The Last Punisher: A SEAL Team THREE Sniper's True Account of the Battle of Ramadi (23 page)

After returning from an unremarkable but blazing-hot twenty-
four-hour overwatch in western Ramadi one night, I changed into PT gear and flip-flops and headed to the shower box. Doc Crispin was there and in the midst of his nightly routine.

“Hey, Dauber, how’s it going? How’s that back of yours?”

“Been good, bro. Thanks for lining me up.”

“You guys been dropping the hammer out there. Kill any bad guys lately?” he said before unsheathing his toothbrush from its little plastic scabbard. Who actually uses those things?

“Not lately. I can’t complain, I know you’re not gonna rack up the numbers on them mail runs,” I muttered.

“Well, Daubs, it’s war. Back in the ’Nam days, you never knew when you’d get the chance to engage. Always ready, bro,” he said nonchalantly.

He squeezed out a neat line of toothpaste and started brushing his grill. I turned my focus to the showers and disease prevention. Getting clean and hitting the rack were the only things on my mind. By now, I was accustomed to our task unit commander’s dogged quest to keep us employed and the unpredictability of our relentless op tempo.

Our tactical operations center (TOC) was a beehive of key leaders and support staff, constantly monitoring the blue force tracker and video feeds from our Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) assets, and communicating with our guys on the hunt while working simultaneously to coordinate new ops. Whenever we finished an op, another one wasn’t far behind, and opportunity often knocked at less-than-ideal times, like when Dauber wanted to sleep after a twenty-four-hour overwatch. We had gotten to the point where we just left our guns on our trucks because it didn’t make sense to pull them off in case we needed to pull out fast and hit a target. We just put the dust covers on and called that good.

I made my shower a quick one, headed back to my tent, and fell asleep. The dream was just getting good when Tony stormed in, still dressed out in full cammies. I’m positive I never saw Tony in PT gear.
Rest
and
relaxation
didn’t
seem to be words in his vocabulary. I’m pretty sure he made it a point to never be seen sleeping or eating, especially by newguys. Sleep and chow were crutches, and Tony had no use for crutches or any other signs of weakness. I never saw him take Motrin, but I’m sure he ate it by the handful when no one was looking. He was like an ancient Spartan throwback—an impenetrable one-man phalanx of hard-motherfuckering.

“Get ya shit. We’re PLO’ing in five minutes,” he said saltily.

I sat up, shook the dream off, and banged on the wall to make sure Marc was awake. His angry “What?” echoed my feelings and assured me he was conscious. We threw our gear on and headed to the mission planning space.

Luke gave a lightning-fast op order: bomb maker in north Ramadi . . . high-value target . . . time sensitive . . . capture/kill. Time sensitive meant we were going after another high-value target and we had a short time window to get him. We had already racked up plenty of raids on HVTs, including some of Zarqawi’s lieutenants, so this op was nothing outside the norm, but we needed more men to man the turrets in the convoy. Luke finished his order and launched us to the trucks. Doc Crispin the Mailman secured his chinstrap, grabbed his M4, and headed out. He’d been tapped to man the .50-cal in the front truck on the raid.

“You ready for this, Crispin?” I asked. “The last time you fired a fifty must have been back in ’Nam, right?”

“Something like that,” he said. “I think I’ll be okay. Like riding a bike, right?”

“I guess so, bro. Gotta be careful on those bikes, though. Wouldn’t want you to fall and break a hip,” I shot back. Jonny chuckled as he threw his med bag in Vehicle 2.

Crispin smirked and climbed up into the turret of the front truck. He began his prep of the .50, situating his ammo cans and checking the gun’s IR laser in his night vision. I watched him go through his gear
checks as methodically as his shower routine. The Mailman was ready to roll.

The convoy rumbled to life, and we headed out in a hurry. There was no time to pick up any Jundis. Rousting them out of bed at two in the morning and getting them mission ready would have taken the kind of time we didn’t have.

There’s nothing quite like rolling out for a direct-action raid. The thought of screaming to a target building in the middle of the night, all jocked up in assault gear with some of the meanest dudes on the planet, intending to capture or kill a high-value individual while he sleeps in his bed and has no idea you’re coming, never failed to fire me up internally. Inside the truck, however, the atmosphere was always eerily mellow when you consider what we were headed out to do.

