Service: A Navy SEAL at War (12 page)

The reply from headquarters arrives quickly. “Request denied.”

Fizbo’s next course of action: beat head against wall. The look on his face was priceless (and his words unpublishable). He sourly considered this news, then asked that the request be pushed to the next level of command. He was denied there, too—and each time questioned on the validity of the target. When Fiz pressed the case, emphasizing that he had never lost sight of the enemy unit since its attack, a senior commander at brigade headquarters got on the radio. “Sorry, my friend, I’m not
giving you this bomb,” he said. Headquarters then passed control of the camera on the Super Hornet to its own Air Force tactical control team. Fizbo was out of business.

The head shed air controllers tried to keep watch on the cell. They saw a car pull up to the house. The bad guys started loading their weapons into the trunk. Then they began driving away. The air controllers did their best to follow the car, I guess, but they soon lost it in the maze. That aircraft never got any ordnance off the rails.

Fizbo and I couldn’t believe headquarters had let them get away. We let the senior chief know it, and Lieutenant Commander Thomas, too.

Day five was quiet at COP Firecracker. As we kept the lookout, we also started filling sandbags and installing communication systems. Fizbo blew off some steam by standing watch with a sniper rifle on a key alleyway. (We had prepped that flyboy on the range, so he would be ready if events demanded action.) Looking for a quick nap, I stretched out some thermal camouflage netting and tied it off on two walls as though it were a hammock. I had no sooner reclined and closed my eyes when a ruckus woke me up: a pair of Army privates were fighting outside in the hall. I ran over and separated them, then hauled them by the arm into a classroom. I asked them what the trouble was. When it turned out to be a trivial thing—a fight over rations or something—I whipped up some choice Navy language and spread it all over them. I reminded them who the enemy was. I asked them if they understood their mission.

In the middle of my ass-chewing, I heard the cracks of gunfire, followed by an outburst of raw, terrified screaming from the roof. A U.S. soldier came falling down the stairs to our floor. He
had taken a bullet in the back. It blew straight down his leg and came out through his knee. He was stabilized quickly and evacuated to a hospital somewhere.

When the excitement was over, I turned to the two teenagers who had been fighting and told them to listen closely. What had happened to that soldier would happen to them if they lost focus on their mission. “The enemy is out there. He’s trying to kill you,” I said. “You fool around, stop thinking, or start fighting like idiots over an MRE, and some asshole with an AK is going to put one through the both of you.” Sometimes in the daily grind of combat, eighteen-year-old privates will be eighteen-year-old privates.

This was unlike any war I ever imagined. There was no territory to hold in the normal sense. It was a war of constant patrol, a war of potshots and snipers, a war that was small-scale and personal. When someone got hit, we usually never saw the enemy, and when we did there were often questions about his identity or intention. But suppose everything checked out: his hostile intent was established, and we took the shot, taking down the bad guy. Well, here comes a military lawyer, interrogating us as though we were criminals and asking us to fill out a “shooter statement,” explaining exactly why we killed the enemy. I understand now that we had to make sure every person killed in battle had a purpose—a purpose that propped up a government and supported the people of Iraq, while not feeding into the efforts of the insurgency. It is hard operating in the gray areas of a COIN environment, for leadership and ground-pounders alike. In the heat of the moment, though, I couldn’t get over how our judgment as operators seemed always to take a back seat to the caution of the lawyers. Sure, political problems can sprout up
quickly as a result of what happens on the battlefield, but that’s bullshit right there. The rules of engagement change constantly in a combat environment, and our operators are rigorously trained to adjust accordingly, depending on their mission and the situation. Certain things should be left to experienced warriors to decide. Does anybody really think a guy riding a bike toward a firefight wearing a black scarf around his head and carrying a rifle slung on his back is looking for a barbershop quartet rehearsal? The lawyers often seemed to want to give him the benefit of the doubt. As a result, we couldn’t always engage the enemy the way we felt we needed to. We couldn’t touch mosques or hospitals, no matter how many bastards might have been shooting at us from the minarets and pediatric wards.

I could think of at least one way to get everyone on the same page. Let’s put the lawyer on the rooftop—let him experience the sensation of having his own skin in the game—and see how far his note-taking skills get him.

