The Last Punisher: A SEAL Team THREE Sniper's True Account of the Battle of Ramadi (22 page)

“You see that?” Chris asked.

“Yeah, dude on the back dropped something in a hole,” I said.

“Yeah, a backpack. I’m gonna shoot ’em.”

Chris and I tracked the moped for several hundred meters, waiting patiently as they meandered between parked cars and pedestrians, slowly closing the distance between themselves and death. I sat watching through binos, waiting for the hammer to fall. Sniping is a voyeuristic practice. You always know the person you’re about to kill has no idea it’s coming. You’re watching them up close, and then you drop the hammer before they ever know what hit them. These guys were thinking they’d just had a highly successful bomb-laying mission and were probably feeling pretty good about themselves. In my mind, they were a train wreck in slow motion. They grew bigger and bigger in my binos: 700 meters, 600, 500, 400 . . .

At about 200 meters, I heard Chris say, “All right,” before taking a deep breath, and then the crack from his .30-cal. The moped was a mere 150 yards out when I saw the pink mist explode from around the two men—a perfect center-mass shot. The driver’s head dropped lifeless like a rag doll, and his hands fell from the handlebars. The moped started wiggling out of control, and I could see that the second guy wasn’t moving at all—no diving for cover or jumping off the bike. He just piled up on top of the driver, obviously lifeless, too. The wiggling moped crashed into a small wall and fell over. Neither passenger moved, and a pool of blood started forming on the ground around them.

“Good kill,” I said from behind the binos. I put the binos down and looked at Chris. “Dude, that was fucking awesome! You just smoked two dudes with one bullet!”

“Yeah, I guess the taxpayer got his money’s worth with that one,”
Chris said smiling, eye still on the scope. “Two birds, one badass piece of American lead.”

“Two more for the Legend. What are you at now, like sixty? Seventy?”

“Something like that.”

“Better watch out. If you fart too hard, them lucky horseshoes will fall out. Nice shooting.”

“Yeah, that was a good one,” Chris replied.

“I guess that makes up for Ralphie’s miss,” I said.

“He sure killed that PowerPoint presentation for this op, though,” the Legend said with a chuckle as he resumed his scan.

About a block over from the moped crash, a Marine patrol had a clear line of sight to the intersection where the muj went down. They’d heard the shot, and from their perspective, all they saw was this moped with two dead guys, wiggling out of control and crashing into a wall. They had no context of the hostile action we’d witnessed when the muj dropped a bomb in a hole eight hundred meters out and casually drove on. The Marines knew our location but didn’t have a line of sight to our building.

Luke came up to our room to get the usual report after a kill. Whenever one of our snipers shot somebody, our OIC or chief would take a report and annotate the details, ensuring all our shots were justified under the rules of engagement. We had to document the shots we took, filling out “Shooter Statements” after every engagement where hostile force was used. These documents involved the time, location, caliber of rifle, what the enemy action was at the time of the shot, and general atmospherics. Early on in our deployment, whenever a sniper would shoot somebody, other Teamguys would come to the room or roof wanting to know what went down. By this point in the deployment, we’d been smoke-checking so many guys that a bad guy getting dumped just became commonplace. The only people who
still came asking for the story were those who were duty-bound to do so. I felt a strong urge to tell everybody in the platoon about the awesomeness I’d just witnessed.

“What do you got?” Luke asked.

“I shot two guys on a moped. Killed ’em both with one bullet. The passenger dropped an IED in a crater at eight hundred meters. Dauber saw the whole thing.”

“Roger that, Luke,” I said.

“Roger that,” he responded.

While Luke took his report, Rex’s radio came alive downstairs in the house with chatter from the Marines asking for an explanation: Why did these two dead guys just coast into a wall? They don’t have any weapons on them. They weren’t doing anything outside our ROEs. Luke explained the situation to the Marines, but they insisted on sending a patrol to inspect the hole. Chris and I weren’t in the loop for all this. We didn’t expect anyone to doubt what we’d seen and question the validity of the shot. With our sniper overwatches, we had thwarted coordinated attacks on Marine patrols on many occasions. In this instance, we were being proactive. We had just stopped an IED before a Marine patrol drove over it. Chris and I kept scanning the road for a potential counterattack.

