Runaway Shows His Colors

Not long afterward, a guy I’ll call Runaway and I were on the street when we had contact with Iraqi insurgents. We ducked into a shallow setback in the wall next to the street, waiting for the hail of bullets to die down.

“We’ll work our way back,” I told Runaway. “You go first. I’ll cover you.”

“Good.”

I leaned out and laid down cover fire, forcing the Iraqis back. I waited a few seconds, giving Runaway time to get into position so he could cover me. When I thought enough time had passed, I jumped out and started running.

Bullets began flying all around, but not from Runaway. They were all coming from the Iraqis, who were trying to write their names in my back with bullets.

I threw myself against the wall, sliding next to the gate. For a moment I was disoriented: where was Runaway?

He should have been nearby, waiting under cover for me so we could leapfrog back. But he was nowhere to be seen. Had I passed him on the street?

No. Motherfucker was busy earning his nickname.

I was trapped, hung up by the insurgents and without my mysteriously disappearing friend.

The Iraqi gunfire got so intense that I ended up having to call for backup. The Marines sent a pair of Hummers, and with their firepower backing up everything I could lay down, I was finally able to get out.

By then I’d figured out what had happened. When I met with Runaway a short time later, I practically strangled him—I probably would have, if it hadn’t been for the officer there.

“Why the hell did you run away?” I demanded. “You ran all the way down the block without covering me.”

“I thought you were following me.”

“Bullshit.”

It was the second time that week Runaway had taken off on me under fire. The first time I’d cut him slack, giving him the benefit of the doubt. But it was now clear he was a coward. Once he was under fire, he just pussied out.

Command separated us. It was a wise thing to do.

“We’re Just Gonna Shoot”

A little after Runaway’s Exciting Adventure, I came down from my position on one of the roofs when I heard a shit-ton of rounds go off nearby. I ran outside but couldn’t see the firefight. Then I heard a radio call that there were men down.

A fellow I’ll call Eagle and I ran up the block until we came across a group of Marines who’d retreated after taking fire about a block away. They told us that a group of insurgents had pinned down some other Marines not too far away, and we decided we’d try and help them.

We tried getting an angle from a nearby house, but it wasn’t tall enough. Eagle and I moved closer, trying another house. Here we found four Marines on the roof, two of whom had been wounded. Their stories were confusing, and we couldn’t get shots from there, either. We decided to take them out so the wounded could be helped; the kid I carried down had been gut-shot.

Down on the street, we got better directions from the two Marines who hadn’t been shot, finally realizing that we had been targeting the wrong house. We started down an alley in the direction of the insurgents, but after a short distance we came to obstructions we couldn’t get around, and we reversed course. Just as I came around the corner back out onto the main street, there was an explosion behind me—an insurgent had seen us coming and tossed a grenade.

One of the Marines following me went down. Eagle was a corpsman as well as a sniper, and after we pulled the injured kid away from the alley he went to work on him. Meanwhile, I took the rest of the Marines and continued down the road in the direction of the insurgents’ stronghold.

We found a second group of Marines huddled at a nearby corner, pinned down by fire from the house. They’d set out to rescue the first group but stalled. I got everyone together and I told them that a small group of us would rush up the street while the others laid down fire. The trapped Marines were about fifty yards away, about one full block.

“It doesn’t matter if you can see them or not,” I told them. “We’re all just gonna shoot.”

I got up to start. A terrorist jumped out into the middle of the road and began unleashing hell on us, spitting bullets from a belt-fed weapon. Returning fire as best we could, we ducked back for cover. Everybody checked themselves for holes; miraculously, no one had been shot.

By now, somewhere between fifteen and twenty Marines were there with me.

“All right,” I told them. “We’re going to try this again. Let’s do it this time.”

I jumped out from around the corner, firing my weapon as I ran. The Iraqi machine gunner had been hit and killed by our earlier barrage, but there were still plenty of bad guys farther up the street.

I’d taken only a few steps when I realized that none of the Marines had followed me.

Shit. I kept running.

The insurgents began focusing their fire on me. I tucked my Mk-11 under my arm and fired back as I ran. The semiautomatic is a great, versatile weapon, but in this particular situation its twenty-round magazine seemed awful small. I blew through one mag, popped the release, slammed in a second, and kept firing.

I found four men huddled near a wall not far from the house. It turned out that two of them were reporters who’d been embedded with the Marines; they were getting a hell of a better view of the battle than they had bargained for.

“I’ll cover you,” I shouted. “Get the hell out of here.”

