The Last Punisher: A SEAL Team THREE Sniper's True Account of the Battle of Ramadi (10 page)

The night was inky black and silent. I strained through the grainy green image of my night-vision goggles as the vehicles came to life, one by one. The low rumble of engines filled the air around me, and I hit the pressure pad on the .50’s infrared laser. The night began to light up with beams of green from our guns.

Downtown Ramadi had several recognizable landmarks. We rolled heavily past the seven-story where Chris Kyle would later kill seven muj in a day. It was one of the taller buildings in Ramadi, and even then seemed to stand out, as if beckoning us to come and play. The southeast corner of the roof sagged from where it had been hit with an American JDAM (Joint Direct Air Munition), looking severely strained under the burden of war. I inspected its blackened windows, looking for insurgents. In the back of my mind, I was also looking for a good place to snipe from. Seven-story provided vantage points, security, and a nice egress route to Observation Post Virginia, a Marine outpost just south of the building.
Another time,
I thought, and continued scanning my surroundings.

I strained my neck to get a better view at the tangled mess of IED craters and suspect wires at the intersection ahead. “Holy shit,” I muttered under my breath. We approached the intersection of Route Michigan and Sunset with caution, as it was a major impact zone. “Shift left,”
came the order over the radio from Squirrel, our convoy navigator, and my vehicle began tracking around the mess. The others followed our lead as we continued down Michigan.

I thought again how much I liked Vehicle 1’s turret. I had more than 180 degrees of free-fire zone and could really lay down some lead. Besides rear security, the other positions didn’t offer the same expansive field of fire. Another benefit of riding lead is that an insurgent usually couldn’t hit the first vehicle with a command-detonated IED. A pressure plate was a different story, but you take the good with the bad. Once again, I thought of my nuts.

I would have welcomed a chance to relax my senses and breathe easy, but as the convoy slowed in the soul of the city, it wasn’t the time. The Government Center was home to Ramadi’s municipal buildings and where the Marines operated from. It was taking some of the heaviest pounding by insurgents holed up and operating out of the surrounding city blocks. They hid with ease in the apartments and homes piled on top of each other and wedged onto the dirty streets like a Tetris game.

Government Center gave me my first real idea of what I was up against. Around it, the scars of battle were evident. Rubble littered the streets, the result of IEDs, small arms fire, RPGs, and the general havoc of war. IR netting attempted to hide the observation points along the roof. I scanned the rooftops of surrounding buildings, searching for our enemy. The scene around us proved they apparently knew where to aim, and it made me uneasy to be in that position. There’s a hum that runs through an element when everybody feels the same sense of unease. Call it warrior instinct. You don’t have to say it; everybody’s automatically locked on and knows things can go bad real quick. From the amount of wreckage piled up around us, even the smell of carnage, I could tell the Marines had dealt some serious death from that roof. It wasn’t a position I was eager to hang around.

The rest of the convoy didn’t get much better in terms of the
warm-and-fuzzies. Muj controlled the battle space between Government Center and Corregidor, and driving through that area in the darkness kicked my hypervigilance into overdrive. That uneasy hum stayed with us as we rolled smack through the middle of enemy territory. I gave tight, nearly imperceptible nods to the Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles providing security on the corners.
Damn right,
I thought.
We’re gonna weed these assholes out if we have to do it block by block.
Little did I know, that’s exactly what we’d be doing in the coming months.

Up ahead in the distance, I could make out the shapes, glowing green on my NVGs, of the Marines patrolling for IEDs. I felt bad for the grunts out there, trekking through the dirty city streets, sweeping for bombs at night. On one side of the street was a river of human waste. Shit creeks were Ramadi’s version of a modern sewage system. Ramadi always smelled bad, but with the lack of airflow and the steam-room humidity, the smell was overwhelming.

Since arriving in country, we’d heard the IED detonations on Michigan every night. When you hear that sound in the distance, you know there’s a good chance some Marines or Army cats just died. I’d usually bow my head for a moment in a sort of silent prayer. With the sound of far-off detonations in my mind, I thought about the grunts’ courage and was thankful for it. Patrolling for IEDs wasn’t a job I would have wanted. I preferred the hunt. Patrolling for bombs was waiting to step in the snare. I am not prey.

