Service: A Navy SEAL at War (22 page)

This sort of thing is a drug for an SOF warrior, but I had to “detox.” The breachers, assaulters, and snipers I helped put into play almost every night became an extension of my own gun sight. We served death to the enemy in innumerable combinations and captured many, many more, usually with an overhead view as the whole thing unfolded. As we looked at these missions roll from the top down, we knew we could get our teammates whatever they needed and took pride in supporting the fight in this way. Supporting our operations became my stock-in-trade in the TOC. When I turned in my rifle for a laptop and
a sand table, I stepped back from the fight itself and dedicated myself to running our plays over and over again till we had them perfect, then starting over and running them again.

Shortly before Christmas, our guys were part of an effort to set up a new combat outpost in a tough neighborhood we hadn’t visited before, the Qatana district. A company of Marines from the 1/6 had been pushing east from COP Firecracker, which we helped install back in October. But the attacks on them were so intense that they never got very far. They asked us to come in and relieve some of the pressure. Our job was to go in and set up overwatch positions to disrupt and kill insurgents who might resist the push. Senior Chief Steffen went outside the wire, running Gold squad with Lieutenant Nathan. Lieutenant Austin and Marty Robbins took Blue.

Before midnight, they convoyed out to COP Firecracker, which had since been renamed the 17th Street Security Station. (I guess the term “security station” was thought to be less frightening to the public than “combat outpost.”) They met with the Marine Corps leadership, then patrolled out. Snaking by night through a landscape of rubble, they found the target building, a three-story structure, southwest of the new COP, just south of the Racetrack.

The family who lived in the house looked scared to death when the Americans arrived; the insurgents had told them we’d kill them all. It was apparent they hadn’t seen our like before. When our terp, Moose, heard their fears, he just started laughing. With a few easy words, he calmed the family down and they began breathing again. Out came the tea, syrupy sweet and hot, and bread, served on what seemed to be their finest china.

Fizbo, running with Blue, set up his comms system in a third-floor room. The door that led to the roof had been riddled with gunfire, and it appeared that a large blast had gone off in the room, judging by the shrapnel holes in the ceiling and walls. The snipers sledged a hole in the wall, giving them a field of fire to the east, along the primary axis of threat. A cold, rainy wind rushed through the holey door and walls. It was a miserable winter’s day.

Morning was quiet, but activity in the neighborhood picked up around noon. From a five-story building about a hundred yards away, insurgents opened up with small arms and RPGs at a Marine Corps position north of our guys, apparently unaware that we were set up on them at six o’clock. From that one spider hole, the boys of Blue opened up with everything they had. They were practically shoving and pushing to taking their turn on that spider hole. After they had unloaded all that ordnance on the building, it was no longer possible to see it. It was completely obscured by smoke. With the overcast too dense to allow air support, Fizbo worked on getting a ground-launched rocket battery into the mix. But by the time approval came, there was no longer any need; patrols found that all the insurgents had either been killed or had hightailed it out of the line of fire.

That night Blue hit a house farther east. Though a great point man, Salazar, was leading the way, this movement had an unfortunate end. The boys took a wrong turn and moved through an intersection flooded about knee-deep with water. Of course, it turned out to be sewage. Marty Robbins, Adam Downs, and the guys sure loved that.

As the snipers got set up and Fizbo lined up the air cover, Brad Shannon, one of our EOD techs, found three bombs dug into the ground and wired to blow right outside the house. Once
again, our SEALs wouldn’t have gotten far without the incredible know-how and solid brass balls of our EOD guys. Of course, as Brad was disarming them, some Army cats located a few houses away chose that moment to blow a charge to open a sniper hole. As the explosion echoed through the streets, Brad enjoyed the feeling of thinking he’d just been blown to bits. When he came back inside the house, he was ghostly white. But I’m sure that doesn’t begin to describe the terror felt by a band of insurgents a few blocks away, who stumbled into Gold squad.

