Service: A Navy SEAL at War (6 page)

We talked about how he kept his fighting edge, both mentally
and physically, in the middle of a full-on urban war zone, where plenty of people want us dead and are willing to take themselves along for the ride. He told me dozens of little things to look for when walking down the street, what neighborhoods and villages to be wary of, how to work with the
jundis
(the Iraqi troops and police whom we’d be charged to train). He and his teammates had perfected the craft of building urban sniper hides—shooting positions in the upper floors or roofs of city buildings. Only someone with a death wish made trouble for our patrols on their watch. Yet there was always someone willing to grab a weapon and go toe-to-toe with us.

One time Chris spotted two guys on a moped speeding along the road down below him. He saw them drive past a big hole in the road, drop a big backpack into it, and keep puttering along. The next thing to drop was both of those IED emplacers, straight to the ground, taken down by a single shot that skewered them both through the neck.

When Chris Kyle was serving in Fallujah in 2004, he started out as a sniper during the beginning of the coalition offensive against that insurgent-held city. Setting up in buildings outside the fortified city as our forces went in on November 7, choosing the clearest and longest lanes of fire down the major streets, he had a couple days of very good shooting. At one point, the prime minister of Iraq himself, Ayad Allawi, visited the area and walked by Chris’s position. Looking down at his field of view, Prime Minister Allawi saw insurgents running around. He asked Chris, “Why aren’t you killing them?” Chris muttered something about the cosmic injustice and hopeless futility of the universe, also known to SEAL snipers as the rules of engagement. The Iraqi leader replied, “They have had four months of warnings to
surrender or leave. Therefore, everybody in that city is to die.” Chris and the other snipers started carrying out the wishes of the prime minister of Iraq, all the way out to sixteen hundred yards.

In Fallujah, Chris never met his equal, but one enemy sniper came close. His name was Mustafa. Word was he had been a shooter for the Iraqi team in the Olympic Games. This SOB was a pretty bad guy. With his high-dollar Accuracy International sniper rifle, he had built a track record picking off the turret gunners in our Humvees. His skill was testified to by the fact that he sometimes landed head shots on Americans in moving vehicles. When we finally got intel on where he was operating from, one of our snipers sent him up with a .50-caliber round.

Whether they’re Marines, Army, or SEALs, snipers are said to be guardian angels of the troops. Elite shooters who endure rigorous specialized training, they strike from on high, unseen. When the enemy wised up and started keeping their heads down, Chris’s mission changed. First he took his sniping into the city. Then he joined them in the city’s mean streets.

Killing didn’t bother Chris. What did bother him was seeing kids die whom he had the skills to save. Thirty years old then, he had been around long enough that it really got into his heart to see eighteen-year-old kids get killed doing room-entry work, a craft that’s a SEAL specialty. Having trained for years to master high-speed house runs, and probably knowing more than a sniper needs to know about ballistic breaching (blowing a door open with explosives), he went to a Marine Corps platoon’s leadership and asked that he serve as their point man, leading the way as they kicked in doors, house by house. “I can help you out here,” he said. The Marines are great warriors and dedicated
patriots who, I can tell you, have saved our butts more times than I can count. But adding a highly trained SEAL’s speed and proficiency to their arsenal made them even more lethal. The platoon he worked with didn’t have an officer at the time, and its enlisted leadership was glad to have him. Sometimes a frogman finds room for a little improvisation after the shooting starts.

At that point, Chris took the guardian angel business to a new level. He waded right down into the fight with these young Marines. In quiet moments, he’d pull them aside and show them how special ops guys enter houses and clear rooms. He wasn’t showing off—Chris never does that. Interservice rivalry has its place, but there was no ego in this instance; it was simply about saving lives. Cooperation and flexibility make our combat forces way more effective. As the offensive rolled into Fallujah—four battalions of Marines and two from the Army—Chris shed his frog skin, put on a set of Marine Corps tricolor camos, and went to war with the Corps.
Semper fi
.

After two weeks of this, Chris’s uniform was covered in blood. More times than he liked, he held mortally wounded Marines in his arms, shot in the gut and bleeding out. Chris would always tell them that they were going to be fine, even when he knew otherwise. And he channeled his anger into action, alongside that crew of pipe-hitting Marines.

By Christmas, the battle for the city was over. The seven-week campaign claimed the lives of more than a hundred U.S., British, and Iraqi soldiers, as well as thousands of insurgents. It all felt like ancient history as I sat with Chris, trading stories like this day and night in Coronado. When I asked him, “What was worse, Fallujah or Ramadi?” he didn’t have to think before answering. “Ramadi,” he said. “Ramadi was ten times worse.”

