Honor and Betrayal : The Untold Story of the Navy Seals Who Captured the "Butcher of Fallujah"-and the Shameful Ordeal They Later Endured (9780306823091) (2 page)
Authors: Patrick Robinson
Rear Admiral Sean A. Pybus
Commander
US Navy Special Warfare Command,
Garrison/HQ
Naval Amphibious Base
Coronado, San Diego
Dear Admiral Pybus,
I formally left the United States Navy this week, after serving for nine years, as a SEAL for the last six of them. You probably heard my name a few times during 2009/2010 when they court-martialed me for abusing a prisoner, failing to protect him, as was my duty, and making a false statement. Not too bad, right? A proud US Navy SEAL, branded a bully, idler and a liar, on the word of a mass murderer and terrorist.
You will understand, as a career SEAL officer, that I could not possibly have been guilty of any such thing. SEALs do not behave like that. Certainly I never met one who did.
I was, of course, found not guilty, after a four-day criminal trial, which, incidentally, almost broke my family's heart, as they watched my humiliation in the courtroom. I was not just found “Not Guilty” by the jury, I was completely exonerated. Mostly because I was completely innocent, but partly because I was represented by one of the finest military lawyers in the world, the former US Marine Lieutenant-Colonel, Neal A. Puckett, of Washington, DC.
Happily, a massive public subscription saved me from financial ruin, but I doubt I'll ever recover from the experience. Because the SEALs were my life. I was Team Leader in the mission which captured the most wanted man in the Middle East. And no one was remotely surprised when he claimed to have been abused. That's what they do. Everyone knows that.
The shocker was, the US military believed him. And essentially, they fell over themselves backwards with political correctness, and hung me out to dry, along with my equally innocent teammates, Navy SEALs Jonathan Keefe and Sam Gonzales, two of the best people I ever met. We were, of course, all exonerated by the courts, every charge dismissed.
Admiral Pybus, I am writing this open letter to you, my most senior commander, only to let you know that I finished with the Navy not for any selfish reason, but for the sake of my “Brothers” in the Teams. After my acquittal, I tried very hard to put it all behind me and I accepted an II-month deployment to Afghanistan.
But ever since they charged me, I have not been able to sleep. In Afghanistan I was never so sharp, and I could not find the same drive, the same determination. I was not even such a good marksman as I once was. Secretly, I think I was just afraid I might let the guys down.
I don't believe anyone knew I was no longer the warrior of old. But something had gone drastically wrong for me, and, try as I did, I could not recover. It was probably the injustice, that utterly undeserved court-martial; that chilling moment when I read the charge sheet,
THE UNITED STATES V. S02 MATTHEW V. MCCABE.
I still wake up thinking about it.
Nonetheless, I still want to thank the US Navy, and especially the SEALs for teaching me darned nearly every worthwhile thing I know: discipline, loyalty, truthfulness, patriotism, courage, skills, and the creed of the team player. I'll never forget those things, and I'll be forever grateful for the opportunity the Navy gave me to be a part of it.
In my mind, I'll always be a SEAL. And, for the rest of my life, I expect I'll be asked, over and over, how long I would have stayed, as
an elite American combat warrior, but for the court-martial. And my answer will always be the same: about a thousand years.
Yours Sincerely
,
Petty Officer Matthew V. McCabe
Formerly Echo Platoon
,
SEAL Team 10
,
Little Creek, Virginia
Rear Admiral Sean A. Pybus
Commander
US Navy Special Warfare Command,
Garrison/HQ
Naval Amphibious Base
Coronado, San Diego
Dear Admiral Pybus,
This is a letter of both appreciation and regret. You may perhaps recall that I was one of three members of SEAL Team 10 who faced court-martial in the Spring of 2010, in connection with the alleged abuse of the Iraqi prisoner, Ahmad Hashim Abd Al-Isawi, a killer and terrorist by trade.
Matter of fact, I helped capture him. I was Point-Man in the Platoon that crossed the desert and stormed into his al-Qaeda stronghold. None of us abused him. He was a professional liar, obeying his
jihadist
training manual.
Anyway, after several months of hell, coping with the threat of disgrace and financial ruin, we were all three exonerated in court, Not Guilty, Case Dismissed. I just thought you should, as my superior Commander, be reminded of the dreadful consequences which befall a falsely-accused Navy SEAL.
Firstly, something dies. With me it was the will to strive to be the best, as I'd always done before. My motivation was way down. On
training trips I was dragging my feet. I'd simply lost that SEAL ethos, that sense of feeling unstoppable. And I could not get it back.
It's hard for me to write this, because we were all taught in the Teams: never make excuses, only solutions; always be accountable for your own actions; aim for perfection, and never stop learning.
But that court-martial floored me. It forced me into some kind of limbo for months on end. All three of us were outcasts, there was no longer any opportunity for me to better myself. My lofty ambitions to become a SEAL officer were shot to pieces.
Then Matthew McCabe and I both went on that II-month deployment to Afghanistan. And it was out there, often in real danger, I first realized I was too much going with the flow. I was following orders, and trying my hardest, but not wanting to be noticed.
