Slab dealt with his experience by putting it in a box, extracting a few “never agains,” and pushing his high-speed career to the next level. He’s a thinker, private and introspective, a dedicated hard charger. But he said enough to me in our time together to show me how he continued to operate and why, how bad experiences strengthened his motivation, and how he learned to distinguish fear from the impostor, being afraid. Fear is a force that sharpens your senses. Being afraid is a state of paralysis in which you can’t do anything. It’s critical to understand the difference, but I never fully saw it until I spent time with Slab. You have to use your fear to keep from that deadly state of being afraid. Watching him go about his business, planning missions and dealing with his troop, had the same effect on me as being with JT, Josh, JJ, and Morgan after I got home from Redwing. He recharged me by his presence and commanded my respect without saying a word.
You don’t have to be an Adonis or a giant to accomplish feats of greatness. You have to have drive and commitment—as well as an honest sense of what is and isn’t possible. During my time with Slab, I realized there was very little I could have done to change the outcome there in the Hindu Kush. I felt my energy level and motivation surge in his presence—just as Master Chief knew it would. I have found that the best way to get through tough times is to surround myself with positive people. If you spend time around people who are weak or always feel sorry for themselves, it’s bound to rub off on you. Always look forward, never back. Thanks, Slab, for all the help.
On February 19, I was still hanging with Slab and his teammates in Al Asad when Al Qaeda in Iraq revealed just how desperate it had become. That morning in Ramadi, a car full of explosives approached an Iraqi police outpost at a place called Tway Village and blew. The guardhouse and the gate were knocked flat, then another vehicle-borne IED—a big dump truck carrying about four tons of explosives and a tank full of liquid chlorine—rolled through the wreckage toward the police station. The extremists no longer cared about influencing the population. With the whole city turning on them, looking to drive them out once and for all, nihilism and murder were all they had left to offer. The truck plowed right through a concrete wall and exploded in the middle of morning muster. Sixteen Iraqi cops were killed and more than sixty were wounded.
“This is the choice that we gave them,” said Sheikh Sattar’s brother, Sheikh Ahmed. “You can either surrender to us or you can be suicided. They despaired of accomplishing any victories, so now they resort to suicide.” If they were chasing an early flight to hell, they caught it, and we were only too happy to help.
When I got back to Camp Marc Lee, my teammates let me know how busy life had gotten. The Army and Marines had been heavily engaged all through the city. Fizbo told me how he had gone out to overwatch a big clearance by the 1/9 infantry out of Camp Corregidor. They inserted into the Ma’laab district around three a.m. and Fiz quickly found a JTAC’s paradise. With his faithful eyes in the sky, he could see the enemy on the move almost everywhere he looked.
For once, headquarters had loosened the leash. Fizbo was giddy as he told me about all the nine lines he had gotten approved. Sitting in a sniper hide with a group of operators, including my brother, he steered tons of air-launched ordnance onto enemy positions. The Army, meanwhile, made excellent use of their multiple rocket systems. Apache helicopters strafed and fired Hellfire missiles. And the big Abrams tanks weighed in, too. By the end of that three-day op, many enemy fighters had been killed. More important, after what happened the last time we went into Ma’laab, it was good to see every one of the boys roll through the gate again with a success under their belts.
Around that time, some encouraging news arrived concerning our recent casualties. Johnny Brands was doing well after surgery. The docs thought he might be able to jump back on the horse someday. Elliott’s prognosis wasn’t as good, but he was finally cleared to fly home from Germany to Texas for treatment of his burns.
Meanwhile, there was a feeling around Task Unit Red Bull that scores had been settled, and that the insurgency in Ramadi was wobbling on its last legs.
15
Blood and Victory
As our time in that hellhole wound down, the rains became heavy and I suppose some part of hell froze over somewhere, too, because the press suddenly seemed to start noticing what had happened during our watch in Anbar Province. With General Petraeus arriving in Baghdad to take command of Multi-National Force–Iraq, reporters seemed newly willing to look at U.S. successes out west (though all too many of them seemed to think it had sprung from the desert unaided by American hands).
Please understand the bitterness I’m spitting here. During the time I’m talking about, my team took more than a dozen wounded—in addition to SEAL Team 3’s own heavy casualties, including two killed—and the conventionals serving alongside us had nearly one hundred killed in action, plus innumerable other casualties. U.S. forces inflicted upward of eleven hundred KIA on the insurgency and captured at least that number for interrogation. The success was there for all to see.
Compared to six months before, insurgent attacks against our forces and local citizens were down from an average of twenty a day to about ten. The total number of mortar and IED attacks fell by two-thirds. The number of insurgents participating in the increasingly rare complex attacks was down by half, from twenty to ten.
The work that remained was to integrate the Sunni people into the Iraqi government at all levels. When Saddam was booted, the removal of his Baath Party from power pushed a lot of Sunnis out of government, so their leaders boycotted elections. With eighteen thousand more Americans arriving in country—five Army brigades to Baghdad, two Marine Corps battalions to Anbar—and with many soldiers’ deployment schedules being extended from twelve to fifteen months, President Bush’s “surge” was under way, and the presence of all that strength encouraged many terrified Iraqis to come in out of the cold.
