Honor and Betrayal : The Untold Story of the Navy Seals Who Captured the "Butcher of Fallujah"-and the Shameful Ordeal They Later Endured (9780306823091) (12 page)

All of their personal operations gear was packed and stowed. Every item of medical equipment SEALs take on patrol was in there. The SEALs support staff had taken care of everything. It was perhaps the first time either Jon or Matt realized precisely the high regard in which the Team members were held. By everyone.

Because everything that could be done for them had been done. They were required to present only themselves, with their handheld ready bag, which holds each SEAL's M-4 rifle, body armor for Iraq, plus night-vision goggles, a combat knife and Sig-Sauer pistol, helmet, and medical blow-out kit.

The ready bag contained all the essentials in case they ran into what they quaintly describe as an “Oh shit! scenario.” As the enormous Boeing freighter commenced its final flight path, helmets and body armor would be pulled on, with rifles ready. No SEAL would disembark through that aircraft door unless the platoon was prepared as a fighting unit to engage the enemy.

One by one they embarked the aircraft, climbing the boarding stairs in the early morning darkness of Virginia's Atlantic coast. When they were inside and all together, the CO reminded them for the last time on American soil: “This is a very serious SEAL deployment. We are going to an extremely dangerous place, and every one of you needs to remember every last lesson you have been taught. Might as well start right now and put on your game faces. Because that's the way it's likely to be from now on.”

Matt recalls that this was a departure like no other they had ever experienced. There was not one iota of levity—no laughs, no jokes. Like so many valorous young men in the past, all of them holders of the legendary SEAL Trident, they were leaving for a war zone. And not everyone comes back.

In silence they each sought out a spot on the aircraft, slinging their hammocks between the great steel packing cases that were stacked high to the ceiling. They cleated them off about ten feet above the cargo floor, some fastened to the high freight palettes, others to the heavy nets that covered the weapon cases.

And everyone felt the faint shudder down the interior as the four giant Pratt and Whitney engines were fired up—special military designation: Globemaster III—F117-PW-100, over forty thousand pounds thrust on each one—seventy-two tons of raw turbo-jet power to hurl them skyward.

They set off into a gusting March wind, the twenty wide wheels of the undercarriage rolling hard through the first revolutions of a journey that would put both Matt McCabe and Jon Keefe through some kind of a living hell. But not yet.

The C-17 thundered southwest, rising off the runway and banking left over the myriad of bays behind the SEAL base. Climbing north up the Atlantic, they left the long finger of Virginia's eastern shore to portside and pressed on along the eastern seaboard over the deep waters off New Jersey, staying well out to sea as they made for Nantucket Island and then the coast of Nova Scotia.

The nine men who traveled with Matt and Jon were a highly diverse group—the most important of them was almost certainly the experienced
Sam Gonzales, from Blue Island, South Chicago, a Special Operations petty officer 1st class, aged around twenty-nine and a highly decorated SEAL, including a Bronze Star with valor. Sam had been in the Navy since 1999 and a SEAL since 2006.

He was one of the most popular SO
1s
on Team 10, a very smooth operator of the comms systems and a joint terminal attack controller (JTAC). And on top of all that he dealt with the onerous duties of the leading petty officer. He stood only five feet seven inches tall, but he found a way to look like an offensive lineman for his local Chicago Bears.

Also on board was a highly amusing twenty-nine-year-old petty officer 1st class from South Carolina, a SEAL who had served in Yemen and Baghdad. He was a breacher by trade and went by the colorful name of “Greens.”

Next to Jon on the flight was another exquisitely named Navy SEAL: Carlton Milo Higbie IV, a twenty-six-year-old petty officer 2nd class. Carl, as he was usually called, was the son of a wealthy financier, based—where else?—in Greenwich, Connecticut.

This six-foot, 240-pound SEAL had always known he would greatly prefer some bomb-blasted landing beach or the rubble of the Fallujah ruins to an office on Wall Street. Carl was a big boy, in terrific shape—the consummate SEAL noncommissioned officer. As a JTAC, his job was to stay in touch with the overhead aircraft on all missions. Jon was one of his main weight-lifting buddies.

