Service: A Navy SEAL at War (15 page)

Sparks were still kicking out from beneath our lead Humvee. Except for that, all was quiet, a storm of yellow-orange glitter amid an absolute eerie silence in the dead of the wartime night.

All of a sudden, the radio crackled with the reply. “We’re all good, bro. What’s your situation?”

I exhaled heavily. The only reason they survived was because the warhead was a shaped charge, meant to penetrate armored vehicles, not to blow up personnel who were less well protected. The explosion punched a clean hole straight up through the right side of the engine block, tore a hole through the hood, blew off the right-side tires, axles, and the front bumper, and virtually split the chassis in half. All the glass on the passenger side and turret was gone. But there were no serious casualties, thank God. They were lucky the engine block took the hit.

As Lieutenant Nathan was radioing his status, the driver of my Humvee already had the transmission in reverse, backing up to get off the X and out of the way of any secondary charges the enemy might have planted to finish us off. As we dismounted and found firing positions, the third Humvee in the column circled around and eased a bumper against our totaled leader. Then the driver started pushing it back toward COP Steel. The night was silent and cold. No follow-up attack came. Optimus Prime was dead, but other than that, we had taken no losses.

Thank you, God, for one more day.

On a raid sometime later, we gathered intelligence that showed that the insurgents were listening to our frequencies and tracing our movements by our
Transformers
call signs. It was also possible we had a leak in camp. Either way, it was clear it wasn’t smart to get too attached to our vehicle’s names.

Of course, we were always doing a little snooping of our own. The bread and butter of special operations is intelligence, and we never launched a raid without having a good handle on the who, what, where, and when of our target. When U.S. forces built COP Eagle’s Nest in the summer before our arrival, we had a toehold in the neighborhood. Once we had a presence, good intel began coming from locals. They’d walk up to us and tell us things. And our patrols found a lot of surprises by beating feet in the street. For instance, there was a whole IED factory hidden inside the soccer stadium. Underneath the bleachers was a workshop containing industrial-grade saws, used for making sharp cuts in the asphalt streets—so fine that it was nearly impossible to detect them visually when the excavated chunks were replaced on top of bombs. They used carbide-tipped saws to cut nearly invisible grooves in the road to hide trigger wires. The huge subsurface IEDs they emplaced in this way were big enough to flip a tank or disintegrate a Humvee outright. Inside that stadium they had everything they needed: bomb-making materials, wires, timers, and explosive ordnance.

In time, our intel network started popping the names and locations of the leadership of the insurgent cell that Team 3 had confronted in that September firefight in which Mikey Monsoor was killed. The idea of delivering justice in this hero’s name focused our attention.

Delivering it, of course, meant venturing into “Indian country.”
In south-central Ramadi, the enemy kept a full-time presence. They patrolled. Eyes watched from every window. Commander Leonard, our skipper, once said, “They were everywhere and nowhere, like a cockroach infestation.”

Women and children walked around reporting anything they saw to the insurgents. IEDs were planted on every other street corner and triggermen stood by 24-7 to clack them off on us if we took a wrong turn. Though most of the insurgents didn’t have radios or night-vision optics, they still found ways to coordinate their attacks. We’d see a moped driver snooping around—a scout, looking for our positions and measuring ranges. (Often, the mortar fire or ground assault against us would begin as soon as the driver disappeared around the corner.) The enemy could tell Army soldiers from Marines and could sniff out the boundaries between their areas of operation. They’d hit the Currahees, then melt back into the Marines’ zone. We adjusted, of course, but we never lost sight of the fact that the hand directing the insurgents on the streets was an intelligent, thinking one. When we were bunkered up in a house doing a sniper overwatch, they’d shoot at our position from one direction, and then try to sneak in from another direction and lay booby traps on the gate if our attention got diverted. In that part of town, we felt like we were on a nearly equal footing with the enemy. One thing we never like is a fair fight.

