse vegetation and palm trees near the banks of the Euphrates to my left, but not much flora beyond that. There was a drought in Ramadi at the time, but I couldn’t imagine a little more water making much of a difference in its general appearance.

We were in the first third of the convoy, and once we got through the outskirts of the city, there was nothing but open desert. It looked like Tatooine, the desert planet Luke Skywalker calls home, and the more I saw of it, the more I did not want to be driving in that convoy. One key difference between Anbar and Tatooine was the endless IED craters. Everywhere I looked along our route, I saw the scars left by massive explosions. There were blow-you-sky-high craters as far as the eye could see. I stopped counting how many we passed when I hit one hundred. I couldn’t imagine how the insurgency was even operating out there; there were no houses, no signs of life, just a barren desert.

My driver was Mike Monsoor, another newguy from Delta Platoon. Within the task unit, there was a mixed bag of experience and expertise. I was one of two newguy corpsmen, just checked into the Team the year before. I was also one of Charlie Platoon’s six snipers.
The rest of the unit was a variety of machine gunners, communications guys, breachers, upper management, and plenty of guys to fill any other job that might arise. Each platoon had sixteen SEALs and two EOD technicians—the guys who handle the bombs.

Mike was a machine gunner and well liked in the Team. He was a quiet guy from California, about six-one with brown hair and a square jaw. Being in different platoons, we didn’t work together much, but I had great respect for Mike. During predeployment training, he and I had beat each other senseless for the viewing pleasure of the seasoned operators in our task unit. SEAL hazing rituals can be pretty sadistic and juvenile in a very elaborate—and often hilarious—way. The older guys liked to fire up the newguys pretty frequently. Getting wasted and having a couple of newguys put on boxing gloves and fight like Roman gladiators was a favorite on long training trips. My battle with Mike was nothing short of epic. I remember repeatedly hitting him as hard as I could, but he wouldn’t go down. He just kept coming at me and dishing it back as hard as I was serving it up. Once the gloves were on, my two-inch-reach and twenty-pound-weight advantages didn’t matter to Mike. He fought like a lion, and I respected that. When it was all over, we sat down together, sweaty and short of breath. The older guys handed us beers.

“Motherfucker, you hit hard,” Mike said.

“Motherfucker, you hit hard,” I replied.

Driving toward TQ, we fought the truck’s engine noise, talking a little about the IED threats and casualties and whatever else came to mind.

“Dude, what’s up with all the chicks on this convoy?” I said.

Most of the soldiers driving the vehicles and running the convoy were women. There was something amusing and attractive at the same time about the often petite women climbing into the massive vehicles and handling them with ease.

“I know, right?
I saw a few who I definitely would not kick out of bed for eating crackers,” Mike said. I laughed in agreement and settled in for the rest of the ride.

The convoy stopped twice along the way to check out suspected IEDs, which turned out to be nothing. Aside from the constant anxiety over the possibility of being blown up without warning, the two-hour drive to TQ was relatively uneventful. Once there, we had the Team’s pallets of gear loaded onto the truck and then chilled out. I sat around, dipping a lot of Copenhagen tobacco, a habit I would only increase over the next several months. TQ had recreation tents where we could access the Internet, so I sent a few emails home. We ate in the chow hall and waited for the next day. Mike and I spent the night talking about nothing in particular.

In the morning, we convoyed back the same way we’d come. We had the task unit’s pallets of gear and the guys who’d been watching it. We were a little more relaxed, having made it without incident the day before. I noticed that the Army cats who’d been there for months didn’t even bat an eye at the prospect of traveling the route littered with the effects of so many IEDs. I managed to take a cue from them for the ride back.

A feeling of calmness settled over me for most of the three-hour journey back to Ramadi. I remembered a couple of our old mantras: “Calmness is contagious,” and “Mind over matter: if you don’t mind, it don’t matter.” The previous day’s two stops to check out suspected IEDs had been false alarms, so I tuned out the noise of the convoy and my restlessness and thought about getting past the setup phase and into combat.

About ten miles from Ramadi proper, signs of life increased as more settlements littered the landscape. The calmness evaporated as Ramadi came into view and my hypervigilance switched back on. A dusty haze enveloped the city like a locust swarm. Thick columns of smoke billowed up from somewhere in the middle of the city. The irony
of driving toward the aftermath of an IED attack after two days of worrying about one was not lost on me.

War is full of cold ironies. You can spend all your time preparing only to get hit the second you turn your head. You can prepare yourself almost to the point of vulnerability. In the end, you never know when your number is up.

“You got to have smelt a lot of mule manure before you can sing like a hillbilly.”

—Hank Williams Sr.

A
NEWGUY DOESN’T HAVE
anything of his own. Not even his weekends. I was at the Team one Saturday morning during work-up squaring away some gear, and was just finishing up. As I secured the last of my stuff and headed downstairs to the quarterdeck, I ran into Tony.

“Dauba’,” he said, “you’re not goin’ anywhere. We got some drinkin’ to do.”

“Roger that, Chief,” I answered. An order is an order.

