The Last Punisher: A SEAL Team THREE Sniper's True Account of the Battle of Ramadi (17 page)

“Is this guy sitting on a pineapple or something?” Chris said. “He’s got a voice like a squeaky dog toy.”

“Sounds like a drunk guy trying to sing Freddie Mercury at karaoke,” I said.

“Good one,” Chris said.

Queen was not the Legend’s flavor of music.

Around eight, a loud burst of gunfire snapped us all to attention. I looked for the source and saw about five muj fighters about two hundred yards to the west, popping up and down out of the tall grass and shrubs like a Whac-A-Mole game, taking potshots at a Marine patrol across the river. They were all dressed in what was apparently the muj’s standard uniform: Adidas tracksuit pants, sneakers, and a T-shirt or tank top. Most had short hair and ratty beards, and their obvious lack of training and tactical skill was so glaringly awful that it was almost impressive. Not only were they not shooting at us, but they had no idea we were there, which was a very unique and awesome position for us to be in. We’d set the perfect ambush for these guys without even meaning to. They had strolled right into the ideal kill zone. There’s a saying: when life hands you lemons, make lemonade. As Teamguys, when Ramadi hands you a team of muj, make dead muj.

Luke gave the order to hold fire until the eight guys in our building could set up to engage. We would hit them simultaneously with a wall of lead. I watched them through my scope as Chris grabbed his gun and headed for the roof. All our guys scrambled to get into position quickly. Bob set up next to me with his Mk 48. A couple of the insurgents shot across the river while the others started setting up a mortar tube. As I waited for everyone to get set, my excitement grew with the thought of dropping the cleaver on these guys’ necks. I remembered
the night on the rooftop when Marc shook me out of my rack to help shoot the muj across the river. These guys were about to pay the man in full.

It took a minute or so to get in place, and then Luke gave the command over comms.

“Three, two, one, execute.”

On the second syllable of
execute
, I squeezed the remaining slack out of the trigger on my Mk 11. I shot a guy in the neck and watched him crumple in a heap.

Never underestimate the neck shot.

I scanned for a second target and saw the life draining from the remaining fighters as Bob and the other gunners tore them up with a vicious onslaught of machine-gun fire while 40 mm “golden eggs” from Jeremy’s M79 grenade launcher erupted loudly in massive dust plumes that swallowed up any life that might have remained. Within about three seconds, all five muj were dead, utterly ruined before they ever knew what hit them. Luke called cease fire over the radio, and all was quiet for a few seconds. Nothing moved from the dust below. Bob and I looked at each other with knowing smiles. I felt sated, like I’d just drunk my fill after hours of thirst.

“That was fucking awesome,” I said.

“That might be the coolest thing I’ve seen yet,” Bob replied, “besides the muj bus.”

I looked out again at the muj lying dead. They lay out there all day in the summer heat, rotting. Better them than the Marines.

At around two in the afternoon, I was lying on my back resting when I heard five shots come from the eastern house where the other half of our platoon was set up. There was about a half second in between each shot. Chris and I looked at each other. I got up and walked to the adjacent room.

“What the fuck’s going on?”
I asked Biff, our secondary comms guy.

“Jonny shot some guy who walked inside the compound, but he’s not dead. They have to go get him.”

“He shot five fucking times,” I said. “How did he not kill him?”

Jason shrugged. “Asianvision.”

“He’s a sniper, right?!”

“Not today,” Biff replied.

Because we actually adhere to the Geneva Conventions, and Article 12 requires we treat wounded combatants, Luke sent Jonny and EOD Nick to grab the guy and bring him inside. A couple of other guys and some Jundis provided security while Jonny and Nick ran outside and dragged him into their building. He was an old Iraqi man who had been pushing a wheelbarrow full of wires, bricks, and bomb-making materials. Jonny had been on his M4, watching the guy as he rolled up. He must not have zeroed his EOTech sight, because after five shots, Jonny managed to hit him only once in the shoulder and once in the left shin. He’d been using frangible rounds, which are designed to disintegrate when they come in contact with a surface harder than the bullet itself. When they hit flesh and bone, they behave very unpredictably. There was only a tiny hole near the guy’s shoulder and not much blood. The bleeding was all internal. The round had taken a hard south turn and then hit some vital organs.

