DAs, Helos, and Heights

With Baghdad settling down, at least for the moment, the head shed decided they wanted to open up a SEAL base in Habbaniyah.

Habbaniyah is twelve miles to the east of Fallujah, in Anabar Province. It wasn’t quite the hotbed of the insurgency that Fallujah had been, but it wasn’t San Diego, either. This is the area where before the First Gulf War, Saddam built chemical plants devoted to manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, such as nerve gas and other chemical agents. There weren’t a lot of America supporters out there.

There was a U.S. Army base though, run by the famous 506th Regiment—the Band of Brothers. They’d just come over from Korea and, to be polite, had no fucking clue what Iraq was all about. I suppose everybody’s gotta learn the hard way.

Habbaniyah turned out to be a real pain in the ass. We’d been given an abandoned building, but it was nowhere near adequate for what we needed. We had to build a TOC—a tactical operations command—to house all the computers and com gear that helped support us during our missions.

Our morale sunk. We weren’t doing anything useful for the war; we were working as carpenters. It’s an honorable profession, but it’s not ours.

Taya:

It was on this deployment that the medical doctors did a test and, for some reason, thought Chris had TB. The doctors told him he would eventually die of the disease.

I remember talking to him right after he got the news. He was fatalistic about it. He’d already accepted that he was going to die, and he wanted to do it there, not at home from a disease he couldn’t fight with a gun or his fists.

“It doesn’t matter,” he told me. “I’ll die and you’ll find someone else. People die out here all the time. Their wives go on and find someone else.”

I tried to explain to him that he was irreplaceable to me. When that didn’t seem to faze him, I tried another equally valid point. “But you’ve got our son,” I told him.

“So what? You’ll find someone else and that guy will raise him.”

I think he was seeing death so often that he started to believe people were replaceable.

It broke my heart. He truly believed that. I still hate to think that.

He thought dying on the battlefield was the greatest. I tried to tell him differently, but he didn’t believe it.

They redid the tests, and Chris was cleared. But his attitude about death stayed.

Once the camp was settled, we started doing DAs. We’d be given the name and location of a suspected insurgent, hit his house at night, then come back and deposit him and whatever evidence we gathered at the DIF—Detention and Interrogation Facility, your basic jail.

We’d take pictures along the way. We weren’t sightseeing; we were covering our butts, and, more important, those of our commanders. The pictures proved we hadn’t beaten the crap out of him.

Most of these ops were routine, without much trouble and almost never any resistance. One night, though, one of our guys went into a house where a rather portly Iraqi decided he didn’t want to come along nicely. He started to tussle.

Now, from our perspective, our brother SEAL was getting the shit kicked out of him. According to the SEAL in question, he had actually slipped and was in no need of assistance.

I guess you can interpret it any way you want. We all rushed in and grabbed the fatso before he could do much harm. Our friend got ribbed about his “fall” for a while.

On most of these missions, we had photos of the person we were supposed to get. In that case, the rest of the intelligence tended to be pretty accurate. The guy was almost always where he was supposed to be, and things pretty much followed the outline we had drawn up.

But some cases didn’t go so smoothly. We began realizing that if we didn’t have a photo, the intelligence was suspect. Knowing that the Americans would bring a suspect in, people were using tips to settle grievances or feuds. They’d talk to the Army or some other authority, making claims about a person helping the insurgency or committing some other crime.

It sucked for the person we arrested, but I didn’t get all that worked up about it. It was just one more example of how screwed up the country was.

Second-guessed

One day, the Army asked for a sniper overwatch for a 506th convoy that was coming into base.

I went out with a small team and we took down a three- or four-story building. I set up in the top floor and started watching the area. Pretty soon the convoy headed down the road. As I was watching the area, a man came out of a building near the road and began maneuvering in the direction the convoy was going to take. He had an AK.

I shot him. He went down.

The convoy continued through. A bunch of other Iraqis came out and gathered around the guy I’d shot, but nobody that I could see made any threatening motions toward the convoy or looked to be in a position to attack it, so I didn’t fire.

