Honor and Betrayal : The Untold Story of the Navy Seals Who Captured the "Butcher of Fallujah"-and the Shameful Ordeal They Later Endured (9780306823091) (13 page)

And so they charged forward, making fast time up to Camp Baharia and, finally, into their new home, named after the fallen Spartan of
SEAL Team 4. Camp Schwedler was approximately two hundred yards by two hundred yards, surrounded by four-foot-thick concrete walls that were fifteen feet high and topped with rolled razor wire. Guarding the entrance was what Matt described as “a big-ass two-ton steel gate,” which not even Rob and Jon, both slamming away with their sledgehammers, could possibly have taken down.

Inside the small desert fortress everything was built purposefully. There were a couple of temporary detainee holding cells that were quite close to the recreation room known as Danny's, with its video games, movies, and television. Outside there was a barbecue pit, tables, and chairs. Danny's, for the record, had profound SEAL Team roots, named as it was after the legendary bar on Orange Avenue close to the Coronado base, second home to generations of Special Forces.

Schwedler had four lines of huts to house the SEALs and support staff, with SEALs on the front end, facing a line of massive heavily armored vehicles in case they had to move fast. Fifty yards further in front, was a long line of smaller military vehicles, all of them ready to go at a moment's notice. The big mechanics' workshop was right there.

At the far end of the compound was the excellently equipped medical room next to the gymnasium and weight room, plus the briefing room and the ready room. Between them was the tactical operation center (TOC), where the senior commanders plotted and schemed the SEALs' missions.

Matt was given a hut in the second line, two doors from his buddy Tyler. Jon was right in front of the ace snowboarder, one hut from Sam.

The camp was on a hair trigger of operational readiness, and the volume of intel coming into the TOC every day never let up. Because half the country wanted the US and coalition troops out of the Middle East forever, this was scarcely surprising.

A SEAL platoon on active duty is there for a purpose, in this case to capture or kill known al-Qaeda operatives who were against the new Iraqi government and insane with dislike for the American military, which was attempting to put the place back together after the carnage that the late Saddam Hussein caused.

The idea was never to kill squads of al-Qaeda personnel but rather to capture their top people and interrogate them. SEALs call them the HVIs (high value individuals), these commanders and planners were the ones the SEALs went after—bin Laden's far-flung henchmen and men with cell phones and Internet connections, not bands of trigger-happy gunmen. The philosophy was quality before quantity.

And the wanted list grew almost by the hour. Not just the jihadist bomb makers who had been responsible for so much destruction but also the bomb distributers—men who journeyed through the night across the desert, delivering high explosive designed to blow young Americans to pieces. There was a vast network of al-Qaeda staff involved in their planning and operational procedures.

And every day American intel field officers either tracked them down or received tip-offs or evidence of sightings, all of which needed to be followed up, checked, and then hit, and hit hard. That's what the SEALs were there for, but great caution was required, because they were always headed directly into harm's way.

And although all SEAL platoons are essentially fearless, their commanders are strongly averse to sending these highly trained special forces on what might become suicide missions. The TOC in Camp Schwedler would need a lot of cast-iron facts before unleashing the might of Echo Platoon onto the local suspects.

The procedures for setting up and then executing a Special Forces attack was time consuming and almost unbearably thorough. And the SEAL senior commanders were relentless in ensuring that the guys had a fighting chance of hitting their target, getting out, and getting home, with their HVIs either dead or alive.

The very first step was almost as dangerous as the last, because the Americans were working under strict rules. For every SEAL on any mission they had two Iraqis working alongside. That was Iraqi Special Weapons and Tactics (ISWAT) in action, trained by the SEALs as decreed by Foreign Internal Defense (FID).

And no matter how urgent the mission, the SEALs were required to first obtain warrants of approval from the Fallujah police headquarters, situated way downtown in this poisonous, bomb-blasted hotbed of insurgent anger.

Broadly, that meant the SEALs had to risk their lives to get permission to risk their lives again. The first time Jon made the journey to collect the warrants he was stunned by the security that surrounded the police HQ; the whole building was barricaded and guarded against the world, the result of years of al-Qaeda attacks on police premises all over Iraq.

The fact that they sent SEALs on what appeared to be a mere errand was a measure of the danger involved. But sending anyone into Fallujah who was less than a combat warrior was impossible. Not if you wanted to see them again.

The SEALs took characteristic precautions from the very start of each downtown journey, which were now regarded as so menacing that they were formally classified as a combat operation. They started by lashing down the standard ammo cans in the back of the vehicle in case they got hit by a hurled bomb or an RPG, which could blast a standard can into a lethal missile that might kill them all, especially if it were full.

Comms systems were primed, seatbelts were fastened with five-point harnesses tight, and machine guns were ready. At least two vehicles would conduct this operation, with four armed SEALs in each—weapons drawn, always in attendance.

And three miles outside the town, the drivers hit the accelerators, and with eight miles to go—five of them through treacherous enemy territory—according to Matt, we “hauled ass every yard of the way.”

They braked and swerved, shot up onto the sidewalk and back down again, and never gave the enemy one moment to set up. They howled through street markets, horns blaring, scattering chickens, and terrifying goats. They shoved cattle out of the way, occasionally camels, as they dodged oncoming traffic.

Shoppers in the markets moved aside and vendors retreated into baskets of fresh vegetables as the US Navy SEALs sped their way through town, weaving and bumping, and God knows what else. Just keep going—fast. That's all.

“It wasn't any fun either,” recalled Jon. “And no one was laughing. This was hostile territory, and we half expected a friggin' bomb to land right behind the driver. Screw that.”

When they arrived at police HQ they left two guys on guard, weapons drawn, and the other two raced to the bolted and barred front door, where guards let them in. The warrants were sometimes waiting, sometimes not, but they eventually were signed, issuing Iraqi approval for American action against their joint enemies in al-Qaeda.

