Adam Downs was a good old southern boy who reveled in his reputation as the platoon hillbilly. Though he told everyone he was from Kentucky, he actually hailed from Illinois. I respected this guy big-time. He carried his ferocious southern way on the battlefield—we called him the redneck mujahideen. But make no mistake: he was a solid operator, reliable and trustworthy, and one of our best snipers. Adam liked to chew cigars, and was superstitious, too. He kept a soggy old stogie with him that dated to his previous deployment. He thought it was good luck, and said his platoon never took a casualty when he was chewing it. And when you go overseas, trust me, you don’t leave something like that behind. By the time he got to Ramadi, that cigar needed so much duct tape to hold it together that at the end of an op, when we returned to base, he could stick it underneath the visor of the Humvee, ready to use again the next time we rolled out.
As we unloaded at Camp Marc Lee, we found that a few of us had brought our compound bows along with us. Blowing arrows through targets on our range was always a way to kill time between ops. Then someone dared Adam to take the bow with him on a mission. We thought it went without saying: the first SEAL to take down an insurgent with an arrow would be an instant legend. With no muzzle flash, a bow might just be the ultimate sniper weapon. Wielding it to lethal effect would be an amazing feat of old-school military art. Of course, it was just crazy talk. The idea would never have gotten past our leadership. We left the Rambo act to the screenwriters. But man, it sure would have been cool.
Adaptability is at the very heart of the way a SEAL team does business. Our tactics are classified, of course, but I can tell you that they change from deployment to deployment based on what we see the enemy doing. I had been out of the war for more than a year and I had to be flexible: no matter how good workup was, you could never start getting comfortable until your boots hit the ground. Throughout a deployment, we’d be one step up on them or one step behind, depending on the day.
When we walked out the front gate of Camp Marc Lee, down the road a little ways to the left was a huge building, a glass factory. Located right on the Euphrates River, it had been used as a recruitment depot for Iraqi police. Earlier in the year, the insurgency rolled a huge truck full of explosives into it when there were several hundred recruits gathered outside. Scores of people died in that blast, a tragedy our forces were powerless to stop. Since then, the building was occupied from time to time by insurgent snipers looking to enfilade our camp. We took a lot of fire from that glass factory before we finally took back control of it and, with it, our own neighborhood.
We relied heavily on the Army and the Corps for intel that helped us maintain our one-up position. All of us appreciated what those Marine Corps and Army companies, and of course the boys from Team 3, had done prior to our arrival. Taking fire every day and returning it many times over, the conventionals and Lieutenant Commander Willis and his guys had cleared out a lot of brush for us, so to speak. He was a straight-up warrior, a gunfighter. He didn’t sit around and wait for things to happen—he led his men out into the streets and made it happen. If you wanted a fight in Ramadi, it was never hard to find one. All you had to do was hop into a Humvee and drive into the middle of town, and, soon enough, the insurgents started maneuvering on you. We usually had just enough time to adjust ourselves before something interesting went down.
The enemy we faced had been winnowed down substantially by Team 3. But that meant they were a little bit sharper than they were over the summer. The worst of them worked (and probably lived) in the dangerous south-central and southeast parts of Ramadi, the Ma’laab district, areas we called the Papa sectors. Generally we could count on a certain level of incompetence on the part of the jihadists; plenty of them were just opportunists looking for a chance to make some money by killing Americans. Others seemed to have gotten their tactical skills from PlayStation 2—they were more aggressive than the idiots were, but never knew what to do without a memory chip and a reset button.
But in the Papa sectors, they were flat-out crafty bastards. Because Ramadi was one of Saddam’s strongholds, it made sense that many of his former Army officers were still living there. That may have been why the enemy in the Ma’laab district was so adept: they were professional or at least trained by professionals, a cut above the fighters elsewhere in the city. When they weren’t going out at night, digging holes in the road to plant IEDs, these insurgents were hiding in crowds, using women and children for cover, maneuvering on us, then slipping away to avoid our return fire. Skulking through narrow alleyways and across congested urban rooftops, they looked for that uncovered angle from which to hit us with gunfire, grenades, or RPGs. The crackle of gunfire and pop of explosions was as common as car horns in Manhattan.