That unlucky band of enemy shooters apparently had no idea where the U.S. positions were. Groping around through the streets, they learned the hard way. The insurgents were trying to sneak up on a Marine Corps outpost north of us when Lieutenant Nathan’s snipers in Gold laid into them. Two insurgents died right off the bat. Shortly thereafter, a mosque put out a request for “blood donations,” and the snipers found themselves in a target-rich environment. Those lucky frogs—I wish I’d been with them to face that doomed onslaught.

For Blue it was mostly quiet until, later that day, Fizbo noticed through the aerial camera of the F-16 on station overhead a group of ten insurgents pouring out of a house just a hundred yards away from his position, headed straight for him and his guys. Fizbo figured this was a suicide attack inspired by the morning call. Given how close they were, he realized there was no time to get approval for an air attack. He also realized that his snipers couldn’t see them yet because of several houses that blocked the line of sight. So Fizbo used his airborne eyes to tell the snipers on the roof exactly where the enemy was.

That was when one of Blue’s snipers, Chuck Norton, turned to Danny Hanks and calmly asked, “Hey, can I borrow a frag?”
Hanks didn’t think anything of it and handed Chuck a grenade. He immediately pulled the pin and tossed it, leaving Danny to wonder why Norton didn’t just ask him to toss it in the first place.

Based on what he saw on his ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) feed—the approaching insurgents were still about a hundred meters away—Fizbo thought Norton had thrown the grenade way too early, with no chance of reaching the incoming insurgents. But the enemy was moving fast, and, as it turned out, Norton’s throw was a one-in-a-million toss, a perfect strike, high and tight. The pilot overhead was in midsentence, saying, “They are headed right for you…” when he stopped. “Uh, well, not anymore!” The grenade exploded right in their midst. Instantly, two insurgents lay dead and three more were seriously wounded. Fizbo told the team, “Good effects, good effects. Direct hit!”

From nearby alleys, other insurgents emerged to try to evacuate the wounded. When Lieutenant Austin said, “Hit ’em again. Throw one more,” every SEAL on the roof thought the LT was addressing him—so everybody threw a grenade. A deluge of frags decimated the insurgents. After that, no one else tried to attack Blue’s position.

Over at Gold, there was a close call. A van rolled up about a hundred yards down the street. A guy got out, stood around, looking suspicious. Senior Chief Steffen was watching him through his sniper hole. He saw one of the rear windows roll down. At that point the senior chief’s fighter’s instinct told him to hit the dirt, and as he did so, two rounds struck right around his sniper hole. He hopped back up, and as his spotter took the measure of the enemy through a periscope, Steffen got the picture,
jumped up, and fired, putting a round dead center into the enemy’s forehead.

Our snipers were on their game that day. Around sundown, Fizbo spotted something suspicious. A dude with a shovel, digging a hole in the street. Four others were hunched around him, assembling something out of parts they had carried there in large sacks. As he tracked them with his aerial camera, Fiz patched his video feed through to brigade headquarters and was preparing a nine line for a Maverick strike when Chuck Norton decided there was no need to impose such an expense on the American taxpayer. He asked Fizbo for the range and bearing of the enemy and Fiz gave it to him: about 150 meters due east. Norton strode outside, carrying an M79 grenade launcher. Fizbo heard a thump followed by a muffled explosion. The pilot of the F-16 reported that only two enemies survived, both of them badly wounded.

Fizbo took note of the houses the two remaining insurgents fled to. He and Norton stayed by their post that night, working the aircraft, while the rest of the guys, led by Lieutenant Austin, Marty Robbins, and Salazar, went out on raids. They rounded up the insurgents and took them into custody. Later, with Fizbo serving as spotter, Norton found a couple more insurgents stalking his position. Done and done—just another night in Ramadi.

Fizbo and the rest of them exfilled later that night to begin Christmas on a cheerful note. Back at Camp Marc Lee for the holiday dinner, they spit-roasted a lamb on a bonfire. It was good to see the guys return. We hung out, counted our blessings. I found time later to call home and had a good conversation with Mom and Dad.

A
lone figure moves swiftly and quietly through the darkness, down a street, into a building. Another figure follows, traversing the city street and moving like a spirit into the building. And another. The building they’ve entered is an apartment complex, four stories high, large and vacant. It is situated on the southwest corner of a soccer field.