A few minutes later, I heard on the radio that the Army is sending a unit out to investigate why I shot him.

Huh?

I had already told the Army command on the radio what had happened, but I got back on the radio and repeated it. I was surprised—they didn’t believe me.

A tank commander came out and interviewed the dead man’s wife. She told them her husband was on his way to the mosque carrying a Koran.

Uh-huh. The story was ridiculous, but the officer—whom, I’m guessing, hadn’t been in Iraq very long—didn’t believe me. The soldiers began to look around for the rifle, but by that time so many people had been in the area that it was long gone.

The tank commander pointed out my position. “Did it come from there?”

“Yes, yes,” said the woman, who, of course, had no idea where the shot had come from, since she hadn’t been anywhere nearby. “I know he’s Army, because he’s wearing an Army uniform.”

Now, I was two rooms deep, with a screen in front of me, wearing a gray jacket over my SEAL camis. Maybe she hallucinated in her grief, or maybe she just said whatever she thought would give me grief.

We were recalled to base and the entire platoon put on stand-down. I was told I was not “operationally available”—I was confined to base while the 506th investigated the incident further.

The colonel wanted to interview me. My officer came with me.

We were all pissed. The ROEs had been followed; I had plenty of witnesses. It was the Army “investigators” who had screwed up.

I had trouble holding my tongue. At one point, I told the Army colonel, “I don’t shoot people with Korans—I’d like to, but I don’t.” I guess I was a little hot.

Well, after three days and God only knows how much other “investigation,” he finally realized that it had been a good kill and dropped the matter. But when the regiment asked for more overwatches, we told them to fuck off.

“Any time I shoot someone, you’re just going to try and have me executed,” I said. “No way.”

We were heading home in two weeks anyway. Aside from a few more DAs, I spent most of that time playing video games, watching porn, and working out.

I finished that deployment with a substantial number of confirmed sniper kills. Most happened in Fallujah.

Carlos Norman Hathcock II, the most famous member of the sniping profession, a true legend and a man whom I look up to, tallied ninety-three confirmed kills during his three years of tours in the Vietnam War.

I’m not saying I was in his class—in my mind, he was and always will be the greatest sniper ever—but in sheer numbers, at least, I was close enough for people to start thinking I’d done a hell of a job.

FAMILY CONFLICTS

Taya:

We went out to the tarmac to wait for the plane when it came in. There were a few wives and children. I came out with our baby and I felt so excited. I was over the moon.

I remember turning to one of the women I was with and saying, “Isn’t this great? Isn’t this exciting? I can’t stand it.”

She said, “Ehhh.”

I thought to myself, well, maybe I’m still new to it.

Later on, she and her husband, a SEAL in Chris’s platoon, got divorced.

Bonding

I’d left the States some seven months before, only ten days after my son was born. I loved him, but as I mentioned earlier, we hadn’t really had a chance to bond. Newborns are just a bundle of needs—feed them, clean them, get them to rest. Now he had a personality. He was crawling. He was more of a person. I’d seen him growing up in the photos Taya had sent me, but this was more intense.

He was my son.

We’d lie on the floor in our pajamas and play together. He’d crawl all over me and I’d boost him up and carry him all around. Even the simplest things—like him touching my face—were a joy.

But the transition from war to home was still a shock. One day, we’d been fighting. The next, we’d crossed the river to al-Taqaddum Airbase (known to us as TQ) and started back for the States.

War one day; peace the next.

Every time you come home, it’s weird. Especially in California. The simplest things can upset you. Take traffic. You’re driving on the road, everything’s crowded, it’s craziness. You’re still thinking IEDs—you see a piece of trash and you swerve. You drive aggressively toward other drivers, because that’s the way you do it in Iraq.

I would shut myself in for about a week. I think that’s where Taya and I started having problems.

Being parents for the first time, we had the disagreements everyone has about children. Co-sleeping, for instance—Taya had my son sleep with her in a co-sleeper in the bed while I was gone. When I came home, I wanted to change that. We disagreed quite a bit on that. I thought he should be in his own crib in his own room. Taya saw it as depriving her of her closeness with him. She thought we should transition him gradually.

