Shock Factor (4 page)

After that incident, the men of 1st Platoon treated every approaching Iraqi as a potential threat.

But on this night, not a soul stirred—at least not that the three men at the bridge could see. But in the darkness, hiding in the shadows, was a well-trained team of devoted Jihadists. Silently, they watched their target, waiting for the moment to strike.

Al-Qaida's spies had long since noticed the Americans left only one Humvee's worth of troops to guard the engineer bridge. In Baghdad proper, it had become standard Army procedure as early as 2004 to never leave the wire with less than three vehicles. Here in the heart of al-Qaida Iraq's stronghold, the lone Humvee was terribly vulnerable, and the insurgents knew it. They watched the shifts change every day, and they plotted an attack. They knew the nearest American reinforcements were almost a mile away, so they devised a way to delay their response. That left only a nearby Iraqi Army outpost as the only possible source of help for the three Americans. The Iraqi troops were poorly trained and undermotivated. Either al-Qaida convinced them to stay out of the fight, or they had no stomach for it. Whichever the case, the insurgent force knew it would not be impeded by America's Coalition partner.

The hours dragged by that night. Tucker, Babineau, and Menchaca let their guard down as the darkness offered nothing but emptiness and boredom. Exhaustion set in. Almost twenty-four hours into their shift, they retreated into the Humvee, closed the armored doors, and pulled off their heavy Kevlar helmets. One of them tossed a pack of Skittles into his helmet.

The eyes on them had seen this happen before. In early June, the assault team had rehearsed their attack for two straight days as part of their final preparations.

Now was their moment. Sweeping out of the darkness, AK-47s blazing, they charged the Humvee. The soldiers bailed out of their vehicle, but they stood no chance. Before any of them could fire a shot, the enemy probably wounded Tucker and Menchaca. Babineau, in a desperate bid to escape the onslaught, bolted down the bank of the canal. Behind him, the al-Qaida assault team opened fire, raking his back and head with bullets. He fell dead into the reeds and shallow water at the edge of the canal.

The soldiers at the nearest checkpoint heard the gunfire and tried to radio the men at the engineer bridge. When they received no response, they climbed into a Humvee to go investigate. The vehicle refused to start—its battery was dead. Sick with worry, the soldiers dismounted and ran to their only other ride, an ancient, Vietnam-era M-113 armored personnel carrier. The track spun onto the road and rumbled toward the bridge, only to encounter two large objects blocking the route ahead. The driver stopped, worried that there might be a roadside bomb.

Time ticked by. The four men in back grew almost frantic. Finally, they piled out and decided to run the rest of the distance on foot. The M-113 and its crew remained behind for an hour and a half, stalled by a couple of oil drums the insurgents had placed across the road.

Fifteen minutes after they'd heard gunfire, the four men from 1st Platoon reached the engineer bridge. The Humvee appeared intact, its M240 Bravo machine gun still in the turret. Both doors on the right side were lying open. Spent shell cases littered the Iraqi dirt. At first they found no sign of their brothers. Then, beside the Humvee, they encountered a pool of blood. Then another. Thirty yards from the Humvee, they found Babineau's body.

Thomas Tucker and Kristian Menchaca were nowhere to be found.

With dawning horror, the soldiers who first responded to the scene realized their brothers had been captured. There was no worse fate for an American in Iraq. Everyone had seen the al-Qaida torture videos. They knew that if they couldn't find Tucker and Menchaca quickly, the worst would happen.

The platoon converged on the scene. They went to every nearby house and dwelling, interrogating the inhabitants and demanding to know what they'd seen. If anyone resisted, or seemed to know more than they were letting on, the men unleashed cold fury on them.

When the Screaming Eagles went to find out what the Iraqi Army troops had seen, they listened in stunned disbelief as their Coalition allies professed ignorance. They told the Americans they hadn't heard or seen a thing. The lies were outrageous—everyone in the area heard hundreds of gunshots from AK-47s being fired full auto. The Iraqi Army reaction only stoked 1st Platoon's rage.

First platoon searched for their captured men for sixteen hours straight, even as the division began to flood the area with more troops. The 4th Infantry Division sent reinforcements into the area as well. An Air Force parajumper team arrived, as did specialized dive units. Drones, helicopters, and jet fighters soon buzzed overhead.