The night is still and their watchword is stealth. No movement is visible unless you’re watching the rooftop closely. A small steel rod, a periscope, rises from behind a rooftop wall. The periscope turns, and the eye using it scans an open field just down the way.

The eye in the periscope belongs to a SEAL sniper. Tipped by a source, he and two more shooters are working in a neighborhood west of Ramadi General Hospital, north of the Racetrack. It’s a neighborhood where our operators haven’t ventured before. They’re part of a mission to lay a trap for a large element of the Al Qaeda brain trust in Ramadi on their home field, as it were. They’ve been assigned to overwatch a soccer field where, a reliable intel source has told us, something big is about to go down. The source says that at 9:00 a.m., certain elements of the Al Qaeda
leadership will gather here to brief insurgents on upcoming operations. They will distribute weapons and cash. The snipers lie patiently in wait, scanning the night and standing by.

The eastern sky brightens, then the sun peeks up, banishing the shadows. By the first light of day, the streets begin to show signs of movement. Just like clockwork, the cars begin arriving—sedans and station wagons, small trucks. Several dozen of them turn off the street and into the soccer field.

Cowboy keys his radio mike. “This is Sniper One. I have movement.”

The insurgents circle up their vehicles, front fender to tailgate, get out, and begin conferring. They carry themselves with the confidence of gangsters. Though they are within plain sight of residents living in houses nearby, they are comfortable and unconcerned. They conduct themselves with a swagger, a brazen disregard for anyone who may be watching them. This is their territory.

They gather and begin unloading weapons from some of the trucks: PKCs, RPGs, AKs, small arms. They brandish the weapons, admire them, and pass them from car to car. Not a care in the world is on their faces. Many of them are foreign fighters, professionals. They must have thought of themselves as an all-star team or something—Saladin’s warriors defending their caliphate.

The Army acknowledges the report.

The operation was supposed to commence with an appearance of the Iraqi police. An IP unit was supposed to show up, loudly announcing their presence so that the insurgents would begin to disperse. Entering the soccer field from the west, the cops were going to push the Al Qaeda types east, toward a
“catcher’s mitt” formed by three other sniper positions. Sniper One was located to the west, positioned as backup in case the op didn’t go as expected.

Well, it didn’t go as expected. When the Iraqi cops made their appearance, they continued driving up the street bounding the soccer field’s eastern side. As a result, the insurgents tried to avoid notice by moving to the west—away from the catcher’s mitt and right toward Sniper One’s hide. It was clear that if a shootout started, the police were going to have their hands full. The other three sniper teams would be in no position to engage.

When you’re serving in the teams, you never stop looking for a fight. In Iraq, the fight never stopped looking for us. I guess you could say it was a match made in heaven. The bottom line: you can fight us head-on, or hide and take potshots. Either way works for us. The world would be a safer place if those who meant harm to America simply learned this lesson and conducted themselves accordingly.

On that day, Cowboy and his teammates Jerry and Lars were in place to teach the latest chapter in this lesson book. They knew right away what they had to do.

Cowboy keyed his mike. “This is Sniper One. Requesting permission to engage.”

“Wait, One.” There was a pause while the operations staff at headquarters conferred. Then the radio crackled again. “Engage.”

It was a sniper’s paradise.

In BUD/S all of us had to qualify as experts in rifle and pistol. Later, you learn to make up to a five-hundred-yard shot. With a long-barrel and the right optics you should be able to make a seven-hundred-yard shot, but that’s pushing it with an ordinary rifle. In sniper school you find out how easy that is when you
have the right gear and training. Snipers take the distances out much farther than that. Chris Kyle from Team 3 has scored from sixteen hundred yards with a .300 Win Mag, and from twenty-one hundred with a larger .338 round. Others have done the same, maybe even better. But sniping involves much more than pure marksmanship. Patience, stealth, and a talent for observation are important, too. Everyday psychology is a big part of it. How does a bad guy act? You study body language and behavior for clues to someone’s intent. It’s a subtle craft. At the end of the day, our snipers are often in the best position to carry out one of Skipper’s favorite expressions of our mission in Ramadi: “Rehab who you can; kill those who have forfeited their time on the planet.”