The Last Punisher: A SEAL Team THREE Sniper's True Account of the Battle of Ramadi (34 page)

The heat hung in the air, as the airflow was minimal. I switched out with Squirrel at 0800 and lased all my reference points out to 1,000 meters. It didn’t take long. The building 700 meters down Baseline drew my attention when a muj with an AK walked out of a doorway onto a street. My heart rate jumped as I found him in my scope. With my Nightforce at full-power magnification, the muj appeared relatively small in my scope. I methodically checked my dope card on my buttstock. I dialed my elevation knob from 300 to 700 meters quickly, hoping I wouldn’t miss the opportunity. I wasn’t about to hold to compensate for the elevation change. At 700 meters, I needed to bring all the marksmanship fundamentals together to deliver a clean shot. Marc and Biggles deserved it. I visualized a center-mass shot as I reacquired my payback target. Still there.

Before Marc’s death, my autonomic response to a bad guy in my scope had become less and less pronounced with every kill. All my previous kills were from shorter distances, so tracking this kill at seven hundred meters sent my heart rate up a notch. This was the bad guy I’d been waiting for since I got back from the States—the one for Marc and Biggles. I wasn’t about to accept failure.

Muj lit a cigarette and stood smoking outside the building, holding his Kalashnikov in his right hand, its collapsible buttstock folded. An unarmed military-age male squatted on either side of him. They were oblivious to the enemy threat, but my target’s AK presented clear hostile intent according to the ROE.

My breathing was fast as I put the crosshairs on the target’s chest. I worked to get my body under control and slow my heart rate. Missing was inexcusable. I cleared my mind and focused on breathing. I began
to relax every muscle in my body and isolate my finger on the trigger. There is a meditative quality to the process.

Watching my target holding steady helped me relax. The target continued to stand still, smoking his cigarette. He had not a care in the world and was oblivious to me. His calmness slowed my breathing. I calmly settled into my natural respiratory pause. With a quarter lung of air left, I isolated my trigger finger and squeezed slowly. When I hit my pause, the last of the slack slowly came out of the trigger and the bullet leapt from my gun. The flight time was about a half second. I didn’t hear the rifle go off. All I felt was the sear reengage as I loosed my pressure on the trigger. The round found its target, dead-on center-mass. The muj crumpled and fell dead. I took a deep breath.

I scanned for other targets as the street came alive with people scurrying around frantically. His pals took off, assholes and elbows. The target’s motionless body, lying down for the dirt nap, was the only stillness on the scene. A few hasty minutes later, a black sedan screamed up next to the muj, and a couple of guys threw him in and drove off. I saw no other weapons or valid targets.

“Whatta ya got, Dauba’?” Tony asked from across the hall.

“Got a guy with an AK, seven hundred meters. He’s down.”

“Rodja’ that,” Tony said.

I looked over at Squirrel. He never made eye contact with me, but he stared out at the scene with a loose smile on his face.

After August 2, I truly had no sympathy for the enemy. The macabre scene of Ramadi over the previous six months had left me robotic. The images of fellow brothers injured, dead, Marines mangled and torn up, left me with no quarter for the enemy. Anger was a small part of it, but sense of duty overrode all other emotions. Had the patriots in Lexington and Concord been swayed by the sight of a brother falling to British musket rounds, the dream of freedom for the colonies might never have been realized. The warrior drives on. We don’t move on. We move forward. Constantly.

As the confusion on the streets began to die down, I let my neck relax and stared down at the dip spit on the ground. The brown puddle speckled with pieces of tobacco was a quiet juxtaposition to the scene on the opposite side of the gun. The sweat began to bead on my forearms as I wiped my brow. The faint aroma of cordite was a welcome change from the smells of the dusty apartment. I reached to my right, plucked the piece of brass off my rucksack, and tucked it neatly into my left breast pocket with the rosary, blood chit, and two hundred dollars cash.

Marc wasn’t the first or the last SEAL to die in combat. Wherever there is conflict, a Frogman will be at the forefront of it. Marc was a brother who died upholding the brotherhood, something that only a select few will ever truly understand.

What Marc and August 2 taught me the most was we don’t quit. There isn’t a test in BUD/S that serves as a prediction for operational capabilities in the midst of adversity. You’ll never know until you are put into that situation. You can’t train for it. You just have to get outside your comfort zone and hope you’re the type who reacts appropriately. I looked back at Squirrel. His gaze had been replaced with a stone-faced glare.