Our enemy was a diverse group. Their ranks included fighters from the Mujahideen Shura Council, a shadowy outfit that tried to unify various Sunni Islamist groups fighting us “infidels.” Basically they were Al Qaeda types, many loyal to the AQ leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, killed in an air strike that June. Right before we landed, that group released a video declaring Iraq an Islamic state and changing its name to the Islamic State of Iraq. Incurable optimists, these people. They’d have to go through the U.S. military to make that happen, and try they did. Needless to say, their bravado attracted a lot of bad guys to Ramadi and encouraged a lot of reckless violence. The insurgents in Ramadi came from all over the world—from Syria, Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan; there were even some American-born extremists. You name a flag, there was an asshole there who was flying it.
One group, Ansar al-Sunnah, was a cadre of Sunni extremists that rivaled Al Qaeda for its hatred of Americans. Some of them were foreigners who had come to Iraq at the invitation of Saddam Hussein as our military gathered strength on his borders. Another faction was made up of criminals who exploited the opportunities of the moment. Smuggling was a big one. They snuck weapons into the city, sold them to the enemy, then came to us and revealed where they were hidden in order to collect rewards provided by the coalition’s buyback program. They made a good living on dumb money. Then there were tribal fighters whose sheikhs didn’t want any outsiders in their neighborhood, and especially us Westerners. We had to deal with Al Qaeda and other “insurgent” supporters drawn from the ranks of the poor. It was easy for AQ to find an old man or an orphaned kid who would take payment in exchange for crossing two wires together when a cell phone rang, thereby clacking off an IED against the next U.S. convoy to roll by. Blackmail and threats worked just as well. God help any Iraqi who let one of his bad personal secrets slip into the hands of some Islamic nut—he’d be working for him right quick. Then we had young Muslim kids coming in from all over the world, insurgents who were looking for a fight and eager to prove themselves in action against us. In that one respect, I guess, they weren’t all that different from us.
So we faced no one kind of enemy. But there sure were a lot of them, hidden in the city’s secret places. Master Chief opened my eyes when he told me of estimates that showed, all across Anbar, probably only a few hundred foreign fighters opposing us in a coordinated way. But there were thousands and thousands of dangerous men who were at their beck and call by way of force, persuasion, or bribery. Given the complete breakdown of law and order there, it was easy for extremists to blame everything on the Americans. The most murderous of the terrorist leaders often claimed the title “emir,” a term of tremendous respect in the Sunni culture. Al Qaeda gave that title, typically reserved for men of great power and wealth, to any insurgent who had a sufficient number of American KIAs to his credit. These men reserved for themselves the authority to kill, steal, rape, and pillage as they saw fit. Without some pushback, it would have spun completely beyond anyone’s control.
A city is a hell of a battlefield. Every window is a fighting position, every rooftop a fortress. There was always a doorway, an alley, a wall, or another place where the enemy could get the drop on us. They had home-field advantage and knew it. And they could hide in pl
ain sight. A guy in sweatpants and a T-shirt is an innocent civilian; a guy in sweatpants and a T-shirt holding an RPG is a dangerous threat. Four of them together are even worse. They could sneak through a narrow alley, invisible to our planes, pop up, fire their weapons, then toss them through a window and rejoin society. If we shot the wrong guy in response, we could have a whole neighborhood turning against us.
I had to hand it to them: they had it figured out and were very smart about the way they engaged U.S. forces. If we were to make it out of there, we had to be as unpredictable and fast-moving as the bad guys were.
