The Last Punisher: A SEAL Team THREE Sniper's True Account of the Battle of Ramadi (32 page)

Luke approached me. “Dauber,” he said. “Would you and Biff like to take Marc back to the States?”

“Yeah, that would be good,” I said.

“Good. Ned’s gonna go with you guys, too. Take a nap and relax for a couple hours, and you guys will fly out tonight.”

“Roger that,” I said.

I looked around at the guys. Sheer dejection covered everyone’s face.

A couple of hours had passed since I got back to Sharkbase when I lay down in my tent. I closed my eyes and fell asleep almost immediately. My body and mind needed a reset, and I slept hard until about 1700. I woke up and walked outside. I found Chris first, still crying and angry. He wasn’t the only one. Everybody loved Marc, and everybody was crushed. All the Big Tough Frogmen were mourning.

Our run of invincibility had ended, and the close calls that foreshadowed August 2 would haunt us long after. The constant questioning
and hindsight are the hardest parts. What could have gone differently? What if Marc had been shot in the leg or chest instead? Could I have saved him? I played it all over and over in my head, an infinite mash-up of all the things that could have or should have been. But there is one cruel truth in war: it plays out the way it plays out. And then you have to live with it.

You’ve got friends with you till the end. . . .

Brotherhood’s our rule we cannot bend.

—Pennywise, “Bro Hymn”

I
GAVE COLLEGE A
second try as a twenty-seven-year-old nontraditional student. I was out of the Teams and felt pretty out of place in most of my classes at the University of Connecticut, where I did not blend well with the eighteen- and nineteen-year-old coeds. Attempts to camouflage myself by sitting in the back row and wearing my Oakleys were apparently ineffective, as I was approached during my first semester by a couple of shaggy-looking frat boys. “Dude,” they said, “can you buy us beer?”

I laughed, remembering myself at their age. “Sorry, guys,” I said and shook my head.

By my third semester, the requests to buy beer were paired with the occasional invite to a frat party. “Can I bring my pregnant wife?” I’d ask. Eventually, the boys left me alone.

Sometimes being a nontrad in undergraduate school felt like being
the designated driver on free drink night, except in Professor Garry Clifford’s American Foreign Policy lecture.

There, he spoke to me. It was everyone else who was out of place.

“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few,” Clifford effortlessly served up to the class, recounting Churchill’s speech in the summer of 1940. “Maybe the world needed to know what was at stake. Those few were willing to sacrifice when others weren’t.” Clifford’s gaze fell upon the class. His words hung in the air, in the space between children who did not yet understand sacrifice.

I smiled to myself.

“Marc. Lee!” V sounded off the prompt.

“HOOYAH, MARC LEE!” the hundred or so operators echoed in unison. The break in the silence snapped me out of my thoughts. I gripped the handles of the aluminum coffin so hard I felt it dig into my hand. I didn’t care. My hands were numb. My mind was numb. My spirit was numb. Marc Lee moved with us, as I ushered him with Biff, EOD Nick, and two others through the ranks on the way to the Black Hawk.

Delta Platoon made the journey through Ramadi from Corregidor. Some of the Tier 1 guys from Sharkbase were there in support. The Marines and Army we worked with were also there. Their presence was felt. We fought and died with them.

Marc Lee was the first SEAL killed in Iraq. There were thousands of American deaths before his and unfortunately there would be more to come, including many more SEALs. The enemy’s rounds don’t discriminate. It’s the harsh reality a soldier comes to realize when he enters
a combat zone. We are all brothers. Each life lost over there has its own story, and I’ve even come to learn many of them. The difference between Marc and the other stories is that I loved Marc.

With one final hoist, we passed Marc into the belly of the bird. Biff, Ned, and I settled in, and I looked again at the scene outside. A bunch of rough men piping Marc ashore on his way to paradise was a fitting send-off. I nodded, full of pride. The rest of Charlie stood in formation until we were airborne. Taking Marc home was heavy, but carrying my brother back was my duty and my honor. I put the muzzle of my M4 down to the floor of the helo, snapped my helmet on, and turned on my NVGs. The August heat was a stark contrast to the rainy arrival I had five months earlier.

