Call it a miracle that all those guys got out of there alive. Elliott and Johnny were rushed to the casualty station at Camp Corregidor, treated by the docs, then loaded into CH-46 Sea Knight helos for evacuation to Al Asad air base, where the trauma surgeons were. Cowboy wasn’t about to leave Elliott Miller’s side. Covered in his friend’s blood, he piled into the bird with him. After the helos took off, Dozer looked around for a ride back to the Papa sector, where his teammates were still shooting it out. He was covered in blood, too. By the time he finally negotiated for a Bradley to drive him back to the fight, it was over. The Camp Corregidor boys had finished it, and found another platoon of Bradleys to take them back to their base.
That was a really bad day. Play with a snake long enough, and even the best snake charmer will get bit.
10
“We’re Not Going to Make It Out of Here Alive”
Back at Camp Marc Lee, I was in the TOC, listening to all this go down on the radio. I could hear everything—the gunfire, the explosions, the radio calls between the teams, and the growing desperation of my teammates in extremis. Sitting there in the TOC, I might as well have been a continent away. I remember the paralyzing feeling of helplessness as I sat there monitoring the radio, unable to take any action and forbidden, of course, to communicate, lest my inquiries muck up the more urgent needs of my teammates across town.
Man down… casevac… another man down… he’s dead.
But who? It took hours for the details to reach us. Then it was a long, anxious wait for our boys to return.
I drifted around Camp Marc Lee like an unchained ghost, ashamed I couldn’t get my gun into the fight. It was impossible to sleep, so I stopped trying. I went to medical for a little PT, and spent some time with people who lifted me up—guys like Marty Robbins, who was still healing from his frag wounds. That dude was as tough as nails, and a fine example for me. He’d fought to get back on the line as LPO and team leader, and when I finally let him start running again, he’d come back after every op and take his boots off, and I’d have to doctor up his feet because his socks were soaked through with blood. If you’re a baseball fan, you may remember Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling’s “bloody sock” World Series game in 2004, when he got a win even though his ankle hadn’t yet healed from surgery. Marty’s bloody socks impressed me a lot more.
I worked out in the gym for as long as my back would allow, then went to the shooting range and amused myself for most of an hour. I know nothing would have changed had I been out there, but it bugged me all the same.
Johnny Brands was flown out to Germany, on a path to becoming a case study in reconstructive orthopedics. I wouldn’t see him again until everyone had come home from Ramadi. As for Elliott—Lord, that frogman nearly died on the hop. When he arrived as an urgent surgical case, the docs put twenty pints of blood back in him and patched him up as well as they could, once the phosphorus burned away. More than once they called us to report Elliott’s death, but each time he fought back for life. Dozer, his closest friend in Bravo Platoon, finally asked the docs not to call unless Elliott’s vitals went flat for more than two hours.
Elliott regained consciousness after about two weeks, but he would never be the same man who quit the Marine Corps after 9/11 to try to make the cut for the SEAL teams. After four deployments, he was a medic and a frogman all the way, and always will be. But he’s in a new world now, facing the huge challenge of recovering as much of his life as possible after suffering wounds that would have killed ninety-nine men in a hundred. Not one of us doubted he’d take it on with determination and the utmost courage.
In the days following the battle, the mood at Camp Marc Lee was sullen. About half the guys who had gone out that night came back carrying shrapnel—Purple Hearts were given out all around. I visited with each of the wounded men at the hospital at Camp Ramadi. I also spent more time than usual on the phone with my family and friends back home.
One morning a few days later, I awoke to the sight of Morgan leaning over me, shining a flashlight in my face. He had just ridden over from Camp Corregidor. From the look on his face I understood how bad it had been for him. All through our lives, very little has ever come between us. We’ve stood together in every fight. Hell, we were swim buddies long before we ever darkened a door at Coronado. What I went through on Operation Redwing was the first thing that pushed us off course from walking basically the same path through life. Now I could see a trace of my new self in him. There was pain and anger, and a new level of seeing, born of the effects of the wounds suffered by Elliott and Johnny. It was visible in his eyes and in the tight set of his jaw, and there was an echo of it between every syllable of every word he bit off, painting the picture for me about what had happened that day. Where once there had been a separation between us, we were now one again.
