The Sheriff of Ramadi

The Ramadi offensive would eventually be considered an important milestone and turning point in the war, one of the key events that helped Iraq emerge from utter chaos. Because of that, there was a good deal of attention on the fighters who were there. And some of that attention eventually came to focus on our Team.

As I hope I’ve made clear, I don’t feel SEALs should be singled out publicly as a force. We don’t need the publicity. We are silent professionals, every one of us; the quieter we are, the better able we are to do our job.

Unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in. If it were, I wouldn’t have felt it necessary to write this book.

Let me say for the record that I believe the credit in Ramadi and in all of Iraq should go to the Army and Marine warriors who fought there as well as the SEALs. It should be fairly proportioned out. Yes, SEALs did a good job, and gave their blood. But as we told the Army and Marine officers and enlisted men we fought beside, we’re no better than those men when it comes to courage and worth.

But being in the modern world, people were interested in knowing about SEALs. After we got back, command called us together for a briefing so we could tell a famous author and former SEAL what had happened in battle. The author was Dick Couch.

The funny thing was, he started out not by listening but by talking.

Not even talking. Mr. Couch came and lectured us about how wrong-headed we were.

I have a lot of respect for Mr. Couch’s service during the Vietnam War, where he served with Navy Underwater Demolition and SEAL Teams. I honor and respect him greatly for that. But a few of the things he said that day didn’t sit all that well with me.

He got up in front of the room and started telling us that we were doing things all wrong. He told us we should be winning their hearts and minds instead of killing them.

“SEALs should be more SF-like,” he claimed, referring (I guess) to one of Special Forces’ traditional missions of training indigenous people.

Last time I checked, they think it’s okay to shoot people who shoot at you, but maybe that’s beside the point.

I was sitting there getting furious. So was the entire team, though they all kept their mouths shut. He finally asked for comments.

My hand shot up.

I made a few disparaging remarks about what I thought we might do to the country, then I got serious.

“They only started coming to the peace table after we killed enough of the savages out there,” I told him. “That was the key.”

I may have used some other colorful phrases as I discussed what was really going on out there. We had a bit of a back-and-forth before my head shed signaled that I ought to leave the room. I was glad to comply.

Afterward, my CO and command chief were furious with me. But they couldn’t do too much, because they knew I was right.

Mr. Couch wanted to interview me later on. I was reluctant. Command wanted me to answer his questions. Even my chief sat me down and talked to me.

So I did. Yup, nope. That was the interview.

In fairness, from what I’ve heard his book is not quite as negative as I understood his lecture to be. So maybe a few of my fellow SEALs did have some influence on him.

You know how Ramadi was won?

We went in and killed all the bad people we could find.

When we started, the decent (or potentially decent) Iraqis didn’t fear the United States; they did fear the terrorists. The U.S. told them, “We’ll make it better for you.”

The terrorists said, “We’ll cut your head off.”

Who would you fear? Who would you listen to?

When we went into Ramadi, we told the terrorists, “We’ll cut your head off. We will do whatever we have to and eliminate you.”

Not only did we get the terrorists’ attention—we got everyone’s attention. We showed we were the force to be reckoned with.

That’s where the so-called Great Awakening came. It wasn’t from kissing up to the Iraqis. It was from kicking butt.

The tribal leaders saw that we were bad-asses, and they’d better get their act together, work together, and stop accommodating the insurgents. Force moved that battle. We killed the bad guys and brought the leaders to the peace table.

That is how the world works.

Knee Surgery

I’d first hurt my knees in Fallujah when the wall fell on me. Cortisone shots helped for a while, but the pain kept coming back and getting worse. The docs told me I needed to have my legs operated on, but doing that would have meant I would have to take time off and miss the war.

So I kept putting it off. I settled into a routine where I’d go to the doc, get a shot, go back to work. The time between shots became shorter and shorter. It got down to every two months, then every month.

I made it through Ramadi, but just barely. My knees started locking and it was difficult to get down the stairs. I no longer had a choice, so, soon after I got home in 2007, I went under the knife.

The surgeons cut my tendons to relieve pressure so my kneecaps would slide back over. They had to shave down my kneecaps because I had worn grooves in them. They injected synthetic cartilage material and shaved the meniscus. Somewhere along the way they also repaired an ACL.

I was like a racing car, being repaired from the ground up.

When they were done, they sent me to see Jason, a physical therapist who specializes in working with SEALs. He’d been a trainer for the Pittsburgh Pirates. After 9/11, he decided to devote himself to helping the country. He chose to do that by working with the military. He took a massive pay cut to help put us back together.

I didn’t know all that the first day we met. All I wanted to hear was how long it was going to take to rehab.

He gave me a pensive look.

“This surgery—civilians need a year to get back,” he said finally. “Football players, they’re out eight months. SEALs—it’s hard to say. You hate being out of action and will punish yourselves to get back.”

He finally predicted six months. I think we did it in five. But I thought I would surely die along the way.

Jason put me into a machine that would stretch my knee. Every day I had to see how much further I could adjust it. I would sweat up a storm as it bent my knee. I finally got it to ninety degrees.