In April—the end of our tour—the peace that settled over Ramadi was surreal. There had been about sixty violent incidents a day when we got there in October; that number was down to one or two a week as the two platoons of Task Unit Ramadi got ready to go home.
However, as our EOD commander, Paul Craig, said, “Being a day closer to going home doesn’t make you safer on any given day.” Our men in Fallujah ran some important but costly operations, too. In early April, a platoon from Team 4 carried out a capture-kill raid in northern Fallujah, targeting an insurgent cell that had reportedly been shooting down our helicopters with SA-7s—Chinese-made shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles. It was suspected that one such nasty little weapon had shot down a Marine Corps CH-46 cargo helicopter in March. When our intel finally fingered the cell’s location and a combined unit of Iraqis and SEALs hit the house, the enemy was ready, bunkered up behind fighting positions inside. In the shootout that developed, one of our men was killed and all his teammates were forced back outside the house.
All his teammates but one, that is. The platoon’s chief, a tough frog named Dan, got pushed into the corner of the entry room. A twenty-one-year veteran with seven deployments under his belt, including two in Iraq, Chief Dan was alone with numerous enemy gunmen. They shot him twenty-seven times at close range. Eleven of the bullets were stopped by his body armor. You do the math. As he was falling to the ground, he managed to kill three of the enemy with bursts from his M4. Before they could finish him, his teammates regrouped and assaulted the house again, killing the insurgents and taking Chief Dan to safety. Fortunately, his wounds were to the lower extremities, and none of them were fatal. As for that insurgent cell, all he’ll say is, “After that night, they’re not shooting down any more helicopters.”
Shortly before we went wheels-up, we took another casualty. Studdard, my longtime point man, was walking outside Camp Marc Lee with forty-eight hours to go before punching a ticket to America. After running more than two hundred combat missions without a scratch, something hit him in the ribs. He thought it was a thrown rock at fi
rst. Looking around, furious and in pain, he realized his wound was deep and hollered for help. The whole camp emptied and we swept the premises looking for his assailant. What hit him was a 7.62mm round, a lucky Hail Mary that had come arcing in from somewhere across the Euphrates River, nearly a mile away. The bullet burrowed in close to his spine—so close that surgeons wouldn’t be able to remove it. By the time they took him away to the hospital, I didn’t have the chance to thank him for everything he’d done as our point man. Doing that night after night in a hellhole like Ramadi wasn’t good for your life expectancy. But he never complained once. And now he still carries a little piece of the city inside him as a reward.
We all took something home, of course. The biggest thing, probably, was victory. The city had been transformed: not its broken infrastructure, but its daily psychology. When the advance element of SEAL Team 7 showed up to relieve us—their turn to do a turnover op, feel out the dangerous textures of this city, and find their battle rhythm—everything had changed. Tribal cops were in the streets. More than three thousand new recruits had joined their ranks. There was no sanctuary for Al Qaeda when the locals were standing tall in uniform. The police knew their neighborhoods. It was easy for them to spot foreign terrorists, and if a local did something bad, well, there was usually a cop nearby who had gone to high school with the guy’s best friend. The fruit of our work could be seen in the new activity by the chamber of commerce to get small businesses working again. Kids played soccer in the side streets. Iraqi women began organizing, aided by some female Marine Corps civil affairs officers who listened to their problems and taught them how to depend on themselves, organize their finances, get jobs, learn to read, and run their households. Most of them were widows, thanks to years of murder and terror in their country. As they began having a greater role in city life, they also served as a bulwark against Al Qaeda’s return. When one of their sons came home with a pocketful of cash, saying he was on a holy mission, Mom had the courage to challenge him: “What kind of holy mission? Who is telling you this?”
In September 2007, there was a five-kilometer road race in memory of an Iraqi police officer, Captain Ali, who died trying to stop a suicide bomber who was targeting his police station. It started at the Ramadi Glass Factory, passed Camp Hurricane Point, then turned down Route Michigan—once almost impassable because of IEDs—and ended in the Ma’laab district. More than a hundred Iraqis took part, and onlookers were waving national flags all along Route Michigan. The success went beyond Ramadi. Skipper and Master Chief had used their freedom of movement in a wide area to help integrate our operations with SOF and conventional units in Fallujah, Habbaniyah, the northern Euphrates River Valley, and even all the way out to Al Qaim, near the Syrian border. Army Special Forces were a big part of it. I saw it up close on my trip to the city of Hit. Those Green Berets did great work there and in Haditha, too, allowing us to focus on the Ramadi-to-Fallujah corridor.
From there, the Anbar Awakening spread east toward Baghdad and north into Diyala Province. Sunni sheikhs in those areas signed their young men into service and went after Al Qaeda wherever they found them. Enjoying the goodwill of tribal leaders, our soldiers were welcomed into towns and villages that had never seen Americans before. Together they systematically dismantled the terrorist threat.