Then, as fast as Morgan had appeared, he was rolling out again, on to the next operation. Such is the life of a high-speed operator in wartime. But it was very, very good to see him. I don’t believe it could have been an accident that, later that day, a package full of good things arrived in the mail from Mom.
When I first got my Trident, I thought fights like the one we found in the Papa sectors would be the be-all and end-all of life in the teams. Everyone in Task Unit Red Bull relished our standing as the guys who were in the thick of it, getting it on in Al Qaeda’s backyard. With that costly mission on November 19, we landed a gut shot on a major insurgent cell that was dedicated to pushing Iraq into the Dark Ages. With the enemy body count north of thirty-five, we seriously weakened Al Qaeda’s ability to enforce its murderous will in that dangerous neighborhood. But our days, nights, and weeks in Ramadi ground away on my body and soul. Though my muscles were cashing checks my bones didn’t have on deposit, I think that mission helped me settle into my new position. I knew that the goal of bringing long-term change to a broken part of the world had to be foremost in our minds. Skipper and Master Chief never stopped spreading that message. Yet as we shifted our focus to helping the sheikhs take back their city, we would never let up entirely on killing the enemy as he came at us. This was the yin and yang of our service as special operations warriors.
Shortly after Elliott and Johnny were hit, our leadership flew in from Fallujah to visit us. Sitting down with the entire complement of both camps, Commander Leonard, later joined by Master Chief, said we had to speed up our transition into doing business differently. Though it might make our conventional brothers uncomfortable to lose us as a direct asset in their firefights, it was critical to the success of our deployment. Since arriving in country, they had been working with leadership on all sides, up and down, and from every unit in our area of operations, including our own task units, to lay the groundwork for tribal engagement and the COIN efforts. This latest overwatch support mission amplified the need to be more careful in selecting how we met the enemy in the street. When we were entering enemy-controlled neighborhoods to set up overwatches, we sometimes had no way out when the shit started flying. Our effectiveness in the overwatch mission was waning, they told us, and our talents had to be used to truly help change the landscape. We all had to avoid getting too heavily invested in the emotional desire to fight it out, seek revenge, and lose sight of our higher purpose, and this included the Skipper and Master Chief. Skipper informed us that from now on, sniper overwatch missions would be carried out only upon his direct command. He didn’t like taking autonomy away from his troop commanders and their men, but we had to make sure these missions were carried out with the right strategic intent.
What happened to Elliott and Johnny broke the hearts of our EOD detachment in particular. They felt they had failed us. Andy took it so hard that he called his OIC, Lieutenant Paul Craig, in Fallujah, and pressed the case he had been making for a while: he thought the bomb techs needed to work differently with our assault elements. Instead of following behind in the train, waiting to be called forward, he wanted to run up front with the point man, studying the stree
t for command wires and pressure plates. Whenever we left a house we had been using for sniper overwatch, he wanted his guys to be the first ones out the door, scanning the ground and walls.
Afterward, Lieutenant Craig visited Camp Marc Lee. He and the Master Chief had discussed these tactics in the past and now that the guys on the ground felt the need, he understood it was time to drive the point home. He and Andy sat down with me and made their case. Their message was, “We’re not going to make it out of here alive if we don’t change things up.”
