Service: A Navy SEAL at War (21 page)

It was the path we all must take. All senior SEALs, including Master Chief, DQ, and Skipper, reached the point where they had to slow down as shooters before they could raise their game as leaders. DQ said there was a new job for me within the platoon, in the operations section. I would be, in effect, his counterpart at Camp Marc Lee. Talking with him made me feel like the ballplayer in John Fogerty’s song “Centerfield.” “Put me in, Coach.” I’d have to get right with the fact that I was no longer operational, but there was a game to play. When my BUD/S class had finished Hell Week, an instructor said, “We’ve all been there and done that. It’s time to get ready for the next step on the ladder.”

It was time to be reborn again.

Climbing that ladder involved standing face-to-face with my teammates and seeing how they took the change in my role. I was afraid of what I’d see on their faces. After word got around that I was coming off the line, I walked into the chow hall and a couple of guys came up to me and said they were sorry to hear it. They told me to use the time to heal up, and not to worry, everything would be fine in the train. In about ten minutes, it was
business as usual and we were all still tightly bound members of the team. There was always someone ready to fill your post.

As I found a new home in the TOC, in the role as chief of the operations section, I wrapped my arms around the challenge of vetting our op plans, coordinating communications, getting aircraft and drones into the mix, designing routes into and back from our targets, making sure the operators never got their toes stepped on by other friendlies when they went outside the wire, and supporting the training mission. It’s easy to think you’re there to do whatever you want, and pursue a personal agenda of some kind. But of course we weren’t. Our duty is to serve the mission, and if we’re not doing that, then we have no right to call what we do service.

Though I knew I was unlikely to carry a rifle into a war zone ever again, I didn’t want to be seen as a paper pusher. I wanted to stay close to the fight. So I kept up with what our operators were doing. I checked and rechecked everything. In briefings, I always wanted to be able to tell them, “It’s all there, everything you need. I know the route, because I’ve walked it.” I’d always remind them that only one thing was important: “From the minute you jock up, the mission’s not over until you’re back here, boots on the ground, mission accomplished, and back in your tent asleep. Bring everybody back. If you get into it, fight like you’ve never fought before.
But bring everybody back.
”

I was thirty-one, but well aware that I was becoming an old man. And I’d earn the right to talk like one, if only those willful young bucks would let me. It helped that I was surrounded by great frogmen who had already made this evolution. As upset as I was by early December’s turn of events, I look back today and see that I was never prouder to stand in their company. My
teammates from that deployment were, as a group, top to bottom, some of the finest I’ve ever served with. I loved seeing guys like Marty Robbins and Wink going to work, and doing it with a level of confidence and authority that they had earned as SEALs. Seeing them rise to the occasion, I was left with no doubt at all that our world doesn’t revolve around one man. No single person makes our world go round.

Pearl Harbor Day was a terrible day in Ramadi. At least ten U.S. servicemen were killed in insurgent attacks. One of those attacks was particularly nasty and costly.

Some American journalists were visiting town that day. They were interested in the story of the Sunni tribal awakening, and they wanted to see it up close, in the street, so a little embed operation was set up to accommodate them. Given the bad press the war had been getting, most of us saw how helpful it could be to have some truth in the papers. Among those members of the press were a twenty-five-year-old woman from a newsmagazine and a photographer who came to see how our work was transforming one of Iraq’s worst places. They were riding Route Sunset in a convoy, bound for COP Falcon. The road was secure, locked down with 24-7 patrols and surveillance. The only vulnerable spot was a road crossing near a newly reopened school. It was there that Al Qaeda managed to insert a bomb team.

An officer riding in the convoy’s second Humvee saw the steel plate buried in the street. He tried to call a warning to the lead vehicle, but it was too late. A heavy rubber tire rolled over it, a fuse triggered, and after a short delay, the third Humvee in line was engulfed in a blast of flames. That vehicle contained four people: a
driver, a turret gunner, a Marine Corps public affairs officer, and Captain Travis Patriquin, the Army civil affairs officer whose work with the Sunni tribes had done so much to pacify Ramadi.

The explosion threw Patriquin out of the vehicle. He died on impact. Two others—the gunner, Army specialist Vincent Pomante, and the Marine Corps PAO, Major Megan McClung, were KIA as well. Major McClung became the first female graduate of the United States Naval Academy ever to be killed in action.