The change that overtook Anbar Province was so durable that it survived even the assassination of the Awakening’s principal sponsor. On September 13, during the opening days of Ramadan, Sheikh Sattar went to Al Asad air base to be photographed with President Bush. At his home afterward, Sattar was attacked by suicide bombers. He died along with several of his guards. It was a blow to the good guys, but just as you can’t kill your way out of an insurgency, Al Qaeda couldn’t kill its way back into one, either: Sattar’s death had no real impact, because his brother, Sheikh Ahmed Abu Risha, stepped into his shoes, took charge, and kept up the momentum toward reconstruction. Believe me, I understood Ahmed’s motivation.
We also saw a different attitude in the Iraqis at the training range. Where once they lived from paycheck to paycheck, caring for little more than getting by, now they seemed interested in something larger than themselves. One time a big argument started between some trainees, and our terps explained what was going on. An Iraqi soldier (a malcontent, one of the lazy ones) was complaining to the others, asking them why they were working so hard. The other trainees responded, “We’re going to fight for Iraq. We’re going to make this country great someday.” The attitude spread. They started training harder, and the next thing we knew, we had a company and then a battalion of Iraqi forces more or less ready for action. We integrated them into our operations and got some great work done straightening out their broken city.
DQ, our operations officer, told me he used to get kidded about the way we were handling the COIN mission. His counterpart in regimental headquarters at Fallujah, a hard-charging Big Army type, liked to say that the SEALs in Ramadi weren’t doing much more than handing out soccer balls. But after seeing the change that had come over the city, his tune changed. He said to DQ, “I’m buying what you’re selling. It all makes sense.”
It was around this time that the majority leader of the U.S. Senate stood on the floor of his chamber and said, “This war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything.” The president called it “one of the most irresponsible acts I witnessed in my eight years in Washington.” Naturally the president’s opponents were determined to deny him any credit. The smart people at another media outlet told their readers, “Whatever [President Bush’s] cause was, it is lost…. Additional military forces poured into the Baghdad region have failed to change anything.” These people’s hatred for our commander in chief seemed to overshadow their love of their country. With Anbar Province turning the corner, it looked like they were moving the goalposts to manufacture a defeat. When America got a new president in 2009, the press seemed more willing to credit us for what we did. Eventually Newsweek ran a cover story declaring, “Victory at Last: The Emergence of a Democratic Iraq.” Better late than never, right? Those of us who were there know how the history really went down. When the guys from the 1/506, the Currahees, got back to Fort Campbell and held their awards ceremony in the Lozada Physical Fitness Center, two hundred soldiers received decorations, including eighty-seven Purple Hearts, fifteen Bronze Stars with a “V” device for valor, and three Silver Stars. Their names stand proudly in the annals of the American military tradition, but they were generally typical of all the men I saw in action in that city.
All of us understand the price we paid for victory.
Something Master Chief said still stands in my mind today as the ultimate expression of what our work is all about, and what it means to serve. When a few of us complained that we were putting ourselves needlessly at risk by letting Iraqis do our work, Master Chief replied, “There are times when you have to put yourself at a disadvantage in order to accomplish a larger mission and secure a longer-term goal.” He went on, “You can take the simple view that Iraqis are all corrupt and beneath us. Or you can see it another way—see that they’re all human, and even America’s been that same way at times during its own history, with innocent people taking fire from both sides in a bloody civil war. There are people who have to live in Ramadi, who can’t flee to Syria, America, or Baghdad. They’re stuck, just trying to get by. It’s complex. And that complexity means you have to understand that everything you do can have a huge effect.” We did have a huge effect in Ramadi. I look to American history to measure it. In 1787, after the shooting was over, the meetings that produced the U.S. Constitution had just adjourned and a lady asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of government he had given the American people. “A republic,” he said—“if you can keep it.” I guess that’s what we helped give the people of Anbar.
Once again, it was Master Chief who summed it all up: “We’ve trained and trained for a reason: to be better at the craft of war than our enemy, to use our skill to perform the missi
on, and to accept the risks. As American warriors, it’s our obligation to protect the innocent. And that means, sometimes, that we’re the ones who need to be put on the disadvantaged side of the threat cycle.”
In other words, it’s not about us. I don’t think you’ll find a better expression of the true nature of service than that.
During the deployment, I fired my weapon at an enemy probably only four or five times. A chief’s job is to put his men in position to handle the gunplay. I took care of my guys and did my best to make sure they had what they needed. There’s satisfaction enough in that.
That deployment marked the last time I would carry a rifle with a SEAL team into battle. The time was coming for me to hang up my spurs as an active-duty warfighter and get on with life’s next adventure.
At the end of the day, what we did in Iraq wasn’t exactly the kind of revenge for Operation Redwing that I thought I had wanted, but as we packed up our gear at Camp Marc Lee and welcomed the advance elements of the SEAL team that was relieving us, I realized I had managed to accomplish my own personal mission as a by-product of the larger, more significant one.
Every now and then, I awake from my dreams thinking of Mikey, Danny, and Axe, and praying that they might be proud.