This wasn’t a casual request. SEALs guard the real estate at the front of their trains jealously—we’re wary of guys who aren’t frogmen wanting to play one on an op. The front is a critical position and we need to be sure we have someone there who can handle the worst when it happens. But the bomb techs articulated their special skill set well, and sold us on its value. Fortunately, this same request had been made by Master Chief to our task unit leadership in the past. So, when we took it up the line, our troop commander, Lieutenant Commander Ryan Thomas, was receptive. From then on, whenever we went on foot patrols, one of our bomb techs ran right behind the point man, be it Salazar or Studdard, studying the ground for pressure plates and command wires. On convoys, they sat behind the driver, advising him to go slow, telling him where to turn, and pointing out obstacles to avoid. They were well-qualified backseat drivers. Watch that crack in the road…. Stop—let me check out that pile of rocks…. Soon our drivers were so well schooled that in their heads they could hear the bomb tech’s instructions before they were actually uttered. It was a change that saved lives. We became such believers that we sent Salazar and Studdard to talk to the Army SOF units in town about the value of putting the EOD guys up front.
When Lieutenant Clint and Dozer both argued that we needed someone else fluent in Pilot to arrange our air support for the Camp Corregidor boys, we brought in another F/A-18 driver, Lieutenant Commander Jake Ellzey, from the head shed at Fallujah. Jake was also a Texas boy. I’m not sure that had anything to do with the fact that our east-side frogs didn’t face another attack after he came to town, but we couldn’t rule it out, either.
The fight for Ramadi wasn’t going to depend on how many enemy fighters we killed. They were replaceable by the dozen. Our goal now became clear: getting the Iraqis ready to take care of this hellhole on their own. It was easy to treat the locals as though they were furniture. Relations with them were never helped when we took over their homes and, in defending them, turned them into replicas of the Alamo, riddled with bullets, leaving the rest of the neighborhood ripped apart by bombs. Sure, a hostile enemy always needed killing, but how could we be sure that the story of how we did that, when it was finally told later in the street, wouldn’t end up completely warped and used by our treacherous enemy as propaganda against us? If we were looking to make an impact at a higher strategic level, we had to take control of the narrative. We had to accept a different level of risk to gain the locals’ trust.
Many of the guys didn’t want to hear it—the talk was always about going out and getting some. Living the warrior way. We saw ourselves as venturing into a savage land and battling a ruthless enemy. Every warfighter loves the history and culture of ancient Sparta, whose heroism against the odds at Thermopylae was one of history’s greatest last stands. We identified with the warrior culture that saved Western civilization. But once Master Chief pointed out that the Spartans often won their battles by putting lesser warriors from other nation-states out front to wear the enemy down—leaving out the fact that they sometimes engaged in personal behavior that many Americans wouldn’t consider manly—our mission made a lot more sense. “If you want to be like Spartans,” he told us, “then start training Iraqis.”
It sometimes seemed impossible to bring freedom to a people who had known nothing but war and murder. Living in dirt-mound poverty while their ruler enjoyed luxurious palaces, the Iraqis were so scared of Saddam Hussein that they rarely bucked the system. Those who did were quickly killed. We had to fight the apathy that overtook the survivors. It often seemed they were ready to run to whichever side came out on top, as long as they could have security for their families. Giving the people of this godforsaken place a chance would be the legacy of our service.
When I was in Afghanistan, local culture came crashing into my life unexpectedly, and immediately became the most important thing in my world. The ancient ethical code of the Pashtun people, Pashtunwalai, meant so much to Gulab and his people that they risked their lives to protect mine, holding at bay Taliban fighters who were looking to capture and execute me. Here in Iraq, too, we found a country of good people looking after their kids, starting schools, improving their prospects in spite of terrible obstacles. But there were basic problems of law, order, economics, government, and the lack of everyday conveniences that we wouldn’t tolerate for a minute in America. Iraqis were doing their best to live through their nightmare. In the short term, though, life for ordinary people was made much harder by our work destroying the murderous cancer afflicting them.
As the weather got cold, some of our guys went to an Iraqi outpost where U.S. Army trainers were getting the Iraqis up to speed. Fumbling around in their blue-collared shirts, the jundis had a long way to go. Meanwhile, our two platoons also continued operating at high tempo, going out almost every night, often for multiple nights, pretty much without a break. The chill in the air meant that the boys were loaded down with extra clothing, which made movement harder.
