Service: A Navy SEAL at War (16 page)

Come morning, around eight thirty, Fizbo and a sniper we called Noise were watching the schoolyard to the south when they saw a line of about ten cars driving past the house. Each time a car went by, the driver leaned on the horn. As they felt the hackles rise on the backs of their necks, Noise and Fizbo agreed that if any of the cars stopped, they’d bring their rifles to bear and light it up. Everyone in Ramadi understood the threat of vehicle-borne IEDs. The only way to stop one was to shoot the driver before he got close enough to clack it off. Sure enough, one of the cars stopped in front of the house.

Noise, Fizbo, and another frog flipped their safeties and were about to fire when a guy came running out of a house across the way and jumped into the car. It sped off. Then they saw a woman in the open field near the school digging with a shovel. She reached down and pulled several sacks out of the ground, the contents of which the snipers couldn’t see, then began passing them into the passenger-side windows of cars driving by. Noise pulled his scope to his eye, took aim, and put a round into one of the bags. He thought it might explode, but it didn’t. The suspects scattered, quickly escaping Noise’s field of fire, and their suspicious activity ceased.

From his rooftop hide, Adam Downs was watching the block to his northeast when an enemy sniper drew a bead on him and fired. The round hit the wall about six inches from his head. Adam returned fire immediately, zeroing on the flash, then displaced, running down the stairs. He was pissed off.

There was no time to dwell on near misses, though, because Lieutenant Austin’s boys, five houses to the east, reported half a dozen insurgents leaving a nearby house, on the move north. In this neighborhood the homes were packed so closely together that you could run across the roofs from house to house. Each structure was set back from the street a pretty good distance and had a tall, thick stucco wall between it and the street. This made each house a natural fighting position, but it also meant that anyone outside could sneak up on the house unseen, hidden by the wall.

Though his squad lost sight of the enemy force, Fizbo was able to pick them up using the airborne camera of a Marine Corps F/A-18 Hornet on station overhead. The insurgents ran west through an alleyway three blocks north of his position, hauling heavy weapons and ammunition. It looked like a flanking maneuver. Passing seven houses, the insurgents finally stopped at the northeast corner of an open field about three city lots wide.

Fizbo contacted the Army commander and requested permission to have the Marine Corps pilot make a strafing run. The commander told Fizbo that strafing was prohibited in densely populated neighborhoods, so our JTAC doubled down, contacting his new friends in brigade headquarters at Camp Ramadi and asking for even heavier ordnance.

Meanwhile, Dozer, the JTAC from Bravo Platoon, asked Fizbo to have the Hornet scan the neighborhood around their house a hundred yards in all directions. It seems the element from Bravo Platoon had had quite an adventure patrolling into the city the previous night. They rode in Bradleys from Camp Corregidor to the edge of the district, then dismounted and went on foot. Led by Elliott Miller, their point man and medic, they
twice had to find alternate routes when Dozer told them that a pilot had detected hot spots on the road. These were likely newly emplaced IEDs. So now the Hornet pilot reported that no one was moving in the streets, but there was a cluster of suspicious vehicles gathering a few blocks to the north.

It was hard for a single aircraft to serve many customers at once. A pilot couldn’t, for instance, watch the streets surrounding Bravo while also lining up an air attack somewhere else. In addition, the pilot had to worry about the perpetual thirst of a modern military aircraft. After scanning Dozer’s area, he came back on line saying that he needed to leave station momentarily to refuel from an airborne tanker.

Fizbo used the short break to double-check the tactical situation and finalize his request for an air strike. Known as a nine line, the request specified the coordinates the aircraft should hit and the type of weapon to be used, and confirmed compliance with the rules of engagement. To avoid collateral damage, headquarters ended up giving Fiz a Laser Maverick—a laser-guided air-to-ground missile—instead of the more powerful five-hundred-pound bomb that he preferred. When Fizbo’s Marine Corps brother returned from refueling, he scanned the area again and reported that the enemy force had doubled in size. There were about a dozen fighters ready to move out and attack. The guys couldn’t afford to wait for headquarters to decide what to do with Fizbo’s nine line.

