The Last Punisher: A SEAL Team THREE Sniper's True Account of the Battle of Ramadi (8 page)

We spilled out of the ops tent into the Iraqi heat. There were tasks to be done and little time to do them in. Priorities: Team gear, platoon
gear, personal gear. Our next brief was at 2100, six and a half hours away, and I needed to be completely squared away by then. Teamguys take pride in their gear. We live by an old adage: take care of your gear and your gear will take care of you. Simple, but effective. From the earliest days of BUD/S, I remember the people around me constantly prepping and then rechecking their gear. A knife was never too sharp, the gear never quite perfect. The cyclic and repetitive nature of fixing, tweaking, and readjusting gear enhances the effectiveness of the operator. I was no different. Previous proper planning prevents a piss-poor performance.

In addition to running the medical department, I was an ordnance rep, which meant I was responsible for making sure my platoon’s vehicles were outfitted with heavy weapons and lasers. I changed into cammies and boots before heading over to where our vehicles were parked. The chariots we rode into battle were the 1152B HMMWVs, armed to the teeth. We named all of them for GI Joe characters and spray-painted their names on the driver-side doors: Snake Eyes, Cobra Commander, Shipwreck, etc. The heavy guns we rolled with were .50-caliber machine guns and the smaller M240B machine gun, which fires 7.62 mm rounds. The big guns laid waste on the battlefield and were always welcomed in a firefight. But in case they weren’t enough, we stockpiled LAW (light antitank weapon) rockets and the 84 mm Carl Gustav recoilless rifle as backups in the trucks.

All our weaponry was impressive and deadly, but I was particularly fond of the .50. It is a classic champion of the American combat arsenal and predates World War II. The .50 can easily punch through brick and metal of all kinds. It can tear a small vehicle to shreds within a matter of seconds. Hitting another human being with a burst of .50-cal will turn said human being into a mangled mass of hamburger. There is a vicious rumor in the military that the Geneva Conventions prohibit the use of the .50 on human targets, but that’s all it is—a rumor. I read a February 2011 blog entry in Rumor Doctor for
Stars and Stripes
that carefully explained how the .50, though capable of causing horrific wounds, has a military advantage that outweighs the suffering it causes. Therefore, it is not considered an illegal weapon for use against human targets under the Law of Armed Conflict.

I checked the headspace and timing of the .50s, and then conducted function tests on all the guns. I replaced the batteries on the lasers and made sure the hand-grip pressure pads were functioning properly. Later on, before departing, each turret gunner would check all of these again. When I finished, I relayed to Bob, the primary ordnance rep, that I had completed the checks.

Bob was on his third deployment with Charlie. He grew up in California’s Central Valley. Fortunately, Bob was spared Valley Fever when he joined the Navy. Bob was a solid 210 pounds on a six-one frame and did the heavy lifting. He was often aloof with the newguys, praised very little, but demanded the highest degree of performance on the job. Uncle Bob made newguys better Frogmen. It’s kind of an unspoken rule in a SEAL platoon that after your first platoon you’re relieved of the burden of carrying the machine gun (otherwise affectionately known as the “Pig”). On this deployment, Bob still carried the bacon. He led by example and was a core member of our platoon.

I split responsibility for the medical department with Jonny, so I checked the medical equipment in Snake Eyes. The spine board, platoon med bag, and body bags were there, so I went back to my tent to check my personal gear. I had my med bag, plus the same gear everybody else carried. My gear was always ready to go. I’ve been meticulous since I was a kid. While my brothers used to play with their Matchbox cars and Tonka trucks, I would spend hours organizing and arranging mine into neat rows. I like things orderly. I already had my grenades all taped down and a full set of magazines loaded and ready to go. I made a habit of rotating my mags every few days to make sure I wasn’t stressing the springs too much. If you take care of your mags, you get fewer jams.

After prepping the gear, I took some time to write an email home to my parents. I was careful to be vague and ambiguous about where I was and what I was doing. I told them things were fine, and everything was going great. In the back of my mind, I was thinking about going out on my first op. Getting shot or blown up was a very real possibility, but that’s not something you share with somebody back home. Those possibilities are part of the job, and how you deal with them defines you as an operator. There’s a lot of stuff you don’t tell the people you love.