W
hen we returned to Camp Marc Lee from the mission to overwatch COP Firecracker, Alfa Platoon’s favorite naval aviator was still plenty hot about being denied the chance to unload a wing rack on that buzzing enemy nest. After dropping off his gear at the camp, Fizbo made a beeline for the brigade combat operations center at Camp Ramadi, looking for some answers. He must have been pulling a few
g
’s when he stormed into the office, because an Army captain noticed him and hurried out of his work space to engage him.

“Hey, what’s going on?” he asked Fizbo. “I can tell you’re upset. What are you trying to do here?”

“I’d like to see the officer who turned down my air strike.”

Fizbo laid out how we watched those shitheads assault U.S. forces, and how we tracked them back to a courtyard where two other armed gangs were gathered.

“Yeah, we were watching that in real time,” the captain said. “We really tried to make the right call.” He explained how strategic objectives had affected the tactical decision that day. He said they were all concerned that Ramadi could become another Fallujah—total rubble, in other words. Ramadi had been so
badly battered by collateral damage in several years of fighting that another rough six months of it might end civilization there altogether. The challenge, the captain said, was to kill the insurgency without killing the city. And that would require a new way of war.

Having defended his commander’s decision, the Army officer then remarked, “You know, everything considered, we probably
should
have let you drop the bomb.”

As it happened, the officer with the fine diplomatic touch was one of a handful of Americans involved in the sensitive effort to win Ramadi’s tribal sheikhs over to our side. His name was Travis Patriquin. A civil affairs officer and a former Green Beret, he was an authority on Middle Eastern cultures and customs and was fluent in seven languages, including the colloquial Arabic dialect that people spoke in the streets. We had seen some of his briefings near the end of workup, and Lieutenant Commander Thomas noticed him as a standout as soon as he got in theater. He recommended that Commander Leonard, our skipper, meet him and hear his thoughts on the tribal dynamics in the city.

When they met, Patriquin explained to Skipper that the Sufiyah district, north of Camp Corregidor, was an opportunity for us. The tribe there, the Albu Soda, was neutral toward us at best, and allowed Al Qaeda to roam. Their sheikh and his people seemed angry at the terrorists, but they needed guns and assurances of support before making a move. Skipper learned that the tribes were establishing their own “emergency response units,” which needed training. An outfit like this could be a windfall for us. Properly trained and equipped, locals serving as police could identify and get rid of the foreign terrorists in a hurry.

Captain Patriquin spent a lot of time meeting with the sheikhs in their homes, breaking bread, drinking chai, and smoking cigars. He sensed that some of them were seriously considering the idea of turning on Al Qaeda, which had done so much to ruin their city. The sheikhs considered Patriquin someone they could deal with, and he became a sought-after dinner guest. One of these sheikhs was named Abdul Sattar Abu Risha. The thirty-four-year-old Iraqi proved to be very effective at getting his peers to come on board the anti–Al Qaeda effort. Patriquin had so much influence with the sheikh that Sattar began calling him his son. Sattar was the first sheikh to ally himself with us. It was a brave move, but it might have been the only thing a man of honor could do, because Al Qaeda had murdered his father and two of his brothers. I can’t imagine the pain he had gone through, but I could understand what motivated him. He wanted to fight, and he was smart enough to realize that the Americans were the toughest fighters in town.

The tribes of Anbar Province are generally quite secular. They’re not unlike the ancient clans of Scotland: membership is based on bloodlines, and loyalty to tribe trumps loyalty to the state. It’s hard to ask an Iraqi to do something in the name of his country. Loyalties don’t typically run that far, at least they hadn’t yet. Since the tribes are full of internal divisions and shifting alliances, their leaders are paranoid about threats to their status and authority. Saddam Hussein had manipulated their insecurities with a Machiavellian finesse, buying the cooperation of the willing and pitting rivals against one another. But with this powerful movement gaining steam, it was clear that Sattar was putting himself on the line in a way that went beyond his own self-interest.

By late 2005, American commanders realized that it might be possible to ally Anbar’s tribes against Al Qaeda. The commander of an armored battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Tony Deane, began providing security for the meetings Sheikh Sattar was holding with other tribal leaders at his compound, north of Camp Ramadi. These meetings were the start of what would be called the Anbar Awakening.

