Service: A Navy SEAL at War (10 page)

It was dark by the time we ditched our vehicles at the COP and set out on foot on our shakeout patrol. It turned out to be a real nut dragger. In urban environments, we travel heavier than we do in the mountains. In the city, where distances are shorter and the air easier to breathe, we wear our body armor, all the plates. My M4 rifle had an M203 grenade launcher attached to the barrel. I had eight magazines of 5.56mm bullets and ChemLights. As team lead, I carried flares, an extra radio, and an extra antenna stuffed in a cargo pocket. I had a computer and a medical pack containing QuikClot, bandages, needles, and tourniquets. I had water and food, too. I weighed about 250 pounds without my gear, and more than 325 with it. With every step I took, I could feel my spine compressing like a shock absorber.

And the noise—good Lord. We would never have been allowed to move in the wilderness the way we did that night in the city. Half of us sounded as though we had cowbells hanging around our necks. At night it was easy to stumble into things. Running around in the darkness, using night-vision goggles, which remove most of your depth perception, I tripped and found myself lying legs up in an open sewer pit. It’s easy to plant your face in the ground when you’re slogging around an unfamiliar area wearing NVGs, hyperventilating from excitement, and feeling your heart rate pegged to the right. I’m always glad to entertain my SEAL brothers, and here, lying in that sewage, I didn’t disappoint. I radioed up and reported that I had found the shitter if anyone needed to go.

After the first hour of humping through the city’s filth, the
exhaustion wore on my lungs, muscles, and bones. Our patrol took us through an open area in the southern part of the city. We halted there, and I found myself kneeling in a depression in the earth. I thought at first that it was a foxhole of some kind. It was nasty. It smelled of death. And for good reason: the field we were in turned out to be a cemetery, and the hole I was standing in was an open grave. Mine was the only body in it, fortunately. I remember how the wind carried the aroma of decay. I remember the burning in my lungs—and in every muscle of my body. And now the grave beckoned to me.

I felt like I’d need to get shot at a few times to know that I was still alive as a gunfighter. I wanted to know I still had my edge, and could trust myself to perform in the line of fire. In the teams we reach a place where that edge percolates in the air between men who have arrived at the pinnacle of fitness and training. I prayed we’d make contact with the enemy and take a little incoming fire. If nothing else, it would be an opportunity to hit the dirt, take the weight off, and catch my breath. After all my years in the teams, I felt like a new guy out there that night.

When we finished our patrol and returned to the outpost, Senior Chief Steffen brought us all together and got right to the point. “Now you know what this lousy place is like,” he said. “You’ve smelled it and you’ve felt it. Start shucking your gear.” Serving during the peak of summer, the Team 3 boys had carried a lot of water. The big dromedary bags they stuffed into their rucks added fifty or sixty pounds to their load, forcing them to economize in other areas. They packed just three or four magazines, maybe a couple of grenades, and left a lot of their body armor at the base. It took one patrol for us to learn to go light, too. We got rid of the extra magazines we carried in our
vests. I removed the grenade launcher from my rifle and switched out its long barrel in favor of a short, ten-inch upper receiver, better for close-quarters fighting. When we did sniper overwatch missions, which were largely stationary, we could afford to go heavy. But an assault element had to travel light.

Back at camp, I called our guys together and told them we had work to do before I would consider us competent to patrol in a nighttime environment. So we practiced over and over, moving with all our gear on, marching up and down along the wall of the camp, back and forth, deep into the night. We finally got streamlined, tucking in our loose straps and securing all our gear, making sure we were quieter and more agile. I hit the gym hard. Working out on the treadmill, I wore all my body armor to get used to the rattle and the weight. My abused joints and bones howled in protest—especially my spine. I was in decent shape, but I wasn’t in
Ramadi
shape. I’d have to get there fast. Spiritual fitness was important, too. I never allowed myself to forget who was in command as I went through these paces. In the journal I kept, the final words in each entry were the same every day:

“Thank you, God, for one more day.”

No matter how bad things would get, I’d never forget to tell Him that.

