Service: A Navy SEAL at War (11 page)

Our first job in Ramadi was an important one. We were assigned to push out into a neighborhood about three miles east of Camp Marc Lee to set up sniper overwatch positions protecting U.S. forces who were building a new combat outpost. Both squads from Alfa Platoon—Blue and Gold—went in, all told about thirty guys. On the morning of the twenty-sixth, we rolled out in our vehicles. We drove to an Iraqi checkpoint, where we picked up the
jundis
and two excellent men who served as our interpreters, or “terps”—Moose and Riddick, military contractors who lived with us full-time. Staging our vehicles there, we spent the day briefing with them, then, joining up with a patrol of Marines, we set out for our target on foot after dark.

As we proceeded down Route Michigan by night into the center of the city, all was quiet, a strict curfew in place. Maneuvering through the night, we kept about twenty feet between each man. As I kept pace with our fast-moving point man, Special Operator First Class Studdard, my radio crackled and burped with reports of American patrols in contact with the enemy, out there somewhere. The glow of small fires cast the low cloud ceiling in a spooky, shifting palette of reds. Skeletons of buildings loomed darkly all around us.

Finally, we reached our destination—an abandoned four-story building situated on a circular chain of streets that everybody called the Racetrack. Formerly an Iraqi military post, then a school, it was about to become a stiff thumb in the eye of the
insurgency, a forward base for a company from the First Battalion, Sixth Marines (or 1/6). We all knew the enemy would come after it hard. We were sent in to keep things cool enough for construction to proceed. It would be known as Combat Outpost Firecracker.

The building was full of reminders of the evil confronting us. As we entered and cleared it, room by room, evidence of its recent darker uses was all around us. It had been an insurgent base of operations, and also a prison or interrogation center. Its filthy walls echoed with the cries of the tortured. Blood stained the tables. Ominous steel implements well suited to a barbecue pit were left behind (there wasn’t any brisket in Ramadi). No telling how many innocent Iraqis had been abused there, but as we took control of the building, its vicious aura gave clarity to our mission.

We decided to set up our command and control element on the fourth floor. One of our officers, another SEAL, and the Navy pilot who served as our JTAC and arranged our air support made their home on the north side. Studdard, Wink, and I led the rest of the group, including all our snipers, around the rest of the floor, looking for positions with the best lines of sight and avenues of fire.

Ten of our thirty SEALs were qualified snipers (the rest were expert marksmen), so we had five pairs to deploy. Putting a two-man sniper team in each room, we arranged an assortment of desks, chairs, pillows, and blankets for functional comfort. Where windowless walls covered up potentially good lines of sight, we sledged or blasted spider holes through them and otherwise redecorated the place. Senior Chief Steffen was with us and I was glad to have him there—and glad to serve in a position
that reflected his trust. Once we were dug in, we lay low and waited for trouble, scanning the wasted city cast in shades of black and green through our night-vision goggles.

Before sunrise we had some small excitement when it was discovered that a mule had gotten inside the huge enclosed open playground behind the school. In Ramadi, nothing was as it appeared. When we noticed a hole in the brick wall nearby, we thought it possible that an insurgent had forced the animal in there with a bomb hidden inside him. They were known to plant explosives in animal carcasses, so nothing was impossible. That jackass certainly could have made a hell of an IED. We called our EOD bomb techs and they checked out the mule, which turned out to be packing nothing more than its usual kick.

Shortly after our arrival, an Army captain showed up, looking to coordinate with us, and I greeted him. Since SEALs don’t wear rank, he seemed interested in figuring out where I stood in the chain of command relative to him.
Whatever, dude,
I thought to myself. I asked him what he needed from us.

“I want protection for my guys,” he said.

“Roger that,” I said. “Just keep your guys away from mine while we’re working. We’ll take the fourth floor. No insurgents will touch you.”

I have to hand it to the men who built the COPs. The whole U.S. military runs on the backs of its smart and resourceful engineers. It’s been that way since the old days: engineers, sappers, Seabees—whatever you call them, good dudes all. The guys we covered worked incredibly fast, usually getting the COPs built overnight. They operated like well-oiled machines, efficiently standing up those outposts and connecting their electrical grids so that our forces could get to the task of taking something
essential from the enemy: the trust and goodwill of the citizens of Ramadi. Working in full combat gear in the unbelievable heat, they set up concrete barriers, laid concertina wire on top of walls, layered sandbags into big piles, hooked up generators, and built guard towers, all the while taking harassing fire—and sometimes worse. You talk about hanging yourself out there. Good Lord.