The muj were sneaky. The going rate Al Qaeda was paying for digging an IED crater in Ramadi was two hundred dollars. Dropping an IED into a hole earned twice as much. The IED business in Ramadi was literally booming. For dirt-poor Iraqis, freelancing as IED droppers often meant the ability to buy food or add a few more goats and chickens to their flock. The muj were clever enough to drop the IEDs, throw fishing line across the street to drag the pressure pads into place, and then fake a broken-down vehicle so someone could connect the device in twenty seconds or less. To the untrained observer, it was easy to miss the nefarious nature of this behavior, but we were dialed into the enemy’s tactics. Any time you’re
hunting the enemy, you have to think like them, and we Teamguys had gotten exceedingly good at this.

After Chris dumped the duo, the street where they’d dropped the IED buzzed with activity. The foot and vehicle traffic around the site obscured our view, and we were unable to maintain a constant visual on the IED crater. I’m sure some aspiring capitalist picked up the IED and took it home so it could fight another day.

When we got word the Marines were sending a patrol, we focused up on the area where the muj had dropped the IED. The road was flooded with activity, and we watched three Humvees approach the hole eight hundred meters out. They set up a security perimeter and inspected the hole. Unsurprisingly, there was nothing in it. Chris and I knew what we saw, and we saw the passenger on the muj moped drop a bomb in that hole.

The lack of evidence was a sticky point, and it caused some friction between the Marines and our leadership. There was an investigation, and the judge advocate general (JAG) paid Chris some special attention. Fortunately, my shooter statement corroborated the fact that lethal force was justified, and that was the end of it. Everyone in the platoon was irritated by the lack of trust. We weren’t in the business of killing innocents, and as professional soldiers, we were very surgical with our use of force. For us newguys, this event marked a baptism into the politics of war. There is a stark dichotomy between Special Operations and the Rear Echelon Motherfuckers (REMFs). From a purely statistical standpoint, the REMFs thought we were operating with carte blanche. To them, shooting two guys on a moped probably seemed too incredible, but the hostile action the muj had committed was undeniable. The REMFs would try to make life difficult for us, but to the Marine grunts and Army ground pounders I chewed Copenhagen with in sniper hides and COPs, we were putting the fear of God into the enemy. That was the only validation I needed. One team, one fight.

We knew what was at stake if our actions caused the deaths of innocent civilians. The media would crucify us, and Leavenworth would become home. Winning the hearts and minds of the local populace was an important part of the overall mission in Ramadi, and you can’t win hearts and minds if you can’t protect the innocent while you kill the bad guys. Truthfully, the threats of the media and Leavenworth were not what kept me honest behind the gun. I wanted to kill bad men. I did not want to kill innocent ones. The investigation pissed me off. I knew what the fog of war was, what the risks were when I pulled the slack from the trigger. I also knew that not every American who had ever donned the uniform deserved to. I knew about Haditha, about My Lai, about atrocities committed as far back as Atlanta in 1864. I also knew my personal motive for being there was for killing terrorists, period. So though I understood somebody might see a shot or engagement from a different perspective, it didn’t take the sting out of their questioning our actions or integrity. Fortunately, the more dead muj you stack up like cordwood, the more conventional troops on the ground appreciate it and help protect you from the bullshit. To those of us in the mix, the struggle was constant, and creeping death was a heartbeat away.

Twenty-four hours later, I watched the ink dry on my shooter statement in the platoon hut at Sharkbase. I reread my words, making sure not to omit any pertinent details. The devil is in the details. In this case, two muj dropping an IED with the intent to kill Americans and coalition forces. “Two military aged males carrying an IED device on a moped . . . IED crater . . . effectively engaged with .30 cal . . . Targets eliminated.” My shooter statement corroborated the fact that lethal force was justified, and that was the end of it. I had signed statements prior to this, and there would be more to come. The Battle of Ramadi was hitting the fever pitch of summer.

I thought about the Legend’s poise when he engaged the easy riders. The man was a machine. In sniping, there are minor details that
can determine whether there is success or total failure. Any clown can pull a trigger on a range, but a vigilant eye and a clear mindset are necessities on the battlefield. Robert Heinlein said, “There are no dangerous weapons. Only dangerous men.” For a few months now we’d been meeting Ramadi’s most dangerous men, and we hammered them as if that desert city were the anvil on which we struck. I stood up, my shooter statement in one hand as I slung my rifle over my shoulder. I needed to head back to my tent and recharge, but I was feeling hungry. Only not for food.