Two days after our shakeout patrol, the rest of the task unit arrived at Camp Marc Lee. I never even got a glimpse of Morgan—my brother’s outfit, Bravo Platoon, was bound for a camp across the city, Camp Corregidor, a smaller base built on land once used as a date farm and as a training camp for Saddam’s army. It was a lousy dump. The camp had barely enough fresh
water to provide just one shower a day—for a single man, not for everybody—so Morgan got used to showering in water pumped from filthy canals. It was said that the fleas and bedbugs that assaulted them daily rode to the attack on the backs of the rats. Still, as home to Bravo Platoon and several companies of conventional infantry, Camp Corregidor would be the center of gravity in our effort to get control of Ramadi’s violent east side.

The crosstown road that led from Camp Marc Lee to Camp Corregidor was known as Route Michigan. It was an IED-choked nightmare. Fortunately, the bomb techs with the EOD mobile unit attached to our squadron spent lots of time with the intel shop getting the latest dope on enemy bomb-making tactics. They ran with our fire teams wherever we went, their simple tool kits always handy—a multitool, some heavy-duty shears, and small explosives (det cord and C-4) to countercharge any bombs they found. And these guys smoldered with their own desire for revenge. In February, a bomb tech named Nick Wilson was killed in Ramadi while tracing a thread of copper command wire over a berm near a road. Andy Fayal accompanied Nick’s body home to his family, while the others vowed to track down the bomb makers responsible for their friend’s death. At Nick’s funeral, Andy was impressed to see a number of SEALs in attendance. I think he finally understood then how much we respected the EOD community’s skills and dedication to their craft. Our camaraderie ran deeper than blood. God bless all the EOD guys.

The Army engineers who did route reconnaissance in Ramadi did a damn good job, too. Their work was similar to what our EOD detachment did, but on a larger scale. They rolled out in formations of vehicles designed to detect and take out the big
subsurface explosive devices. Each vehicle performed a different function—detecting IEDs, marking them, sweeping the street of debris, and finally digging them up and disposing of them. The Army used a type of heavily armored truck known as a Buffalo, which has a big arm that can be fitted with various attachments and extended out front to sweep the roads and uncover planted bombs. They also used these lunar-lander-looking monsters known as Joint EOD Rapid Response Vehicles, or JERRVs. Those bad boys could absorb huge blasts and keep going. It was a talent they used often. The guys inside would be fine as long as they wore their five-point harnesses and helmets. The Army also deployed tracked robots known as TALONs, which are tricked up with sensors and a mechanical arm to deal with the deadly toys they dig up. Sometimes it was just as easy to roll over suspected bomb positions and take the blast. They could work faster that way and cover more ground.

These convoys rolled through the city streets at two miles an hour, creeping along the most dangerous thoroughfares all night long, bright lights blazing, and continuing through the next day and into the next night as well. If a JERRV got hit—and acting as a blast magnet was definitely part of their job description—the recovery team would move in, hoist the wreck onto a five-ton flatbed, and take it back to Camp Ramadi. A replacement would take its place and the formation would continue roaring along at its snail’s pace, never losing a beat.

It made a big impression whenever one of their vehicles was dragged back to camp, all the tires blown off—basically a capsule. But every night they went back out, going into the kill zone and staying there because they couldn’t stand to see regular
infantry get caught there instead. They saved hundreds of lives, and the men who drove them impressed us with their bravery.

Driving Route Michigan, we made good use of our crazy week learning tactical driving. SEALs don’t run convoys, as the regular Army does. The conventionals usually travel heavy, motoring slowly across the road, often in broad daylight. This gives the insurgency’s IED triggermen plenty of time to see them coming and hit them. By contrast, in Ramadi, we drove like bats out of hell, our vehicles blacked out like shadows. If there was a triggerman along our path who was counting on a few seconds’ notice, well, he would be sorely disappointed. The threat of roadside bombs was downright grave already. We didn’t need to make it easy for him.

Watching a battered Pathfinder return to Camp Ramadi one morning, I said to Lieutenant Commander Thomas, “Sir, those guys are getting beat to hell. The enemy has to know they’re coming. How else would they be sitting on them like this?”

If our troop commander heard any fear in my voice, his easy response didn’t acknowledge it. He said to me, “Marcus, if we thought about that too much, we wouldn’t be able to do our job. We’d never get out there into the fight.”