I was still ready to put my life on the line for any one of my Brothers, as they would for me. But something I could not grab, was missing. The flame which had always burned within me, had dimmed, and if I was not very careful, might die altogether.
It was out there, deep in Taliban country, that I knew I had to go. Because suddenly an average-to-good showing in combat seemed okay. It had never been so before, because I'm a SEAL, and average is
never
okay. SEALs, as you well know, don't do average.
Well, I finally left the Navy last month, and I hope I'll find new paths to follow. And I'll never forget how the Navy straightened me out when I was a kind of goof-ball college drop-out. And I'll never forget the way my character was formed in the discipline of the Teams.
When I look back I hope to remember the good times. The days of triumph, when we were out in force, demonstrating on a daily basis, that we were indeed the front line of United States military muscle.
And yet, the specter of that cruelly unfair court-martial haunts me still. It nearly broke my mom's heart. And when I think of those complacent prosecutors and investigators, deaf to our protests, I'll always feel that rising anger I used to reserve for the enemy.
I can forgive. But I can't forget the brutal unfairness of it all. And would I do it all again? Would I still put my life on the line for my country, for my SEAL Trident?
The question stands stark before me. Looking back, would you risk it all again? Just to have been a United States Navy SEAL, and the hell with the court-martial?
Admiral, the answer will always be, Yes.
Wishing you the very best, in Command of the greatest fighting force the world ever saw.
Yours sincerely
,
Petty Officer Jonathan Keefe
Formerly Echo Platoon
,
SEAL Team 10
,
Little Creek, Virginia
In the violent, blasted side streets of Fallujah, the demented Sunni killer Ahmad Hashim had assumed a loose and terrifying control.
T
hrough millennia the ancient Babylonian city of al-Fallujah has shuddered from violent atrocities and deeply profound mysteries. Did the Persian hordes really slay the teenage Emperor of Rome, Gordian III, on the banks of the Euphrates in the year 244? Centuries later, in 1920, was the English government's envoy, Lieutenant Colonel Gerard Leachman, truly beheaded with one swipe of a two-handed sword by Sheik Dhari, right here in the Royal Palace of al-Fallujah?
And who, on the night of March 31, 2004, was directly responsible for the medieval butchering of four American security officersâall of them burned alive, dragged through the town, and then strung up from the old bridge across the Euphrates, turning it into a grotesque iron gallows, before a roaring crowd of Iraqi fanatics?
The Persians swore that the young Caesar, Gordian III, was cut down in battle, whereas the Romans, claiming victory, deny it, stating the gallant Emperor died much later, way upstream.
In turn the Iraqis dismiss the very thought that Sheik Dhari would have stooped to any such barbarism as murdering a British colonel
with a scimitar. Efficiently, they produce records to show that his son, demonstrating commendable chivalry, shot the colonel in the back.
But the ongoing mystery of who slaughtered the American security officers rumbles on, shaking and shuddering like the bolted iron girders of the old bridge when the heavy US armored vehicles roar daily over the river, west of the city.
This most barbarous act of the twenty-first century, almost eighteen hundred years after the demise of Emperor Gordian III, was more brutal, more primitive, and less human than anything that had ever happened before. And the US intelligence authorities were faced suddenly with near-incontrovertible evidence that another terrorist serial killer was emerging who was even more of a psychopath than the rising “star” of al-Qaeda, the thirty-seven-year-old deranged Jordanian jihadist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Initially there was little doubt as to who planned the strike against the Americans, who had, after all, been attacked at gunpoint by a gang of armed guerrillas on a main city street and then incinerated, their vehicles set ablaze, while a big chanting crowd stood back and hurled rocks into the flames.
Thereafter things became particularly unattractive. Two charred corpses were tied to cars and dragged through the streets. Body parts were pulled off and hung from telephone wires. Two incinerated bodies were hauled up onto the old bridge and left dangling from the rafters.
All of this seemed somewhat beyond the pale, even for the savagely anti-American al-Zarqawi. And even if it were within the pale, these actions certainly represented a new and grim semitribal low for the apparent successor to Osama bin Laden.
And there was a planned tribal madness to the attack. The Americans all worked for the private security corporation Blackwater and were helping to safely transport supplies for a catering company. But there were more than 150 Iraqis shouting and chanting at the old bridge as the mutilated bodies swung in the light desert breeze:
Long live Islam ... Allahu Akbar [God is great]!
One town official mentioned, unhelpfully, that this would be the fate of all Americans who entered Fallujah. And for several hours the crowd
grew and grew, still chanting anti-American slogans. It took the sudden and thunderous howl of a US fighter-bomber, screaming in low from out of the southeastern desert, to finally scatter and disperse them.
And, of course, these four frenzied murders seemed to bear all the hallmarks of the work of al-Zarqawi. Although he was not yet a confirmed member of bin Laden's inner councils, he very soon would be and, indeed, later that year would be proclaimed “Emir of al-Qaeda in the Country of Two Rivers.”