Service: A Navy SEAL at War (13 page)

Back home, the American press was writing a different story. Two days after the deal was struck with the sheikhs, western
Iraq was said to be “beyond repair.” The reporter who wrote this wasn’t out there with us, witnessing reality. Instead, he was writing from Washington, D.C., working from rumors about a Marine Corps intelligence report that supposedly deemed Ramadi “lost.” He hadn’t actually seen the intel report in question, and relied on characterizations of it by “officials familiar with its contents.” Once President Bush’s political opponents got hold of that newspaper clipping ahead of the midterm congressional elections, reality took a backseat to calculation. And so an untruth became the conventional wisdom: Ramadi was lost.

The five thousand U.S. military men and women serving in Ramadi were working from a different narrative. Change was coming fast, under the radar of journalists working on the other side of the world. Change was in the streets. It was change we could believe in. We, the combined forces from the United States and the Anbar Awakening, were the change the people of the city had been waiting for.

Earlier, I mentioned that a good number of SEALs love the movie
The Boondock Saints,
in which two brothers, Connor and Murphy MacManus, go after the murderous gangsters plaguing their city. In Ramadi, that was us—Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps—taking on an enemy who was virtually begging for the righteous to step forward and end their barbarism. They had taken the lives of many innocents and many American servicemen who were fighting in their defense. We mourned the loss of our own and were eager to exact the price.

Every time our assaulters and snipers came together at Camp Marc Lee to brief a new mission prior to stepping outside the wire, we recited the MacManus brothers’ Irish Catholic prayer.

I
t’s a mysterious force, this thing we call battle rhythm. But after our successful overwatch operation at COP Firecracker, I felt like we were establishing one, finding our ability to adjust to the daily grind, and adjust to the environment and the operational tempo. Getting there always takes time. Our snipers, with four confirmed kills, had kept the enemy at bay. We were learning to read the streets. We were finding our groove.

The morning after we got back to Camp Marc Lee, I went to the gym. I was working hard to stay physically worthy of the honor of leading Alfa Platoon. Our missions are high-tempo and the pace never quits. We work like hell, and success becomes an expectation. After a good op, the new guys in the task unit return to camp all jacked up and eager for more. Most of them don’t realize how bad it can get. I knew I never wanted to get into something like Redwing again—surrounded, outnumbered, buddies dying and you can’t do anything about it. I wasn’t sure how I’d perform if I were ever thrown into those circumstances again. I suppose no one ever is.

Shortly after I returned to base, Lieutenant Austin, the OIC of Gold squad, tapped me to join him in another foray into the
city. It was no sniper mission this time. It was a DA—a direct action, or raid—an assault on two houses that were thought to be storing weapons for the insurgency. We were also to capture an insurgent leader who had popped up on our radar.

The “concept of operations” came down from Lieutenant Austin to Senior Chief Steffen. As acting platoon chief, I put the teams together and scripted out what everyone would do. Choosing a point man was the first big decision. The point man has huge responsibilities. Leading our train, the first in the stack, he navigates (using maps and GPS), keeps us oriented by the compass, counts paces, and locates the landmarks that serve as set points for our missions. All that, and he’s the first guy to take fire if the enemy ever sees us coming. But that decision made itself. Special Operators First Class Studdard and Salazar were our two best. They were smart, aggressive, and experienced. Dark, intense, charismatic, and ferocious, Salazar was built as if he resulted from the coupling of an angry bull and a fire hydrant. A great frogman, he ran point for Blue squad the whole six months we were there. Studdard was with my squad most of the time and he proved to be as reliable as the sunrise.

I asked Studdard and Salazar to find three ways into our target and three ways out. The comms guys, Guzman and Hanks, had a huge job managing their advanced single-channel ground and airborne radio systems (SINCGARS), keeping their clocks synced with those of other commands, and staying ready to let us talk to everybody. Our EOD bomb technicians went over the road like hound dogs, looking for bombs. Breachers, assaulters, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance—I put all the details into PowerPoint along with the force list and passed it up to Lieutenant Austin, who would sign off on it. Senior Chief
Steffen was the final authority. He’d either kick it back down to me for revision or he’d sign off, too, and then it was ready for Lieutenant Commander Thomas’s final okay.

