Service: A Navy SEAL at War (14 page)

That old warrior meant this as a compliment, of course, and Master Chief was gracious and cool with him—he respected and cared for our brothers in arms—but the exchange bothered him. He and Skipper saw SEAL teams as strategic-level assets, not regular infantry. “If we’re stuck running around the streets doing the infantry’s bidding,” he said, “we’re not focused on the
larger strategic mission, which is winning the war for the long term.” Using elite special operations forces to do patrols and block clearance didn’t get us there. Hooking and jabbing with enemy gunmen in the street was only the beginning of what we needed to be doing. “We’re here to do the right missions for the right reasons,” Master Chief said. “The work of a SEAL team goes far beyond racking up numbers against low-level fighters.” The ultimate aim was to make a more lasting impact. Figuring out exactly how to do that was part of our challenge.

As Master Chief put it, the difference between counterinsurgency warfare and assault operations is like the difference between shooting paper targets and shooting steel targets. “Shooting a steel target is damn fun,” he said. “It’s dynamic. The target clinks and falls down. You see paint and lead splash off it. There’s an instant effect.

“A sniper mission is like a steel target. If you kill a bomb emplacer, congratulations, you just did something for America—you see and feel the satisfaction of saving an American life. But counterinsurgency, that’s more like shooting paper targets. You shoot from a distance and you don’t see an immediate effect; the bullet passes right through without disturbing the paper. You have to run up close to the target to gauge your success. In the same way, training an Iraqi cop and putting him on the street doesn’t make a dramatic difference right away. But somewhere soon, maybe weeks or months from now, the effect will be dramatic. That Iraqi will influence others, maybe train ten more men, and together they’ll bring security to a whole neighborhood. If we keep at it consistently over several deployments, we can change the landscape and save a lot of lives—including Americans.” Often he would lay it out as a matter of simple
math: “Shoot an IED emplacer and save an American life, maybe three. But put Iraqis on the street and take our American brothers and sisters off for good—you will save hundreds.”

Commander Leonard and Master Chief struck this match everywhere they went, hoping to start a wildfire among us. Leaving the head shed’s extremely capable operations officer, DQ, and executive officer, Mark Starr, to run the Fallujah headquarters, Team 5’s two top dogs traveled the province like Old West circuit riders, settling local disagreements between commanders and urging everyone to take up the challenge of setting up the Iraqis to defend themselves. I guess you could also call what they did preaching. They knew taking a backseat to Iraqis, as part of the training mission, was hard for some of us to swallow. But Master Chief had lived it a year earlier in Anbar. We knew how to fight and win. It seemed crazy to many of us to emphasize putting less-capable forces in our place when our conventional brothers needed us. But they wanted to balance slogging it out in the streets with performing missions that would drive the larger COIN strategy. It was the modern-warfare version of the “Give a man a fish… Teach a man to fish” proverb.

None of this was brand new. Counterinsurgency strategy came from an almost-forgotten playbook. General Petraeus and others had revived it in the years before he became commander of all U.S. forces in Iraq, and we believed that if we did it right, we could root out the city’s violent elements once and for all. If everyone pulled together as a team—all the U.S. forces in Anbar—we could bring peace not just to Ramadi but to all of Anbar Province.

At Camp Marc Lee, the tension between doing kinetic ops and counterinsurgency was always present. The “thinking soldier’s
war” gave all of us a few headaches. Lieutenant Commander Thomas, Senior Chief Steffen, and others thought we shouldn’t separate ourselves from the immediate, urgent needs of the soldiers and Marines around us. We were intensively trained gunfighters. We couldn’t very well deprive those guys of our help when they were right there, running life-and-death missions alongside us. Three Marines, lance corporals from the 1/6, were killed right in our area on October 20–21, reminding us that it could happen any time to anybody.

It could happen to one of us. It was important to keep that knowledge in its box.

As always, the only easy day was yesterday.