“That’s outstanding,” he told me. “Now get more.”

“More?”

“More!”

He also had a machine that sent a shock to my muscle through electrodes. Depending on the muscle, I would have to stretch and point my toes up and down. It doesn’t sound like much, but it is clearly a form of torture that should be outlawed by the Geneva Convention, even for use on SEALs.

Naturally, Jason kept upping the voltage.

But the worst of all was the simplest: the exercise. I had to do more, more, more. I remember calling Taya many times and telling her I was sure I was going to puke if not die before the day was out. She seemed sympathetic but, come to think of it in retrospect, she and Jason may have been in on it together.

There was a stretch where Jason had me doing crazy amounts of ab exercises and other things to my core muscles.

“Do you understand it’s my knees that were operated on?” I asked him one day when I thought I’d reached my limit.

He just laughed. He had a scientific explanation about how everything in the body depends on strong core muscles, but I think he just liked kicking my ass around the gym. I swear I heard a bullwhip crack over my head any time I started to slack.

I always thought the best shape I was ever in was straight out of BUD/S. But I was in far better shape after spending five months with him. Not only were my knees okay, the rest of me was in top condition. When I came back to my platoon, they all asked if I had been taking steroids.

Rough Times

I’d pushed my body as far as I could before getting the operations. Now the thing that was deteriorating was even more important than my knees—my marriage.

This was the roughest of a bunch of rough spots. A lot of resentment had built up between us. Ironically, we didn’t actually fight all that much, but there was always a lot of tension. Each of us would put in just enough effort to be able to say we were trying—and imply that the other person was not.

After years of being in war zones and separated from my wife, I think in a way I’d just forgotten what it means to be in love—the responsibilities that come with it, like truly listening and sharing. That forgetting made it easier for me to push her away. At the same time, an old girlfriend happened to get in contact with me. She called the home phone first, and Taya passed the message along to me, assuming I wasn’t the type of guy she had to worry about straying.

I laughed off the message at first, but curiosity got the best of me. Soon my old girlfriend and I were talking and texting regularly.

Taya figured out that something was up. One night I came home and she sat me down and laid everything out, very calmly, very rationally—or at least as rational as you can be in that kind of situation.

“We have to be able to trust each other,” she said at one point. “And in the direction we’re going, that’s not going to work. It just won’t.”

We had a long, heartfelt talk about that. I think we both cried. I know I did. I loved my wife. I didn’t want to be separated from her. I wasn’t interested in getting divorced.

I know: it sounds corny as shit. A fucking SEAL talking about love?

I’d rather get choked out a hundred times than do that in public, let alone here for the whole world to see.

But it was real. If I’m going to be honest, I have to put it out there.

We set up a few rules that we would live by. And we both agreed to go to counseling.

Taya:

Things just got to the point where I felt as if I was looking down into a deep pit. It wasn’t just arguments over the kids. We weren’t relating to each other. I could tell his mind had strayed from our marriage, from us.

I remember talking to a girlfriend who’d been through an awful lot. I just unloaded.

She said to me, “Well this is what you have to do. You have to lay it all on the line. You have to tell him that you love him, and you want him to stay, but if he wants to go, he is free to do so.”

I took her advice. It was a hard, hard conversation.

But I knew several things in my heart. First, I knew I loved Chris. And second, and this was very important to me, I knew that he was a good dad. I’d seen him with our son, and with our daughter. He had a strong sense of discipline and respect, and at the same time had so much fun with the kids that by the time they were done playing they all ached from laughing. Those two things really convinced me that I had to try to keep our marriage together.

From my side, I hadn’t been the perfect wife, either. Yes, I loved him, truly, but I’d been a real bitch at times. I had pushed him away.

So both of us had to want the marriage and we both had to come together to make it work.

I’d like to say that things instantly got better from that point on. But life really isn’t like that. We did talk a lot more. I started to become more focused on the marriage—more focused on my responsibilities to my family.

One issue that we didn’t completely resolve had to do with my enlistment, and how it would fit with our family’s long-term plans. My earlier reenlistment was going to be up in roughly two years; we had already begun discussing that.

Taya made it clear that our family needed a father. My son was growing in leaps and bounds. Boys do need a strong male figure in their lives; there was no way I could disagree.

But I also felt as if I had a duty to my country. I had been trained to kill; I was very good at it. I felt I had to protect my fellow SEALs, and my fellow Americans.

And I liked doing it. A lot.

But…

I went back and forth. It was a very difficult decision.

Incredibly difficult.

In the end, I decided she was right: others could do my job protecting the country, but no one could truly take my place with my family. And I had given my country a fair share.

I told her I would not reenlist when the time came.

I still wonder sometimes if I made the right decision. In my mind, as long as I am fit and there is a war, my country needs me. Why would I send someone in my place? A part of me felt I was acting like a coward.

Serving in the Teams is serving a greater good. As a civilian, I’d just be serving my own good. Being a SEAL wasn’t just what I did; it became who I was.

Date: 2016-01-03; view: 695