Service: A Navy SEAL at War (19 page)

Our next mission, a raid to capture a high-value target, was known as Operation Mind Freak. It was followed by a sniper mission in a neighborhood we hadn’t operated in before. We had some new guys in the platoon for this one. Our straphangers were all solid operators, and some of them were very experienced. We valued their ideas and their input. Just because we had been there for six weeks didn’t give us a monopoly on smarts.

In line with the wishes of the head shed, our missions evolved from static overwatch operations to more active, mobile assignments. We used our intel to target leaders more surgically. We moved out fast, doing snatch-and-grab operations. We didn’t do bait ops anymore, or patrol to contact, looking for a fight. As the
enemy went to ground, the challenge now was to make sense of ambiguity, and to get smart about people. It was about deciding when to blow down a door and when to hand out candy. When you blew down the wrong door, the principles of counterinsurgency warfare required you to call in the home repairman or grab some tools and become one yourself. They say SEALs can operate anywhere, and we do. But this was a whole new battlefield for us. Sometimes a hammer and a pack of nails (and a handful of M&Ms for the kids) did more damage to the enemy than a laser-guided Maverick.

When I was serving in Afghanistan, I couldn’t fire my gun fast enough. In Ramadi, though, a rifle magazine was like a can of worms. The battle for the city sometimes seemed less likely to turn on the shots we took as on the rounds we decided to keep in our chambers. One night one of our snipers spotted two insurgents digging a hole in the road, attempting to plant an IED. He shot both of them, killing one and leaving a wounded survivor, who we quickly took into custody and promptly sent to the hospital. Saving the life of an enemy may seem like the wrong thing to do. But ask yourself: Which of the two bullets fired by the sniper that night did more to pacify the area? The insurgent who got killed will never plant another bomb. But the guy who was shot, taken in, cared for, and saved by American forces is likely to come away with his mind changed about what Americans are all about. We were there, it had been said, to steal their oil and their women, after all. Or were we?

Sometimes Skipper and Master Chief went out with us to see how we were doing business. They took positions in the back of the train, and, wanting us to operate naturally, asked us to pretend they were invisible. One time Master Chief joined us while
we were overwatching the flank of an Army unit doing a block clearance in a heavily contested part of the city. They had set up a cordon—a secure perimeter of cleared buildings, which no one could approach without being seen. A call came on the radio from one of the snipers. “We’ve got a mover. A military-age Iraqi male.” There he was, down on the street. He was holding something in his hands. He didn’t seem to be moving toward our forces or acting threatening. Still, the sniper thought he was highly suspicious, standing in an area he had no business being in, even though he was a good distance from anyone’s position and well outside of our “ring of safety.”

The team listened as the radio chatter continued.

“He might have a grenade—ah, never mind, I don’t think it’s a frag.”

“I think it’s an apple.”

“Wait—it looks like it could be a frag.”

“No, I don’t think so. I think it’s an apple.”

“It’s a grenade. It has to be….”

As the dialogue went back and forth, Master Chief got up and tried to take a look. To his eye, it was hard to determine the guy’s exact intent, and besides that he really didn’t look more than fourteen or fifteen years old. And that was when the shot rang out. The sniper across the way decided to engage the kid as he approached a block of buildings. It was a tough shot on a moving target heading toward the defilade of a structure nearby. The sniper’s bullet missed the kid’s head by a matter of inches. Having cheated death, he wisely disappeared. There was nothing in his hands as he left the cordon area.

When we got back to camp, Master Chief walked our snipers through an analysis of what had taken place.

“So what do you make of this? Do you think that was really a grenade in his hand?”

No one had any reason to doubt the shooter’s sincerity, but Master Chief didn’t get an answer.

“Well, in the end, I think it’s fortunate that he missed him,” Master Chief said. “Judging by what I heard, I think we
wanted
to see a grenade.

“Think about it. Even if it was a grenade, what was that one kid going to do? There were no American forces in the area, and he was no threat to our or any other position.”

One of our snipers suggested that the shot might have served to deter Iraqis from picking up hand grenades, if that’s what it was, or from acting suspiciously in restricted areas. Maybe this was a dangerous insurgent who needed to be shot. Maybe shooting him would give a second thought to anyone planning to gather ordnance for money.