Our short helo flight played like a silent film above the desert. The high-pitched roar of the twin-turbine faded into the white noise of cognitive anesthesia. When we landed at TQ I felt numb, like a body still humming after too many hours on a motorcycle.

“It’s okay, brother.” The Mortuary Affairs soldiers were somber angels, carrying out their duties with the utmost professionalism and constant deference to the gravity of our loss. They understood: first Teamguy killed in Iraq. “We’ll take care of him,” they said when we delivered Marc to the morgue. We floated listlessly to a temporary berthing area to relax and wait for our flight out.

EOD Nick edited together a Marc Lee remembrance video in the hours before our departure, so Biff and I found a DVD player to watch it on. It was hard to watch. I was still processing the previous hours’ events and it seemed too soon to look at pictures of him happy and in another life. The contrast was just too stark compared to the images I had stuck in my mind of him on that floor, staring into nothing. I sifted through the mental slide show, trying to find where it had
all gone awry. The abruptness bothered me most. It was cold and merciless, and there was no reasoning with it about how you needed just a little more time. It was like an echo infinitely repeating inside me:
Marc is gone.

Biff and I didn’t talk much. Teamguys aren’t the type to do a lot of talking about their feelings. Mental toughness is our default—the reset button. Big Tough Frogmen can handle anything. The death of a brother is no different. I needed to compartmentalize, to channel my thoughts away from powerlessness. Biff had known Marc since BUD/S, and he was dealing with the same feelings. It was something we had to sort out internally.

I sat in quiet reflection on all the good times I’d had with Marc, working and training. I thought about how this man I’d known for less than a year had become like blood. I thought about Maya, his wife, and how he’d talked about her endlessly. They’d made their marriage legal to start getting the benefits, he’d confided to me early in the deployment, but they were planning a big formal ceremony in Italy when the deployment was over.

I thought about how none of that was going to happen now. Maya was never going to celebrate a marriage to Marc in Italy and Marc’s mom, Debbie Lee, would never see her son married.

I’d never met Debbie or Maya, and I was anxious. I’d taken the pictures of Marc’s room for Maya. His living space on Sharkbase was mostly a shrine to their relationship. I wanted her to see what I saw and to know how deeply Marc loved her, and I worried about how I, someone she didn’t know, would convey all this or if I could even do so. I thought again about Heinlein’s words about fulfillment. I believed that Marc was too young to die and wished fervently that I could have saved him. But I also knew that I’d been with him when he killed a bad man, and I’d borne witness to how happy he was loving Maya. I hoped that one day, when the dust settled, I would be at peace with Marc’s sacrifice.

We crossed the Atlantic in the massive belly of an Air Force C-5, with Marc’s flag-draped casket peacefully in line among the six others. There were five from Iraq and two from Afghanistan. Biff and I sat against the bulkhead, staring at the scene in front of us. There was no room for conversation. We stared endlessly. There was time for that.

Dover Air Force Base, in Delaware, is the central receiving and processing point for all remains of U.S. service members. The joint-service Mortuary Affairs detachment at Dover specializes in the solemn dignified transfer of remains from aircraft on the flight line to the port mortuary, where their medical personnel, administrative staff, and embalmers fully document and prepare the fallen for the trip to their final resting places.

We filed down the plane’s ramp and lined the path outside while a carry team marched in perfect formation up the ramp to get Marc. A senior officer moved a team of six sailors into place around Marc’s casket. With automatic efficiency, they lifted Marc in unison, paused, and marched him down the ramp. We all saluted as they walked past to the vehicle waiting to make the short drive to the port mortuary.

With Marc in the careful hands of Dover’s staff, my attention turned to Biggles. We checked into our hotel outside Dover and went to check on our other brother.