One of my duties in mission planning was to give names to our ops. The next two we did were known as Blind Fury and Armageddon. After our losses in the Papa sectors, those words described everyone’s state of mind. Blind Fury was a raid to take down a bomb maker and an assassin. Lieutenant Austin and the boys took care of that one. I was in the train with Gold for Operation Armageddon, an overwatch operation to support conventional forces, as well as the follow-on raids the next two nights. It was good to be back, but the good feeling was short-lived. This op would prove to be my undoing.
Thanksgiving dinner was luxurious by the standards of the battlefield—a dry ham-and-cheese sandwich washed down with some Mountain Dew. But there was no joy in the holiday. The weather was wet and cold. That might have been why sleep was difficult.
Our next mission, a raid to capture a high-value target, was known as Operation Mind Freak. It was followed by a sniper mission in a neighborhood we hadn’t operated in before. We had some new guys in the platoon for this one. Our straphangers were all solid operators, and some of them were very experienced. We valued their ideas and their input. Just because we had been there for six weeks didn’t give us a monopoly on smarts.
In line with the wishes of the head shed, our missions evolved from static overwatch operations to more active, mobile assignments. We used our intel to target leaders more surgically. We moved out fast, doing snatch-and-grab operations. We didn’t do bait ops anymore, or patrol to contact, looking for a fight. As the enemy went to ground, the challenge now was to make sense of ambiguity, and to get smart about people. It was about deciding when to blow down a door and when to hand out candy. When you blew down the wrong door, the principles of counterinsurgency warfare required you to call in the home repairman or grab some tools and become one yourself. They say SEALs can operate anywhere, and we do. But this was a whole new battlefield for us. Sometimes a hammer and a pack of nails (and a handful of M&Ms for the kids) did more damage to the enemy than a laser-guided Maverick.
When I was serving in Afghanistan, I couldn’t fire my gun fast enough. In Ramadi, though, a rifle magazine was like a can of worms. The battle for the city sometimes seemed less likely to turn on the shots we took as on the rounds we decided to keep in our chambers. One night one of our snipers spotted two insurgents digging a hole in the road, attempting to plant an IED. He shot both of them, killing one and leaving a wounded survivor, who we quickly took into custody and promptly sent to the hospital. Saving the life of an enemy may seem like the wrong
thing to do. But ask yourself: Which of the two bullets fired by the sniper that night did more to pacify the area? The insurgent who got killed will never plant another bomb. But the guy who was shot, taken in, cared for, and saved by American forces is likely to come away with his mind changed about what Americans are all about. We were there, it had been said, to steal their oil and their women, after all. Or were we?
Sometimes Skipper and Master Chief went out with us to see how we were doing business. They took positions in the back of the train, and, wanting us to operate naturally, asked us to pretend they were invisible. One time Master Chief joined us while we were overwatching the flank of an Army unit doing a block clearance in a heavily contested part of the city. They had set up a cordon—a secure perimeter of cleared buildings, which no one could approach without being seen. A call came on the radio from one of the snipers. “We’ve got a mover. A military-age Iraqi male.” There he was, down on the street. He was holding something in his hands. He didn’t seem to be moving toward our forces or acting threatening. Still, the sniper thought he was highly suspicious, standing in an area he had no business being in, even though he was a good distance from anyone’s position and well outside of our “ring of safety.”
The team listened as the radio chatter continued.
“He might have a grenade—ah, never mind, I don’t think it’s a frag.”
“I think it’s an apple.”
“Wait—it looks like it could be a frag.”
“No, I don’t think so. I think it’s an apple.”
“It’s a grenade. It has to be….”
As the dialogue went back and forth, Master Chief got up and tried to take a look. To his eye, it was hard to determine the guy’s exact intent, and besides that he really didn’t look more than fourteen or fifteen years old. And that was when the shot rang out. The sniper across the way decided to engage the kid as he approached a block of buildings. It was a tough shot on a moving target heading toward the defilade of a structure nearby. The sniper’s bullet missed the kid’s head by a matter of inches. Having cheated death, he wisely disappeared. There was nothing in his hands as he left the cordon area.