Another petty officer 1st class on board was Eric, the platoon's top medic and lead sniper. He was an excellent swimmer and runner, and he competed in triathlons. He was very, very fast across the sand. Slightly unusually for such a dedicated athlete, Eric was also the platoon intellect, a graduate of Georgia Tech, which NASA now recognized as the aerospace capital of all US universities.

Echo Platoon called him the rocket scientist. And although he could most certainly find his way through outer space, Eric was equally adroit at navigation on planet Earth. He spent a lot of time studying maps, and this made him, in SEAL parlance, the point man, out in front of the others, leading the Team from waypoint to
waypoint, checking the ground contours, watching the compass and the GPS.

Eric was, invariably, the reconnaissance leader, exploring the lay of the land, reporting back from his forward position. He was experienced, too, and had already been on two combat deployments, one of them to Baghdad at a very bad time. Every man on the C-17 was pleased to have Eric in the platoon.

The other five SEALs who traveled in the C-17 have remained in the US Navy, and their names will not be revealed. Meanwhile the mighty Globemaster III, jammed to the gills with SEAL equipment, thundered out over the North Atlantic, making its crossing just to the south of Greenland.

It was an eight-hour journey, and the men mostly slept, waking when they entered Europe and crossed the Scottish borders before flying high over the rough, gale-swept North Sea. They made their mainland Europe landfall just north of Ostend, Belgium, and then descended over tiny Luxembourg and into the American Air Base at Ramstein, Germany.

They touched down shortly after 1900, and it was as dark as it was in the United States when they took off. This was a two-hour refueling stop for the C-17, which took on board about a zillion gallons of gas and, for the SEALs, a few dozen cheeseburgers.

Surrounded by fifty-three thousand Americans—the largest overseas population of US citizens in the world—the guys from Echo Platoon were mildly surprised at how isolated they immediately became. It seemed that no one felt sufficiently confident to come over for a chat.

But Ramstein is a massive military base, home of the 86th Airlift Wing, headquarters of US Air Force in Europe. Everyone knows the unwritten rules of the Special Forces: basically, leave them alone, because their work is always top secret and ought not to be discussed with anyone.

Matt had firsthand experience of this military form of
omertà
, their own code of silence. “The SEALs operated with the Marines for a couple of months while we were in the Gulf,” he recalled. “I never once spoke to any of them. It's just the way it is with SEALs. They always seem pretty quiet, and everyone keeps their distance.”

Slow on conversation but outstanding at cheeseburgers—that was more or less the SEAL verdict on this little corner of the US of A right here in the Rhineland.

And by 2100 they were back in the aircraft, settling down for another long journey, seven more hours in this flying warehouse. Their route would take them south as swiftly as possible, as all US military transporters avoid flying over the old Eastern European states, preferring to run down the Adriatic Sea, east of the Italian coast, and then angle even more easterly across friendly Turkey before cutting south again over northern Iraq and down toward Baghdad.

During this time most of the SEALs were asleep, but those who weren't sipped iced water and laughed at the endless anecdotes Carlton Milo Higbie IV offered as he outlined his plan to retire one day from the SEALs and write a political book.

The final destination for the C-17 was al-Taqaddum Air Base—known as TQ in military slang—which was fifty miles west of Baghdad and operated by the US Marine Corps. With its two giant runways, both of them more than two miles long, TQ stands on a pancake-flat desert plateau on the shores of Lake Habbinaya, south of the Euphrates. It's around halfway between Fallujah and Ar-Ramadi and was the main US air hub for men and materiel moving into Anbar Province for Operation Enduring Freedom.

The SEAL transporter came down through clear skies and landed just before 0700, local time. The sun had already risen above the shimmering horizon of the Syrian Desert, with its parched and dusty wadis.

By the time they came to a halt the SEALs were wearing body armor and helmets. There was, as yet, no sign of an “Oh shit! scenario,” and they disembarked into a hot, silent wasteland, dead flat, with, as far as the eye could see, no trees or any kind of vegetation. Also, it was hotter than hell.