On November 12, I was part of a sniper overwatch operation supporting an Army block clearance in south-central Ramadi. We moved out from COP Iron, on the south side of the city, late that night, with an Abrams tank leading the way. For anyone looking for a fight, there was no better op than one like this. The term “overwatch” was a misnomer, actually. It suggested that
we were standing on passive guard, protecting other forces against an enemy who was attacking them. What actually happened was very different: while we were set up in our positions, the enemy quickly figured out where we were and came after
us,
often ignoring the conventionals doing street patrols. And we generally didn’t mind that. Every round sent our way was one that some Army kid in the street didn’t have to worry about.

When we reached our target that night—a nice house furnished with a chandelier, comfortable furniture, and an actual heater, which made our night much more pleasant—we cleared it quickly and took up positions on the roof and on upper floors. When we tried to blow spider holes in the wall for our snipers, however, we found it was too thick for our explosive charges. We couldn’t even scratch it. Our resourceful snipers managed to work around that little problem and had a productive day.

Around 11:00 p.m. that night, a long day’s work done, Lieutenant Nathan made the call to pull Gold squad out and return to our COP. We took some fire from down the street, including some heavy stuff. When we called for our return ride, we were hoping for Bradleys. Instead, we got Abrams tanks. Nothing against those big armored beasts—they were your best friend in a heavy fight—but they weren’t what we wanted for a lift. There was no room inside to carry us. So we formed up in columns and jogged along behind the tanks, doing what we call the Mogadishu Mile. During the whole exhausting slog, spirits stayed high. I remember guys joking about who was going to step on the first IED.

We speculated who would fly the farthest, propelled by the blast. “If you’re going to go,” someone said, “you should do it with distance, and style points.”

On November 15, Blue squad went out to set up a pair of sniper positions in south-central Ramadi. It was a bait op, our favorite kind of mission. We almost always drew fire, and whenever we did, we gave it back tenfold. This time, though, the insurgents changed the way they came at us. Seems they had learned they couldn’t outshoot our snipers, so early on the first morning, the enemy located the sniper hide and probed it with small arms fire. The guys gave far better than they got and held their position, but by midafternoon, both overwatch locations came under heavy attack. The enemy couldn’t outshoot us, but he could use his familiarity with the streets to sneak up on our positions.

Marty Robbins was walking up the stairs to the roof with an armload of water bottles for him and his partner on the roof, when the frags started landing. At least three of these old-fashioned German potato mashers came flipping end over end into the snipers’ midst. One of them hit Robbins square in the crotch, bounced to the ground at his feet, and started rolling toward his teammate. With seconds to act, thinking he was a dead man, Robbins hollered, “Grenade!” then kicked that one away, keeping it from his buddy, then dropped his load of water and dove toward the stairs just as the grenades went off. Another SEAL, a chief by the name of Mulder, hit the deck of the roof and curled up tight. When the grenades exploded, they sent a storm of shrapnel into both men’s feet and the backs of their legs. The blast slammed Robbins into the door frame as he tried to dive through it, and he tumbled down the stairs. Amazingly, both men made it out of there under their own power in spite of their wounds. It was an incredible lifesaving reaction, and a heroic act. After suppressing the attack and doing triage on the
wounded members of his fire team (with no thought to himself), Robbins called the QRF—the quick reaction force.

As the other sniper overwatch position came under attack—that team got into a full-on grenade-lobbing contest with the enemy—two Bradleys pulled up. It was the QRF. Unfortunately, it arrived in front of the wrong house. Robbins and Mulder were forced to run for it. Under fire the whole time, the two wounded SEALs made it all the way over there. As they piled in to the rear compartment, the Brads turned their powerful chain guns on the house that Robbins and Mulder had exfilled from and tore it down, concrete block by concrete block.

I was working on the mission plan for the next night when they returned to camp—twelve hours sooner than we were expecting them. They had gotten a rough lesson in what awaited us in south-central. We were lucky we didn’t lose anyone that night. The enemy was getting brave. We decided that next time out, things would roll differently.

W
e had a big operation planned for the night of November 18–19—a push into the hottest part of the southern area of the city, the Ma’laab district. It was high time for us to shake the bushes and see what came crawling out.