What happened to Team 3 in Ramadi in the late summer and early fall of 2006 was an indicator of what awaited us. No one was beyond death’s reach.

The first U.S. military operations there, in 2004 and 2005, consisted of raids by our special operations forces, who were working with newly trained Iraqi army units. Conventionals later set up in bases outside the city. They pushed in to attack enemy strongholds, kicked around for a few hours, and then returned to base. But by the summer of 2006, the Army and Marine Corps began moving into the city proper with the intent to stay, ordering their engineers to build combat outposts, known as COPs, right in the heart of the place. Setting up in the enemy’s midst was part of the new counterinsurgency strategy. We no longer commuted to the fight. SEAL Team 3 helped install the first of these outposts in the city that summer. They started the fight that we would try to finish.

During workup, Skipper and Master Chief brought in some impressive guys from other branches of the SOF community and academia to talk about their experiences in Anbar. I think we understood there would be plenty of heavy fighting in the months ahead. But these briefings on counterinsurgency warfare gave us notice that the upcoming deployment was likely to be the most challenging thing many of us had ever been part of.

The plan to win Ramadi back from the terrorists was a mixture of traditional offensive operations—with our forces going block by block, doing “cordon and search” missions—and raids. It was a lot of police work, too: traffic control, ID checks, biometric screening, searches, and curfews. The goal in the end was
to make the city livable again, leaving the place in the hands of its citizens for good and making sure the enemy never again found sanctuary there.

In Afghanistan, the fight was mostly about muzzle velocity, windage, defilade, and time to target—that’s what it was about for our SEAL teams, at least. In Anbar Province, however, we would deal with a full range of targets, hard and soft. We targeted the enemy’s fighting forces, but we also never forgot that the security and confidence of the people were paramount. “You can’t kill your way out of an insurgency,” was an often-repeated bit of wisdom. (Though some of us sometimes felt the urge to try.) We needed to bring security to the people so that they could fend for themselves. Brigade headquarters put a lot of effort into shaping perceptions, too, including setting up a news service that broadcast to the locals.

There always seemed to be enough bad guys to go around. Casualties were high from 2004 through mid-2006. President Bush remembered the summer of ’06 as “the worst period in my presidency.” In his memoirs he wrote, “I was deeply concerned that the violence was overtaking all else…. If Iraq split along sectarian lines, our mission would be doomed. We could be looking at a repeat of Vietnam—a humiliating loss for the country, a shattering blow to the military, and a dramatic setback for our interests.” I take my commander in chief at his word, no matter who he is.

Yet confronted with a grim outlook and an impossible problem, what does our military do? We wade right into the middle of it and tell the enemy to bring it on. What other option was there? Quit? Politicians may go that route (see “Vietnam, war in”) but our military forces don’t.

None of us thought it would be easy to square the circle of building a nation in a place as irredeemably violent as Ramadi. The SEAL who gave me that ominous advice at the team house—“Pray”—had been wounded in a hotly contested fight in the worst part of the city. On August 2, 2006, he and Chris Kyle were part of a squad supporting a U.S. Army tank unit, augmented by Iraqi forces, doing a block-clearance operation in the rough and untamed southeast part of the city, the Ma’laab district. Team 3 had helped install an outpost there known as COP Falcon. An Al Qaeda cell was discovered nearby, so that morning our tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles rolled out to tackle it before first light. Wisely, the insurgents in the neighborhood let the armor pass them by, hiding until they could turn their weapons on our infantry.

Much as we’re eager to fight, most of our leadership would say it isn’t our job to do a block-clearance operation like this—that’s the work of the larger conventional units. But the Army was strapped for personnel and Team 3’s troop commander, Lieutenant Commander Willis, simply couldn’t tolerate Americans being put at risk without our support. Chris and two other SEALs decided to establish a sniper position in a building near the COP. They dismounted from their Bradleys, humped their gear up to the rooftop, set up a fighting position, and started scanning for targets.

