Getting Ready to Go

While I was home, Taya became pregnant with our second child. Again, that was a lot of strain for my wife.

My father told Taya that he was sure once I saw my son and spent time with him, I wouldn’t want to reenlist or go back to war.

But while we talked a lot about it, in the end I didn’t feel there was much of a question about what to do. I was a SEAL. I was trained for war. I was made for it. My country was at war and it needed me.

And I missed it. I missed the excitement and the thrill. I loved killing bad guys.

“If you die, it will wreck all our lives,” Taya told me. “It pisses me off that you would not only willingly risk your life, but risk ours, too.”

For the moment, we agreed to disagree.

As it came up to the time to deploy, our relationship became more distant. Taya would push me away emotionally, as if she were putting on armor for the coming months. I may have done the same thing.

“It’s not intentional,” she told me, in one of the rare moments when we both could realize what was happening and actually talk about it.

We still loved each other. It may sound strange—we were close and not close, needing each other and yet needing distance between us. Needing to do other things. At least in my case.

I was anticipating leaving. I was excited about doing my job again.

Giving Birth

A few days before we were scheduled to deploy, I went to the doctor to see about getting a cyst in my neck removed. Inside his examining room, he numbed the area around it with a local anesthesia, then they stuck a needle in my neck to suction the material out.

I think. I don’t actually know, because as soon as the needle went in, I passed out with a seizure. When I came to, I was out flat on the examining table, my feet where my head should have been.

I had no other ill effects, not from the seizure or the procedure. No one really could figure out why I’d reacted the way I did. As far as anyone could tell, I was fine.

But there was a problem—a seizure is grounds for being medically discharged from the Navy. Luckily, there was a corpsman whom I’d served with in the room. He persuaded the doctor not to include the seizure in his report, or to write what happened in a way that wouldn’t affect my deployment or my career. (I’m not sure which.) I never heard anything about it again.

But what the seizure did do was keep me from getting to Taya. While I’d been passing out, she had been having a routine pregnancy checkup. It was about three weeks before our daughter was due and days before I was supposed to deploy. The checkup included an ultrasound, and when the technician looked away from the screen, my wife realized something was wrong.

“I have a feeling you’re having this baby right away,” was the most the technician would say before getting up and fetching the doctor.

The baby had her umbilical cord around her neck. She was also breached and the amount of amniotic fluid—liquid that nourishes and protects the developing infant—was low.

“We’ll do a C-section,” said the doc. “Don’t worry. We’ll get this baby out tomorrow. You’ll be fine.”

Taya had called me several times. By the time I came to, she was already at the hospital.

We spent a nervous night together. The next morning, the doctors performed a C-section. As they were working, they hit some kind of artery and splashed blood all over the place. I was deathly afraid for my wife. I felt real fear. Worse.

Maybe it was a touch of what she’d gone through every moment of my deployment. It was a terrible hopelessness and despair.

A hard thing to admit, let alone stomach.

Our daughter was fine. I took her and held her. I’d been as distant toward her as I had been toward our son before he was born; now, holding her, I started to feel real warmth and love.

Taya looked at me strangely when I tried to hand her the baby.

“Don’t you want to hold her?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

God, I thought, she’s rejecting our daughter. I have to leave and she’s not even bonding.

A few moments later, Taya reached out and took her.

Thank God.

Two days later, I deployed.

THE PUNISHERS

“I’m Here to Get Those Mortars”

You would think an army planning a major offensive would have a way to get its warriors right to the battle area.

You would think wrong.

Because of the medical situation with the cyst and then my daughter’s birth, I ended up leaving the States about a week behind the rest of my platoon. By the time I landed in Baghdad in April 2006, my platoon had been sent west to the area of Ramadi. No one in Baghdad seemed to know how to get me out there. It was up to me to get over to my boys.

A direct flight to Ramadi was impossible—things were too hot there. So I had to cobble together my own solution. I came across an Army Ranger who was also heading for Ramadi. We hooked up, pooling our creative resources as we looked for a ride at Baghdad International Airport.