Having served in Baghdad in 2003, I had experienced urban combat before. But Ramadi was nothing like that. Back then, the enemy hid and we went in and rooted him out. The high-value targets we looked for—bomb makers, terror financiers, former officials of Saddam’s criminal regime—were basically craven cowards. They weren’t nearly as well organized or militarized. Pursuing them was a thrill, but it didn’t seem as dangerous as what we would be asked to do in Ramadi. Here the aggressive ill will was percolating in the air. Everyone felt it. There were so many ways things could go wrong. In a counterinsurgency fight, we had to battle the criminals, persuade the military-age men to work with us (or at least not against us), and spend time and money training them—all while standing ready to jock up on a moment’s notice to blow in the door of a fortified insurgent safe house and deal out “medication” in 5.56mm doses while taking care not to disturb the neighbor’s goat, for fear he might get annoyed and end up on the enemy’s payroll.
Moving through the city, we learned to be hyperalert, “ballooning” our rifles the whole time—keeping them pointed to the sky as if they were attached to balloons floating through the air. This was an exhausting way to work. By the end of a patrol, we felt like we’d been doing curls and shoulder presses for hours. But it saved us a critical fraction of a second if we had to draw on an enemy who had the high ground on us. We were always ready, and always respectful of Murphy’s Law—the minute you decide to skip a window, that’s where the next insurgent will be, rifle at his shoulder, with you in his sights. The minute you got complacent, you were dead.
The insurgency’s bomb makers were relentless. Most of the American servicemen who died in Anbar Province were killed by IEDs. The enemy would take artillery shells and bury them in the street, using concealed wires to detonate them. By breaking sewer lines to flood the dusty streets, they would use the muddy, sewage-laced mess to conceal their trigger wires. They’d plant their charges under the water, making them hard to detect, especially at night. They’d lay monofilament trip wires in the streets, with fishhooks tied to them, to catch a guy by the boot, trigger a bomb, and blow him to kingdom come. The electrical command wires they used were those thin copper wires used to wind small electrical motors—really hard to detect. A street that we patrolled and swept at noon could be thick with hidden explosives before the lunch hour was over. All of Iraq seemed stuffed with stolen ordnance, stockpiled anywhere you can imagine. You make the wrong move, boom—you’re in a bag. If you really screw up, they’ll be picking you up with a sponge.
The insurgency’s bomb emplacers were in constant battle of wits with our EOD guys. Andy Fayal and our other bomb techs were expert in detecting the telltale traces of a bomb that was ready to ruin your day. About 80 percent of the IEDs in Ramadi were what our techs called victim-operated. These devices work with pressure plates or other mechanical components that close a circuit when someone steps on or drives over them. About 15 percent were command-wire detonated—remote-controlled, set off by triggermen in hiding. The rest were remote-controlled by a radio or infrared signal. And the insurgents weren’t content merely to blow us up: they added kerosene and other incendiary accelerants to the charges, aiming to set us on fire. When they really wanted to spice things up, they added payloads of chlorine, mercury, or other nasty elements to the bomb packages. (We found their chemistry labs on any number of the raids we did.) When our route-reconnaissance guys got good at using their magnetic detection gear to find buried artillery rounds, the enemy put their homemade explosives in rice sacks. Surviving in those streets took guts, nuts, and smarts.
On that first patrol out of Camp Marc Lee, we drove out to one of the combat outposts in the southern part of the city and shook hands with the conventional commanders who controlled the area—who “owned” the battle space, as we say. The Army would lead the way during our time in Ramadi. Colonel Sean MacFarland, commander of the First Brigade Combat Team of the First Armored Division, would be a major player in this fight, and our leadership was right there at his side. We were the long blade he held behind his back.