I jumped up and laid down fire as they ran. The final Marine tapped me on the shoulder as he passed, signaling that he was the last man out. Ready to follow, I glanced to my right, checking my flank.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a body sprawled on the ground. He had Marine camis.

Where he came from, whether he’d been there when I arrived or crawled there from somewhere else, I have no idea. I ran over to him, saw that he’d been shot in both legs. I slapped a new mag into my gun, then grabbed the back of his body armor and pulled him with me as I retreated.

At some point as I ran, one of the insurgents threw a frag. The grenade exploded somewhere nearby. Pieces of wall peppered my side, from my butt cheek down to my knee. By some lucky chance, my pistol took the biggest fragment. It was pure luck—it might have put a nice hole in my leg.

My butt was sore for a while, but it still seems to work well enough.

We made it back to the rest of the Marines without either of us getting hit again.

I never found out who that wounded guy was. I’ve been told he was a second lieutenant, but I never had a chance to track him down.

The other Marines said I saved his life. But it wasn’t just me. Getting all those guys to safety was a joint effort; we all worked together.

The Corps was grateful that I had helped rescue their people, and one of the officers put me in for a Silver Star.

According to the story I heard, the generals sitting at their desks decided that, since no Marines had gotten Silver Stars during the assault, they weren’t going to award one to a SEAL. I got a Bronze Star with a V (for valor in combat) instead.

Makes me smirk just to think about it.

Medals are all right, but they have a lot to do with politics, and I am not a fan of politics.

All told, I would end my career as a SEAL with two Silver Stars and five Bronze Medals, all for valor. I’m proud of my service, but I sure as hell didn’t do it for any medal. They don’t make me any better or less than any other guy who served. Medals never tell the whole story. And like I said, in the end they’ve become more political than accurate. I’ve seen men who deserved a lot more and men who deserved a lot less rewarded by higher-ups negotiating for whatever public cause they were working on at the time. For all these reasons, they are not on display at my house or in my office.

My wife is always encouraging me to organize or frame the paperwork on them and display the medals. Political or not, she still thinks they are part of the story of my service.

Maybe I’ll get around to it someday.

More likely, I won’t.

My uniform was covered with so much blood from the assault that the Marines got one of their own for me. From that point on, I looked like a Marine in digi cami.

It was a little weird to be wearing someone else’s uniform. But it was also an honor to be considered a member of the team to the point where they’d outfit me. Even better, they gave me a fleece jacket and a fleece beanie—it was cold out there.

Taya:

After one deployment, we were driving in the car and Chris said, just out of the blue, “Did you know there is a certain kind of smell when someone dies in a particular way?”

And I said, “No. I didn’t know that.”

And gradually I got the story.

It was suitably gruesome.

Stories would just come out. A lot of times, he said things to see what I could handle. I told him I really, truly did not care what he did in wartime. He had my unconditional support. Still, he needed to go slow, to test the waters. I think he needed to know I wouldn’t look at him differently, and perhaps more than that, he knew he would deploy again and he didn’t want to scare me.

As far as I can see it, anyone who has a problem with what guys do over there is incapable of empathy. People want America to have a certain image when we fight. Yet I would guess if someone were shooting at them and they had to hold their family members while they bled out against an enemy who hid behind their children, played dead only to throw a grenade as they got closer, and who had no qualms about sending their toddler to die from a grenade from which they personally pulled the pin—they would be less concerned with playing nicely.

Chris followed the ROEs because he had to. Some of the more broad-spectrum ROEs are fine. The problem with the ROEs covering minutiae is that terrorists really don’t give a shit about the Geneva Convention. So picking apart a soldier’s every move against a dark, twisted, rule-free enemy is more than ridiculous; it’s despicable.

I care about my husband and other Americans coming home alive. So other than being concerned for his safety, I truly wasn’t afraid to hear anything he wanted to share. Even before I heard the stories, I don’t think I was ever under illusions that war is pretty or nice.

When he told me the story about killing someone up close, all I thought was, Thank God he’s okay.

Then I thought, You’re kind of a bad-ass. Wow.

Mostly, we didn’t talk about killing, or the war. But then it would intrude.

Not always in a bad way: one day, Chris was getting his oil changed at a local shop. Some men were in the lobby with him. The guy behind the counter called Chris’s name. Chris paid his bill and sat back down.

One of the guys waiting for his own vehicle looked at him and said, “Are you Chris Kyle?”

And Chris said, “Yeah.”