At some point, I overheard an officer talking about problems the Army was having with some insurgent mortarmen at a base to the west. By coincidence, we heard about a flight heading to that same base; the Ranger and I headed over to try to get onto the helicopter.

A colonel stopped as we were about to board.

“Helicopter’s full,” he barked at the Ranger. “Why do you need to be on it?”

“Well, sir, we’re the snipers coming to take care of your mortar problem,” I told him, holding up my gun case.

“Oh yes!” the colonel yelled to the crew. “These boys need to be on the very next flight. Get them right on.”

We hopped aboard, bumping two of his guys in the process.

By the time we got to the base, the mortars had been taken care of. We still had a problem, though—there were no flights heading for Ramadi, and the prospects of a convoy were slimmer than the chance of seeing snow in Dallas in July.

But I had an idea. I led the Ranger to the base hospital, and found a corpsman. I’ve worked with a number as a SEAL, and in my experience, the Navy medics always know their way around problems.

I took a SEAL challenge coin out of my pocket and slipped it into my hand, exchanging it when we shook. (Challenge coins are special tokens that are created to honor members of a unit for bravery or other special achievements. A SEAL challenge coin is especially valued, both for its rarity and symbolism. Slipping it to someone in the Navy is like giving him a secret handshake.)

“Listen,” I told the corpsman. “I need a serious favor. I’m a SEAL, a sniper. My unit is in Ramadi. I got to get there, and he’s coming with me.” I gestured to the Ranger.

“Okay,” said the corpsman, his voice almost a whisper. “Come into my office.”

We went into his office. He took out a rubber stamp, inked our hands, then wrote something next to the mark.

It was a triage code.

The corpsman medevac’d us into Ramadi. We were the first, and probably only, people to be medevac’d into a battle rather than out of it.

And I thought only SEALs could be that creative.

I have no idea why that worked, but it did. No one on the chopper we were hustled into questioned the direction of our flight, let alone the nature of our “wounds.”

Shark Base

Ramadi was in al-Anbar, the same province as Fallujah, about thirty miles farther west. Many of the insurgents who’d been run out of Fallujah were said to have holed up there. There was plenty of evidence: attacks had ratcheted up ever since Fallujah had been pacified. By 2006, Ramadi was considered the most dangerous city in Iraq—a hell of a distinction.

My platoon had been sent to Camp Ramadi, a U.S. base along the Euphrates River outside the city. Our compound, named Shark Base, had been set up by an earlier task unit and was just outside the wire of Camp Ramadi.

When I finally arrived, my boys had been sent to work east of Ramadi. Arranging transportation through the city was impossible. I was pissed—I thought I’d gotten there too late to join in the action.

Looking for something to do until I could figure out how to get with the rest of the platoon, I asked my command if I could sit out on the guard towers. Insurgents had been testing the perimeters, sneaking as close as they dared and spraying the base with their AKs.

“Sure, go ahead,” they told me.

I went out and took my sniper rifle. Almost as soon as I got into position, I saw two guys skirting around in the distance, looking for a spot to shoot from.

I waited until they popped up behind cover.

Bang.

I got the first one. His friend turned around and started to run.

Bang.

Got him, too.

Seven Story

I was still waiting for a chance to join the rest of my platoon when the Marine unit at the northern end of the city put in a request for snipers to help with an overwatch from a seven-story building near their outpost.

The head shed asked me to come up with a team. There were only two other snipers at the base. One was recovering from wounds and looped out on morphine; the other was a chief who appeared reluctant to go.

I asked for the guy who was on morphine; I got the chief.

We found two 60 gunners, including Ryan Job, to provide a little muscle, and with an officer headed out to help the Marines.

Seven Story was a tall, battered building about two hundred yards outside the Marine outpost. Made of tan-colored cement and located near what had been a major road before the war, it looked almost like a modern office building, or would have if it weren’t for the missing windows and huge holes where it had been hit by rockets and shells. It was the tallest thing around and had a perfect vantage into the city.

We went out in early evening with several Marines and local jundis for security. The jundis were loyal Iraqi militia or soldiers who were being trained; there were a number of different groups, each with its own level of expertise and efficiency—or, most often, the opposite of both.