Skipper said Sattar reminded him of Sonny Corleone, the hotheaded son from
The Godfather
. He carried a beautiful Walther PPK pistol under his gold-braided white robes, liked whiskey, and enjoyed telling tall tales. He cultivated a reputation of being violent. His brother Ahmed was more like Michael Corleone—cool and political. Yet to me, the comparison wasn’t to Francis Ford Coppola but to John Ford: in 2006, Ramadi reminded me of the American West in the 1840s, rife with lawlessness, with Sattar as a maverick dust bowl sheriff and our SEAL team standing in for the mounted Ranger service. There were some in our headquarters who didn’t want us dealing with local strongmen at all. They wanted everything to run through the national government instead. Problem was, the governor of Anbar was little more than a figurehead. Sattar’s Texas-size confidence didn’t bother us. He was someone our commanders thought they could work with.

At a meeting at Sattar’s compound on September 9, the sheikh told Colonel MacFarland and Lieutenant Colonel Deane that he would encourage men from his tribe to join the Iraqi police. “We’re with whoever is against Al Qaeda,” Sattar told the Americans. He said his tribe would treat an attack against Americans as an attack against themselves. He persuaded twenty sheikhs to form an organization known as the Anbar Salvation Council.
Our leaders felt it was an important step down the right path and supported the tribes’ change of heart.

Once gathered, the sheikhs asked their people, “When are you going to be able to send your children to school? How are you going to live a normal life, when these thugs are in charge? These people are wearing masks. They cannot build the country.” Sheikh Sattar said that members of Al Qaeda were murderers and drug addicts. “They abuse our traditions and generosity,” he said. Another sheikh on Sattar’s Anbar Salvation Council said, “They are bastards. And the people who follow them are also bastards.” The Salvation Council finally declared war on Al Qaeda, basically so they could rebuild their society and get on with their lives.

The political side of all this was outside the reach of an assault platoon’s daily mission planning. It was a city full of good guys, bad guys, and a whole lot of innocents who risked getting caught in the crossfire every time they set foot in the streets. Mostly we were concerned with the bad guys—finding them, targeting them, and killing or capturing them. That was our work, night after night.

I’ll tell you one story that got into our hearts. After a firefight against American forces, an insurgent who nearly had his arm severed was treated and saved by a medic from Team 3. His time in their care turned him around to cooperating with us. He came to understand that the IEDs he planted had killed many innocent Iraqis, and that he had an obligation to repair his honor in service to his country. He began to work with us against Al Qaeda and the insurgency. His family did, too. He was passionate and proud of his work, so much so that he resisted our efforts to protect him. With such a high profile, he was bound to attract
Al Qaeda’s attention, and he did. They captured him and brutalized him unmercifully. They tore off his newly healed arm and worked on him with a cordless power drill. They dragged him over to his family’s house and shot him dead while they all watched.

Though the Sunni tribes didn’t trust the Shiites any more than a Southerner trusted a Yankee in 1864, Al Qaeda proved itself the enemy of both Muslim groups. The terrorists were more brutal than Saddam’s goons ever had been. Yet thanks to two years of hard fighting by our soldiers and Marines, these insurgents had turned out to be powerless to expel U.S. forces from Ramadi. The death and destruction they spread were the ultimate in hypocrisy. Muslims murdered Muslims to restore Islam’s glory. And after our forces had flexed their muscle and made a down payment in blood on the security of the city, the sheikhs found the courage to rise up.

The Anbar Awakening was a gift that kept on giving, as Iraqis came forward to volunteer as police and offer intel on insurgent leaders. Armed with that useful data, we kept up a high tempo of raids and other operations through the fall. Every time an Iraqi turned away from Al Qaeda and began cooperating with us, it was a double blow to the enemy. Sure, there were still large neighborhoods in the city where it was extremely dangerous to tread. But with the rise of the Anbar Awakening and the goodwill of more and more Iraqis coming our way, we had a chance to finish the job that American forces had been struggling with for years: grabbing hold of Al Qaeda and ripping it out by the roots.