Wink used data from the plane’s camera to find his target, then, as a pair of his teammates began laying down automatic weapons fire on the insurgents’ building, four other operators began lobbing 40mm grenades. Their aim was true. The aircraft
reported several direct hits, and a number of wounded fighters crawled away from the field. Fizbo passed corrections to the grenadiers and more frags flew. By the time they were finished, no one was left in the field. The survivors had crawled (or were dragged) into a house just to its east.

The teams were only getting warmed up. Adam Downs pulled out the heaviest weapon in the platoon’s arsenal, a recoilless rifle that we call a Carl Gustav, heaved it to his shoulder, and sent an 84mm rocket downrange. It slammed into an empty house that stood between them and their quarry. Equipped with a time-delayed fuse, the projectile punched through the empty house and exploded in the neighboring house a split second later, after it had penetrated the wall between them.

The pilot promptly reported an explosion in the house where the enemy was holed up. Fizbo, standing in a stairwell in Lieutenant Nathan’s sniper’s nest, updated his nine line to make that new house the Hornet’s target. As he awaited approval, Wink turned loose another Carl G. with a fiery roar. The backblast blew out the windows around him and shook the house. The Marine Corps pilot reported another direct hit on the enemy’s hidey-hole, and told Fizbo that four insurgents were hauling ass, running south into the next house. Our JTAC relayed this to Wink, who sent another Carl G. to visit the next house.

In spite of the SEALs’ deadly handiwork, the Hornet pilot told Fizbo that an even larger group of insurgents than before, as many as twenty of them, was in a house just north of the one Wink had hit. It was then, finally, that Fizbo got approval to unleash the Hornet’s heavy weapons. He verified the coordinates and confirmed compliance with the rules of engagement
for close air support missions. Then he contacted the pilot, verifying the target and the weapon of choice, and finally spoke the magic words into his microphone:

“Cleared hot.”

Hustling in from the south, the aircraft dropped a Laser Maverick from the rails. “Rifle,” the pilot announced. Fizbo told his teammates to duck and cover.

When that delta-winged weapon hit, its three-hundred-pound warhead detonated with a thudding roar, cloaking half a city block in a cloud of dust. When it began to clear, the guys could see that much of the target building was gone. The pilot reported seven insurgents escaping to another building across the street. That left, of course, more than a dozen bad guys buried inside the house. When brigade headquarters denied Fizbo’s request to use another missile, Wink and his rocket team were on the survivors like sand on a BUD/S student, throwing another Carl G. at them and scattering those who were still somehow ambulatory into the northern part of the neighborhood.

It was a hell of a satisfying hour’s work, the kind of thing that SEAL teams, and regular soldiers and Marines, do every day. You seldom see it in the papers. Once in a while some guys get put up for decorations and a ceremony takes place somewhere. You see them in dress uniforms, standing proud. But that’s politics and theater. You should see them as I have, downrange, in action. They’re amazing to watch, risking their lives to serve their country. I don’t like to talk about valor awards. I don’t think it’s useful to think about them. We just go to work, and it’s the work itself that tells us who we are. Our pride is no less without the fanfare.

Alfa Platoon’s little live-fire exercise against the insurgents in
the sector designated Papa 12 was just the first act of a long day—one that will live in the memories of those who were there as one of the hardest days of their lives. Soon after we heard that the enemy was fleeing, a radio call came from battalion headquarters asking whether any of our guys had requested a casevac.

What the hell was this?
the boys in Gold squad wondered. None of their positions had taken casualties, and if the Corregidor SEALs had gotten hit, surely they would have heard from them directly about it. What was headquarters talking about?

No one in Alfa Platoon had any idea. Then, one and all, they realized it had been a while since they had heard
anything
from the two elements from Camp Corregidor.

Not good.

As it happened, the enemy’s attack on Gold was part of a larger, loosely coordinated assault on all the units in the neighborhood. As Gold was wreaking havoc on the insurgents in their neighborhood, all three overwatches manned by Bravo Platoon came under simultaneous concentrated attack.