While there was still light, we got a few shots here and there, all on isolated insurgents. The area around the building was pretty rundown, a whitewashed wall with a fancy iron gate separating one sand-strewn empty lot from another.

Night fell, and suddenly we were in the middle of a flood of bad guys. They were on their way to assault the Marine outpost and we just happened to be along the route. There were a ton of them.

At first, they didn’t realize we were there, and it was open season. Then, I saw three guys with RPGs taking aim at us from about a block away. I shot each of them in succession, saving us the hassle of ducking from their grenades.

The firefight quickly shifted our way. The Marines called us over the radio and told us to collapse back to them.

Their outpost was a few hundred treacherous yards away. While one of the 60 gunners, my officer, and I provided cover fire, the rest of our group went downstairs and moved over to the Marine base. Things got hot so fast that by the time they were clear we were surrounded. We stayed where we were.

Ryan realized our predicament as soon as he arrived at the Marine outpost. He and the chief got into an argument over whether to provide cover for us. The chief claimed that their job was to stay with the Iraqi jundis, who were already hunkered down inside the Marine camp. The chief ordered him to stay; Ryan told him what he could do with that order.

Ryan ran upstairs on the roof of the Marine building, where he joined the Marines trying to lay down support fire for us as we fought off the insurgents.

The Marines sent a patrol over to pull us out. As I watched them coming from the post, I spotted an insurgent moving in behind them.

I fired once. The Marine patrol hit the dirt. So did the Iraqi, though he didn’t get up.

“There’s [an insurgent] sniper out there and he’s good,” their radio man called. “He nearly got us.”

I got on my radio.

“That’s me, dumbass. Look behind you.”

They turned around and saw a savage with a rocket launcher lying dead on the ground.

“God, thank you,” answered the Marine.

“Don’t mention it.”

The Iraqis did have snipers working that night. I got two of them—one who was up on the minaret of a mosque, and another on a nearby building. This was a fairly well-coordinated fight, one of the better-organized ones we would encounter in the area. It was unusual, because it took place at night; the bad guys generally didn’t try and press their luck in the dark.

Finally, the sun came up and the gunfire slacked down. The Marines pulled out a bunch of armored vehicles to cover for us, and we ran back to their camp.

I went up to see their commander and brief him on what had happened. I had barely gotten a sentence out of my mouth when a burly Marine officer burst into the office.

“Who the hell was the sniper up there on Seven Story?” he barked.

I turned around and told him it was me, bracing myself to be chewed out for some unknown offense.

“I want to shake your hand, son,” he said, pulling off his glove. “You saved my life.”

He was the guy I’d called a dumbass on the radio earlier. I’ve never seen a more grateful Marine.

“The Legend”

My boys returned from their adventures out east soon afterward. They greeted me with their usual warmth.

“Oh, we know the Legend’s here,” they said as soon as they saw me. “All of a sudden we hear there’s two kills at Camp Ramadi. People are dying up north. We knew the Legend was here. You’re the only motherfucker who’s ever killed anyone out there.”

I laughed.

The nickname “the Legend” had started back in Fallujah, around the time of the beach ball incident, or maybe when I got that really long shot. Before that, my nickname had been Tex.

Of course, it wasn’t just “Legend.” There was more than a little mocking that went with it—THE LEGEND. One of my guys—Dauber, I think it was, even turned it all around and called me THE MYTH, cutting me down to size.

It was all good-natured, in a way more of an honor than a full-uniform medal ceremony.

I really liked Dauber. Even though he was a new guy, he was a sniper, and a pretty good one. He could hold his own in a firefight—and trading insults. I had a real soft spot for him, and when it came time to haze him, I didn’t hit him… much.

Even if the guys joked about it, Legend was one of the better nicknames you could get. Take Dauber. That’s not his real name (at the moment, he’s doing what we’ll call “government work”). The nickname came from a character in the television series Coach. There, Dauber was the typical dumb-jock type. In real life, he’s actually an intelligent guy, but that fact was of no consideration in his getting named.