I willed the hours to tick by like a kid on Christmas Eve. I hit the range with my M4 to make sure my dope was dialed in (the settings on my rifle sights) before settling in to prepare the medical brief for the op order. This was one of my biggest responsibilities. The brief covered plans such as what to do if a man went down on the way to the target . . . on target . . . during exfiltration, etc. It’s your basic planning for every conceivable mission scenario distilled into a PowerPoint presentation. The medical slides were an important part of the brief. Where someone was going if they got shot and who was going to transport them was nothing to breeze through.

When all the prep work was done, I headed to dinner with the other newguys. We ate lunches in our small, private chow hall on Sharkbase, but for dinner we usually drove to the bigger Army chow hall on Camp Ramadi. Besides, the PX sold Copenhagen, and if you didn’t get there on shipment day, the Texas boys would clean the place out in short order.

I piled into a Toyota Hilux with Marc Lee, Ryan Job, Biff, and Jonny. Jonny had just finished his daily call to his girlfriend. He used to take a lot of flak for the amount of time he spent calling, IM’ing, writing letters to, and phoning her. If there was a way to communicate with her, he exhausted it. He probably floated a message in a bottle down the Euphrates one night. If he thought an Iraqi pigeon would have made it with a message all the way to her house in the States, he
would have tried it. He once got his ass chewed for sitting behind a generator on the satellite phone during a mortar attack on Sharkbase. The rest of us ran for cover, and he had one of his hour-long conversations, oblivious to the overhead threat because of the noise from the generator.

“So anybody know what’s up with this place we’re headed into?” I asked from the passenger seat. “What are the atmospherics?”

Jonny was driving dangerously and first to speak up. “Hell if I know, bro. I’m just operating on the assumption it’s like the rest of Ramadi: shitty. As long as we don’t get blown up on the ride over, I think we’ll be good.”

“Jonny, you think you’re gonna be okay to see the enemy tonight through them tiny slits for eyes?” Marc said from the backseat, recycling one of our go-to jokes. Military humor in general is dark, crass, and often tasteless and offensive by civilian standards, but for us, mildly racist jabs like Marc’s were a great way to defuse tension before an op.

“Yeah, I think I’ll be okay,” Jonny said. “I just hope nobody mistakes you for muj tonight, bro. I don’t want to have to bandage you up after Dauber gets too excited and accidentally shoots your ass.”

Muj
(pronounced “Mooj”) was our term for the insurgents we fought. It was short for
mujahideen,
which is a broad term for one engaged in jihad and is what a lot of the insurgents called themselves.

“Ha! No shit, right? Dauber will shoot a motherfucker straight up,” Ryan said from behind me. “What do you think, Dauber?”

“I guess we’ll see,” I said. “But if I do, it won’t be Marc. I don’t have enough magnification on my scope to see them tiny arms.”

“You shoot me in a dream, you better wake up and apologize,” Marc said.

The
Reservoir Dogs
reference made me smile, and I fired back. “I wouldn’t shoot you, man. You’re my favorite Iraqi.”

“You two aren’t gonna kiss now, are you?” Biff said as we bounced
over uneven terrain on our way to Camp Ramadi. The cackling continued as we pulled up to the chow hall.

By 2300, I was loaded up and ready to go. I wore my tricolor BDUs with my black parachute rigger’s belt and Oakley assault boots. In my right breast pocket, I had my blood chit and rosary beads. In my other chest pocket, I kept two hundred dollars cash in case I ever got separated from my platoon and had to barter with the locals for my freedom. After Operation Redwings, escape and evasion were given more attention in training, and carrying cash into combat became standard procedure. Fortunately, in an urban environment, your area of operation is finite and there’s an Abrams tank on every street corner.

In my right shoulder pocket, I had a tourniquet. In the left cargo pocket of my trousers, I had a blowout kit: three compressed Kerlix field dressings, a 14-gauge needle, an Asherman chest seal, and a couple of ACE wraps. Each of us carried one in order to hastily treat a gunshot wound until more help could be summoned. I carried a CRKJ folding utility knife, which could come in handy if I needed to dig some brass out of a badly jammed gun or as a last-resort weapon. Under my web gear, I wore a set of low-pro body armor with an American flag folded up with the ceramic plates inside. I carried Old Glory with me at all times, a reminder of the liberty for which we fought.