Marty Robbins, the Blue LPO, and I moved miniature buildings around on the sand table until we had a handle on the neighborhood and how we would maneuver through it. We laughed bitterly at the idea that the brigade commander seemed to consider Iraqi houses more valuable than we were. That might have been unfair, but the idea stayed with us after Fizbo was denied his perfect air strike. Part of me longed for the old days, when I didn’t have to worry about the big picture, when I could just line up in the stack and get after the enemy.

When Lieutenant Commander Thomas’s approval came down, we went to the tactical operations center and went over several dozen details of the op. Lieutenant Austin explained that the guy we were going after was an emir. We fixed our attention on the profile intel had on him. We reviewed the contingencies, along with the tactics, techniques, and procedures we’d use. Then up came the last slide: a prayer. After the amens, we had fifteen minutes to get jocked up with all our gear and be standing tall beside our vehicles, ready to go.

One of the consequences of my hard-won wisdom was insomnia. I never did sleep much during that deployment. Every thirty minutes I bounced awake. I eventually realized it was pointless to try going back. It didn’t help that the Army had a big artillery battery in Camp Ramadi, just across from our camp. Whenever their guns cut loose—and they were liable to start at any time of day or night—the blast was deafening, and the overpressure shook the whole camp.

With any luck, our op that night would deprive the enemy of
the ability to respond in kind. As I mentioned earlier, arms and ordnance are stored everywhere in Iraq. Some of the secret stashes—such as those buried in pits under trash bins—were easy to find. Others turned up in the damnedest places, like inside plaster walls. (We’d go into a house and sledge a wall for a sniper hole and there it was: a whole arsenal of small arms and RPGs.) We often found that the shortest path to these hidden treasures ran through the kid on the corner. Why would he lie to us when we’re the ones handing out candy? Worked every time.

Sometimes when we took down a building to clear a line of fire, it was like digging up Fort Bragg and Fort Knox all at once: weapons and piles of cash. That’s what we were looking for the night of November 3 as we drove to COP Falcon and pushed out, walking down Baseline Road under a full moon.

The road had high walls on both sides. I was concerned about this lack of visibility on our immediate flanks. Walls were not our friends. When we took fire, we always tried to stay away from them. They may seem to offer cover, and it seems instinctive to stay close to them. But in combat, bullets, thanks to ricochets, always seem to run along the walls. So we kept moving; as ever, the hardest thing to hit is a moving target.

We were heading toward our objective, with Studdard on point, when I noticed that the road, with its high walls, was narrowing. It was, as planned, leading us toward the house we were supposed to hit, but the side streets that we expected to find had all been blocked off. I felt like we were being drawn toward a position with no alternate routes or avenues of escape. If we were walking into a channelized trap, there would be only one way out.

SEAL platoons are small units that often depend on larger ones for support. Sometimes, when the mission requires it, we gladly go out on a limb—us against the world. But we fight smart. We stay alert for the signs that something’s about to go down: a guy standing on the street corner with a camera; a car pulling up a few blocks ahead and the driver honking the horn, signaling to his buddies that we’re on the way. You always need an exit from the kill zone, and we constantly keep track of escape routes in case we take fire—such as a house to push into. In that case, we would kick in the door, secure the first room, separate the women and the children from the men, put security on them, and head for the roof, where we could set up a perimeter and call in reinforcements. Advancing down that channelized road that night in Ramadi, I was all too aware that my team would have nowhere to go if the worst happened.

That was when the bullets started flying. They were 7.62mm rounds, from AK-47s. Good weapons, but not very accurate from medium to long range. (And there are many times I’ve thanked God for that.) I heard the bullets first, snapping in the earth and walls around us. Then came the echoes of the rifle reports themselves. On the squad radio, somebody called, “Contact left.” The gunfire was coming from our left side, from higher ground, from buildings that were shrouded in the dark. The shooters had the drop on us. They were impossible to pinpoint from our position in the street. Taking cover meant we couldn’t return fire effectively. Then someone else called, “Contact rear.” That’s when the picture came into focus for me, and darkened.