Luke, Marc, EOD Nick, and a bunch of Jundis gathered around watching as Jonny tried to save him. Jonny sweated profusely as he stripped the guy’s man-dress down to find his anatomical landmarks. The guy’s trachea started shifting, and Jonny had to do a needle decompression into his lung to try to save him. He sank the needle in, and a small whoosh of air came out when he pulled it. It took Jonny a minute to figure out the round had hit the descending aorta, and there was basically no chance for him. He died a few seconds later,
and Jonny just kind of sat there for a few seconds, short of breath and sweating. Everyone was quiet.

Then the opening lines from Kansas’s “Dust in the Wind” broke the silence: “I close my eyes, only for a moment and the moment’s gone. . . .” Marc was singing.

Teamguy humor is dark because war is dark. Sometimes you need a laugh to get your head back in the game. All eyes turned to Marc, and we couldn’t help but laugh.

“At least your singing is better than Jonny’s shooting,” EOD Nick said.

“Or his corpsman skills,” Marc said. “I think you needled him to death, Jonny.”

Everyone was laughing, but Jonny’s somber look showed he was not amused, and he fired back, “Fuck all you guys,” while packing up his med bag. Jonny was an excellent medic. He was more pissed about his shot placement than the futile attempt at saving the muj’s life.

“I still gamble better than you, Marc. I’m Asian. It’s math and I can at least count to eleven,” Jonny replied. Laughter erupted.

Everyone stared at the body for a minute, realizing it couldn’t just sit there in the middle of the hide site. Luke eventually made the call to put the body in the middle house—the one without air-conditioning. Because he had shot the guy, Jonny had to move him again. EOD Nick helped him, and everybody else went back to their positions.

The rest of the day was mostly uneventful. We didn’t see the target-rich environment we’d been expecting from the Marines’ assault on the hospital to our east, which started earlier that day. The head shed had hoped the assault would push a lot of retreating muj in our direction and we’d be able to take them out, but it didn’t happen that way. The afternoon and evening were slow, and the biggest problem we faced was the need to conserve water for our second day of
overwatch. Luke got on the horn and convinced the Marines we could do more good if we moved to the hospital that night.

Tony briefed us up on the plan. At midnight, we were going to move to another position inside the hospital and provide sniper overwatches there. The body was coming with us, and Jonny was going to carry him. The Marine leadership had told Luke he needed to clear out the buildings completely, and that included taking the dead muj with us and delivering him to the hospital. It really was the best thing to deliver him to the hospital and have a body to match the shooter statement. Nobody wants an investigation launched when some Iraqi civilian finds a body in a building with a couple of American rounds in it. And it wouldn’t be beneath the muj to find a way to use it as a propaganda tool. Unfortunately for Jonny, the body had been cooking in the middle house for almost eight hours.

When it got close to launch time, we all consolidated in the eastern house, where I got a good look at the three-hundred-yard area we had to traverse. The seven-story hospital poked up prominently above the other buildings in the city to our south. Beyond our compound gate, there was an open field, stretching about two hundred yards to an east–west running road just before the hospital.

Right before we moved out, Tony told Jonny to get the dead guy and get ready to move. I swear I could hear the sound of Jonny’s spirit breaking as he walked away to carry his prize. Under the cover of darkness, we left the house and moved tactically through the compound’s gate with the first couple of guys pressing out left and right to set a footprint and hold security while the rest of the element rolled through. Jonny is a small guy and on top of his usual combat load, which includes sniper rifle and med bag, he had heaved the rotting muj onto his shoulder and was trying to run with him. The body was forcing Jonny’s helmet down over his eyes. The poor guy couldn’t see anything and was exhausted before we even got out of the gate. Ned, our third officer, gave Jonny a hand, and they made the mad dash
through the field toward the hospital. I saw them in the middle of the platoon formation, awkwardly lugging the body, struggling to hold on to the guy’s man-dress while their guns flapped all around.

“Dauber, give us a hand,” Ned said.

“Fuck no,” I said. “I didn’t shoot that guy. I don’t want anything to do with that. I’m not carrying that dirty muj.”