There was always a quick handshake and a polite greeting for the local police chief, and then the Americans raced outside, scrambled back into the vehicle, and burned rubber on the rough sandy ground as they sped back the way they had come—through the five miles of alien streets, where everyone hated them and where death might await around any corner as it had for so many other members of the US armed forces.

This entire business of driving through unfriendly Arabian streets was a thoroughly nerve-wracking experience. This was like Bahrain, 2005, at another forward SEAL base south of the capital, Manama. Any time those SEALs were going anywhere from out of the US Air Base at Muharraq Island, they had to go through the middle of town. And back then it was darn near as bad as it was in Fallujah—at least it was in spirit if not in active high explosive.

The citizens of Manama were fed up to the back teeth with the American military, and there were even areas where the locals hung out black flags from homes and shops signifying
Americans not welcome
. It was similar in Yemen, not quite so intense in Saudi Arabia, but again very obvious in areas of Damascus in Syria and certainly worse in Gaza City, Israel.

Fallujah never needed those black flags. Every house was a black flag. The SEALs saw the whole place as one massed enemy redoubt. And every time the Camp Schwedler intel guys thought they'd located a possible target, the SEALs had to race straight through the middle of this hostile city to get Iraqi permission to attack ... huh?

That was just the way it was. And in fairness to the Iraqi police, they rarely if ever refused to sign the warrants because, of course, they were under attack as well. And they were granted a major voice in finalizing who should be taken down. But when push came to shove US Navy SEALs carried out the actual operation.

When Echo Platoon first arrived there were heavy briefings day after day, lecturing the men on Iraqi customs, the likely tactics of their enemy, and the standard SEAL operational procedures to deal with every conceivable occurrence.

They were shown lists and photographs of the most wanted terrorists and reports of previous attempts to detain them, both successful and unsuccessful. Like all US military postmortems, they were searching in the extreme, trying to pinpoint what had worked and what had failed. Many lessons had been learned, but some of these al-Qaeda commanders remained on the loose, several for many months.

There were two or three still free after several years. And one of these was the murderer Ahmad Hashim Abd Al-Isawi, the Butcher of Fallujah, who had been evading capture for almost five years. There were others too. Matt recalls reading up on one al-Qaeda tribesman who they'd gone after twenty times and had still not located—not because the SEALs had been outfought or outwitted but simply because the villain was not where he was supposed to be.

The al-Qaeda networks had become more and more efficient. And the reason for this was not only obvious; it was god awful. The Americans and their coalition partners were forced, politically, to reveal almost all of their plans to the Iraqi police in order to get the agreed warrants signed.

This was, in one sense, a reasonable method of ensuring mutual cooperation, but in another sense it was like standing up on your hind legs and begging for a betrayal. No one knew what the hell was going on inside those barricaded police buildings. And yes, most of the Iraqi personnel genuinely wished the US security forces well.

But in the shady world of espionage, be it in rain-swept night streets of Moscow or the hot and sandy terrorist enclaves of the Middle East, it still takes only one mole. Just one solitary person working quietly, listening to his superiors, or copying down those warrants for the whole thing to come unraveled.

For the SEALs finally to capture or kill one thoroughly dangerous member of al-Qaeda, any scheme will simply flounder if someone tells him the Americans are coming at this time, in this place, with this intention.

Of course US intel was keenly aware of the problem, but nothing could be done—not against politicians who had made up their minds that US-Iraqi relations were always more important than mission secrecy.

From the SEALs' point of view this was doubly bad. Not only were their missions likely to come up empty, but the risk of enemy ambush was plainly heightened. The dread of a heavily armed terrorist fighting force actually waiting for your arrival is not much fun.

But it was a daily fact of life for the residents of Camp Schwedler. And it always meant intensive briefings, maps, charts, warnings, black spots, and long walks into the zone under full gear and weapons because the noise of car or aircraft engines was always too loud and too risky in the silence of the desert nights.

Like most terrorist operations, it was a guessing game. Hard facts were rare, but the one that stood out over long periods of study were al-Qaeda and Taliban attacks on Iraqi police personnel, attacks in which the staff were targeted, usually so well that it must have been conducted with inside information. It took Matt and Jon very little time to view the police HQ in downtown Fallujah with consummate mistrust.

Meanwhile Echo Platoon was moving into battle mode. There was intensive training in stealth, marksmanship, and navigation across the burning sands, where temperatures sometimes reached 115 degrees.

When the operations began they were, like most SEAL missions, conducted at night. And the objectives were often simple—at least they were to the guys who were not actually out there. The orders mostly involved a long walk in, through the night, before busting into a building, locating this or that al-Qaeda terrorist, grabbing him and his immediate cohorts, and bringing them in for questioning and incarceration. If there was heavy armed resistance, the SEALs were to shoot them.

And no chances were ever taken with these killers, who would slit a SEAL's throat or knife him in the back as soon as they looked at him. Procedures for capture were subsequently harsh: grab him, search and disarm him, then get him on the deck fast—either the easy way or, if necessary, the other way. Hold him down, get the cuffs on him, and tell him to shut up.

None of this could be described as subtle. But this was not a subtle business. At best it was lethal. And the greatest care needed to be taken at all stages of the mission. Matt and Jon had effectively been in strict training for this since they arrived in Coronado three years previously. And now they were judged to be ready to step forward into the footprints of so many heroic young Americans who had gone before them.

Matt remembers the briefing in the evening before they left on an operation—the thoroughness, the maps, and the details of the journey in. It was scheduled for a small town maybe twenty miles outside the base, and the Iraqi security men who were accompanying the platoon were already inside the walls of Camp Schwedler.