That wasn’t how I saw it at all. I felt children should sleep in their own beds and rooms.

I know now that issues like that are common, but there was added stress. She’d been raising him completely on her own for months now, and I was intruding on her routines and ways of doing things. They were incredibly close, which I thought was great. But I wanted to be with them, too. I wasn’t trying to come between them, just add myself back into the family.

As it happened, none of that was a big deal for my son; he slept just fine. And he still has a very special relationship with his mom.

Life at home had its interesting moments, though the drama was very different. Our neighbors and close friends were completely respectful of my need for time to decompress. Once that was over, they put together a little welcome-home barbecue.

They’d all been great while I was gone. The people across the street arranged to have someone cut our grass, which was huge to us financially and helped Taya with the heavy load she carried while I was gone. It seemed like a little thing, but it was big to me.

Now that I was home, of course, it was my job to take care of things like that. We had a small, itty-bitty backyard; it took all of five minutes to cut the grass back there. But on one side of the yard were climbing roses that climbed up these potato bush trees we had. The bushes had little purple flowers on them year-round.

The combination looked really pretty. But the roses had thorns in them that could pierce an armored vest. Every time I’d mow the yard and come around the corner, I’d get snagged by them.

One day, those roses just went too far, tearing at my side. I decided to take care of them once and for all: I picked up my lawnmower, held it up about chest-high, and trimmed the mothers (the roses and the trees) down.

“What! Are you kidding me?” yelled Taya. “Are you trimming the bushes with a lawnmower?”

Hey, it worked. They never snagged me again.

I did do some genuinely goofy stuff. Having fun and making other people smile and laugh has always been something I like to do. One day, I saw our backyard neighbor through our kitchen window, so I stood on a chair and knocked on the window to get her attention. I proceeded to moon her. (Her husband happened to be a Navy pilot, so I’m sure she was familiar with such things.)

Taya rolled her eyes. She was amused, I think, though she wouldn’t admit it.

“Who does that?” she said to me.

“She laughed, didn’t she?” I said.

“You are thirty years old,” she said. “Who does that?”

There’s a side of me that loves to pull pranks on people, to get them to laugh. You can’t just do regular stuff—I want them to have a good time. Belly laughs. The more extreme the better. April Fools’ Day is a particularly tough time for my family and friends, though more because of Taya’s pranks than my own. I guess we both like to have a good laugh.

On the darker side, I was extremely hot-headed. I have always had a temper, even before becoming a SEAL. But it was more explosive now. If someone cut me off—not a very rare occurrence in California—I could get crazy. I might try and run them off the road, or even stop and whup their ass.

I had to work at calming down.

Of course, having a reputation as a SEAL does have its advantages.

At my sister-in-law’s wedding, the preacher and I got to talking. At some point, she—the preacher was a lady—noticed a bulge in my jacket.

“You have a gun?” she asked.

“Yes, I do,” I said, explaining that I was in the military.

She may or may not have known that I was a SEAL—I didn’t tell her, but word tends to get around—but when she was ready to start the ceremony and couldn’t get anyone in the crowd to be quiet and get into place, she came over to me, patted me on the back, and said, “Can you get everyone to sit down?”

“Yes, I can,” I told her.

I barely had to raise my voice to get that little ceremony going.

Taya:

People talk about physical love and need when someone comes home from a long absence: “I want to rip your clothes off.” That sort of thing.

I felt that way in theory, but the reality was always a little different.

I needed to get to know him again. It was strange. There’s so much anticipation. You miss them so much when they deploy, and you want them to be home, but then when they are, things aren’t perfect. And you feel as if they should be. Depending on the deployment and what I’d been through, I also had emotions ranging from sadness to anxiety to anger.

When he came back after this deployment, I felt almost shy. I was a new mother and had been doing things on my own for months. We were both changing and growing in totally separate worlds. He had no firsthand knowledge of mine and I had no firsthand knowledge of his.

I also felt bad for Chris. He was wondering what was wrong. There was distance between us that neither one of us could really fix, or even talk about.

Date: 2016-01-03; view: 524