Among those who mourned this loss hardest was Sheikh Sattar. Burning with anger and grief, he wept at the news of Captain Patriquin’s death. “For some reason when I make good friends with Americans,” Sattar would say, “they become my brothers, and they die.” The sheikh decided he couldn’t bear making any more American friends. “I don’t want them to die,” he said. At the memorial service for Patriquin, McClung, and Pomante, held several days after Patriquin’s body was flown home—and that was one of the largest “hero flights” anyone in Iraq could remember, attended by more than a thousand people—Sattar offered a traditional Muslim burial prayer to his slain friend. “O Allah, admit him to Paradise and protect him from the torment of the grave and the torment of hellfire. Make his grave spacious and fill it with light.” He also pledged himself to bringing righteous justice to the killers.

Within forty-eight hours, tipped off by a relative, Sattar and his police got the intel that led us to the prize. In a series of raids conducted on December 19, our forces searched for the three assassins who planted that bomb. Gold team finally grabbed them. As we all suspected, they were your run-of-the-mill Al Qaeda hirelings, teenagers, greedy opportunists looking for a payday. They were turned over to Iraqi police. Sheikh Sattar
boasted later on that he had “fed them to his dogs.” Was it true? I don’t know. It was his city, so I suppose that was his business.

Patriquin’s death was not in vain. You talk about one man making a difference—his role in the Anbar Awakening, from his work with Sheikh Sattar to his encouraging of Sheikh Jassim’s rebellion against Al Qaeda, was of enormous importance. Those sheikhs knew how to take care of business in their city: Sattar’s recruitment work was invaluable, and in his fight up in Sufiyah district, Jassim put Al Qaeda on the run, at a cost of just seventeen of his men. Jassim called his KIA martyrs. Call them what you want; they were heroes to the people of Ramadi. Our estimates put Al Qaeda losses in that fight at around sixty, though in the chaos of mobs, troop movements, and air attacks it was hard to nail down a final number. Afterward, many tribes that had been devotedly unhelpful to us and the cause of a new Iraq came on board and helped us with our police recruitment and training effort. It appeared that a turning point was near. Travis Patriquin’s hands were all over this success and his fine touch would be forever missed.

President Bush had been conferring with Iraq’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, about our progress. In late November, at a meeting in Jordan, the president first broached the idea of a “surge,” pushing another twenty or thirty thousand U.S. troops into Iraq to improve security for the people. Around the same time, another American newspaper article was published claiming that things in Anbar were so bad that “U.S. and Iraqi troops are no longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in al-Anbar.”

Actually, maybe that was partly correct, because the wave that was sweeping Ramadi clean of terrorists was only partly military in nature. When Iraqis saw that members of Al Qaeda were the
real infidels, young Iraqi men everywhere rallied to the idea of defending a just cause. Captain Patriquin put his finger on it when he wrote in early December, “The promise of a life of adventure, steady pay, and being on the side of righteousness has proved to be the right mix.” It allowed peace-loving Iraqi men on the right side of the law to serve family, tribe, and nation. All of a sudden a lot of farmers and shopkeepers were up to their hips in marksmanship, assault tactics, checkpoint operations, rules of evidence, and techniques for handling detainees. Those who showed promise were sent to a detective school across town. The change was bubbling up from within. We played a role in helping it along, but we were far from being the conquerors of Anbar Province.

On December 13, President Bush met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to discuss how to capitalize on our momentum. Five days later, the new secretary of defense, Robert Gates, was sworn in and went to visit Prime Minister al-Maliki. When he came home, Secretary Gates recommended the appointment of a new commander for all coalition forces in Iraq. The man selected was the Army’s premier counterinsurgency strategist, General David Petraeus. It’s clear from this that our success in Ramadi, building on previous successes in Tal Afar and elsewhere, was a blueprint for what could be done throughout the country.

Confronted with a citizens’ uprising, the terrorists seemed to know the days of their reign of terror were numbered. And at Camp Marc Lee and Camp Corregidor, Task Unit Ramadi was fully in its battle rhythm—another big problem for the bad guys. The surge in police recruitment was bringing us better intel all the time, and night after night, our assault elements went out and bagged a growing number of high-value targets. Some of the missions we ran were quite audacious.