“My turn, Dauber.”

“Check,” I replied.

War kills and maims with cold indifference, and the best you can hope for is to keep yourself on the right side of the gun.

The withering PKC fire got everyone’s attention. Twenty minutes after I successfully practiced some long-range target interdiction, Tony took some machine-gun fire in his room. A burst came through his loophole and peppered the wall a couple of feet above his head.

“What the fahk??” Tony yelled, pushing his gun aside and scrambling to his feet. He looked around the room and zeroed in on Chucky’s
Mk 48. He lurched toward the gun, snatched it up, and stuck the barrel out of his loophole, lighting off about a hundred rounds.

“FAHK YOU!” Tony yelled like a madman as he let loose in consecutive angry bursts. “Fahk you, you mothafuckas!” Squirrel and I just sat there looking for the gunner as Tony shot and cussed at the invisible enemy who’d nearly killed him a few seconds earlier. Chucky sat in the corner of the hide and watched him work through his rage. When Tony was done, he stood there sweating and winded as he looked around at all of us watching him.

“Yeah, fahk you guys. What are you looking at?”

Everybody chuckled.

“Ah, what the fuck. Gimme a dip, Dauba’.”

I threw my can of Copenhagen across the hallway into his room, still grinning. Tony packed a dip and got back behind his gun and started scanning.

Man, I love that salty old Frogman. He’s got a personality like a mafia henchman.
I thought of the Bohdi Sanders quote, “Beware of an old man in a profession where men usually die young.” Tony wasn’t exactly old, he was probably thirty-seven or thirty-eight. But age in the Teams is really measured in deployments more than years, and by that measure he was ancient. Teams and shit. We sat back waiting for an officer to come get an assessment of the engagement. Ramadi continued to boil in the heat.

“Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

—John 15:13

F
OR THE PAST
decade or so, I’ve spent Veterans Day at the cemetery. When I was still stationed on Coronado, I’d ride my chopper all the way up to Point Loma and spend the afternoon at Rosecrans, visiting my brothers’ graves. As their numbers grew, so did my compulsion to return. I know Memorial Day might be a more fitting day for this tradition, but for some reason I prefer November and the end of a year, the close of a chapter, for my yearly homage.

Since leaving the Teams and San Diego behind, I have made the trip to various cemeteries. Fredericksburg National Cemetery is the final resting place for more than fifteen thousand Union soldiers who died in the Civil War. Just down the street is a Confederate cemetery full of the graves of men who were not allowed to be buried next to their Union countrymen. I visited them both.

Last year I took my wife and children to Barrancas National Cemetery. We walked through the rows and rows of markers, bearing names of veterans who’d
died as long ago as the Civil War. The deeper we went into the cemetery, the more wars we saw represented: the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan. Every branch of service was there from every conceivable conflict.

Our weapons change, and our wars change, but the warrior spirit unites us all. Every generation of American has answered the call willingly, and I rest easy knowing they’ll answer long after I’m gone.

I cracked my eyes as the alarm clock sounded its monotone, rhythmic beeping. The AC had cut out sometime in the middle of the night and I awoke in a pool of sweat, the sleeping bag splayed open. Same shit, different day. I swung my feet over the side of the green Army cot, slipped into my flops, and rubbed the lingering sleep from my eyes. I picked up the Copenhagen can from the ground and packed a very BTF-sized chew. Start each day with a success.

I walked out of my eight-by-eight-feet partitioned room and headed to the exit of the tent. I paused. It was quiet then. Bob was in San Diego. Dale was at the TOC and Spaz had already left for the morning. I turned around suddenly, walked past my room, and hung in the doorway of Marc’s room. I looked at the emptiness. The only things that remained were the shelves that he had built and the Army cot. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and exhaled. I quickly walked out of the tent and didn’t look back.

Morale was still low following August 2. The unraveling of our tight-knit dynamic was unmistakable in our daily interactions. Everyone just marked time as we looked forward to the end of our tour. Newguys took care of our regular duties and then slinked back to our rooms to play video games and bitch among ourselves.

Then things got worse.

