Back at camp, I called our guys together and told them we had work to do before I would consider us competent to patrol in a nighttime environment. So we practiced over and over, moving with all our gear on, marching up and down along the wall of the camp, back and forth, deep into the night. We finally got streamlined, tucking in our loose straps and securing all our gear, making sure we were quieter and more agile. I hit the gym hard. Working out on the treadmill, I wore all my body armor to get used to the rattle and the weight. My abused joints and bones howled in protest—especially my spine. I was in decent shape, but I wasn’t in Ramadi shape. I’d have to get there fast. Spiritual fitness was important, too. I never allowed myself to forget who was in command as I went through these paces. In the journal I kept, the final words in each entry were the same every day:
“Thank you, God, for one more day.”
No matter how bad things would get, I’d never forget to tell Him that.
Two days after our shakeout patrol, the rest of the task unit arrived at Camp Marc Lee. I never even got a glimpse of Morgan—my brother’s outfit, Bravo Platoon, was bound for a camp across the city, Camp Corregidor, a smaller base built on land once used as a date farm and as a training camp for Saddam’s army. It was a lousy dump. The camp had barely enough fresh water to provide just one shower a day—for a single man, not for everybody—so Morgan got used to showering in water pumped from filthy canals. It was said that the fleas and bedbugs that assaulted them daily rode to the attack on the backs of the rats. Still, as home to Bravo Platoon and several companies of conventional infantry, Camp Corregidor would be the center of gravity in our effort to get control of Ramadi’s violent east side.
The crosstown road that led from Camp Marc Lee to Camp Corregidor was known as Route Michigan. It was an IED-choked nightmare. Fortunately, the bomb techs with the EOD mobile unit attached to our squadron spent lots of time with the intel shop getting the latest dope on enemy bomb-making tactics. They ran with our fire teams wherever we went, their simple tool kits always handy—a multitool, some heavy-duty shears, and small explosives (det cord and C-4) to countercharge any bombs they found. And these guys smoldered with their own desire for revenge. In February, a bomb tech named Nick Wilson was killed in Ramadi while tracing a thread of copper command wire over a berm near a road. Andy Fayal accompanied Nick’s body home to his family, while the others vowed to track down the bomb makers responsible for their friend’s death. At Nick’s funeral, Andy was impressed to see a number of SEALs in attendance. I think he finally understood then how much we respected the EOD community’s skills and dedication to their craft. Our camaraderie ran deeper than blood. God bless all the EOD guys.
The Army engineers who did route reconnaissance in Ramadi did a damn good job, too. Their work was similar to what our EOD detachment did, but on a larger scale. They rolled out in formations of vehicles designed to detect and take out the big subsurface explosive devices. Each vehicle performed a different function—detecting IEDs, marking them, sweeping the street of debris, and finally digging them up and disposing of them. The Army used a type of heavily armored truck known as a Buffalo, which has a big arm that can be fitted with various attachments and extended out front to sweep the roads and uncover planted bombs. They also used these lunar-lander-looking monsters known as Joint EOD Rapid Response Vehicles, or JERRVs. Those bad boys could absorb huge blasts and keep going. It was a talent they used often. The guys inside would be fine as long as they wore their five-point harnesses and helmets. The Army also deployed tracked robots known as TALONs, which are tricked up with sensors and a mechanical arm to deal with the deadly toys they dig up. Sometimes it was just as easy to roll over suspected bomb positions and take the blast. They could work faster that way and cover more ground.
These convoys rolled through the city streets at two miles an hour, creeping along the most dangerous thoroughfares all night long, bright lights blazing, and continuing through the next day and into the next night as well. If a JERRV got hit—and acting as a blast magnet was definitely part of their job description—the recovery team would move in, hoist the wreck onto a five-ton flatbed, and take it back to Camp Ramadi. A replacement would take its place and the formation would continue roaring along at its snail’s pace, never losing a beat.
It made a big impression whenever one of their vehicles was dragged back to camp, all the tires blown off—basically a capsule. But every night they went back out, going into the kill zone and staying there because they couldn’t stand to see regular infantry get caught there instead. They saved hundreds of lives, and the men who drove them impressed us with their bravery.