“Were you in Fallujah?”

“Yeah.”

“Holy shit, you’re the guy who saved our ass.”

The guy’s father was there and he came over to thank Chris and shake his hand. They were all saying, “You were great. You got more kills than anyone.”

Chris got embarrassed and very humbly said, “Y’all saved my ass, too.”

And that was it.

PHOTOS

Stick ’em up, Yankee… Young hunters and their prey. My brother (left) is still one of my best friends. I’ve been a cowboy pretty much from birth. Look at those fine boots I wore as a four-year-old. Here I am in junior high, practicing with my Ithaca pump shotgun. Ironically, I’ve never been much of a shot with a scattergun. You’re not a real cowboy until you learn to lasso… And I eventually got to where I was halfway decent at it. It’s a rough way to make a living, but I’ll always be a cowboy at heart. All kitted up with my Mk-12 sniper rifle, the gun I was carrying when I rescued the trapped Marines and reporters in Fallujah. Fallujah in ’04. Here I am with my .300 WinMag and some of the snipers I worked with. One was a SEAL, the others were Marines. (You can tell their service by the camis.) The sniper hide we used when covering the Marines staging for the assault on Fallujah. Note the baby crib turned on its side. General Peter Pace, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, hands me the Grateful Nation Award from JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. JINSA gave me the award in 2005 in recognition of my service and achievements in Fallujah. Charlie Platoon of SEAL Team 3 during the Ramadi deployment. The only faces that are shown are Marc Lee’s (left), Ryan Job’s (middle), and mine (right). Marc Lee leading the platoon on patrol in Ramadi. With the help of the Marines, we were able to use the river to launch several ops against insurgents. We made our own logo, reminiscent of the Punisher character. We spray-painted it on our vests and much of our gear. Like him, we were righting wrongs. Photograph courtesy of 5.11 Here I am with the boys in ’06, just back from an op with my Mk-11 sniper rifle in my right hand. Set up on a roof in Ramadi. The tent provided me a bit of relief from the sun. Another sniping position I used in the same battle. We chose roofs in Ramadi that provided us with good vantage points. Sometimes, though, the job called for more than a sniper rifle—that black smoke in the background is an enemy position obliterated by a tank. Marc Lee. After Marc died, we created a patch to honor his memory. We will never forget. Ryan Job. A close-up of my Lapua .338, the gun I made my longest kill with. You can see my “dope” card—the placard on the side contains the come-ups (adjustments) needed for long-range targets. My 2,100-yard shot exceeded the card’s range, and I had to eyeball it. When not on the gun myself, I like to help others improve their skills. This was taken during my last deployment, while instructing a little class for some Army snipers. Leading a training session for Craft International, the company I started after leaving the Navy. We make our sessions as realistic as possible for the operators and law enforcement officers we teach. Photograph courtesy of 5.11 Here I am on a helo training course for Craft. I don’t mind helicopters—it’s heights I can’t stand. Photograph courtesy of 5.11 Our company logo and slogan (“Despite what your momma told you… violence does solve problems”) honor my SEAL brethren, especially my fallen comrades. I’ll never forget them. Me and Taya, the love of my life and better half. Photograph courtesy of Heather Hurt/Calluna Photography

My son and I check out a C-17.

DOWN IN THE SHIT

On the Street

The kid looked at me with a mixture of excitement and disbelief. He was a young Marine, eager but tempered by the fight we’d been waging the past week.

“Do you want to be a sniper?” I asked him. “Right now?”

“Hell yeah!” he said finally.

“Good,” I told him, handing over my Mk-11. “Give me your M-16. You take my sniper rifle. I’m going in the front door.”

And with that, I headed over to the squad we’d been working with and told them I was helping them hit the houses.

Over the past few days, the insurgents had stopped coming out to fight us. Our kill rate from the overwatches had declined. The bad guys were all staying inside, because they knew if they came outside, we were going to shoot them.

They didn’t give up. Instead, they would take their stands inside the houses, ambushing and battling the Marines in the small rooms and tiny hallways. I was seeing a lot of our guys being carried out and medevac’d.

I’d been turning the idea of going down on the street over in my head for a while, before finally deciding to go ahead with it. I picked out one of the privates who’d been helping the sniper team. He seemed like a good kid, with a lot of potential.

Part of the reason I went down on the streets was because I was bored. The bigger part was that I felt I could do a better job protecting the Marines if I was with them. They were going in the front door of these buildings and getting whacked. I’d watch as they went in, hear gunshots, and then the next thing I knew, they’d be hauling someone out in a stretcher because he just got shot up. It pissed me off.

