Different Ways of Killing

We went on patrols with the Army unit several more times, trying to reduce resistance in the area. The idea was simple, if potentially risky: we’d make ourselves visible, trying to draw fire from the insurgents. Once they showed themselves, we could fire back and kill them. And usually we did.

Pushed from the village and the mosque, the insurgents retreated to the hospital. They loved hospital buildings, not only because they were big and usually well-made (and therefore protective), but because they knew we were reluctant to attack hospitals, even after they were taken over by terrorists.

It took a while, but the Army command finally decided to attack the building.

Good, we all told them when we heard the plan. Let’s go do it.

We set up an overwatch in a house some two or three hundred yards from the hospital building, across a clear field. As soon as the insurgents saw us, they started letting us have it.

The rocket helped take some of the fight out of them, and as resistance weakened, the Army punched in and took the building. By the time they reached the grounds, there was almost no resistance. The few people we hadn’t killed had run away.

It was always hard to tell how many insurgents were opposing us in a battle like that. A small handful could put up a pretty good fight. A dozen men fighting behind cover could hold up a unit advance for quite a while, depending on the circumstances. Once the insurgents were met with a lot of force, however, you could count on about half squirting out the back or wherever to get away.

We’d had the Carl Gustav with us earlier, but as far as I know, this was the first time we’d actually killed anyone with it, and it may have been the first time any SEAL unit did so. It was certainly the first time we used it against a building. Once word spread, of course, everyone wanted to use them.

Technically, the Carl Gustav was developed to combat armor, but as we found out, it was pretty potent against buildings. In fact, it was perfect in Ramadi—it just blew right through reinforced concrete and took out whoever was inside. The overpressure from the explosion wiped out the interior.

We had different rounds for the gun. (Remember, it’s actually considered a recoilless rifle rather than a rocket launcher.) A lot of times, the insurgents would hide behind embankments and other barriers, well protected. In that case, you could set an air-burst round to explode over them. The air burst was a lot worse than anything that detonated on the ground.

The Gustav is relatively easy to use. You have to wear double ear-protection and be careful where you stood when it’s fired, but the results are awesome. Everyone in the platoon wanted to use it after a while—I swear there were fights over who was going to launch it.

When you’re in a profession where your job is to kill people, you start getting creative about doing it.

You think about getting the most firepower you possibly can into the battle. And you start trying to think of new and inventive ways to eliminate your enemy.

We had so many targets out in Viet Ram we started asking ourselves, what weapons have we not used to kill them?

No pistol kill yet? You have to get at least one.

We’d use different weapons for the experience, to learn the weapon’s capabilities in combat. But at times it was a game—when you’re in a firefight every day, you start looking for a little variety. No matter what, there were plenty of insurgents, and plenty of firefights.

The Gustav turned out to be one of our most effective weapons when we came up against insurgents shooting from buildings. We had LAW rockets, which were lighter and easier to carry. But too many of them turned out to be duds. And once you fired a LAW, you were done; it wasn’t a reloadable weapon. The Carl Gustav was always a big hit—pun intended.

Another weapon we used quite a bit was the 40-mm grenade launcher. The launcher comes in two varieties, one that attaches under your rifle and another that is a stand-alone weapon. We had both.

Our standard grenade was a “frag”—a grenade that exploded and sprayed an area with shrapnel or fragments. This is a traditional antipersonnel weapon, tried and true.

While we were on this deployment, we received a new type of projectile using a thermobaric explosive. Those had a lot more “boom”—a single grenade launched at an enemy sniper in a small structure could bring the whole building down because of the over-pressure created by the explosion. Most times, of course, we were firing at a larger building, but the destructive power was still intense. You’d have a violent explosion, a fire, and then no more enemy. Gotta love it.

You shoot grenades with what we call Kentucky windage—estimating the distance, adjusting the elevation of the launcher, and firing. We liked the M-79—the standalone version that was first used during the Vietnam War—because it had sights, making it a bit easier to aim and hit what you wanted. But one way or another, you quickly got the hang of things, because you were using the weapon so much.

We had contact every time we went out.

We loved it.

Taya:

I had a hard time with the kids after Chris deployed. My mom came and helped me, but it was just a difficult time.

I guess I wasn’t ready to have another baby. I was mad at Chris, scared for him, and nervous about raising a baby and a toddler all by myself. My son was only a year and a half old; he was getting into everything, and the newborn happened to be really clingy.

I remember just sitting on the couch and crying in my bathrobe for days. I would be nursing her and trying to feed him. I’d sit there and cry.

The C-section didn’t heal well. I had women tell me, “After my C-section, I was scrubbing the floors a week later and I was all good.” Well, six weeks after mine I was still in pain, still hurting and not healing really well at all. I hated that I wasn’t healing like those women. (I found out later it’s usually the second C-section that women bounce back from. No one told me that part.)

I felt weak. I was mad at myself that I wasn’t tougher. It just sucked.

The distances east of Ramadi made the .300 Win Mag my rifle of choice, and I started taking it regularly on patrols. After the Army took the hospital, they continued taking fire and getting attacked. It didn’t take too long before they started getting mortar fire as well. So we bumped out, fighting the insurgents who were shooting at them, and looking for the mortar crews.

One day, we set up in a two-story building a short distance from the hospital. The Army tried using special gear to figure out where the mortars were being fired from, and we chose the house because it was near the area they identified. But, for some reason, that day the insurgents decided to lie low.

Maybe they were getting tired of dying.