The search soon focused on a nearby village and a power plant. At the entrance to the plant, an American discovered blood smeared on a bridge handrail. Blood trails and drag marks led from the road into the facility. All through the following morning, American troops searched every inch of the power station. They found a chunk of American body armor, and an abandoned white truck with congealing blood pooled in its bed.

The search continued. Hundreds, then thousands of American troops and Iraqi commandos descended on the area. They searched villages, conducted air assaults, interrogated detainees. All through the seventeenth, the insurgents emerged from concealed positions to launch hit-and-run attacks on the search teams. Mortar fire rained down on the Americans. The fighting killed one Coalition soldier and wounded a dozen more. Thirty-six insurgents were captured and two al-Qaida operatives killed. The area was laced with roadside bombs, twelve of which went off and destroyed or damaged eight vehicles.

Through the explosions, mortar fire, and AK-47 ambushes, the Americans pressed on in search of their lost soldiers. Finally, on the afternoon of Sunday, June 18, a sweep through the village of Rushdi Mullah netted two prisoners who told their interrogators where Tucker and Menchaca could be found.

Two miles northeast of the power plant, American troops located their mutilated bodies. Al-Qaida had mined the road around them with bombs, and had booby-trapped their remains. It took twelve hours for specialized engineers to defuse the bombs and clear a path to the bodies. When the Americans finally reached them, they discovered Menchaca and Tucker had been tortured. Postmortem, Tucker had been decapitated. Both had been eviscerated, then dismembered.

The Mujahideen Shura Council of Iraq, one of the al-Qaida front groups in country, later released a video showing Jihadists defiling the bodies. One jubilant terrorist held Thomas Tucker's head up for the camera. The four-minute, thirty-nine-second video extolled the greatness of the holy fighters responsible for the mutilation, and announced that Abu Ayyub al-Masri, al-Zarqawi's replacement as head of al-Qaida Iraq (Zarqawi had been killed by U.S. forces earlier in June), had personally killed both men.

The U.S. Army vowed to track down those responsible and mete out justice. In the meantime, the bodies of the three Screaming Eagles were returned to the States. In Madras, the memorial service for Thomas Tucker drew thousands of people. The procession to the cemetery where he was laid to rest was eight miles long—longer than Madras itself. Late into the evening that night, hundreds of residents protectively ringed the Tucker residence, keeping outsiders and reporters at bay as they consoled the family.

Back in Iraq, American intelligence concluded that al-Qaida had lied about al-Masri killing the two soldiers personally. Although Zarqawi had been filmed slowly decapitating an American contractor in 2003, the claim that al-Masri was involved in the murders was seen as a bid by al-Qaida to build up their new commander after Zarqawi's death.

But who had planned and carried out the attack? And who had killed Tucker and Menchaca once the al-Qaida assault force had seized them?

Months passed seemingly without any progress in finding those responsible. Finally, in 2008, the U.S. Army developed enough evidence against three men to hand them over to an Iraqi court. DNA evidence convinced the court that one of the men had been in the truck used to drag the bodies. He received a death sentence for his role. The other two were acquitted.

Back home, pundits railed against this meager response. Where was justice for the families? One man out of the entire team was convicted? It seemed a pathetic effort compared to the barbarity that befell these two warriors. Bloggers howled at our apparent impotence, one even went so far as to say President Bush should have personally announced he would have every man responsible hunted down, much as Russian president Vladimir Putin had done after a terrorist attack in his country.

In the shadows, another story developed, far away from the media's prying eyes. Unknown to the American public, the Iraq War's most deadly sniper had been put on al-Qaida's trail.