We left the Marines behind, but the smell of the shit creeks came with us. They reflected ink black in the green hue of my NODs. It was like the city had been gut-shot and was spilling its bowels out onto its streets. From what I knew of gut wounds from my combat medic course, it’s possible to die a slow and miserable death of sepsis after a wound to the abdomen, a death that creeps up slowly from your own feces infecting the rest of your body. It might take days to die, as you suffer the whole time from fever, pain, thirst, and coma. I looked
around at the city streets of Ramadi, all shot up and infecting themselves with their own shit, and wondered how thirsty they’d get before they’d eventually die.

Finally, we arrived at Corregidor, which was blacked out like every other installation according to an overall rule, because of the mortar threat. The gate opened as I wiped the sweat and moondust from my brow, feeling relieved the drive was uneventful. Shooting bad guys was at the front of everyone’s mind. We could feel the storm coming, but we wanted it to be on our terms, on ops that we planned, moving silent and deadly and so fast that we were literally on top of the enemy before they knew what hit them. Nobody really wants a firefight in a convoy.

What we’d heard from SEAL Team TWO was that they’d only just gotten started in Ramadi by the time they had to turn over to us. They’d been handed a new model to work with—the now well-known counterinsurgency tactic of tribal engagement. They were supposed to build bonds with village elders in hopes the elders would cooperate with coalition forces. But it was going to take more than just a month or two to inspire enough confidence in the local sheiks to convince them to start identifying the terrorists hiding in their communities. To us, a Syrian posing as an Iraqi looked like an Iraqi. An Iraqi religious leader, however, knew immediately when eight or ten guys who had never been in his neighborhood before took up residence in an abandoned house. What we really needed was for the leaders of the Iraqi communities to recognize that the insurgency was just as bad for Iraq as it was for the coalition forces and to help us out. When Task Unit Bruiser got on the ground in Anbar Province, there was still more civil war than Sunni Awakening going on and the troop surge of 2007 hadn’t quite begun. In other words, the Punishers were primed to do some killing. I was closer to my original goal.

SEALs don’t normally own battle space, so wherever we went our head shed had to coordinate with whoever was in charge before we
could actually operate. Corregidor was an Army installation, so in this case that meant planning with the Army brass how to best employ us. Good commanders immediately saw the value of utilizing our expertise to mitigate the threats their soldiers routinely engaged. However, it can be a delicate interaction, not unlike a negotiation. It’s the Army’s space and they’ve been gutting it out against the insurgency for years. They don’t want to hand over their autonomy. SEALs come in eager to do a job they know they’re good at. They don’t want to take orders from conventional ground forces. The head shed has to make sure early on that the working relationship is a good one.

For anyone not involved in that tap dance, that translated to more hurry up and wait. We were told to stay out of trouble until we received marching orders, so we mostly spent our time on the range, cleaning our weapons, practicing our patrols, training the Jundis, and rehearsing our missions.

The best-case scenario was that the Army would pretty much let us do whatever we wanted. In an effort to appease those who chose to be all they could be, our task unit commander sent down a directive that we would all maintain Army standards of grooming. For a SEAL, this is kind of a kick in the pants. We’re proud of our reputation for being cocky and arrogant, and we normally flaunt our relaxed military grooming standards. It’s not uncommon to see a Teamguy in Coronado with sideburns nearing Elvis proportions or hair a couple of inches too long. It’s just his way of saying he’s not regular Navy, and the rules don’t apply to him. Deployment is often an opportunity to forget regular haircuts and shaves. This time, it appeared, that would not be possible. Short hair and regular shaves would be mandatory. I groaned inwardly.

“Cheer up, Dauber,” said Marc Lee. “Nobody’ll notice if you don’t shave that baby face. Can you even grow facial hair?” Marc’s thick black beard normally showed a five o’clock shadow sometime around noon.

“What
does this have to do with work?” I asked. “And when are we going to start doing some?”

Guy walked up. “We keep them happy, thinking we’re falling in line, they keep us operating. Just shave your fucking beard and cut your hair.” He smiled before walking off. “Know what’s within regs, boys?” We shrugged. “A nice eighties, caterpillar war-stache.”