I decided to see if we could flush them out. I always carried an American flag inside my body armor. I took it out and strung some 550 cord (general-purpose nylon rope sometimes called parachute cord) through the grommets. I tied the line to the lip on the roof, then threw it over the side so it draped down the side of the building.

Within minutes, half a dozen insurgents stepped out with automatic machine guns and started shooting at my flag.

We returned fire. Half of the enemy fell; the other half turned and ran.

I still have the flag. They shot out two stars. Fair trade for their lives, by my accounting.

As we bumped out, the insurgents would move farther away and try and put more cover between us and them. Occasionally, we’d have to call in air support to get them from behind walls or berms in the distance.

Because of the fear of collateral damage, command and the pilots were reluctant to use bombs. Instead, the jets would make strafing runs. We’d also get attack helicopters, Marine Cobras and Hueys, which would use machine guns and rockets.

One day, while we were on an overwatch, my chief and I spotted a man putting a mortar in the trunk of a car about eight hundred yards from us. I shot him; another man came out of the building where he’d been and my chief shot him. We called in an airstrike; an F/A-18 put a missile on the car. There were massive secondaries—they’d loaded the car with explosives before we saw them.

Among the Sleepers

A night or two later, I found myself walking in the dark through a nearby village, stepping over bodies—not of dead people, but sleeping Iraqis. In the warm desert, Iraqi families would often sleep outside.

I was on my way to take up a position so we could overwatch a raid on the marketplace where one of the insurgents had a shop. Our intelligence indicated this was where the weapons in the car we’d blown up had come from.

Four other guys and I had been dropped off about six kilometers away by the rest of the team, which was planning to mount a raid in the morning. Our assignment was to get into place ahead of them, scout and watch the area, then protect them as they arrived.

It wasn’t as dangerous as you might think to walk through insurgent-held areas at night. They were almost always asleep. The Iraqis would see our convoys arrive during the day, and then leave before it got dark. So the bad guys would figure we were all back at the base. There’d be no guards posted, no lookouts, no pickets watching the area.

Of course, you had to watch where you stepped—one of my platoon members nearly stepped on a sleeping Iraqi as we walked to our target area in the dark. Fortunately, he caught himself at the last second, and we were able to walk on without waking anyone. The tooth fairy had nothing on us.

We found the marketplace and set up to watch it. It was a small row of tiny, one-story shacks used as stores. There were no windows—you open a door and sell your wares right out of the hut.

Not too long after we got to our hide, we received a radio call telling us that another unit was out somewhere in the area.

A few minutes later, I spotted a suspicious group of people.

“Hey,” I said over the radio. “I see four guys carrying AKs and web gear, all mujed out. Are these our boys?”

Web gear is webbing or vest and strap gears used to hold combat equipment. The men I saw looked like mujahedeen—by “all mujed out” I meant they were dressed the way insurgents often did in the countryside, wearing the long man-jammies and scarves. (In the city, they often wore Western-style clothes—tracksuits and warm-ups were big.)

The four men were coming from the river, which would be where I expected the guys to be coming from.

“Hold on, we’ll find out,” said the com guy on the other end of the radio.

I watched them. I wasn’t going to shoot them—no way I was going to take a chance and kill an American.

The unit took its time responding to our TOC, which, in turn, had to get a hold of my platoon guys. I watched as the men walked on.

“Not ours,” came the call back finally. “They cancelled.”

“Great. Well I just let four guys go in your direction.”

(I’m sure if they had been out there, I never would have seen them. Ninjas.)

Everybody was pissed. My guys back at the Hummers sat ready, scanning the desert, waiting for the muj to appear. I went back to my own scan, watching the area they were supposed to hit.

A few minutes later, what did I see but the four insurgents who’d passed me earlier.

I got one; one of the other snipers got another before they could take cover.

Then another six or seven insurgents appeared behind them.

Now we were in the middle of a firefight. We started launching grenades. The rest of the platoon heard the gunfire and came hard. But fighters who’d stumbled past us melted away.

The element of surprise lost, the platoon went ahead with the raid on the marketplace in the dark. They found some ammo and AKs, but nothing important in terms of a real weapons cache.

We never found out what the insurgents who slipped past were up to. It was just another mystery of war.

The Elite Elite

I think all SEALs highly respect our brothers in the elite anti-terror unit you’ve read so much about at home. They are an elite group within an elite group.

We didn’t interact with them in Iraq much. The only other time I had much to do with them came a few weeks later, after we got into Ramadi proper. They had heard we were out there slaying a huge number of savages, and so they sent one of their snipers over to see what we were doing. I guess they wanted to find out what we were doing that worked.

Looking back, I regret not having tried to join. At the time, they weren’t using snipers as heavily as the other teams were. The assaulters were doing the majority of the work, and I didn’t want to be an assaulter. I was loving what I was doing. I wanted to be a sniper. I was getting to use my rifle, and killing enemies. Why give it up, move to the East Coast, and become a new guy all over again? And that’s not even considering the BUD/S-like school you have to get through to prove you belong.

I would have had to spend a number of years as an assaulter before working my way up to be a sniper again. Why do that when I was already sniping, and loving it?

But now that I’ve heard about their ops and what they accomplished, I think I should have gone for it.

The guys have a reputation for being arrogant and more than a little full of themselves. That’s plain wrong. I had the opportunity to meet a few after the war when they came out to a training facility I run. They were extremely down-to-earth, very humble about their achievements. I absolutely wished I was going back out with them.

Date: 2016-01-03; view: 655