“Roger that, sir,” I said. “Let’s go get some.”

The boys at Camp Corregidor didn’t waste any time getting their rifles into the fight. One day, at his spartan digs across town, Morgan had a quick in-brief from EOD, then turned in for the night. He awoke early the next morning to the sound of enemy mortar fire coming into camp.

Smaller than Camp Marc Lee and more exposed to its surrounding neighborhoods, Camp Corregidor took fire regularly. The boys there just had to live with it. They wore body armor even for a quick run to take a dump. Men were still sometimes killed by mortar fire while in the chow line. The camp was bounded to the north by Route Michigan. An irrigation canal separated it from a nasty part of the city that was home to COP Eagle’s Nest, the neighborhood where Ryan Job and Marc Lee got shot back in August. Several lookout towers were located on the camp’s western perimeter wall. One of Bravo Platoon’s snipers, Cowboy, ran to one of those towers and climbed up to take a look. He had his sniper rifle with him.

From the tower, Cowboy had a good view of the major road that skirted the residential district of the east-central part of the city, intersecting with Route Michigan. Eventually it would be known as Sniper Alley because of the high volume of sniper fire hitting Camp Corregidor from the street. On this day, though, Cowboy was sending it the other way. Through the scope of his rifle, more than six football fields away, he spied a red Opel sedan parked on the road across the canal with its flashers on. A man was standing in front of the car. He looked up and down the road, then lifted the hood, walked around the side of the car, and looked around some more, up and down the street. The guy was expecting something, but Cowboy sensed it wasn’t a tow truck.

Apparently believing he was unobserved, the man gave a little hand signal and two other guys came running out of a nearby house carrying rice sacks that seemed to hold a heavy load. They heaved the payload into the car’s trunk.

Cowboy didn’t need another set of eyes to know what he was
looking at. He fixed his crosshairs on one of the bag handlers and squeezed the trigger. A round of .300 Win Mag flew 680 yards downrange. Hit, center mass. The other bag handler began dragging his buddy back toward the building. The driver slammed down the hood, jumped into the car, and began to drive away. Cowboy got on the radio to the tactical ops center. “This is Cowboy in Echo Tower. We’ve got one EKIA [enemy killed in action] and a VBIED [vehicle-borne improvised explosive device] moving down the street in a red Opel. They’re right out in front of you now.” In short order some
jundis
hustled out and took that driver and his car into custody. They found explosives in the trunk. It was indeed a VBIED, quite literally hell on wheels. Thanks to Cowboy, they took it off the street before it could find a target. He went back to his quarters and said to his platoon, “Y’all ain’t gonna
believe
this….” From then, Cowboy followed the same ritual every morning, climbing to the top of Echo Tower and having a look at his exciting new neighborhood.

F
or a SEAL team looking for work, the action never comes soon enough. Team 5 had taken the nickname Task Unit Red Bull. We wore a patch showing a head-down, horns-low longhorn with the Team 5 logo branded on his rear. Our slogan, “If you mess with the bull, you get the horns,” had a sort of Texas twang and was also fitting because of all the Red Bull energy drinks we went through every day just to stay awake. To this day the SEAL teams do their part to keep that brand in business.

The teams can be pretty strongly personality driven, and some of us took the liberty of personalizing our uniforms. My brother and I wore a small three-by-five-inch Lone Star flag front and center on our chests. On his shoulder, Adam Downs had a patch honoring the New York City fire department’s Engine 53, Ladder 43, in memory of the 9/11 attacks. Once in a while Morgan brandished a patch with the colonial-era “Don’t Tread on Me” flag on it, modified SEAL-style: the snake was replaced by the skeleton of a frog, and the famous command was replaced with something a little more provocative: D
ON’T
F——
K WITH
M
E
. Team 3 stenciled the bare-skull image of the Punisher, a Marvel Comics character, on their vehicles, gear, and weapons. In Team 5,
we took a more modest approach. We named our Humvees after characters from the
Transformers
movies—Optimus Prime, Ironhide, Bumblebee, Soundwave, and so on. Our comms truck and troop hauler was known as Omega Supreme. Folks don’t typically run this way in the conventional military.