 

CHAPTER THREE

Al Shatan

JUNE–JULY 2006
AL ANBAR PROVINCE, IRAQ

That June, sixty miles northwest of where al-Qaida captured and killed Thomas Tucker, Kristian Menchaca, and David Babineau, one of the pivotal battles of the Iraq War was raging. After the second Battle of Fallujah in November 2004, much of the surviving insurgent leadership retreated to Ramadi, a city of about 500,000 people that sprawls for dozens of miles along the banks of the Euphrates River. It had long served as the capital of Al Anbar Province, which made control of it both strategic and symbolic. Despite every Coalition effort, in the spring of 2006 the city remained a hornet's nest. Daily, American patrols trying to secure Ramadi's streets ran into fierce firefights or roadside bombs. Iraqi police who dared to take a stand against the insurgents had their families threatened or killed. Some were captured and beheaded by al-Qaida zealots. Others simply walked off the job, or did al-Qaida's bidding, which inflicted major setbacks on the Coalition's effort to establish Iraqi control of security in the area.

In early June, just after Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qaida Iraq, was killed by USAF bombs, the Coalition began to concentrate troops around Ramadi. Its citizens learned of this development and, fearing a second Fallujah, began to leave in droves. A big battle was in the offing, and both sides prepared for another brutal urban slugfest.

The Americans assembled a joint force that included parts of the Army's legendary 1st Armored Division and the 8th Marine Regiment. Instead of assaulting the city directly, the Americans threw a cordon around Ramadi, using outposts to choke off the flow of supplies and reinforcements to the insurgents hiding within the labyrinth of streets and alleyways.

Al-Qaida's legions did not sit quietly as they were surrounded. Using teams of up to a hundred men, they assaulted many of the newly established American combat outposts and tried to overrun the troops there. Pitched small-unit battles raged around these key positions, but the Americans held firm and drove off the attackers.

Meanwhile, instead of launching a full-scale assault into the city, the Americans moved in one block at a time. Hoping to keep the damage to the city to a minimum, artillery and air strikes were used only as a last resort. Without such firepower, sniper teams became the best way to help support the patrols pushing into the city. Both sides deployed some of the most deadly snipers of the war, and Ramadi became fertile hunting ground for these shooters.

Rumors swirled through the American ranks that an Iraqi Olympics sharpshooter had been brought into Ramadi to help beat back the Coalition offensive. Known only as “Mustafa,” there is some doubt as to whether he was a concoction of al-Qaida propaganda or an actual person. Either way, the effect on American morale was significant, especially when the insurgent shooters began killing Marines and GI's with devastating, long-range shots. Like our snipers, the enemy's favored high ground. They took to using the local children's hospital for hide sites, which prompted the staff there to evacuate the kids to the lower levels of the facility. Ramadi's main hospital, a towering structure with a commanding view, also became a key sniper position, one from which the enemy sharpshooters claimed many Coalition lives.

As the battle slowly developed, SEAL Team Three deployed to Ramadi to assist with the offensive that spring. Arriving a short time after the majority of the team reached the area was thirty-two-year-old Chris Kyle. He'd been held up Stateside due to illness while his team settled into Al Anbar Province, but was eager to link up with his brother SEALs and get into the fight. Unfortunately, the military's transportation system made this difficult, and after he flew into Baghdad, the Navy sniper could not find a ride out to Ramadi. Finally, he convinced a corpsman to help him out. The corpsman triaged Chris and an Army Ranger stuck in the same situation, and ordered both men medevac'd into Ramadi.

Despite the belated and backdoor arrival into the inferno raging around the city, Chris Kyle soon made a name for himself. A veteran SEAL who had already seen combat during the drive on Baghdad in 2003, Petty Officer Chris Kyle had a passion for all things gun—not surprising given his Texas upbringing.

Born and raised on an Odessa-area cattle ranch, he worked as a cowboy for seven years before joining the Navy. Through his college years, he roped calves and broke colts for four hundred dollars a month and a cot in the bunkhouse of a twelve-thousand-acre ranch. Horses became a passion of his. In '92, he turned pro on the rodeo circuit, but his budding career came to a crashing halt when a bronco flipped over and crushed him in the chute before a round. Trapped, unconscious, beneath the terrified animal, Kyle suffered severe injuries while his friends struggled to get to him. When the chute gate was opened, the horse bolted. Kyle's foot was stuck in one stirrup, and he was dragged into the arena, which inflicted even more injuries to his body. When he was finally freed and taken to the hospital, the doctors discovered he had broken ribs, a shattered wrist, bruised lungs and kidneys, two badly injured knees, and a severe concussion.