Prayers and Bandoliers

Before every op, a bunch of the platoon would gather and say a prayer. Marc Lee would lead it, usually speaking from the heart rather than reciting a memorized prayer.

I didn’t pray every time going out, but I did thank God every night when I got back.

There was one other ritual when we returned: cigars.

A few of us would get together and smoke them at the end of an op. In Iraq, you can get Cubans; we smoked Romeo y Julieta No. 3s. We’d light up to top off the day.

In a way, we all thought we were invincible. In another way, we also accepted the fact that we could die.

I didn’t focus on death, or spend much time thinking about it. It was more like an idea, lurking in the distance.

It was during this deployment that I invented a little wrist bandolier, a small bullet-holder that allowed me to easily reload without disturbing my gun setup.

I took a holder that had been designed to be strapped on a gun stock and cut it up. Then I arranged some cord through it and tied it to my left wrist.

Generally, when I fired, I would have my fist balled up under the gun to help me aim. That brought the bandolier close. I could fire, take my right hand, and grab more bullets, and keep my eye sighted through the scope at all times.

As lead sniper, I tried to help the new guys, telling them what details to look for. You could tell someone was an insurgent not just by the fact that he was armed but by the way he moved. I started giving advice I’d been given back at the beginning of Fallujah, a battle that by now seemed like a million years ago.

“Dauber, don’t be afraid to pull the trigger,” I’d tell the younger sniper. “If it’s within the ROEs, you take him.”

A little bit of hesitation was common for the new guys. Maybe all Americans are a little hesitant to be the first to shoot, even when it’s clear that we’re under attack, or will be shortly.

Our enemy seemed to have no such problem. With a little experience, our guys didn’t, either.

But you could never tell how a guy was going to perform under the stress of combat. Dauber did real well—real well. But I noticed that, for some snipers, the extra strain made them miss shots that they would have no trouble with in training. One guy in particular—an excellent guy and a good SEAL—went through a spell where he was missing quite a lot.

You just couldn’t tell how someone was going to react.

Ramadi was infested with insurgents, but there was a large civilian population. Sometimes they’d wander into firefights. You’d wonder what the hell they were thinking.

One day, we were in a house in another part of the city. We’d engaged a bunch of insurgents, killing quite a few, and were waiting through a lull in the action. The bad guys were probably nearby, waiting for another chance to attack.

Insurgents normally put small rocks in the middle of the road to warn others where we were. Civilians usually saw the rocks and quickly realized what was going on. They always stayed far away. Hours might pass before we saw any people again—and, of course, by that point, the people we would be seeing would have guns and be trying to kill us.

For some reason, this car came flying over the rocks and floored it, speeding toward us and passing all sorts of dead men on the way.

I threw a flash-crash but the grenade didn’t get the driver to stop. So, I fired into the front of the car. The bullet went through the engine compartment. He stopped and bailed out of the car, yelling as he hopped around.

Two women were with him in the car. They must have been the stupidest people in the city, because even with all that had happened, they were oblivious to us or the danger around them. They started coming toward our house. I threw another flash grenade and finally they started moving back in the direction they’d come. Finally, they seemed to notice some of the bodies that were littered around and started screaming.

They seem to have gotten away okay, except for the foot wound. But it was a miracle they hadn’t been killed.

The pace was hot and heavy. It made us want more. We ached for it. When the bad guys were hiding, we tried to dare them into showing themselves so we could take them down.

One of the guys had a bandanna, which we took and fashioned into a kind of mummy head. Equipped with goggles and a helmet, it looked almost like a soldier—certainly at a few hundred yards. So we attached it to a pole and held it up over the roof, trying to draw fire one day when the action slowed. It brought a couple of insurgents out and we bagged them.

We were just slaughtering them.

There were times when we were so successful on overwatch that I thought our guys on the street were starting to get a little careless. I once spotted them going down the middle of the street, rather than using the side and ducking into the little cover area provided by the walls and openings.

I called down on the radio.

“Hey, y’all need to be going cover to cover,” I told them, scolding them gently.

“Why?” answered one of my platoon mates. “You’ve got us covered.”

He may have been joking, but I took it seriously.

“I can’t protect you from something I don’t see,” I said. “If I don’t see a glint or movement, the first time I know he’s there is when he shoots. I can get him after he’s shot you, but that’s not going to help you.”

Heading back to Shark Base one night, we got involved in another firefight, a quick hit-and-run affair. At some point, a frag came over and exploded near some of the guys.

The insurgents ran off, and we picked ourselves back up and got going.

“Brad, what’s with your leg?” someone in the platoon asked.

He looked down. It was covered with blood.

“Nothin’,” he said.

It turned out he’d caught a piece of metal in his knee. It may not have hurt then—I don’t know how true that is, since no SEAL has ever actually admitted feeling pain since the beginning of Creation—but when he got back to Shark Base, it was clear the wound wasn’t something he could just blow off. Shrapnel had wedged itself behind his patella. He needed to be operated on.

He was airlifted out, our first casualty in Ramadi.

Date: 2016-01-03; view: 861