The Red Circle: My Life in the Navy SEAL Sniper Corps and How I Trained America's Deadliest Marksmen (37 page)

We opened our mouths, ducked and rolled. The second drop took them all.

*   *   *

We continued our patrol but never did find anything from the previous night’s air strike. We were at the exact coordinates they’d passed to us. Maybe they got the GPS coordinates wrong. We headed back for our new base of operations, and on the way we came upon another little village that appeared deserted. We started doing two-man house clearings, room by room. There was a well there, so we collected some water to bring back with us, since we were already running out of supplies at our impromptu base camp. Before hauling it, we treated the water with the iodine tablets we had on us as part of our standard survival supplies.

Even though we had planned to be out in the field for only twelve hours, SEALs are well acquainted with Murphy’s Law. We wouldn’t think of going out on any mission, no matter how brief, without certain critical supplies. Before inserting the day before, for example, we had been supplied with updated maps, such as they were (which wasn’t much), and had each gotten an updated blood chit. A blood chit is a map of the area you’re going to be patrolling that has a notice written on the back, in this case in both Arabic and Pashtun, promising a substantial cash reward (I think it was $100,000) to anyone who gives assistance to the bearer. Each of us carried an escape and evasion kit, which included a piece of flint, water purification tablets, and a knife, along with our blood chit. If we got into a situation where we had to ditch everything, this was what we’d keep as last resort. Some guys sewed their blood chit into a hideaway pouch tucked into their clothing, so that if everything but their clothes was taken away from them, they’d still have it on their person.

The last room we cleared led out into a stable area. Cautiously, I made my way in to check it out. There was nobody inside except a single donkey. I slid up onto the donkey’s back. It’s SOP when you exit a room after clearing it to call, “Coming out!” so you don’t surprise anyone. I called out, “Coming out!” then smacked my mount on the ass and emerged from the stable like a gunslinger in a Western, except that my steed wasn’t exactly a tall white horse. Poor thing could barely support my weight. The other guys cracked up. Someone said, “Which one’s the jackass?”

In one of the houses we found caches of suitcases filled with passports, money, and clothing. Evidently this was a safe house for Taliban and/or al Qaeda in their war against the infidels. After taking GPS coordinates, we left; a subsequent air strike reduced the building to rubble.

When we got back to camp, the other guys were returning from blowing up some more caves, not only to destroy more matériel they’d found but also to do their level best to make the place uninhabitable.

We were now feeling the pinch of our lack of supplies. We had each brought with us a single MRE, and that was long gone. We decided it was time to start slaughtering some of the animals there. The marines were reluctant to do this. These guys count their bullets and do inventory after every operation. We had no such scruples. Osman and Patrick pulled out their guns and
bang!
shot a few chickens dead, followed by one goat, then started dressing it all up to cook and eat. The captain of the marines seemed a little freaked out. “Holy shit,” he said, “you guys don’t mess around.”

Still, there were only so many chickens to go around. With our twenty marines and our platoon of sixteen now swollen to twenty-five, we had a crew of forty-five mouths to feed. In addition to food, we also needed fresh batteries for our radios. We radioed in and were told we’d be getting resupplied the following day.

When two big H-53 helos landed the next morning with our resupply, they had brought a few large cases of radio batteries—enough to last a month of talking twenty-four hours a day. Then they kicked out one case of water and one case of MREs and took off.

We stood there staring at the case of MREs. “You’ve got to be shitting me,” someone said. The warehouse at Bagram was full of these things. A case of MREs is ten meals. Ten. That was not even enough to feed a single meal to one in four of us. How were we supposed to divide these things up? It was like chopping up an M&M into thirty pieces.

This was a classic case of military communication. (It’s worth noting that the terms SNAFU, “situation normal: all fucked up,” and FUBAR, “fucked up beyond all repair,” both originated in the military during World War II.) Someone had probably passed on our request: “Hey, those guys up at Zhawar Kili need some food and water.” So they’d sent us some food and water. We hadn’t specified
how much
food and water.

T
UESDAY
, J
ANUARY
8

On day 3 (after our exciting resupply) we started systematically patrolling specific areas we had charted out over the previous two days, getting a feel for the area and following up on reports from our C-130s, who were continuing to see activity at night, giving us new targets to search for and additional bomb damage assessments (BDA) missions to run the following days.