A few of us tried to grab a little sleep as the eastern sky warmed before dawn. We planned to stick around for as long as it took to make sure ours was a long-term lease. But come morning, all hell broke loose in our little sector of Ramadi’s shithole.

In Baghdad, we had rolled through the city in unarmored early-model Humvees, our legs and weapons hanging out the open doors on both sides. We looked pretty slick, but were very vulnerable then. Three years of IEDs and RPG attacks had helped us evolve. Now, on the street below us, a Humvee started taking fire from a position beyond our line of sight. Several RPGs hit the vehicle and the road around it. As that Humvee took several more hits, all of us watching were sure its occupants were goners. But somehow, it emerged from the swirl of dust and smoke and continued on. Those up-armored models could really take a beating.

The attack on the vehicle was followed by a barrage of mortar fire, falling on us in high arcs, lobbed from far away. They were big shells, 120mm rounds, and accurately targeted. Three of these bad boys straddled our building. One blew a huge crater in the street right where that Humvee had been. Another went off in the playground. The closest detonation shook the plaster and knocked paint from our walls.

As the attack continued, the streets rattled with the sound of
American small arms fire as well as enemy PKC machine guns, AK-47 rifles, and rocket-propelled grenades. Once in a while, people would appear on the streets. Whenever we saw them milling around, we fired warning shots; when a wall splintered behind them, they usually disappeared quickly. The children were widely believed to be harmless, but we always had our suspicions that they served as lookouts and probes for the insurgency. Whenever we saw an older one acting aggressively, we paid attention and didn’t quit paying attention until we figured out what he was up to. Polyester tracksuits and old-school Adidas-style sneakers—the ones with three diagonal stripes running down each side—seemed to be the uniform of choice for many of their fighters.

Adam got our team’s first kill in Ramadi, earning him a case of beer the next time we got somewhere that had beer. He was always a source of laughs. One time after that, he was doing an overwatch when he needed to take a dump, so he stood up and dropped his drawers, only to be spotted by an American sentry across the way, who opened up on the sniper with his M60 machine gun. Apparently word of our position hadn’t gotten around. The sentry ceased fire pretty quickly, though. (I think what saved my teammate was the New York Giants ball cap he was wearing, which must have been visible from quite a distance.) The experience was sure exciting for Adam—and particularly memorable: as he ducked the gunfire, he fell right back into his own crap. Needless to say, for the next few days he was alone in his sniper hole. (Sorry, bro; that moment was too funny not to immortalize in print.)

Confronting shooters of Adam’s caliber, our cowardly enemies used any dirty tactic to gain an advantage. They exploited
defenseless civilians and forced them into the crossfire. They understood that we were men of morals, governed by laws, and uncomfortable seeing innocents harmed. I remember three terrified women who showed up near COP Firecracker pushing a large handcart with an oil drum in it. An armed man moved along behind them, using them for cover. One of our snipers fired into the drum and another took aim between the women and fired right between the guy’s legs. At this, all four Iraqis turned and ran. The guy moved so fast he bolted right out of his flip-flops. When the Marines checked out the oil drum, it turned out to be full of explosives.

By noon of the first day, our snipers had three kills. The streets became quiet.

The next day was calm until the late afternoon. The Army had three Humvees and an Abrams tank parked about 150 meters north of us, near a traffic circle. Just before dark, the insanity resumed. The street outside COP Firecracker came under heavy attack as dozens of insurgents opened up on the Hummers parked there. It sounded like they were firing everything they had.

As I watched from our top-floor sniper gallery, a Humvee parked near the traffic circle started taking machine-gun fire. The rounds were just ricocheting off the vehicle’s up-armored hide, so the enemy brought out the heavier stuff. With a loud
whoosh
came an RPG. They shot it low, I think trying to skip the rocket under the vehicle to strike at its vulnerable underside. Through my binoculars I could see the vehicle begin to burn.