Master Chief said, “Okay, let’s say that one of those things was the goal, and we shoot this guy, because it’s going to keep Iraqi kids from picking up grenades and, we suppose, save an American life somewhere in the future. So now the kid’s dead, and the grenade’s still lying there on ground. We’re not going to go out and take the grenade off the street, are we? No, we aren’t. So very likely it will just end up in an insurgent’s hands again. Meanwhile, how did an average Iraqi see what just happened?

“They’re going to see a dead boy,” he said. “And they’re going to say, ‘The Americans shot this child for no reason. There lies an innocent boy, killed just because he was standing in the street, holding an apple.’ This is the word that gets around on the street, even if he really was holding a grenade.

“If you make the wrong call, you can lose a whole
neighborhood,” Master Chief continued. “And that grenade, or that apple, will still be lying there in the street. Either outcome harms our mission. If we take the shot, we have to be ready to get out there and influence the perception. I won’t ask you to hesitate, but we need to have tactical patience. We need to know the shot is necessary, and if you feel it is, then you have to make the hard call.”

Master Chief was tough to beat in this kind of exchange, brilliant at breaking down complexity and casting aside bullshit. He had seen similar situations in 2005, when the rules of engagement allowed our snipers to shoot anyone seen holding a shovel or a bag of trash that could be hiding an IED. Men with shovels and heavy trash bags were suspected of being an IED threat—until it became clear that innocent shopkeepers now and then used shovels and dustpans when they would sweep their stoops clean, and that sad souls were sometimes coerced by the insurgents to carry sacks of rocks and drop them into a hole in the road to test if our snipers were nearby. He learned well from history, from his peers, from anyone who had seen things he hadn’t and he took it in to use with his men.

If you couldn’t out-argue Master Chief, you were wise just to keep your mouth shut. He never raised his voice, and always grounded his lessons in reason. That’s what master chiefs get paid to do in the Navy, what sergeant majors do in the Marine Corps and Army, and what chief master sergeants do in the Air Force. They live by an idea that many folks hold dear where I come from: There’s no education in the second kick of a mule.

As we saw it, a leader should always be ready to ask anyone under him: Are you preparing yourself to make the team better? Are you acting to make the team’s record and reputation stronger?
Are you staying in good shape—in both body and mind—for the greater good? You don’t get people to follow you by demanding it with your words. You do it by
commanding
it with your example. In the chow hall at Camp Marc Lee, we put a sign above the door that read: I
F
E
VERY
SEAL W
ERE
L
IKE
M
E
, H
OW
G
OOD
W
OULD THE
T
EAMS
B
E
?

Team 5’s outstanding enlisted leadership kept me wanting to stay sharp, even as my body threatened to collapse under the weight of my plates. A feeling of competent, effective command was just exuded by our leadership and it trickled down from there. Success built upon success, and even after a bad day we felt motivated to get better. I think we all knew we were serving with some special people. Even our oldest frogs still say that about Task Unit Ramadi, all these many deployments later.

I once heard DQ say, “The day will come when the fight for the city will just seem to tip. One day, victory came from putting an artillery round into a building. The next day, victory will come from
not
doing it. The key to success will be recognizing as quickly as possible when that change has taken place.”

Every man in Task Unit Ramadi can point to the day when that change came and our fortunes fell clearly into alignment with the people’s. It was the day after Thanksgiving, when we copied a desperate radio call on the tactical net.

“My people are being killed. I need your help!”

T
he man who sent the message was an Iraqi sheikh named Jassim Muhammad Saleh al-Suwadawi. The leader of the Albu Soda tribe, he controlled the sparsely populated northeastern part of Ramadi, the Sufiyah district. It was the same tribe that Travis Patriquin had identified to Commander Leonard as a likely key ally against Al Qaeda.

Our recent history with them wasn’t good. They had been a thorn in the side of the men at Camp Corregidor ever since Americans had been there. Just about every day, Al Qaeda–linked insurgents roamed freely in that neighborhood, firing mortars at the camp from the backs of pickup trucks, then driving like hell to get away before our radar-directed return fire arrived. On some days early in our deployment we could mark time by the cadence of the mortars they lobbed in. Sometimes they came in volleys of five or six at a time. More than a few soldiers were killed on the chow line. You didn’t go anywhere in the camp without a full kit and body armor.