Worse yet, it was likely to be home for the next six months. “Holy shit,” said Matt. “Perrysburg suddenly looks like paradise.”

And he had been there before, briefly, with Carlton, for just a couple of weeks after their training in Stuttgart in October 2007. But he'd forgotten how diabolical it actually was, this colossal sweep of flat, unbroken land, without a rise, a hill, or even a decent gradient. They'd
been on the ground for all of four minutes and could all see that desert heat shimmer on the aircraft's fuselage.

All they knew about this place involved its population of thousands of frantic tribesmen who were happy to kill each other over some religious differences but would much prefer to kill American military personnel for no reason whatsoever.

“Is this it?” said Jon, staring at the horizon and shoving back his helmet. “Does anyone actually live here?”

On the tarmac to meet them was their officer in charge Lieutenant Jimmy and his veteran chief petty officer, Gibby, a great bull of a man, aged thirty-four, platoon chief.

The biggest man there was Petty Officer 1st Class Rob, a natural-born breacher if ever there was one. This was one smart Navy SEAL. A former second-choice offensive lineman for Penn State, Rob weighed in at 289 pounds and stood six foot five inches in his game socks.

He was, as his fast mobile position on the Team suggests, a light-footed tiger out there in front of an advancing SEAL Team. And when he swung that sledgehammer at an unsuspecting, barricaded door, the foundations shuddered. He would likely cave in not only the door, its frame, and half the mud wall but also the roof with it. Petty Officer Rob had to think hard to control his own power. His teammates loved him.

And there they stood, blinking in the dazzling desert light with a hot wind from the south drifting past, blowing little dust storms across the runways. There is nothing more foreign to an American than the Arabian Peninsula.

Except for the vast oil deposits, much is unchanged since biblical times. Tribal laws have survived down the centuries. You can sense it, feel it, this inner soul of martyrdom, where the residents will go to war—a real, hot, shooting war, red in tooth and claw—over a difference of religious opinion. And not even much of a difference.

There is a brutality here, where one group of Muslims will think nothing of blowing up an entire marketplace, killing, maiming, and blasting women and children, because the shopping group believed in some variation of the Koran.

And although US troops tried to bring sanity to Iraq, nothing really worked. They are who they are: a couple of paces in front of the ancient Bedouin tribes, but not much more. And now Matt and Jon were in the heart of the War on Terror on the edge of the Syrian Desert, ready to play their part in hunting down the commanders of this weird and secretive killing society, al-Qaeda in Iraq.

And now a line of US military trucks was advancing to transport the men from Echo Platoon to their new base, Camp Schwedler, a custom-built Navy SEAL stronghold set in the corner of the US Marine Corps' Camp Baharia. As Marine camps go, this one was in the heavyweight division. Twelve miles around, with a lake that was six miles around, it was home to thousands of troops.

It was a ninety-minute journey for the SEALs, now sweltering in their body armor but under orders not to remove it. It was, for Jon and Matt at least, a first glance into the accepted method of driving through the Islamic Republic of Iraq: floor it, and keep it right there.

Those trucks bumped, lurched, and rattled as they sped along the road that led up to Baharia. There is no other way for US troops to move about, so cunning and full of hatred are their enemies. A roadside bomb, an IED placed under the asphalt, a rocket-propelled grenade, explosives, raking fire from an AK-47—the insurgents were everywhere: lean, bearded terrorists, awaiting their chance.

But hitting a huge truck meandering slowly along a desert road is one thing. Hitting a high-speed military vehicle hurtling along at 70mph plus, packed to the gunwales with armed Navy SEALs—that's quite another. And the al-Qaeda “warriors” have always been specialists in the sneak attack, not full-on confrontation with US fire and steel.

Timing a bomb accurately is almost impossible if the target is moving fast, covering one hundred yards of ground every three seconds. And these Muslim IEDs, though lethal, are famously inaccurate. “Abdul the bomb maker” probably was not trained at Textron Defense Systems in Massachusetts. At least he better not have been.