Driving Route Michigan, we made good use of our crazy week learning tactical driving. SEALs don’t run convoys, as the regular Army does. The conventionals usually travel heavy, motoring slowly across the road, often in broad daylight. This gives the insurgency’s IED triggermen plenty of time to see them coming and hit them. By contrast, in Ramadi, we drove like bats out of hell, our vehicles blacked out like shadows. If there was a triggerman along our path who was counting on a few seconds’ notice, well, he would be sorely disappointed. The threat of roadside bombs was downright grave already. We didn’t need to make it easy for him.
Watching a battered Pathfinder return to Camp Ramadi one morning, I said to Lieutenant Commander Thomas, “Sir, those guys are getting beat to hell. The enemy has to know they’re coming. How else would they be sitting on them like this?”
If our troop commander heard any fear in my voice, his easy response didn’t acknowledge it. He said to me, “Marcus, if we thought about that too much, we wouldn’t be able to do our job. We’d never get out there into the fight.”
“Roger that, sir,” I said. “Let’s go get some.”
The boys at Camp Corregidor didn’t waste any time getting their rifles into the fight. One day, at his spartan digs across town, Morgan had a quick in-brief from EOD, then turned in for the night. He awoke early the next morning to the sound of enemy mortar fire coming into camp.
Smaller than Camp Marc Lee and more exposed to its surrounding neighborhoods, Camp Corregidor took fire regularly. The boys there just had to live with it. They wore body armor even for a quick run to take a dump. Men were still sometimes killed by mortar fire while in the chow line. The camp was bounded to the north by Route Michigan. An irrigation canal separated it from a nasty part of the city that was home to COP Eagle’s Nest, the neighborhood where Ryan Job and Marc Lee got shot back in August. Several lookout towers were located on the camp’s western perimeter wall. One of Bravo Platoon’s snipers, Cowboy, ran to one of those towers and climbed up to take a look. He had his sniper rifle with him.
From the tower, Cowboy had a good view of the major road that skirted the residential district of the east-central part of the city, intersecting with Route Michigan. Eventually it would be known as Sniper Alley because of the high volume of sniper fire hitting Camp Corregidor from the street. On this day, though, Cowboy was sending it the other way. Through the scope of his rifle, more than six football fields away, he spied a red Opel sedan parked on the road across the canal with its flashers on. A man was standing in front of the car. He looked up and down the road, then lifted the hood, walked around the side of the car, and looked around some more, up and down the street. The guy was expecting something, but Cowboy sensed it wasn’t a tow truck.
Apparently believing he was unobserved, the man gave a little hand signal and two other guys came running out of a nearby house carrying rice sacks that seemed to hold a heavy load. They heaved the payload into the car’s trunk.
Cowboy didn’t need another set of eyes to know what he was looking at. He fixed his crosshairs on one of the bag handlers and squeezed the trigger. A round of .300 Win Mag flew 680 yards downrange. Hit, center mass. The other bag handler began dragging his buddy back toward the building. The driver slammed down the hood, jumped into the car, and began to drive away. Cowboy got on the radio to the tactical ops cente
r. “This is Cowboy in Echo Tower. We’ve got one EKIA [enemy killed in action] and a VBIED [vehicle-borne improvised explosive device] moving down the street in a red Opel. They’re right out in front of you now.” In short order some jundis hustled out and took that driver and his car into custody. They found explosives in the trunk. It was indeed a VBIED, quite literally hell on wheels. Thanks to Cowboy, they took it off the street before it could find a target. He went back to his quarters and said to his platoon, “Y’all ain’t gonna believe this….” From then, Cowboy followed the same ritual every morning, climbing to the top of Echo Tower and having a look at his exciting new neighborhood.
6
Firecracker
For a SEAL team looking for work, the action never comes soon enough. Team 5 had taken the nickname Task Unit Red Bull. We wore a patch showing a head-down, horns-low longhorn with the Team 5 logo branded on his rear. Our slogan, “If you mess with the bull, you get the horns,” had a sort of Texas twang and was also fitting because of all the Red Bull energy drinks we went through every day just to stay awake. To this day the SEAL teams do their part to keep that brand in business.