In my new position, I frequently dealt with Army and Marine Corps officers face-to-face, because we had to ask them for permission to go into their areas. We certainly stood apart from them in many ways—in everything from experience and training to matters of grooming, appearance, and attitude. We’re often allowed to go unshaven and can be a bit more cavalier in outlook. We don’t blouse our pant legs over our boots or wear insignia, as they do. But make no mistake: the Army and Marine Corps outfits we worked with were balls-to-the-wall warfighters. They understood urban combat. They had raised their game for Ramadi’s challenge, training for weeks, day in and day out, at rifle ranges and “shoot houses,” guided by contractors who had served in special operations. They did ballistic breaching, close-quarters battle, and so on. Over and over again they rehearsed what the Army calls Battle Drill 6a: entering a building and clearing a room. They did it in single-room, multiple-room, hallway, and staircase settings, standardizing their tactics so that platoons from different companies could play from the same sheet of music. Some of their leadership had done the special operations training course at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Their snipers refreshed their skills at Fort Benning, Georgia. We were more than impressed.
It was dark by the time we ditched our vehicles at the COP and set out on foot on our shakeout patrol. It turned out to be a real nut dragger. In urban environments, we travel heavier than we do in the mountains. In the city, where distances are shorter and the air easier to breathe, we wear our body armor, all the plates. My M4 rifle had an M203 grenade launcher attached to the barrel. I had eight magazines of 5.56mm bullets and ChemLights. As team lead, I carried flares, an extra radio, and an extra antenna stuffed in a cargo pocket. I had a computer and a medical pack containing QuikClot, bandages, needles, and tourniquets. I had water and food, too. I weighed about 250 pounds without my gear, and more than 325 with it. With every step I took, I could feel my spine compressing like a shock absorber.
And the noise—good Lord. We would never have been allowed to move in the wilderness the way we did that night in the city. Half of us sounded as though we had cowbells hanging around our necks. At night it was easy to stumble into things. Running around in the darkness, using night-vision goggles, which remove most of your depth perception, I tripped and found myself lying legs up in an open sewer pit. It’s easy to plant your face in the ground when you’re slogging around an unfamiliar area wearing NVGs, hyperventilating from excitement, and feeling your heart rate pegged to the right. I’m always glad to entertain my SEAL brothers, and here, lying in that sewage, I didn’t disappoint. I radioed up and reported that I had found the shitter if anyone needed to go.
After the first hour of humping through the city’s filth, the exhaustion wore on my lungs, muscles, and bones. Our patrol took us through an open area in the southern part of the city. We halted there, and I found myself kneeling in a depression in the earth. I thought at first that it was a foxhole of some kind. It was nasty. It smelled of death. And for good reason: the field we were in turned out to be a cemetery, and the hole I was standing in was an open grave. Mine was the only body in it, fortunately. I remember how the wind carried the aroma of decay. I remember the burning in my lungs—and in every muscle of my body. And now the grave beckoned to me.
I felt like I’d need to get shot at a few times to k
now that I was still alive as a gunfighter. I wanted to know I still had my edge, and could trust myself to perform in the line of fire. In the teams we reach a place where that edge percolates in the air between men who have arrived at the pinnacle of fitness and training. I prayed we’d make contact with the enemy and take a little incoming fire. If nothing else, it would be an opportunity to hit the dirt, take the weight off, and catch my breath. After all my years in the teams, I felt like a new guy out there that night.
When we finished our patrol and returned to the outpost, Senior Chief Steffen brought us all together and got right to the point. “Now you know what this lousy place is like,” he said. “You’ve smelled it and you’ve felt it. Start shucking your gear.” Serving during the peak of summer, the Team 3 boys had carried a lot of water. The big dromedary bags they stuffed into their rucks added fifty or sixty pounds to their load, forcing them to economize in other areas. They packed just three or four magazines, maybe a couple of grenades, and left a lot of their body armor at the base. It took one patrol for us to learn to go light, too. We got rid of the extra magazines we carried in our vests. I removed the grenade launcher from my rifle and switched out its long barrel in favor of a short, ten-inch upper receiver, better for close-quarters fighting. When we did sniper overwatch missions, which were largely stationary, we could afford to go heavy. But an assault element had to travel light.