We shaved our beards and cut our hair, but several of us started growing our mustaches. They were hot and gross and Copenhagen stuck to them. They filled up with moondust like everything else, but there wasn’t a damn thing anybody could say to us about them. A year and some change later, I returned from a training trip in Niland, California, after a couple of weeks in the field with a mustache, and my girlfriend, now my wife, dubbed it “the molestache.” Some guys could grow Tom Selleck works of art. I grew a patchy molestache.

There was plenty to be learned from the Army if you knew where to look. A typical Army deployment was twelve months, so a seasoned soldier could be a wealth of information. Tony and the other senior Teamguys were excellent mentors when it came to Team tactics and operations in Iraq in general, but Ramadi was new to all of us. I was looking for somebody to give me the skinny on Ramadi’s ins and outs, and I found my source when I met an Army sniper named Adam. Adam was a sergeant in the 502nd. He was in his early thirties, short and balding with a medium build. He was a good soldier and a smart guy, and I liked him because he was eager to share information and advice. Eight months in Ramadi had put Adam’s finger on the pulse of the battle tempo. He knew Ramadi. He knew the Ma’Laab. And he knew the enemy.

“There’s a guard tower that’s constantly getting rocketed and hit with small arms fire,” Adam said with his generic southern accent. “It provides a good vantage point overlooking the canal and a good angle down most of the alleys on the eastern side of the city. Prime real estate for sniping.”

The next afternoon, I awoke and sat up slowly on the edge of my rack. As I rubbed my eyes and ruffled my matted-down hair, I wondered what was in store for the day.
I’m gonna lose it if I have to train more Jundis today,
I thought. Adam’s words from the morning before still echoed in my mind: prime real estate for sniping. In high school, I studied Latin and the phrase
Audentes Fortuna iuvat
(Fortune favors the bold) drifted into my thoughts.
Virgil,
I remembered, before sleepily winding down a tangent of other Latin phrases I had retained:
si vis pacem, para bellum
(if you wish for peace, prepare for war),
aut viam inveniam aut faciam
(I will either find a way or I will make one),
semper ubi sub ubi
(always where under where). I quit the underwear thing a long time ago. Frogmen don’t wear briefs.

I ate hurriedly and came back to my room to put my tricolors on. Around 1400, I made my way to the ops tent and looked up at the whiteboard. Nothing planned for the day. With Virgil’s encouragement in mind, I peeled the Dauber magnet off the board and placed it with confidence at the guard tower position. I stopped momentarily and contemplated my move.

I was ready to go hunting.

Over breakfast, I had briefed my chief, lead petty officer, and officer in charge on my plan. “Get some, Dauber,” they said. And I planned to do just that.

I barely noticed the weight of my Mk 11 as I began the walk to the guard tower. My Oakley assault boots kicked up little clouds of moondust as I trudged through the tracks left by various vehicles. As I moved through cover, I kept a regular pace. At the last piece of cover I started moving tactically. Muj didn’t have a direct bead on the facility, but I took no chances as I zigzagged, low to the ground and as quickly as I could.

The tower itself was a stone structure. The pockmarks left by small arms fire alerted me not to linger outside, so I pushed the door open and trekked straight up the spiral staircase. Upstairs on the top floor, I found a couple of soldiers on watch.

“What’s up, guys?” I said casually. “Mind if I hang out here for a while? I heard this is a good place to smoke some muj.” I set my rifle on the table and pulled out my laser range finder. Looking out on the Ma’Laab, I began checking my reference points across the canal. End of the alley—500 yards, red car—300, etc.

“Sure, man,” said one of the soldiers. He introduced himself and told me his buddy’s name.

“I’m Dauber,” I said. I settled my nerves as I rested my gun on the platform and began to glass the alleyways. I felt eyes on me and looked up at the soldiers. One of them was looking at my sniper rifle.

“So you’re a SEAL, huh?” he asked.

“Yup,” I answered, my eye back on my scope. On the other end, a dirty alleyway was crowded with garbage, clotheslines, and the occasional car.

“And a sniper?” he continued. I cleared my throat.