But one of the best nicknames was Ryan Job’s: Biggles.

It was a big, goofy name for a big, goofy guy. Dauber takes credit for it—the word, he claims, was a combination of “big” and “giggles” that had been invented for one of his relatives.

He mentioned it one day, applying it to Ryan. Someone else on the team used it, and within seconds, it had stuck.

Biggles.

Ryan hated it, naturally, which certainly helped it stick.

Along the way, someone later found a little purple hippo. Of course, it had to go to the guy who had the hippo face. And Ryan became Biggles the Desert Hippo.

Ryan being Ryan, he turned it all around. It wasn’t a joke on him; it was his joke. Biggles the Desert Hippo, best 60 gunner on the planet.

He carried that hippo everywhere, even into battle. You just had to love the guy.

The Punishers

Our platoon had its own nickname, one that went beyond Cadillac.

We called ourselves the Punishers.

For those of you who are not familiar with the character, the Punisher debuted in a Marvel comic book series in the 1970s. He’s a real bad-ass who rights wrongs, delivering vigilante justice. A movie by the same name had just come out; the Punisher wore a shirt with a stylized white skull.

Our comms guy suggested it before the deployment. We all thought what the Punisher did was cool: He righted wrongs. He killed bad guys. He made wrongdoers fear him.

That’s what we were all about. So we adapted his symbol—a skull—and made it our own, with some modifications. We spray-painted it on our Hummers and body armor, and our helmets and all our guns. And we spray-painted it on every building or wall we could. We wanted people to know, We’re here and we want to fuck with you.

It was our version of psyops.

You see us? We’re the people kicking your ass. Fear us. Because we will kill you, motherfucker.

You are bad. We are badder. We are bad-ass.

Our sister platoon wanted to use the template we used to mark our gear, but we wouldn’t let them. We told them we were the Punishers. They had to get their own symbol.

We went a bit light with our Hummers. They were named, mostly, for G.I. Joe characters, like Duke and Snake Eyes. Just because war is hell doesn’t mean you can’t have a little fun.

We had a good team that deployment, starting at the top. Decent officers, and a really excellent chief named Tony.

Tony had trained as a sniper. He was not only a bad-ass, he was an old bad-ass, at least for a SEAL—rumor has it he was forty that deployment.

SEALs usually do not make it to forty and stay out in the field. We’re too beat-up. But Tony somehow managed it. He was a hard-core son of a bitch, and we would have followed him to hell and back.

I was the point man—snipers usually are—when we went on patrols. Tony was almost always right behind me. Generally, the chief will be toward the rear of the formation, covering everybody else’s ass, but in this case our LT reasoned that having two snipers at the head of the platoon was more effective.

One night soon after the entire platoon had gotten back together, we traveled about seventeen kilometers east of Ramadi. The area was green and fertile—so much so that it looked to us like the Vietnamese jungle, compared to the desert we’d been operating in. We called it Viet Ram.

One night not long after the unit reunited, we were deposited at a patrol area and began walking toward a suspected insurgent stronghold on foot. Eventually, we came to a huge ditch with a bridge going across it. Most of the time, these bridges were booby-trapped, and in this case we had intel indicating this one definitely was. So I went up and stood there, shining my laser to look for a trip wire.

I played the light across the top of the bridge but saw nothing. I ducked a little lower and tried again. Still nothing. I looked everywhere I could think of, but found no contact wires, no IEDs, no booby-traps, nothing.

But since I’d been told the bridge was booby-trapped, I was sure there had to be something there.

I looked again. My EOD—the bomb disposal expert—was waiting behind me. All I had to do was find a trip wire or the bomb itself, and he’d have it disarmed in seconds.

But I couldn’t find shit. Finally, I told Tony, “Let’s go across.”

Don’t get the wrong image: I wasn’t charging across that bridge. I had my rifle in one hand and the other parked protectively over my family jewels.

That wouldn’t have saved my life if an IED exploded, but at least I’d be intact for the funeral.