I carried seven mags, two frags, a smoke grenade, an IR strobe, three sets of flex-cuffs, a battle map inside a Rhodesian officer pouch, pen, and paper. On my wrist I wore a Garmin Foretrex GPS and G-Shock watch. My M4 with EOTech was optimized for close-quarters battle and had a 10-inch barrel with a 6-inch suppressor and Surefire flashlight attached to the rail system. I had it rigged with the old Vietnam-style shortened buttstock and metal handgrip. In a leather Galco holster on my hip, I wore my sidearm: a SIG Sauer P226 pistol with a 15-round magazine. I carried two spare mags on my
belt. On my Modular Integrated Communications Helmet (MICH), I mounted my AN/PVS-15 night-vision goggles. Last but not least, I carried my med bag, fully outfitted with hemorrhage control measures, advanced airway surgical tools, needle decompression, bag valve masks, and pulse oximetry. I was wearing fifty pounds of gear, but it didn’t feel cumbersome. You get used to wearing combat gear, and it becomes a sort of extension of your body. I felt like I carried no excess, like everything on my person was a completely vital item. I genuinely felt swift, silent, deadly.

I loaded into the back of Big Zev, our hulking beast of a flatbed stake truck, which we named after an old Vietnam-era truck that appeared in
Tour of Duty,
the classic 1980s show about Vietnam. We would binge-watch the show during off hours on Sharkbase, and in one episode, the crew had painted the name Big Zev on the truck’s door—a pop culture Easter egg and nod to Zev Braun, the show’s executive producer. Big Zev was an ambling beast and sat in the middle of our convoy of four armored Humvees, and as we wound our way through Camp Ramadi, I noted again the half-inch steel walls and sandbags lining the floor. I thought about my beloved balls and wondered to what extent the sandbags could keep them intact in the event of an IED blast.

We were on our way from Sharkbase to pick up our Jundis.
Jundi
(“Jundee”) is the Arabic word for soldier, and is what we called the members of the Iraqi Security Forces our team was tasked with training. My platoon was divided into four groups, and each group was given a set of Jundis to work with. My group was assigned the Jundi Special Missions Platoon (SMP). The SMP was theoretically a step up in tactical proficiency compared to the regular-army guys, but a real soup sandwich nonetheless when we first got them. Completely lacking in most military discipline, they were mostly young, skinny Iraqis who played a lot of soccer and smoked a lot of cigarettes. They were in pretty decent shape for Iraqi standards and had been selected for the
SMP as a result. Most were Shias from Baghdad who commuted by bus to Ramadi, where they would put on their uniforms and pick up their guns for training. Their fidelity to the cause of building Iraq into a Western-style democracy was often dubious at best. Some of them believed in Iraq and genuinely wanted to fight to make it better. Some were just there for the paycheck. Some gave off a very strong muj vibe. It was something about the shifty glances—the guys who wouldn’t sustain eye contact. They were the ones who got my Spidey senses tingling. You try to embrace the whole “one team, one fight” mentality, but in the back of your mind, you’re thinking,
These are some nefarious individuals.
You find yourself wondering,
When’s that dog gonna turn on me?
You hold them at a distance because you have to. It’s nothing personal; it’s just basic survival instinct and combat.

We always waited until the last minute to brief the Jundis on the time and location of our missions because we had to account for the possibility that some of them were muj. None of them knew where we lived because we didn’t want any of them tipping off our enemies with coordinates to Sharkbase.

The Jundis’ main training facility was an old Iraqi prison on Camp Ramadi’s outer edges that once housed Iranian POWs during the Iran-Iraq War. That’s where Marc and I spent our first few days in country training them on myriad tactics. We focused a lot in those early training days on how to not accidentally shoot us in the back. We taught them two- and four-man room clearing, how to bound from cover to cover, how to load onto and exit tactical vehicles, how to scale walls and set security on both sides, how to prepare for a breach, and how far away you have to be in order to not get concussed. We applied the crawl, walk, run method. We would talk through the training with an interpreter and then demonstrate the tactics over and over again.

Slow is smooth; smooth is fast. This is your mantra when clearing rooms in urban combat.

When the Jundis cleared rooms in training, it was not uncommon
to see guys run into the middle of a room and proceed to wave their AK-47s wildly with no regard whatsoever for the need to identify targets, maintain muzzle awareness, or avoid crossing into a friendly line of fire. Some of them seemed to try to make up for their lack of precision with violence of action. This led to more than one instance of Jundis tripping over their own feet or falling down hard by virtue of general clumsiness. They did not inspire confidence. Officially, we were training the Jundis to take the lead in the fight against the insurgency, but off the record, we were doing the door-kicking ourselves on every mission. The Jundis were always in the back of the assault train. We’d let them handle more menial tasks, like searching buildings after we’d secured them and frisking the women on target.