Several blocks east of Alfa Platoon’s two overwatches, Bravo had cleared and secured three different houses about two hundred yards apart as sniper positions. With a couple of Abrams tanks parked at the intersections of important streets, and the blocks cordoned off, the infantry was kicking in doors and entering houses. Bravo was set up to provide the Army a wide blanket of coverage while also staying close enough to each other to regroup and fight together if the worst came to pass. A key factor behind what happened in the hours ahead, however, was the fact that the three overwatch positions weren’t within visual sight of
each other. When one of the squads decided they didn’t like the layout of the first house they took, they shifted to the one two doors over. This took them out of line of sight of their teammates. Watching the streets north of their position, they were in a house that backed up to a huge courtyard bounded by the backs of several other houses. In one of the nearby houses, they heard somebody clapping. It was an Iraqi, signaling to some pigeons—real birds, homing pigeons. We suspected the insurgents used them to tell their buddies where the Americans were. Every time we saw a pigeon flying near us, we seemed to get shot at. Like so much else about this ancient country, this stuff was straight out of the Middle Ages. We always had to assume the worst was possible.

Cowboy was with this fire team. He came up over the wall, looking to draw a bead on the birdman, but the Iraqi saw him and dove down a stairwell to escape. Then, out of the corner of his eye, the SEAL saw something in the air, flying toward him from another direction. It wasn’t a pigeon. He ducked back behind the wall of the roof as a grenade flew by and exploded some distance away. Then the squad radio crackled with news from one of the other overwatches that all was not well.

The guys at the other position—Lieutenant Clint (who had been switched over to Bravo Platoon), Dozer, Elliott Miller, Johnny Brands, and some others—had sensed a strange feeling in the air as their day began. As they set up their position, the family who lived in the house they were borrowing was behaving nervously. Then, from the loudspeakers on the mosques, came announcements that the terps thought were unusual, perhaps a coded message of some kind. It was around that time that an insurgent managed to creep up on their roof and toss a grenade
through one of the spider holes. They reacted by the playbook, hitting the deck fast, with their arms covering their heads and showing their tails to the frag. It exploded amid them and ripped up their backsides. No one was killed, but Elliott took deep shrapnel wounds to the shoulder and arm. With an arterial bleed, he was quickly treated by his teammates.

Then Lieutenant Clint called Camp Corregidor with a troops-in-contact report and a casevac request. The other sniper positions were directed to close up shop, collapse on his position, and await extract. A quick reaction force—Bradley Fighting Vehicles from the 1/77—was en route to pick them up. They were going home—at least, that was the plan. But as the SEALs moved from the rooftop to the first deck, they began taking heavy fire. Realizing that insurgents had infiltrated the roof, they took a head count and gathered their sensitive gear as the crack of small arms fire and blast of grenades sounded just outside the walls.

To defend ourselves, there are certain measures we take as a last resort. In a worst-case scenario, such as the immediate threat of being overrun, we implement these measures, which include setting off explosions that we hope will kill or incapacitate anybody lurking in the alleys and streets outside. With grenades detonating in the interior courtyard and small arms fire popping everywhere, it was clear Bravo Platoon was at risk of being overrun. The platoon’s officer in charge, Lieutenant Chris, decided to blow the window-mounted charges, and his bomb technician, Shane Snow, did the honors.

The explosion was more than the guys had bargained for. The wave of overpressure rebounded off the heavy wall of the house next door and slapped back at them, shaking the entire structure.
The door leading outside to the front gate was jammed in its frame—definitely not what they needed as they prepared to bust out of that house.

The guys were wrestling with the door when another explosion came. This one felt heavier than anything they had heard during their time in the city. Several blocks away, the Alfa Platoon squads from Camp Marc Lee, Gold and Blue, felt it as well. Fizbo thought to himself,
I hope that’s nobody we know.

Over the radio, Lieutenant Clint informed the other Bravo Platoon elements: “Mass casualties. Calling for extract. Move to extract position, our location.”

There was no time to waste. Hearing the order, someone called out, “Time for a Mogadishu Mile.” To reach their teammates, they would have to make a two-hundred-yard dash through hell.

Checking the open courtyard to their rear, they forced their way through the balky front door and pushed out of the house to the gate in the outer wall, which led out to the street. They formed their stack and the EOD, Shane Snow, used his shears to cut the zip ties securing the gate. When nothing exploded, they thanked God the insurgents hadn’t managed to booby-trap it with an IED. That was always a risk when you were camping in the enemy’s backyard.