The bridge was all of ten feet long, but it must have taken me an hour to get across that thing. When I finally reached the other side, I was soaking wet from sweat. I turned around to give the other guys the thumbs-up. But there was no one there. They’d all ducked behind some rocks and brush, waiting for me to blow up.

Even Tony, who, as point man, should have been right behind me.

“Motherfucker!” I yelled. “Where the hell did you go?”

“There’s no reason for more than one of us to get blown up,” he told me matter-of-factly as he came across.

Terps

Fallujah had been taken in an all-out assault, moving through the city in a very organized fashion. While it had been successful, the attack had also caused a lot of damage, which had supposedly hurt support for the new Iraqi government.

You can argue whether that’s true or not—I sure would—but the top American command didn’t want the same thing to happen in Ramadi. So, while the Army worked on a plan for taking Ramadi with minimal destruction, we went to war in the area nearby.

We started with DAs. We had four interpreters—terps, as we called them—who helped us deal with the locals. At least one and usually two would go out with us.

One terp we all really liked was Moose. He was a bad-ass. He’d been working since the invasion in 2003. He was Jordanian, and he was the only one of the terps we gave a gun. We knew he would fight—he wanted to be an American so bad he would have died for it. Every time we got contacted, he would be out there shooting.

He wasn’t a great shot, but he could keep the enemy’s heads down. Most importantly, he knew when he could and couldn’t shoot—not as easy a call as it might seem.

There was this little village outside Shark Base we called Gay Tway. It was infested with insurgents. We would open the gates, walk out, and hit our target. There was one house we went to three or four times. After the first time, they didn’t even bother putting the door back.

Why they kept going back to that house, I don’t know. But we kept going back, too; we got to know the place pretty well.

It didn’t take too long before we started getting a lot of contact in Gay Tway and the village of Viet Ram. An Army National Guard unit covered that area, and we started working with them.

Targets

Among our first jobs was to help the Army reclaim the area around a hospital along the river in Viet Ram. The four-story concrete building had been started and then abandoned a few years before. The Army wanted to finish it for the Iraqis; decent medical care was a big need out there. But they couldn’t get close to it to do any work, because as soon as they did, they came under fire. So we went to work.

Our platoon, sixteen guys, teamed up with about twenty soldiers to clear the nearby village of insurgents. Entering town early one morning, we split up and started taking houses.

I was at point, carrying my Mk-12, the first guy in each building. Once the house was secure, I’d go up to the roof, cover the guys on the ground, and look for insurgents, who we expected to attack once they knew we were there. The group leapfrogged forward, clearing the area as we went.

Unlike in the city, these houses weren’t right next to each other, so the process took longer and was more spread-out. But soon enough, the terrorists realized where we were and what we were up to, and they put together a little attack from a mosque. Holed up behind its walls, they started raining AK fire at a squad of soldiers on the ground.

I was up on one of the roofs when the fight started. Within moments, we started firing everything we had at the bad guys: M-4s, M-60s, sniper rifles, 40-mm grenades, LAW rockets—everything we had. We lit that mosque up.

The momentum of the battle quickly shifted in our favor. The soldiers on the ground began maneuvering to assault the mosque, hoping to catch the insurgents before they could slide back into whatever sewer they’d emerged from. We shifted our fire higher, moving our aim above their heads to allow them to get in.

Somewhere in the middle of the fight, a piece of hot brass from another gun—probably an M-60 machine gun next to me—shot against my leg and landed in my boots next to my ankle. It burned like hell, but I couldn’t do anything about it—there were too many bad guys popping up from behind the walls, trying to get my people.

I was wearing simple hiking boots rather than combat boots. That was my normal style—they were lighter and more comfortable, and ordinarily more than enough to protect my feet. Unfortunately, I hadn’t bothered to lace them up very well before the battle, and there was a space between my pants and the boot where the brass happened to fall after it ejected.

What had the instructors told me in BUD/S about not being able to call “time out” in battle?

When things quieted down, I stood up and pulled out the casing. A good wedge of skin came out with it.

We secured the mosque, worked through the rest of the village, then called it a day.

Date: 2016-01-03; view: 575