With the Anbar Awakening under way, the citizens of Ramadi were buying into the idea of retaking their city and owning their own security. They became ever more helpful, offering tips that kept us hot on the trail of the murderers and opportunists who were happy to destroy the city on their perverted journey to power and glory. Skipper and Master Chief were out front with the brigade leadership, encouraging the Iraqis to support us, and U.S. forces to commit to the training piece of the COIN strategy. The number of police recruits we pulled into the system was growing by the week. As we trained them up to a basic level of proficiency, they served as leadership for the new guys in the pipeline.

Still, we were well aware that large parts of Ramadi were firmly in the insurgency’s control. The areas south of Route Michigan and east of the stadium were hotbeds of violence. The fights that took place down there had a different feeling. In that
part of the city, the insurgents were skilled, well armed, and fully supplied. They fought like pros, making coordinated tactical movements, assaulting us from multiple positions, then slipping away, “going slick”—tossing their weapons into a house—and blending in with the populace. It was the enemy’s home turf, and he was hell-bent on keeping it that way.

As team lead of an assault element, I didn’t have much to do with training Iraqis. We always worked with a few
jundis
when we went outside the wire, but they didn’t operate at our speed—and that’s an understatement. The SEALs who were training them told us the stories with a mix of disgust and hilarity. At the shooting range, some of the Iraqis set their rifles on the wrong shoulder, had the wrong hand on the trigger, and looked through the sight with the wrong eye. But our instructors kept at it, teaching them to patrol, clear houses, investigate crime, and handle themselves like cops. We were multitasking—juggling raids, sniper overwatches, and training. A separate team of guys would get up in the morning, take Iraqis to their training camp, and lead them through simple tactical exercises, such as room clearances. As comical as their antics on the training ground might have been, and as suspicious and squirrelly as some of them seemed to us, what they gave us—intel—was a boon to our efforts to hit the enemy’s leadership.

November 7 of that year was a day of rain and mud, memorable mainly because it was the first time that Morgan and I had seen each other in a couple of weeks. He had arrived at Camp Marc Lee in a fast convoy the previous night. The occasion was a major combined operation that the Camp Marc Lee and Camp Corregidor contingents were going to do together.

Blue squad was just back from a sniper overwatch mission
near COP Falcon, located on the western edge of downtown. When they’d returned, Lieutenant Commander Thomas told everybody that a big follow-on operation was scheduled that very same night. This was pretty unusual, so we all geared up and gathered in the chow hall to hear the plan. It sounded big, but there was a surprise waiting for Morgan and me.

When we got there, a cake was sitting on the table, and it turned out the op was simply cover for a quick, impromptu thirty-first birthday party for me and my brother. I’ll always be grateful to Lieutenant Commander Thomas for allowing it—he knew how to keep our spirits high. I remember someone producing a big combat knife and handing it to Morgan to use on the cake. “Which one of you is older?” someone asked. Morgan is, by seven minutes, and he said so, adding with a grin, “I’m king.” And then it was cake for everyone.

But it was quickly back to work. I had an operation to help plan with Senior Chief Steffen for the next night. A Marine had been killed at COP Firecracker that day, the victim of an IED. We were going to roll out the next night on a sniper overwatch and reconnaissance mission that we called Operation Steel Shield.

I struggled through a night of fitful sleep and spent most of the next day in the gym, studying the ops plan, and emptying a few mags at the range. Come nightfall, I got Gold squad together in the TOC and helped Lieutenant Nathan go over the final details. At about 2300 hours, we rolled out.

Shortly after midnight, we arrived at Combat Outpost Steel, located in the Ta’meem district, southwest of the Habbaniyah Canal. I had a short face-to-face with the commander. Discovering he was a Texan was almost enough to make me forget the
full moon that hung ominously over Ramadi that night. We set up our sniper teams to provide a 360-degree perimeter around the outpost. Our interpreter, Riddick, and I took the bottom floor with two other guys. Sleeping on the floor, we found out how cold Iraq can be. We froze our butts off.

The next day was entirely too quiet. We spent it watching the streets. Nothing moved. I remember a cloud of shitty-smelling smoke flowing in from the window. Turns out some idiot was burning a shit barrel right outside our house.