I was on the radio calling for a quick reaction force when the guys in the Humvee surprised us all, popping open the turtle shell and jumping out into the street. Running around to the
back, under direct attack the whole time, they opened the hatch and pulled out a fire extinguisher. They sure cared about that Humvee, I’ll say that for them.

I was expecting to see every one of those guys get hit, but without a visual on the enemy shooting at them, there wasn’t much we could do to help. That was when the other Humvees showed up, bringing additional U.S. forces into the fray. These new arrivals compelled the insurgents to make other plans. The crew of the damaged vehicle was quickly extracted from harm’s way, and the enemy force, which was fairly sizable, vanished into the alleyways of Ramadi.

Insurgents took big risks when they took on our forces like this. A big part of the reason why was the Navy pilot who ran with our assault element whenever we did sniper overwatches. His name was Brandon Scott, call sign FSBO, or Fizbo. His squadron buddies in Norfolk hung that name on him—an acronym for “for sale by owner”—after he and his wife bought a house and promptly got reassigned to another part of the country. In the military you never live down something like that, and if anyone senses that a nickname bugs you, you’re stuck with it forever. (The best pilots usually have the most unflattering nicknames. The pilots I know say they don’t generally have much confidence in anyone with a call sign like Maverick or Viper. If you meet one named Outhouse or Dumpster Diver, however, it’s a safe bet he’s good to go.)

Fizbo, as a JTAC, was basically a traveling fire-control station. Ours was one of the first platoons to let JTACs run with us on missions. Carrying as much as 150 pounds worth of portable radios into the streets, Fizbo kept in constant contact with pilots and lined up air support and overhead reconnaissance for us. He
spoke the incomprehensible language known as Pilot and made life a lot easier for us, calling down hell from aircraft circling high above the clouds. Every request for close air support was like Christmas, though you never knew how Santa would deliver your gift. Sometimes he arrived on an F-16 or F/A-18 jet. Other times he rode a Predator drone or an Apache helicopter armed with rockets. Whatever the case, he and his sleigh were always welcome.

Working with a SEAL team wasn’t what most high-flying fighter jocks like Fizbo wanted to do, but he wasn’t like most pilots. After Redwing happened, he told his squadron mates at Norfolk all he wanted to do was grab a rifle and a radio and get into the fight down on the ground. That’s our kind of flyboy. When he joined us at Camp Marc Lee, he got his wish. We did, too. His AN/PRC-117F multiband tactical radio plugged us into a network of aircraft operating from bases all around the region. SEALs can earn a JTAC qualification, but I prefer having someone who speaks Pilot doing the job. They understand the problems facing the guy in the sleek Plexiglas cockpit up there—believe me, his problem is our problem. Although the assignment of a pilot to our platoon was out of the ordinary, our leadership saw the value in it and supported the effort to get some pilots into the mix. Doing time out there with us outside the wire, Fizbo took down a lot of bad guys and saved our butts many times.

So this Humvee is burning out there in the streets. The enemy has withdrawn, and probably thinks he’s gotten away from us. He hasn’t. Not with Fizbo sitting there next to me, talking to a buddy of his sitting in the cockpit of a Super Hornet twenty-five thousand feet above us. Thanks to some great technology, he can
see what the pilot sees. Taking control of the aircraft’s targeting pod, which mounts a powerful camera, he spots the squad of insurgents who launched the attack withdrawing through a warren of streets. Following them, he observes them entering a courtyard several blocks away. Three other insurgent teams, about twenty-five dudes in all, were gathered there. On the jet’s infrared camera, some of their weapons glow brightly, still hot from being fired. What a target. Fizbo checks in with our platoon OIC, Lieutenant Nathan, and tells him we’ve found our boys.

We have a couple of options now. We can push out and launch a ground assault. But that isn’t our mission at the moment. We can direct another patrol to their position, but that has risks, too. The easiest approach is a nice, clean bolt from the blue—a missile or bomb strike from Fizbo’s airborne brother. Fiz agrees, so he calls in a strike request to brigade headquarters at Camp Ramadi—their approval was a standing requirement in the sensitive counterinsurgency fight—verifying that he’s achieved positive identification on a hostile force. With all of them in that courtyard area, he wants to light it up with a five-hundred-pound bomb.