I let the weight of the weapon on my side comfort me. It was a gnawing that grew daily in the desert, quenched only by the squeeze of the trigger and the blood of my enemy. I took a deep breath and headed out into the bright Iraqi sunlight.
Maybe “hungry” is the wrong word,
I thought. I nodded to myself, trudging through the moondust toward my tent.
Dangerous,
I thought.

I feel dangerous.

I
. Michael Lee Lanning,
Blood Warriors: American Military Elites
(New York: Random House, 2002), 235–36.

“We have met the enemy and they are ours. . . .”

—Oliver Hazard Perry

P
HOTOJOURNALIST RICHARD SCHOENBERG
followed BUD/S Class 246 through the entire journey from indoc to SQT graduation. When it was over, he sorted through his thousands of photographs and published a coffee-table book called
The Only Easy Day Is Yesterday: Making Navy SEALs
. I’m twenty-one in the photographs, my hair bleached from the sun and salt, my face masked in youth and fatigue.

When my son was old enough to realize that some of the pictures were of me, he pointed me out. “What are you doing there?” he asked. He was three years old.

“I’m trying to be a SEAL,” I answered.

“It looks hard,” he said.

“It was.”

He thought for several moments, his face a mess of concentration. “Could you do it again?” he asked.

It was my turn to think for a moment.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I could.”

Doc Crispin was an old Frogman. Pushing fifty, Crispin had been in the Navy about as long as I’d been alive. After enlisting as a corpsman and completing BUD/S in the late 1970s, he did one four-year stint on active duty and then transitioned to the Navy Reserve. There he completed his weekend-warrior training requirements for more than twenty years until the Navy called him up for active duty in the Global War on Terror. With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in full swing, the frequency of deployments had started to put a strain on Naval Special Warfare, so the Navy tapped old salts like Crispin to shoulder some of the burden. He left his successful practice as a chiropractor in middle America to train up and deploy with us, and his age and worldliness made him the old man of SEAL Team THREE. He was a Frogman, but he was a Frogman well into middle age. Having arrived in the Teams after the Vietnam War, Panama, Grenada, and Desert Storm were the conflicts of his era. He was as new to the War on Terror as I was.

Since Crispin was a recently activated reservist, our leadership found him best suited for administrative duties back at Sharkbase. He became our trusty mailman, making the trip from Sharkbase into Camp Ramadi every day to pick up our mail. He was also our rear-echelon corpsman. His presence on Sharkbase meant I didn’t have to deal with anyone’s trivial aches and ailments during the few periods of downtime I had back in the rear. You’ve got jock itch? Negative, Ghostrider; the pattern is full. Go see Crispin. For anything relating to back pain, Crispin was a guru. Guys popped in frequently
to see the old man for a quick back adjustment—Doc Crispin’s Frogman-in-combat special. My own back received an adjustment or two from the grandpa Frog. The old man was a fixture at Sharkbase. For the most part, he had settled early on into the monotony of life inside the wire. He seemed to thrive on routine, and he could often be seen making his nightly walk from the homey tent that housed his de facto medical practice to the plywood shower house where all the Teamguys and other operators washed away the filth and stink of combat. With his middle-aged-doctor glasses and his little shower towel and toiletry bag tucked neatly under one arm like the morning newspaper, Doc Crispin would slip into his flip-flops and head to the shower box.

Like all of us, Crispin strived to avoid contact with the toxically organic slime that coated the thin sheets of vinyl hanging as partitions between each shower. The water we bathed in smelled like a juicy government contract whose corners had been liberally cut—like some retired trucker from Arkansas had pumped Euphrates water into the giant bladder feeding the showers, thrown in some iodine tablets, said a few Hail Marys, and then moved on to suck out the shitters. Showering in Iraq was kind of like being one of the uninfected survivors in
28 Days Later
. You had to be always on alert for the possibility of someone angling the showerhead next to yours in a way that launched the scum-sheets toward you in a biological-warfare ambush. The slow-draining ecosystem that pooled menacingly around your feet was one thing, but you were even more wary of the bacterial-supervirus mutation fermenting on the dividers a few inches from your skin. Nobody wants to catch the Rage Virus. Never touch the goo partitions. I remembered studying the Civil War in high school, reading about the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who died of disease, largely because of poor hygiene.
Some threats on the battlefield change,
I thought.
And some don’t
.