I love the Marines, but the truth is these guys had never been taught to do room clearances like I had. It’s not a Marine specialty. They were all tough fighters, but they had a lot to learn about urban warfare. Much was simple stuff: how to hold your rifle as you come into a room so it’s hard for someone else to grab; where to move as you enter the room; how to fight 360 degrees in a city—things that SEALs learn so well we can do them in our sleep.

The squad didn’t have an officer; the highest-ranking NCO was a staff sergeant, an E6 in the Marine Corps. I was an E5, junior to him, but he didn’t have a problem letting me take control of the takedowns. We’d already been working together for a while, and I think I’d won a certain amount of respect. Plus, he didn’t want his guys getting shot up, either.

“Look, I’m a SEAL, you’re Marines,” I told the boys. “I’m no better than you are. The only difference between you and me is I’ve spent more time specializing and training in this than you did. Let me help you.”

We trained a little bit during the break. I gave some of my explosives to one of the squad members with experience in explosives. We did a little run-through on how to blow locks off. Until that point, they’d had such a small amount of explosives that they’d mostly been knocking the doors in, which, of course, took time and made them more vulnerable.

Break time over, we started going in.

Inside

I took the lead.

Waiting outside the first house, I thought about the guys I saw being pulled out.

I did not want to be one of them.

I could be, though.

It was hard to get that idea out of my mind. I also knew that I would be in a shitload of trouble if I did get hurt—going down on the streets was not what I was supposed to be doing, at least from an official point of view. It was definitely right—what I felt I had to do—but it would severely piss the top brass off.

But that would be the least of my problems if I got shot, wouldn’t it?

“Let’s do it,” I said.

We blew the door open. I led the way, training and instincts taking over. I cleared the front room, stepped to the side, and started directing traffic. The pace was quick, automatic. Once things got started and I began to move into the house, something took over inside me. I didn’t worry about casualties anymore. I didn’t think about anything except the door, the house, the room—all of which was plenty enough.

Going into a house, you never knew what you were going to find. Even if you cleared the rooms on the first floor without any trouble, you couldn’t take the rest of the house for granted. Going up to the second floor, you might start to get a feeling that the rooms were empty or that you weren’t going to have any problems up there, but that was a dangerous feeling. You never really know what’s anywhere. Each room had to be cleared, and even then, you had to be on your guard. Plenty of times after we secured a house we took rounds and grenades from outside.

During our breaks, I would take the Marines out and go through some drills with them. While other units were taking their lunch, I was teaching them everything I’d learned about room clearance.

“Look, I don’t want to lose a guy!” I yelled at them. I wasn’t about to get an argument there. I ran them around, busting their asses while they were supposed to be resting. But that’s the thing with Marines—you beat them down and they come back for more.

We broke into one house with a large front room. We’d caught the inhabitants completely by surprise.

But I was surprised as well—as I burst in, I saw a whole bunch of guys standing there in desert camouflage—the old brown chocolate-chip stuff from Desert Storm, the First Gulf War. They were all wearing gear. They were all Caucasian, including one or two with blond hair, obviously not Iraqis or Arabs.

What the fuck?

We looked at each other. Something flicked in my brain, and I flicked the trigger on the M-16, mowing them down.

A half-second’s more hesitation, and I would have been the one bleeding out on the floor. They turned out to be Chechens, Muslims apparently recruited for a holy war against the West. (We found their passports after searching the house.)

Old Man

I have no idea how many blocks, let alone how many houses, we took down. The Marines were following a carefully laid out plan—we had to be at a certain spot each lunchtime, then reach another objective by nightfall. The entire invasion force moved across the city in choreographed order, making sure there were no holes or weak spots the insurgents could use to get behind us and attack.

Every once in a while, we’d come across a building still occupied by families, but for the most part, the only people we were seeing were insurgents.

We would do a full search of each house. In this one house, we heard faint moans as we went down into the basement. There were two men hanging from chains on the wall. One was dead; the other barely there. Both had been severely tortured with electric shock and God knows what else. They were both Iraqi, apparently mentally retarded—the insurgents had wanted to make sure they wouldn’t talk to us, but decided to have a little fun with them first.

The second man died while our corpsman worked on him.

There was a black banner on the floor, the kind the fanatics liked to show on their videos when beheading Westerners. There were amputated limbs, and more blood than you can imagine.

It was a nasty-smelling place.