When the patrol made it to the road, they stopped and put him down. Two hundred yards carrying almost two hundred pounds of dead weight was no joke, and as they sat there panting next to the muj, I thought about
Weekend at Bernie’s
and almost laughed. The only thing missing was a pair of sunglasses for the dead guy. I know it’s not really funny, but sometimes you just have to give in or go nuts.

We set security and pressed across the road, the dead guy tormenting Jonny and Ned the entire time. When we reached the hospital’s perimeter, Jonny and Ned ran into yet another fuck-my-life moment. A wrought-iron fence surrounded the hospital, big spearlike spikes protruding about eight or nine feet high. We all had to get up and over that, and so did Desert Bernie. After a few of us got over, Jonny and Ned made a valiant heave, hoisting Bernie up and over feetfirst, only to have his man-dress get caught on the fence. The fence pulled Bernie’s dress over his head like a hockey player in a fight, and as he fell awkwardly against the fence on the other side, Bernie let out a death fart.

That was the moment I learned that a dead body farting is one of the most disgusting things you can ever smell, especially when it’s a dead body that’s been cooked for eight hours in a house with no AC in 130-degree heat. The smell was absolutely vile. I looked at Jonny and could tell it was almost too much for him. After shooting this guy, trying to save him, shepherding him across a few hundred yards of muj country, and then inhaling his death fart at close range, Jonny looked like he was ready to blow chunks. But he didn’t. He held it together like a Frogman should.

“Want some Copenhagen?” I said.

He flicked me the bird.

We had done our duty with Bernie. We left him at the front door to the hospital and headed inside. The Marines said they needed help in the east wing, so we moved cautiously toward it. Even though the Marines had already cleared the building, we wanted to be careful. The hospital was huge, and the Marines had found a bunch of areas where the muj had been treating their people. We pressed into the east wing and set in our hide sites to provide overwatch for the Marines in the area. The fact that the place had so many windows meant better security for us because the muj didn’t know where to shoot. We spent a day in the hospital, and Chris and Tony ended up getting one kill each. The Marines had assaulted the area in force, and met much less resistance than they had expected.

The next night, we left the same way we’d come. We opened the wrought-iron gate and headed toward the same road we’d crossed the night before. At the road, we set up security and moved tactically across. The road was on a berm that crested about ten feet above the hospital side and field to the north, and there was soft dirt on both shoulders. We set security on the near and far side, and the platoon moved across. Biggles and Tony picked up rear security, and as they began to cross, an Army unit shot at them. The soldiers had been holding security on the area and mistook Biggles for muj. He took cover, and we turned on our IFF markers (Identify Friend/Foe) to signal that we were friendly and could you please stop trying to kill us.

“Why the fuck are you shooting at us?” Rex barked into the radio at the Army unit.

I couldn’t hear the response, but I have to assume it was something like “Whoops. Sorry.” Thank God for poor marksmanship, I guess. We made our way back to the SURC-boat pickup, skipping the eighteen-foot wall, then to Hurricane Point and back to base. On the
ride back to Sharkbase, we were all pretty tired, but Jonny looked like somebody had shit in his MRE.

“Hey, Jonny, are you going to head out to the range anytime soon?” Biggles asked.

“Why?” Jonny said.

“I was thinking you might help a lowly Pig gunner like me get better at shooting an M4,” Biggles said.

“Carlos Hathcock couldn’t help you, Biggles,” Jonny said.

“Maybe help me with my medic skills,” I said.

“Dumb Polack,” Jonny retorted.

I joined in Biggles’s laughter as we rumbled on in the back of Big Zev. I thought about Bernie and his wicked wheelbarrow of IED tricks. I looked to my left and heard Biff ragging Jonny about how bad he was at video games. Marc was smiling as he watched the banter. I was smiling, too. War can be terrible, but it has its moments.

“I promise you, Jonny,” EOD Nick said above the hum of the diesel and groan of tires on the asphalt, “I’ll drive the water taxi the next time we invade Vietnam.” We all laughed. Even Jonny managed a chuckle.

“A pint of sweat, saves a gallon of blood.”

—George S. Patton

W
E WERE ON
our way to a land navigation exercise during work-up when Tony turned to me. “Dauba’,” he said nonchalantly, “you’re on point. Get ya shit together.”