Around 7:30 p.m., we were all set to roll, but the driver of the Bradley that functioned as the entry gate to COP Steel was asleep on watch. We raised a little hell trying to awaken him, but our rifle butts pinging on the hull must have sounded like gunfire—hardly enough to disturb him in his much-needed sleep. It took a call to Camp Ramadi to rouse him, and soon he rolled the vehicle out of our way and we were pushing out. Leading the column was the Humvee we called Optimus Prime.

Our EOD tech, Andy Fayal, felt a cold chill come over him when he realized the implication of that Bradley driver being asleep for so long. More than just serving as the gate to the FOB, that vehicle was there to monitor the street outside as well, and keep it clear of bomb emplacers. If the crew was snoozing, well, who had been watching the road? Plus, we were pushing out early—another no-no. The guys from Team 3 had warned us not to go out before 11:00 p.m. or after 4:00 a.m. The insurgency’s IED crews were too active during those times. But with things on the street pretty quiet, I thought we could get the job done and get the guys home for some badly needed rest.

As we left COP Steel, Andy, nervous about the unmonitored
road, advised the driver of our lead Humvee to swing his vehicle into the wheel tracks of another convoy that had just come down the road. He scanned the road through his NVGs as though he were a jeweler examining a diamond.

We weren’t two hundred yards outside of the gate when I realized what a mistake we had made. I was in the Humvee behind Andy’s, looking out at the city through my NVGs, when everything went white. I felt a powerful shock, but I don’t remember any sound. It was a hell of an explosion. Andy heard a metallic
brrannggg
and was thrown upward, smashing his head on the top of the vehicle. His vehicle had hit an IED.

Our EOD guys were among the most important people in the squadron. They’re different from SEALs. They’re the techies of our world, intuitive, interested in how things work, and more than a little paranoid about what type of infernal mechanism might be waiting for us around the next corner. They were gearheads, and warriors, too. Lieutenant Paul Craig, the OIC of the EOD mobile unit at Fallujah, was a twelve-year veteran of Marine Force Recon. And Andy Fayal stood five foot eight but was built like a brick shithouse. He owned the record in all of I MEF for bench press: 475 pounds. They spent most of their time studying the enemy’s treacherous ways, scanning the ground ahead of us in the streets, hunting for explosives in the roads, shoulders, embankments, and walls.

Andy had developed his approach from his time assisting the Secret Service. His job one day was to go into a hotel the president might be staying in and look for bombs. He’d sit on chairs, jump on mattresses, and open drawers and closets, doing what they call a find or function operation. If there was a bomb in
there, he was supposed to locate it, either with his eyes or by detonating it. “Our job is to preserve life and critical infrastructure. My life means nothing,” Andy told me. When he was with us, he was ready to do more than just defuse the bombs. He would willingly turn himself into a pink mist to save us if he had to.

Nothing is impossible when you have people like that working with you. I considered our EOD bubbas some of the best in the world at their craft. One reason I felt that way: it was clear that thoughts like that—
I’m the best
—never once entered their selfless minds. We were blessed to be working with men like them.

On foot patrols, Andy and the other techs—incredible men like Shane Snow, Nick Ferrier, Brad Shannon, and their lieutenant, Paul Craig—made sure to check out every suspicious hole in the road or pile of rocks, and stood right between it and us when we proceeded by. Whenever Andy found a wire that looked suspicious, he’d take out his tools and cut it. During our ops, he electrocuted himself on more than a few live power lines, but he took it as a point of pride. He was determined that no threat would escape his notice. That night outside COP Steel, he settled for using his helmet as a bell clapper against the metal roof of his Humvee.

Once we felt the blast ahead of us, those of us in the second Humvee knew we were likely next. After a lead vehicle is disabled, the enemy’s next move is often to target the next vehicle in line with more explosives or a ground assault. The first responders for the lead vehicle become easy targets. In our parlance, those guys are “sitting on the X.” That was my vehicle that night.

Ahead of us, sparks were pouring out in all directions from underneath Optimus Prime. “Get off the X, get off the X,” came
the order on the radio. I was more concerned with whether anyone in our lead Humvee was even alive.

I called Lieutenant Nathan, Gold’s leader, riding in Optimus Prime. “Status.” I was ready for the worst.