At Bethesda Naval Medical Center, Biggles was still in a medically induced coma. Just two days had passed since he suffered a traumatic brain injury and extensive damage to his eyes and face. When I walked into his room for the first time, I didn’t know what to expect. I guess I was a little shocked by what I saw. Biggles’s eyes were swollen up to the size of purple golf balls on a patchwork of pink, black, and blue skin. It didn’t feel right. As we stood around his bed in our civvies, Biggles
had no idea we were there. The whole scene made us uneasy. He had tubes protruding from his mouth and one from his head to relieve the pressure. He wasn’t the same Biggles I saw on patrol headed down Baseline—now placid with unconsciousness and badly wounded. None of us could say much of anything until I finally muttered, “Be strong, Biggles. We’ll be back to see you soon, brother.”

During our refuel in Germany, I had called my parents to let them know I was coming home. They were a little surprised to hear I was headed home, but nonetheless they were glad I was coming. My mom and youngest brother made the trip from Connecticut to Bethesda, Maryland. My dad wasn’t able to get away and my middle brother had just started the fall semester at UConn.

I’d been on U.S. soil about a day, and I started to notice the feeling that things were different. I love my family and was glad to be around Biggles’s friends, but five months in Ramadi isn’t easy to just shake off and move right back into everyday America. It isn’t combat stress or PTSD. It’s just an unshakable feeling that no one back home has any real sense of ownership of the war. Our loved ones knew what we told them and understood as much as we could make them, but the rest of the world seemed somehow clueless about the fact that we were at war or that one of my best friends had just given his life for them. It was a hard conclusion to reach, but I began to understand that most people will never understand the brotherhood.

“You were in Ramadi?” my mom asked incredulously.

Five months in Ramadi, and I’d never told my family where I was. I kept them in the dark for the sake of operational security and for their own peace of mind. My mother’s wide eyes and dropped jaw told me I’d made the right call by not telling them. Ramadi was in the news constantly. Like many Americans with loved ones overseas, she knew the city was the most dangerous place in Iraq.

It feels sort of strange to admit that it had never really struck me that what I was doing would have a profound impact on my family. I guess I was kind of on autopilot and shouldering any of their anxiety was not part of my war. I could see my mom begin to take on that anxiety on a much deeper level and more earnestly. When you come home carrying your Teammate’s body and introduce the family to another Teammate who’s been seriously wounded, the effect on your family, especially your mom, is profound.

“Well, what are you doing over there, Kevin? Will you have to go back? How did Marc get killed?”

I gave my mother the PG-rated version of everything and reassured her that I would be fine. I had about a month left before I’d deploy back stateside for at least a year, but I just told my mom I probably wasn’t going back to Ramadi.

“Don’t worry, Mom. I’ll be fine.”

“I’m proud of you, man,” my little brother said.

“Thanks, Mikey. That means a lot.”

“Serious, brother. You’ve come a long way. I remember when Dad, Mom, Sparky, and I came out to your BUD/S graduation. I knew you were going to do good things. I want you to know that.”

My mom was talking with Biff on the other side of the table, but the noise of the bar seemed like a million miles away. My youngest brother sat across from me. He was only twenty. I couldn’t believe how much he had grown up. His words left a lasting impression on me. I had spent a childhood growing up with Mikey and Mark. However, in the last few years, I had entered a different type of brotherhood. I had been back stateside for less than a day and I felt uncomfortable. Mikey didn’t pry.

I smiled. It was good to see my family again.

“You know I speak for all of us—you constantly make us proud.”

I clenched my jaw tight and fought back a flood of emotion.

“I love you, man,” I responded.

The business-class accommodations from the East Coast to San Diego were an abrupt change from the third-world life I’d been living in Ramadi. We escorted Marc back with Master Chief Bro, who was Team THREE’s new master chief. He had put me through SEAL Qualification Training a few years before and had managed to go out on a few ops with us in Ramadi. Bro was a solid operator and the quintessential SEAL master chief.

He flew from TQ to Dover to make the trip back to San Diego with us. Bro had arranged for our dress blues to be sent to Dover so we could make the final leg of the journey back to Coronado. With the autopsy done, it was time to take Marc home.

As we taxied off the runway in San Diego, the captain asked everyone to stay seated while we deplaned to remove Marc’s body from the cargo hold and take him on to the final leg of his journey home.

“You’re gonna call cadence as we pull him off the plane, Dauber,” said Bro.