We knew that Al Qaeda terrorists were responsible for a great many of these attacks. We also knew, because there was hardly
ever a letup, that the terrorists had made a deal with Sheikh Jassim and his tribe.

Then, it seems, their infernal little bargain fell apart.

Sheikh Jassim resented the way his homes and his people were always caught in the crossfire. Al Qaeda militia often fired at Camp Corregidor from schools and hospitals in his area, probably hoping it would deter us from shooting back. Sometimes it did. But sometimes, too, there was collateral damage. Sheikh Jassim didn’t care much for Al Qaeda’s brand of cowardice, and the loss of life and property it inflicted upon his people, so he tried to put an end to it by banishing them from his neighborhoods. He set up checkpoints to keep the terrorists from getting in. He only had a force of about fifty men in his tribal police, but it took them no time, using their well-placed checkpoints and ability to distinguish locals from troublemakers, to shut them out.

The terrorists issued grave warnings. “Take the checkpoints down within seventy-two hours or we will kill you and everyone in your tribe.” But the sheikh stood his ground. That’s when Al Qaeda made its move: a huge attack on the Sufiyah district, aimed at wiping out Jassim’s people.

The terrorists began by overwhelming the police checkpoints. With just a few dozen rounds apiece in their weapons, the tribal cops on duty didn’t stand a chance. Then the killers turned on the tribe’s women and children. It was a shocking and deliberate slaughter of innocents. The tribe’s population of military-age males was quickly decimated by the attacks—but that wasn’t enough for Al Qaeda’s killers.

The Americans had long feared that something like this would happen. Captain Patriquin had the foresight to give the
Sunni chief a satellite phone and his own personal phone number. That’s how Sheikh Jassim was able to reach American forces directly, through a personal phone call to Patriquin. “My people are being killed. I need your help!”

Aerial surveillance gave us a grim real-time picture of what was going on. The terrorists were killing everyone they could find. They shot them dead in their yards, in their houses, and in the streets. They slaughtered their livestock, poisoned their water, and destroyed their electrical generators.

The brutality and scope of the attack was quickly followed by an explanation, thanks to our intel shop: the top commander of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, had come to Ramadi to organize it personally. I guess the success of the counterinsurgency mission and the Anbar Awakening was reflected in the desperation of the response.

As the closest commander on the scene, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Ferry of the First Battalion, Ninth Infantry Regiment (the 1/9), ordered his tanks and infantry to move out of Camp Corregidor and enter the neighborhoods that not a month before had been virtually off-limits to them.

As the Americans began arriving, Al Qaeda assassins were heading for the sheikh’s house. Jassim and his fighters abandoned their compound, falling back toward the Euphrates River. “We’re coming, we’re coming, hang on!” Captain Patriquin told him.

Meanwhile, from many mosques rose the familiar shrill voices over the loudspeakers. The Sunni imams were calling their faithful to jihad. This time, though, the message was different. Our terps told us the jihad was aimed not at the “infidels”—usually, that was us—but against Al Qaeda.

So here we were, Americans from several units, working
together to essentially join a call to jihad. The world really had been turned on its head.

Colonel Ferry ordered aircraft to make low-level runs over the neighborhood, looking to slow down the bad guys. Army artillery began targeting the terrorists. Other strategic air assets began arriving overhead, too, helping to win the fight. Despite its chaotic battlefields, Anbar Province was seen as a backwater by some higher commanders in Baghdad, and we’d never seen this kind of air support before. Still, not everybody wearing a black head scarf and carrying an AK-47 was a bad guy. There were tribal fighters coming over from other neighborhoods to support Jassim’s besieged people. But Al Qaeda fighters often stood out by their cruelty. As the terrorists fled the neighborhood in their pickup trucks, they tried to intimidate the locals by dragging bodies of the dead behind them, chained to their fenders. All this did was help our airborne watchers distinguish friend from foe. A Marine Corps F/A-18 Hornet was vectored to attack. The terrorists were blown into pieces, their last stain upon the earth. It was old-fashioned American shock and awe that finally stopped al-Masri’s murder brigade.