After a couple of days, one of the Marine snipers decided to come down with me, and both of us started leading the DAs.

We would take a house on the right side of the street, then cross to the left and take the house across the way. Back and forth, back and forth. All of this took a lot of time. We’d have to go around the gates, get to the doors, blow up the doors, rush in. The scum inside had plenty of time to get prepared. Not to mention the fact that even with what I’d contributed, we were running out of explosives.

A Marine armored vehicle was working with us, moving down the center of the street as we went. It only had a .50-cal for a weapon, but its real asset was its size. No Iraqi wall could stand up to it once it got a head of steam.

I went over to the commander.

“Look, here’s what I want you to do,” I told him. “We’re running out of explosives. Run through the wall in front of the house and put about five rounds of .50-cal through the front door. Then back up and we’ll take it from there.”

So we started doing it that way, saving explosives and moving much faster.

Pounding up and down the stairs, running to the roof, coming back down, hitting the next house—we got to where we were taking from fifty to one hundred houses a day.

The Marines were hardly winded, but I lost over twenty pounds in those six or so weeks I was in Fallujah. Most of it I sweated off on the ground. It was exhausting work.

The Marines were all a lot younger than me—practically teenagers, some of them. I guess I still had a bit of a baby face, because when we’d get to talking, and for some reason or another I’d tell them how old I was, they’d stare at me and say, “You’re that old?”

I was thirty. An old man in Fallujah.

Just Another Day

As the Marine drive neared the southern edge of the city, the ground action in our section started to peter out. I went back up on the roofs and started doing overwatches again, thinking I would catch more targets from there. The tide of the battle had turned. The U.S. had mostly wrested control of the city from the bad guys, and it was now just a matter of time before resistance collapsed. But being in the middle of the action, I couldn’t tell for sure.

Knowing that we considered cemeteries sacred, the insurgents typically used them to hide caches of weapons and explosives. At one point, we were in a hide overlooking the walled-in boundaries of a large cemetery that sat in the middle of the city. Roughly three football fields long by two football fields wide, it was a cement city of the dead, filled with tombstones and mausoleums. We set up on a roof near a prayer tower and mosque overlooking the cemetery.

The roof we were on was fairly elaborate. It was ringed with a brick wall punctuated with iron grates, giving us excellent firing positions; I sat down on my haunches and spotted in my rifle through a gap in the grid work, studying the paths between the stones a few hundred yards out. There was so much dust and grit in the air, I kept my goggles on. I’d also learned in Fallujah to keep my helmet cinched tight, wary of the chips and cement frags that flew from the battered masonry during a firefight.

I picked out some figures moving through the cemetery yard. I zeroed in on one and fired.

Within seconds, we were fully engaged in a firefight. Insurgents kept popping up from behind the stones—I don’t know if there was a tunnel or where they came from. Brass flew from the 60 nearby.

I studied my shots as the Marines around me poured out fire. Everything they did faded into the background as I carefully put my scope on a target, steadied the aim on center mass, then squeezed ever so smoothly. When the bullet leapt from the barrel, it was almost a surprise.

My target fell. I looked for another. And another. And on it went.

Until, finally, there were no more. I got up and moved a few feet to a spot where the wall completely shielded me from the cemetery. There I took my helmet off and leaned back against the wall. The roof was littered with spent shells—hundreds if not thousands.

Someone shared a large plastic bottle of water. One of the Marines pulled his ruck over and used it as a pillow, catching some sleep. Another went downstairs, to the store on the first story of the building. It was a smoke shop; he returned with cartons of flavored cigarettes. He lit a few, and a cherry scent mingled with the heavy stench that always hung over Iraq, a smell of sewage and sweat and death.

Just another day in Fallujah.

The streets were covered with splinters and various debris. The city, never exactly a showcase, was a wreck. Squashed water bottles sat in the middle of the road next to piles of wood and twisted metal. We worked on one block of three-story buildings where the bottom level was filled with shops. Each of their awnings were covered with a thick layer of dust and grit, turning the bright colors of the fabric into a hazy blur. Metal shields blocked most of the storefronts; they were pockmarked with shrapnel chips. A few had handbills showing insurgents wanted by the legitimate government.

I have a few photos from that time. Even in the most ordinary and least dramatic scenes, the effects of war are obvious. Every so often, there’s a sign of normal life before the war, something that has nothing to do with it: a kid’s toy, for example.

War and peace don’t seem to go together right.

Date: 2016-01-03; view: 574