We were rolling out heavy. Gold squad’s two fire teams would set up sniper positions protecting tankers from the First Battalion, Seventy-Seventh Armor Regiment, based at Camp Ramadi, and the infantry from the First Battalion, Ninth Infantry Regiment, known as the Manchus, based at Camp Corregidor, as they went block by block, yanking the enemy out by the roots. We found out during planning that Bravo Platoon was putting in three sniper positions of their own in the neighborhood, too. They moved out from Camp Corregidor to COP Eagle’s Nest, and then infilled on foot into Ma’laab—labeled the “Papa sectors” on our map—where they would set up three more positions to our east.

Running a daylight block-clearance op in the Ma’laab district was an easy way to get into a fight. Located about half a mile southwest of the soccer stadium, the neighborhood was densely residential and widely feared by the locals. Moose and Riddick,
our terps, shook their heads at the mere mention of the place. “It’s
baaad
news down there, man.”

I wanted nothing more than to have my rifle in that fight. With Robbins and Mulder still nursing shredded glutes, we all wanted payback. But I wouldn’t be going out with them—I was on “injured reserve,” because my back was a mess. Senior Chief Steffen had some good advice. “Just step back a little, Marcus.” He was a man of few words, but these were the ones I needed to hear. He let me know that the guys had it covered, that I could take a moment to heal. In the teams, it seems like we all take a heavy load on our shoulders, feeling like we need to be there at all times to help our brothers. It never hurt to have a reminder about the strength of our team and the capabilities of the men in it, and know that they would be good without me. The teams never depend on a single person—ever. If they try to, what can happen is not far from what happens to a sports team that relies too heavily on a single guy: there’s no chemistry, and they’re set up perfectly for failure. We have no use for glory hounds, either.

We shuffled our team leads. Wink took Gold squad and, with Marty Robbins down, Senior Chief took over the chief spot in Blue. I already thought he was one of the best frogmen I’d ever worked with, but when he returned to the train, taking the place of a wounded comrade, it was business as usual. I knew it was going to be a busy night, and it sucked to see the boys roll out while we had to stay back. Marty and I would make our contributions in different ways. (Just call me the paper bitch.) One way or another, we were determined to collect on debts that night.

Gold squad, under Lieutenant Nathan—with Wink as his platoon chief, six other frogs, and our JTAC, Fizbo—loaded up at Camp Marc Lee and took a fast convoy to COP Iron. Staging
there, they pushed out on foot around 2300 local time on November 18. Carrying enough food and water for two days, they patrolled eastward, along the base of a stone embankment supporting the railroad tracks that marked the city’s southern boundary. The nearly full moon was throwing out more light than the sun, but it was good that Fizbo was with them. Using his radio, he kept in close touch with aircraft overhead. Their infrared eyes were lifesavers, their air-to-ground weapons game changers in a pinch.

Coming to an intersection, Gold squad crossed the railroad tracks and patrolled north into the southern part of the Ma’laab district. Moving like smoke through the nighttime streets, they advanced through a maze of narrow alleyways threading between houses made of brick and mud. Stepping over trash and avoiding sewer pits, they could hear people stirring in the houses as they passed. If they weren’t careful, they’d end up facedown in a sewer. But unwanted noise—the foul-smelling splash—could exact a price far higher than a soiled uniform.

Continuing north, they passed a schoolhouse. Littered with small arms, tools for making bombs, and bloody whips and other instruments of interrogation and torture, it had been recently used as an Al Qaeda playground. When some dogs began to bark and a donkey began to bray, Gold thought they might have been compromised. Hairs rose on the backs of their necks as they pushed the mission ahead. I know what that feels like; the fear that you might have been compromised can be worse than the actual knowledge of it.

When they finally reached their target, a neighborhood spanning five or six city blocks, they split into two groups and moved to their overwatch positions. Nathan’s team entered and cleared
a house situated just north of the school. Austin and his boys approached a four-story structure located five houses to the east, on a street corner. With eight guys in the upper floors of each house, they were ready to go to work.