We spent the entire day driving from bar to bar in the Murder Van, getting completely wasted. Eventually, we met up with KPM and Tony’s roommate, Jeff Paine. Jeff was about forty and had made a big impression on me as my BUD/S instructor when he chummed the water during my five-and-a-half-nautical-mile swim. He was an old-school Frogman like Tony, and the last of the true pirates.

In the morning, I woke up on Tony’s living room floor. KPM was
passed out on the couch. Sometime in the night he had taken a piss in their dryer. Jeff ambled down the stairs shakily, a cloud of liquor fumes rolling out in front of him.

“Anybody got any whiskey?” he asked. “I need to get this toothpaste taste out of my mouth.”

“Jesus,” Tony called from the kitchen. “Don’tcha ever worry about ya liver?”

“That’s all right, brother,” said Jeff. “That’s why God gave me two of them.”

I glanced over at KPM, whose slight shaking and stifled laugh betrayed the fact that he had woken up. I strained my neck to look up at my platoon chief in his kitchen, pouring a whiskey for Jeff.
Jesus
, I thought.
I just don’t want to let these guys down
.

I woke up around noon and sat up on the edge of my cot. Four days in Iraq, and nothing interesting yet. Patience is a virtue, I thought, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. I looked around at the gear and personal belongings in various stages of being unpacked that littered the tent. Mike Monsoor and I had brought all our gear to Sharkbase, Task Unit Bruiser’s base of operations. Our private little Special Operations compound was concealed behind a big wall. It housed SEALs, Rangers, and Tier 1 assets. We had our own firing range and an old palace we used for our tactical operations center (TOC). Throughout the course of the summer, we’d get tasked to support the Army at Corregidor or the Marines at Government Center, or we’d venture out for a forty-eight-hour sniper overwatch, but we always eventually came home to Sharkbase. I shared a tent with Spaz, Bob, Marc, and Dale, our sister platoon chief.

It was quiet in the tent. I was alone. I scratched my beard stubble,
slipped on my flip-flops and sunglasses, and headed for the porta-potties in PT shorts and T-shirt. A belligerent wave of desert heat hit me when I walked outside the air-conditioned comfort of my tent. Sporadic rains had left the desert air thick with moisture, carrying with added efficiency the smell of the American war machine and the Euphrates’s mix of shit and decay.

I hit the row of porta-potties and briefly recalled the story I’d heard about the guy who took a direct mortar round after walking out of a crapper on Camp Ramadi. The mortar threat was another unsettling reminder that my war could end in a flash without my ever having had the chance for a fair fight. War is a 360-degree environment.

I finished and made the forty-yard walk to our mission planning space, a plywood building full of all kinds of grenades, rockets, and boxes of ammo—a general cornucopia of small arms ordnance. A life-sized cardboard cutout of Elvis stood watch over our impressive hive of dormant destruction and other mission-essential gear. Young Elvis from the 1950s, not fat Elvis. We’d spent some time training in Memphis during our deployment work-up, and the King of Rock and Roll deployed with Charlie Platoon to Iraq as a reminder of our good times. Elvis never saw combat when he served in the Army in the 1960s, but we figured he could handle the mission of looking cool next to a bunch of explosives. I walked past the King and checked the 3x5 dry-erase board where the head shed would post ops updates. I’d been checking the board every day before hitting the chow hall, and today I saw the green light I’d been waiting for.

“Warning order—1400, Op brief—2100, Roll time—2300.”

My heart rate kicked up a notch and sent a jolt of excitement through my body. It reminded me of my first time jumping out of an airplane. I felt like I just got the call up to the big leagues and was about to pitch my first game. I headed to the chow hall with a cheesy grin on my face, barely noticing the fecal smell in the air.

I sat in the middle of the mission planning area, surrounded by the rest of the platoon. We sat on folding chairs or leaned against plywood tables, waiting for Luke and Tony to begin the brief. Elvis stood off to the side, waiting for further instructions.

Guy, one of our task unit officers, sat next to me. Guy checked into Team THREE with me the year before. Although I didn’t go through BUD/S with him, we quickly became good friends. He was an Annapolis guy, so he wasn’t an E-Dog like me, but he was from Jersey, so we shared a connection as northeasterners. Guy wrestled at the Academy and was built like a diesel engine. He was a Big Tough Frogman who possessed the natural Teamguy ability to turn on the aggression when needed. He was also one of the officers who instilled confidence among the enlisted, which became increasingly important as the deployment wore on. He and I built a great friendship over fine whiskey, good cigars, and the strenuous life of combat.

Chucky, Squirrel, Spaz, and Rex sat alongside Guy. EOD Nick sat to my left. Nick was a former Surface Warfare Combatant-Craft Crewman (SWCC) operator turned bomb nut. Nick’s SoCal swagger was juxtaposed with his Polish-Mexican ancestry. He was an avid big-wave surfer and would drop into a dust storm if he could. Nick’s operational skill saved lives on more than a few occasions. We were very fortunate to have him attached to our platoon.

Luke was our officer-in-charge (OIC). He kept the warning order quick and simple. It was a straightforward direct-action (DA) mission—our specialty: capture or kill a bomb maker and known insurgent in Tamim, a little village in southwest Ramadi. Tony broke into the details of what needed to get done in the meantime.