It’s hard to confront skilled enemy snipers who enjoy a home-field advantage—they tend to know all the angles. And sure enough, good as those boys from Team 3 were, they soon ran into trouble. As they scoped the streets, they began taking fire from the surrounding rooftops, windows, and streets. Chris was watching the area north of their position, another sniper had a
sector to the west, and a third SEAL, Ryan Job, manned a machine gun and looked out to the east. When shots rang out from the east, nicking their parapets and raising clouds of dust, the SEALs took cover. Chris hollered to Ryan, “Did you see where that came from?” Hunkered down behind a parapet, the machine gunner didn’t answer. He had been hit. Actually, it was his rifle that took the hit. The metal shattered, throwing a spackle of lead fragments into his face.

Chris put out the call, “Man down, man down,” and right away reinforcements came up to the roof. When a SEAL corpsman finally got to Ryan, he noticed that the machine gunner’s right eye had been pierced straight through. Ryan told everyone he’d be okay, but few thought he’d make it with his eye socket and face shattered. He sat upright to avoid choking on his own blood. Marc Lee, a damn good SEAL, ran up and took his place on the roof. As Lee laid down suppressing fire to cover the extract, Chris threw Ryan over his shoulder and hauled him to the stairwell. About halfway down, Ryan began spitting up blood. He told Chris he couldn’t breathe and said he wanted to stand. Chris realized that Ryan’s chest was being compressed by its own weight pressing down on Chris’s shoulder, causing blood to pool up somewhere inside his chest. So Chris set Ryan down, resituated, and helped him hobble down the stairs. An armored personnel carrier was waiting on the street outside to evacuate him.

As Chris eased him into the vehicle, Ryan asked for a shot of morphine, then went unconscious from blood loss. The docs eventually stabilized Ryan and arranged to medevac him out of the combat area. With their brother taken care of, Chris and his team returned to the COP to plan their next move.

The Army stayed in heavy contact with insurgent forces
throughout the day. Our guys had their hands full. Aerial reconnaissance revealed large bands of insurgent fighters moving toward our positions, bounding through streets and alleyways on either side, looking to envelop the Americans. As the battle was escalating, intel pointed to a certain house as a suspected location for the enemy sniper who had shot Ryan Job. There was no chance to get him if they didn’t move fast. So Chris and his guys decided to push out again, jumping into a couple of Bradleys and returning to the fight. They were powerfully supported by several tanks from an Army outfit that all the SEALs respected, Bulldog Company, First Battalion, Thirty-Seventh Armor Regiment, under command of a fast-moving captain named Mike Bajema. He stood out front; his own tank led the way.

A block or two from where Ryan had gotten hit, the Bradleys stopped and the SEALs dismounted, taking fire almost as soon as the ramp dropped. As Captain Bajema turned his tank’s gun on the wall of the target building, blowing a hole in it, the SEALs moved quickly up, formed a stack, and poured inside. Hostile fighters were lighting them up from every angle. Nearby, unseen insurgent machine guns were making it rain with bullets.

As Chris writes in his book,
American Sniper,
he believes they had been drawn into a trap. As the SEALs secured the first floor, Marc Lee led the way to the second deck, running up the staircase. Then, through a window on the stairs, he spotted an enemy shooter in the building next door. The insurgent saw him, too. Marc turned and laid down a burst of suppressing fire. He was opening his mouth to alert his teammates when the insurgent popped back up, drew on Marc, and pulled the trigger. The bullet went straight into Marc’s mouth and cut his spine,
making him the first SEAL to be killed in action since Operation Redwing more than a year earlier, and the first team guy to die in Iraq. He went out with his boots on, fighting hard for his country. He’s remembered as one of the great ones. He died for his teammates. There’s no greater gift than that.

The death of Marc Lee and the serious injury to Ryan Job, both in the same day, was a heavy blow to Team 3. No matter how many men we lose, it never gets any easier. They reported the casualties and called the Army for extract. The men of Team 3 had served the Army well. Now the soldiers returned the favor. A pair of M1A1 Abrams tanks, sixty-seven tons apiece, and four Bradley Fighting Vehicles moved into the neighborhood. They are built for one reason: to inflict total destruction on the enemy. At that point, they started doing what they do best. Captain Bajema’s tanks sealed the neighborhood so the enemy couldn’t escape or be reinforced. Trapped, the insurgents came out in force and presented themselves just as Big Army wanted them to: openly, wielding rocket-propelled grenades, heavy machine guns, and AK-47s. With help from an aircraft on station overhead, which carried excellent cameras, Bajema’s tankers saw them coming and turned loose on them. When a vehicle loaded with insurgents came barreling out of an alley and bore down on Bajema’s tank, he turned his fifty-caliber machine gun on it and cut them down like weeds in a garden.