Walking along a narrow, twisting mountain road, we heard the sound of an approaching vehicle. We quickly formed ourselves into an L-shaped ambush formation, with the longer element stretched out across the road and the shorter, perpendicular element (consisting of Chief Dye and me) parallel to the road, lying hidden with some heavy weapons behind the bushes that lined the road.

As the vehicle came around the bend we could see what it was: a little white Datsun pickup with three guys in it, two in the front and one in the back. As soon as they came face-to-face with our guys lined up across the road, Chris and I popped up out of the bushes with our big guns. By the time they knew what was happening they were locked in a crossfire setup, outgunned, with no avenue of retreat and no options.

These three characters were hardcore and clearly up to no good. The one in the front passenger seat seemed to be in charge. He wore a black turban and a beautiful dark red shawl, a particular kind of earth-colored wrap the Taliban used, that did double duty: It kept him warm and also served as camouflage.
Shit,
I thought,
that looks pretty warm.

We took their weapons away from them, zip-tied them, and threw them in the back of the truck. Now we had a vehicle.

I knew some basic Arabic, enough to get by on ship boardings (“Get down! Get up!”) and order a meal, but that was about it. These guys were not Arabs, though, and my Pashtun was almost nonexistent. Fortunately, we had our interpreter with us: The dude from CTIC was a cryptologist and an accomplished linguist, and he spoke Pashtun. He interrogated them briefly, and they pointed out a village that we had already checked out and thought was abandoned. Turned out this was where they’d just come from.

We went back to the site and looked where these guys directed us. They were caching weapons there. This was SOP for these guys: They would dig hideyholes on the outskirts of abandoned villages and use them to stash weapons and other matériel.

Exactly what we were looking for.

We couldn’t take this stuff back with us, so we marked the GPS coordinates and took off, our three prisoners in the back with sacks over their heads. We drove far enough away that we could still see the village location from a safe distance and stopped. Chief Dye called in the coordinates to the platoon so Brad or Eric could call in a CAS (close air support) strike. He pulled the leader’s sack off his head a few seconds before the bombs fell, so he got a glimpse of his village blowing up, then slammed it back on again, and we headed back up the mountainside for our camp.

Now, in addition to keeping ourselves alive, we had three prisoners to keep, feed, and guard in our little village. The next day, another squad went out and rolled up two more vehicles (a little pickup and a Daihatsu mini-SUV, both diesel) and a half dozen more guys. Thank God we had the marines to watch them all.

One day back in Kandahar, just before flying up to Bagram, six of us were walking back from the TOC when a marine general accosted us. This particular general was your perfect image of the archetypal hard-hitting, cigar-chomping, no-bullshit marine, like General Patton incarnate. His nickname was Mad Dog.

“Hey, are you guys my SEALs?” he barked at us. Yessir, we told him. “You boys going up north?” Yessir. He pointed over toward the makeshift EPW (enemy prisoner of war) camp we had set up, where there were now several hundred prisoners incarcerated. “You see that EPW camp over there?” Yessir. “I already got enough fucking prisoners there. You get my drift? I don’t want any more fucking prisoners coming back here. You get what I’m sayin?” Yessir. It wasn’t a subtle message:
You find any guys out there, you take them out. Don’t bring ’em back.
He hadn’t actually come out and said that (in other words, there was plausible deniability), but the intent was understood.

Now here we were, developing our own little prisoner-of-war camp out in the field. We had nine prisoners we would soon be airlifting back to Kandahar. Mad Dog wasn’t going to be happy with us.

W
EDNESDAY
, J
ANUARY
9

On day 4 we went out on patrol again and found another village to clear, this one fairly substantial in size. We divided up the platoon, each of us clearing half the village to make sure it was abandoned. It was, and we collected a good amount of both weapons and intelligence, including all sorts of plans and notes. Some we photographed; some we brought with us.