Consider, for example, a stay-behind operation. You move into a neighborhood in strength, with forces that have a “large signature”—tanks, vehicles, and a lot of men. You patrol around, entering and clearing houses, making a lot of noise. You plant your footprint on that neighborhood, let everyone know you’re there. Then you leave—or appear to leave. The tanks withdraw, the patrols load up into Bradleys and drive away. But not everybody goes home. A lot of guys stay behind. You can only do an operation like this when you’re comfortable working in your battle space, when the people and their reactions are familiar to you, when there’s a baseline level of goodwill in the streets, and you know basically how the enemy is going to come knocking.

You leave a few platoons of riflemen dispersed throughout the neighborhood. They’ll sit quietly with their hosts, talking, being friendly, and explaining that they are there to stop the people who are killing their children and ruining their neighborhoods. The innocent residents of Ramadi are like good people everywhere. They don’t want fights going on around their homes. And they don’t want their families to be put needlessly into harm’s way. They bring out pita bread and their syrupy sweet chai. All the while, our guys are keeping an eye on the streets. Because the enemy, when they see our vehicles leave, is going to come back, looking to set up their IEDs and so on. It may happen at first light of dawn, or after the mosques let out. There will be movement, a gathering. The gunmen and bomb makers will awaken and assert themselves.

When they show up again, that’s when we spring the trap. Sometimes it’s a tank platoon supported by heavy weapons pushing suddenly out of a hidden position. Sometimes we’d catch them in a crossfire between mutually supporting rooftop sniper
positions. There was almost always close air support overhead, with missiles ready on the rails. Those pilots—we loved them. They were always dying to hear the magic words from a JTAC in the city down below: “Cleared hot.” And we were always happy to follow what happened next: our guys would see cars and small trucks driving along, full of armed men—and then all of a sudden the vehicle would burst into flames, struck by a missile. We put a serious dent into the enemy’s ranks this way. It’s a tactic we picked up from the Army. Since the beginning of the teams, we’ve never hesitated to upgrade our playbook with tactics borrowed or stolen from the conventional side. Whatever it takes to keep our enemies squealing from the feeling.

We used psychological operations, too. A “call to fight” operation would consist of a psy-ops team setting up loudspeakers and broadcasting insulting messages to the enemy. Targeting the insurgents’ fragile egos, the psy-ops team would broadcast aggressive messages in Arabic. “Stop hiding behind your women and crawling around like dogs. Come and fight! We are waiting for you!” At this, the enemy would usually go nuts, and when the mosques let out around noon, we’d hear a cryptic call to arms from the Al Qaeda–friendly muezzins. “It’s time to harvest in the garden….” “Bring forth the blood donations….” We’d see the troublemakers stir, go to their vehicles, grab weapons out of hidden storage areas, then start moving toward us. We let them come.

Sometimes it was over quickly. Other times it was more profitable just to observe and track their movements. We might find an IED-emplacing team. Those usually consisted of three guys. We’d have a sniper take out the driver and the shoveler, but let the bomb carrier get away. We would watch the survivor all the way home, then snap on the nest and round up all his buddies.

We changed up our approach almost every time so the enemy never figured out our pattern. But there was one constant they almost never seemed to recognize: if you fight us, you’re going to lose.

There’s no excitement to match heavy-breaching an enemy-held house. If you’re serving as point man, you’ll be hitting the door before the dust has even settled. Sometimes you get lucky and a bad guy answers the door as the charge goes off—a head start on the room clearance. You step over him and enter the house, your number two and number three men right on your belt, moving fast. You move and fight as one, each man counting on the others to cover his corner. As you flood the room, part of you prays that an armed enemy will appear before you. Whether he has a weapon at the ready or is reeling, stunned, bleeding, and concussed from the charge, you welcome him, and finish him, running down the wall as the stack floods in behind you. “Clear!” “Clear!” “Clear!” come the calls on your headset. Having secured one room—elapsed time, five and a half seconds—we roll into the next. We gather and exploit sensitive materials. Depending on what we find, there may be several days of follow-on raids to do.