There were two or three shooters somewhere to our left. A round ricocheted behind us with a sharp zing. Another zipped right over my head—
thpff
—and punched a hole in the cinder-block wall next to me. A spattering of dirt and dust hit me in the face.

I remember freezing in that moment. Despite knowing better, I leaned against a wall, my mind blank.

These were the first bullets to come my way since Redwing. I had wondered what it would be like. Staring down into the dusty street, I sensed that I was scared. No denying that now. At least there was no belt-fed stuff, thank goodness.

Ernest Hemingway once wrote that “There is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter.” Let me flip that around: there is, in fact, no fear as deep as the fear of being hunted. Those who experience this fear find, later in life, that they never have reason to be afraid of anything else. Still, you can prepare for combat all day, you can read, think, and study, but you’ll never know if you’re really ready for it until an enemy gunner sends one flashing past your temple.

My hesitation couldn’t have lasted more than three seconds. But all these years later I can still replay the whole time-stopping scene. It seemed to last an eternity.

Scared though I was, I had an even greater fear: that Lieutenant Nathan, Senior Chief Steffen, Wink, or the E-5s in our train had noticed my mental stutter step. I was glad Studdard was in front of me. I valued his opinion, too, and I didn’t need to be standing in his line of sight when I went blank.

I took two short, hard, deep breaths. And there—a switch was thrown.
The edge.
It was back again. I felt a clarity and a will to act. A rush of adrenaline and an aftertaste of bile. I thought to myself,
I got this.

The road ahead curved around out of sight and there was no telling what awaited us there. We had to find another way. I
knew what the right call was and I made it: the best route of egress from our channelized area was to double right back the way we had come.

I keyed the radio. “Blue and Gold: center peel!
Let’s-go-let’s-go-let’s-go!
” The center peel is a standard maneuver for breaking contact with an enemy force. We do it fast, like a machine, and practice it often. If you can’t do it that way, someone’s likely to get shot.

Our mission that night wasn’t to get into a street fight. It was to come down like a hammer on our target house and seize some weapons. We weren’t going to get it done with half the turds in Ramadi throwing lead at us. Life in the SEAL teams isn’t always a warfighter’s nirvana. We run plenty of missions that go nowhere. Sometimes we have to recognize when the “cank bird” has flown and an op has gone south. That described our little job the night of November 3. We fell back, knowing that, in those circumstances at least, discretion was the better part of valor.

So it didn’t bother me to be returning to base. What bothered me was my standing in the eyes of my teammates. I figured they must have noticed the three critical seconds I spent with my brain in a sling. We lost some good men on Redwing. I had been unable to save them. Eager though I was to fight, I didn’t need to see my name tattooed on another episode like that. I had a vision of me surviving another terrible ambush, with several SEALs lost, and going back to base. Some time later, someone on the chow line would invariably make light of it—“Damn, Luttrell, what the hell kind of dark star were you born under?” Laughs all around. And my story would be written.

We were happy to discover what a great working relationship Team 3 had with the conventional units in the city. One of the Army units working out of Camp Corregidor was from the 101st Airborne, the First Battalion of the 506th Infantry—those legendary Currahees. We were uncharacteristically awestruck in the presence of the fabled 1/506. An officer from Team 3 asked the battalion’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Ron Clark, if his frogmen could wear the paratroopers’ famous ace of spades insignia. Colonel Clark granted the request, prompting the SEAL to say later, “We earned the right to call ourselves soldiers.” In turn, some of the Army boys had given the frogmen a nickname after six months of serving together: they called them Army SEALs. Talk about the universe being turned on its head—say that to a frogman in Coronado or Virginia Beach with the wrong tone in your voice and pretty damn quick you might find yourself crapping out your teeth. But in Ramadi, the rules were different. The brotherhood of battle had grown and spread. And we liked it. We liked it a lot. Still, as some of us saw it, the erasure of boundaries was threatening to erode the unique nature of our special operations mission. Master Chief was visiting Camp Corregidor one day when an Army sergeant major walked up to him and said, “Man, I love you guys. You’re the best. It took us a while to learn how to task you, but you have become one of our
best assets
. Whatever we need,
you’ll do it
.”