As we were going through this process of rounding up our spoils, we had one of the biggest—and certainly happiest—surprises of our entire deployment. From inside this abandoned village we had just cleared, who should come trotting out toward us but a small, light tan puppy. Last thing we expected to see, that was for sure. I’m a sucker for animals; most of us were. We named him JDAM, and he became our platoon mascot. Cassidy eventually adopted JDAM as his own and brought him back to raise him in the States. Later on we found a second puppy, whom we called CAS, and he ended up with an adopted SEAL home, too.

Finding JDAM was not the only memorable thing about that particular patrol. At one point the group I was with found another of those hidey holes with a cache of weapons in it. Osman and I went down inside, leaving Newman, one of our platoon mates, to stand watch while the others moved on. Osman and I had been in there for a little while, rummaging through passports, money, and various materials, when all of a sudden we heard Newman say, “Hey, guys, come on out here.” His voice sounded strained. We crawled out and looked up at him. “What is it, Newman?”

He had his gun raised and pointed, and his eyes were like the proverbial deer in the headlights. We swiveled around to see what he was pointing at. Less than 50 yards away stood four Taliban dudes, heavily armed and staring at us from behind the crest of a hill.

Osman and I immediately drew our weapons, and the four turned and ran back in the direction they’d just come from. They had been walking up the hill toward us and had just started cresting when they’d come to a standstill, so they were still half-concealed by the hill and visible only from the waist up. Now they quickly sank below the ground line again. We got a few shots off but didn’t hit them.

Osman and I both turned on Newman. “What the hell is wrong with you? ‘Hey guys, come on out here’—and you don’t happen to mention that there are four guys with fucking guns out here? What the fuck, Newman?”

We were just about apoplectic with fury. He’d nearly gotten us killed. To this day, I am completely baffled as to why those four didn’t simply shoot us in the back as we crawled out of that hole oblivious to their presence.

But there wasn’t time to ream Newman out in the manner that he deserved, at least not now. We hopped on the radio and told Cassidy what was going on, then ran over to the hilltop to search out the retreating four Afghans. We glassed them, and sure enough, there they were, tearing for the Pakistan border where we could not pursue. We called in an air strike fast and took them out with a 1,000-pounder before they could get make the border.

Then we went back and unloaded on Newman. I wanted to call in an air strike on him, too.

T
HURSDAY
, J
ANUARY
10

After the previous day’s close call, on day 5 we decided to go out and set up a reconnaissance position so we could have the whole valley in view and watch enemy forces sneaking back and forth along a series of mountain trails that led across the border into Pakistan.

Osman and I took a map and planned the whole thing out. We would go in and insert before dawn, at 3
A.M.
, driving out on night vision in vehicles that were completely darked out. We’d go in two teams. Four of us—Osman, Patrick, a guy named Mark, and I—would insert at the north end of the valley (where the caves were) and take a position on the northeast corner of the area we were surveilling. A team of six marines would take a position across from us on the northwestern corner, so they could observe the other side of the valley from their vantage point. Two of the marines were first-rate snipers, and they were pretty psyched to get out there and do a sniper op for a change.

By now we knew there was a significant level of enemy activity going on here in this valley. The idea was for these two teams to hide out for the entire day and fill in as many details in our overall picture as possible: who was moving around and where, what they were up to during the day, and where they were laying up at night. We would pass any intel we gathered back to the platoon, who would sort through it all and feed it back to base at Bagram.

Since our resupply, I now had my .300 Win Mag. I felt much better going out on patrol with my proper sniper gun.

Two other guys from the platoon were going to insert us, Jackie and Doug, with Doug driving and Jackie riding shotgun. Osman, Patrick, Mark, and I would ride in the back and quietly slip out when we reached our location at the top of the valley.

In preparation for the mission that night, we each had our specific tasks. Doug and Jackie’s job was to tape up all the vehicle lights before we left. There were two reasons for this. First, obviously, was to dark out the vehicle so the enemy couldn’t see it. Anyone who happened to be close enough would be able to hear the vehicle, but without any lights showing we’d be invisible, so they wouldn’t be able to place us or even know for sure who was driving it. (This was, after all, a vehicle we’d taken from some of their guys.) The second reason was equally important, and that had to do with our ability to see what we were doing. Night vision is so sensitive that any significant source of light renders it useless. Even a vehicle navigation light will flood you with too much illumination and make you as good as blind.