The Legend had to leave early. His daughter’s illness called him back to San Diego, and Chris needed to be with his family. Under different circumstances, he might have opted to stay in the fight, but our war was winding down. It was mid-September, and we were scheduled to leave at the end of the month. Chris had done more than his share of killing in Ramadi. His kill count stood at 101 and comprised roughly half of the platoon’s total. Chris had personally changed the dynamic of Ramadi.

The way most of us saw it, we’d all done our share of killing. Task Unit Bruiser had played a huge role in turning the city into a strategic vise. In the Ma’Laab district to the east, our Delta Platoon brothers worked with the Army to put the squeeze on the insurgency while we pressed the offensive from the west. As we approached the end of our tour, there was no doubt we’d moved the chains and put the coalition a lot closer to pacifying the insurgency and winning peace in Anbar.

I sat on the top of Vehicle 1 and looked south to the gates of Sharkbase. The evening stillness was peaceful. I looked over at the Ma Deuce next to me. She was locked and loaded. Somewhere in the distance, an IED blast shook the calmness of the evening.

“Well, Dauber,” said the Legend in his usual Texas twang.

“Well, Legend,” I replied.

“I got a plane to catch, we ready to roll?”

“That’s right,” I said. “Cinderella can’t miss the ball.”

“You’ll be home before too long,” he replied.

I nodded in agreement, snapped my helmet on, and jumped into the turret. In his civilian clothes, Chris jumped into the shotgun position and looked over his navigation computer. The vehicle checks began from the rear.

The whole platoon made the trip to TQ to see Chris off. As we convoyed across the crater-filled desert plains from Anbar to TQ, the IED threat was barely a thought. Muscle memory, neural numbness, six months of combat—call it whatever.
The convoy was uneventful, and we escorted Chris to the terminal. He wore jeans, a black polo, and his crusty Longhorns hat, and he carried his pistol, rifle, and a ruck.

“Hey, brother,” Chris said, “you know I hate to leave my boys, but . . . trouble on the home front, ya know?”

“We’ll see you back in San Diego in a couple weeks,” I said. “You take care of what you need to take care of.”

“I will. You keep your head down out there, Dauber.”

“Sure. But who am I gonna bum some Copenhagen off of?!”

He smiled and tossed me his can.

I didn’t like seeing Chris go. He was my mentor and a damn good Frogman. More than that, he was my good friend and a trusted ally to the newguys. When we griped, Chris listened. He was the type of leader who valued input, even criticism, from subordinates. If he thought our concerns were worth elevating, he always brought them higher. He had been one of the biggest proponents of dialing back the types of patrols we’d lost guys on. Nobody begrudged the Legend for leaving. I think we all felt relief for him because we knew he’d taken Biggles and Marc pretty hard. He deserved a break, but his leaving exacerbated the fractures in the platoon. As we left Chris at TQ, all of us looked forward to our own exit from the sandbox.

With the sun setting behind me, I stood on the dock at the edge of Sharkbase and whipped a raggedy fishing pole toward the Euphrates. A hooked ball of dough plopped into the deep green, and I took a long pull off an unauthorized Jack and Coke. For a minute, I almost felt like I was back home in Connecticut, launching giant plugs for some late-summer stripers. My brother Mark had recently sent me a video of his latest tuna trip. To say I wasn’t excited to get back on the water would have been a bald-faced lie.

I had recently acquired a whiskey-filled Listerine bottle in a care
package from a buddy back in the States, and a partially drained can of Coke made a convenient and inconspicuous mixer. Moose sat next to me, blowing thick billows of sweet smoke from his hookah, and Scotty, with his own pole and covert cocktail, lounged next to Moose.

After sending Chris off, we all needed something to take the edge off, and Moose had the answers Scotty and I were looking for. The whiskey wasted no time on our alcohol-deprived bodies, and the hookah’s sweet tobacco accentuated the deep calm we all felt, shooting the shit on the dock and pretending for a night that we were somewhere that wasn’t a war zone. We talked about our friends and retold the best stories from the past five months. Moose told us all about life in Jordan and service in his country’s Special Forces. Scotty talked about Wisconsin and his beloved Packers, and I told him why the Packers sucked and that the Patriots were obviously the greatest football franchise of all time. After a while, I got a bite on my line and reeled in a twelve-inch carp. I felt like I was back home. I lit a Cuban cigar and poured myself another Jack and Coke.