The teams can be pretty strongly personality driven, and some of us took the liberty of personalizing our uniforms. My brother and I wore a small three-by-five-inch Lone Star flag front and center on our chests. On his shoulder, Adam Downs had a patch honoring the New York City fire department’s Engine 53, Ladder 43, in memory of the 9/11 attacks. Once in a while Morgan brandished a patch with the colonial-era “Don’t Tread on Me” flag on it, modified SEAL-style: the snake was replaced by the skeleton of a frog, and the famous command was replaced with something a little more provocative: DON’T F——K WITH ME. Team 3 stenciled the bare-skull image of the Punisher, a Marvel Comics character, on their vehicles, gear, and weapons. In Team 5, we took a more modest approach. We named our Humvees after characters from the Transformers movies—Optimus Prime, Ironhide, Bumblebee, Soundwave, and so on. Our comms truck and troop hauler was known as Omega Supreme. Folks don’t typically run this way in the conventional military.
Our first job in Ramadi was an important one. We were assigned to push out into a neighborhood about three miles east of Camp Marc Lee to set up sniper overwatch positions protecting U.S. forces who were building a new combat outpost. Both squads from Alfa Platoon—Blue and Gold—went in, all told about thirty guys. On the morning of the twenty-sixth, we rolled out in our vehicles. We drove to an Iraqi checkpoint, where we picked up the jundis and two excellent men who served as our interpreters, or “terps”—Moose and Riddick, military contractors who lived with us full-time. Staging our vehicles there, we spent the day briefing with them, then, joining up with a patrol of Marines, we set out for our target on foot after dark.
As we proceeded down Route Michigan by night into the center of the city, all was quiet, a strict curfew in place. Maneuvering through the night, we kept about twenty feet between each man. As I kept pace with our fast-moving point man, Special Operator First Class Studdard, my radio crackled and burped with reports of American patrols in contact with the enemy, out there somewhere. The glow of small fires cast the low cloud ceiling in a spooky, shifting palette of reds. Skeletons of buildings loomed darkly all around us.
Finally, we reached our destination—an abandoned four-story building situated on a circular chain of streets that everybody called the Racetrack. Formerly an Iraqi military post, then a school, it was about to become a stiff thumb in the eye of the insurgency, a forward base for a company from the First Battalion, Sixth Marines (or 1/6). We all knew the enemy would come after it hard. We were sent in to keep things cool enough for construction to proceed. It would be known as Combat Outpost Firecracker.
The building was full of reminders of the evil confronting us. As we entered and cleared it, room by room, evidence of its recent darker uses was all around us. It had been an insurgent base of operations, and also a prison or interrogation center. Its filthy walls echoed with the cries of the tortured. Blood stained the tables. Ominous steel implements well suited to a barbecue pit were left behind (there wasn’t any brisket in Ramadi). No telling how many innocent Iraqis had been abused there, but as we took control of the building, its vicious aura gave clarity to our mission.
We decided to set up our command and control element on the fourth floor. One of our officers, another SEAL, and the Navy pilot who served as our JTAC and arranged our air support made their home on the north side. Studdard, Wink, and I led the rest of the group, including all our snipers, around the rest of the floor, looking for positions with the best lines of sight and avenues of fire.
Ten of our thirty SEALs were qualified snipers (the rest were expert marksmen), so we had five pairs to deploy. Putting a two-man sniper team in each room, we arranged an assortment of desks, chairs, pillows, and blankets for functional comfort. Where windowless walls covered up potentially good lines of sight, we sledged or blasted spider holes through them and otherwise redecorated the place. Senior Chief Steffen was with us and I was glad to have him there—and glad to serve in a position that reflected his trust. Once we were dug in, we lay low and waited for trouble, scanning the wasted city cast in shades of black and green through our night-vision goggles.
Before sunrise we had some small excitement when it was discovered that a mule had gotten inside the huge enclosed open playground behind the school. In Ramadi, nothing was as it appeared. When we noticed a hole in the brick wall nearby, we thought it possible that an insurgent had forced the animal in there with a bomb hidden inside him. They were known to plant explosives in animal carcasses, so nothing was impossible. That jackass certainly could have made a hell of an IED. We called our EOD bomb techs and they checked out the mule, which turned out to be packing nothing more than its usual kick.
Shortly after our arrival, an Army captain showed up, looking to coordinate with us, and I greeted him. Since SEALs don’t wear rank, he seemed interested in figuring out where I stood in the chain of command relative to him. Whatever, dude, I thought to myself. I asked him what he needed from us.
“I want protection for my guys,” he said.
“Roger that,” I said. “Just keep your guys away from mine while we’re working. We’ll take the fourth floor. No insurgents will touch you.”
I have to hand it to the men who built the COPs. The whole U.S. military runs on the backs of its smart and resourceful engineers. It’s been that way since the old days: engineers, sappers, Seabees—whatever you call them, good dudes all. The guys we covered worked incredibly fast, usually getting the COPs built overnight. They operated like well-oiled machines, efficiently standing up those outposts and connecting their electrical grids so that our forces could get to the task of taking something essential from the enemy: the trust and goodwill of the citizens of Ramadi. Working in full combat gear in the unbelievable heat, they set up concrete barriers, laid concertina wire on top of walls, layered sandbags into big piles, hooked up generators, and built guard towers, all the while taking harassing fire—and sometimes worse. You talk about hanging yourself out there. Good Lord.
A few of us tried to grab a little sleep as the eastern sky warmed before dawn. We planned to stick around for as long as it took to make sure ours was a long-term lease. But come morning, all hell broke loose in our little sector of Ramadi’s shithole.
In Baghdad, we had rolled through the city in unarmored early-model Humvees, our legs and weapons hanging out the open doors on both sides. We looked pretty slick, but were very vulnerable then. Three years of IEDs and RPG attacks had helped us evolve. Now, on the street below us, a Humvee started taking fire from a position beyond our line of sight. Several RPGs hit the vehicle and the road around it. As that Humvee took several more hits, all of us watching were sure its occupants were goners. But somehow, it emerged from the swirl of dust and smoke and continued on. Those up-armored models could really take a beating.
The attack on the vehicle was followed by a barrage of mortar fire,
falling on us in high arcs, lobbed from far away. They were big shells, 120mm rounds, and accurately targeted. Three of these bad boys straddled our building. One blew a huge crater in the street right where that Humvee had been. Another went off in the playground. The closest detonation shook the plaster and knocked paint from our walls.
As the attack continued, the streets rattled with the sound of American small arms fire as well as enemy PKC machine guns, AK-47 rifles, and rocket-propelled grenades. Once in a while, people would appear on the streets. Whenever we saw them milling around, we fired warning shots; when a wall splintered behind them, they usually disappeared quickly. The children were widely believed to be harmless, but we always had our suspicions that they served as lookouts and probes for the insurgency. Whenever we saw an older one acting aggressively, we paid attention and didn’t quit paying attention until we figured out what he was up to. Polyester tracksuits and old-school Adidas-style sneakers—the ones with three diagonal stripes running down each side—seemed to be the uniform of choice for many of their fighters.
Adam got our team’s first kill in Ramadi, earning him a case of beer the next time we got somewhere that had beer. He was always a source of laughs. One time after that, he was doing an overwatch when he needed to take a dump, so he stood up and dropped his drawers, only to be spotted by an American sentry across the way, who opened up on the sniper with his M60 machine gun. Apparently word of our position hadn’t gotten around. The sentry ceased fire pretty quickly, though. (I think what saved my teammate was the New York Giants ball cap he was wearing, which must have been visible from quite a distance.) The experience was sure exciting for Adam—and particularly memorable: as he ducked the gunfire, he fell right back into his own crap. Needless to say, for the next few days he was alone in his sniper hole. (Sorry, bro; that moment was too funny not to immortalize in print.)