From the driver-side rear seat, I looked over at Chris. The Legend’s eyes were glued to the navigation computer, passing directions to the convoy as Chucky hammered away at the throttle of the 1152B Humvee. I looked over at Bob across from me in the backseat. He was quietly taking in the landscape as we burned up the night. Playing off his cue, I closed my eyes for a quick nap, waiting to hear the five-minutes call over comms.

“Five min,” Chris passed over comms and I snapped awake. The thirty-minute drive had passed by in a blink. As we rolled in, I noticed how poorly lit the neighborhood was. Streetlights were nearly nonexistent, and there was an occasional light on in a few houses here and there. We drove down a long alleyway with eleven-foot walls on each side, and my immediate thought was,
Why the fuck are we in this alleyway?
Alleyways are the fatal funnels of urban convoys. Alleyways are never ideal, but Murphy’s law can rear its head at any time once you leave the wire. You can do map studies of an area until your eyes bleed, but you never know what you’re going to get until you arrive. I knew Chris would have never planned to park us in an alleyway, but Ramadi
continued to present us with situations that materialized differently than we planned for. We just had to read and react.

The plan called for a roll-up assault to the target building in order to minimize our movement on foot to the compound. We were hitting two simultaneous targets, one beyond the wall on our left side, and one beyond the wall on our right.

“All stop.”

The command came across comms as the vehicles halted. The assault force quickly disembarked from the trucks and moved into patrol formation. We split into dual columns instinctively, one squad on each side of the street. I was assault team 1’s lead on the right side of the alley. I had the Legend, Squirrel, EOD Nick, Ralphie, Bob, and Marc carrying the ladder behind me. Our objective was house 1. Vehicle 1—the Mailman’s vehicle—pushed ahead to set security for the assault force as we made our way over the walls and into our respective compounds.

As I led the patrol up to the ladder set point, I saw an unarmed military-age male milling around at the end of the alleyway. He appeared briefly in a splash of scant light from a house and then scurried out of sight.

“I’ve got one guy at the far end of the alleyway,” I said quietly into my PRC 148 MBITR radio before climbing up the ladder.

“Roger that,” came back as I reached the top of the wall and peeked over. Clear, as far as I could tell. I cradled my M4, rolled over, and slithered down the wall, hanging for just a second before dropping the last three feet. I popped up on a knee and scanned with my laser. I was in a corner of the yard about twelve feet from the building. We had planned to breach the front door, but it turned out to be at the other side of the house. We would need to go completely around the building first. Read and react.

Uncle Bob came over next and picked up security to my right. I
stayed focused on everything to the left while the other guys dropped one by one into place behind me. It took no time at all to get all nine guys over. I got the signal to go.

I was designated to be the first man up to the breach point. It was my job to set security for the breacher so he could place his charge. Unlike previous targets, this would not be a simultaneous breach and we would not be communicating over comms to the other assault force. We needed everything to go off as quickly as possible, so we were just supposed to blow it whenever we were ready. Speed, surprise, and violence of action were the plan.

Once I got the signal, I moved up and around the first corner of the house to my left, assuming the rest of the element was behind me. There was a car in a carport that I needed to clear to get a line of sight on the front door. I was moving steadily toward the car when Chris reached up from behind me and pulled me backward. I froze and took a knee, holding forward, looking for whatever threat Chris might have noticed.

For a minute or so, I waited, scanning. I saw nothing. When Chris gave me the signal again, I moved around the car toward the front door. My intention was to reach it and hold security while Bob came up from behind me and set the C6 strips to blow the door open. I thought about the time we lost moments earlier and wanted to make the breach point quickly. I moved with a purpose.

I was within about six feet of my target when an explosion went off, knocking me backward with a blast of hot air and unexpected momentum. “Fuck,” I muttered, trying to determine what had just rung my bell so hard. I shook it off as Chris jumped past me into the open door. I followed him as the rest of the element materialized around us. Somehow, the breach charge had been set before I’d reached the door.

Later, I would find out that in the fog of war my assault team had split in half, with Bob and three guys hooking around the other side of the house to set the breach. Chris holding me back by the car had
been him realizing we were alone. He’d given me the signal when he thought they’d caught up. “Once more into the breach, dear friends” gained a whole new meaning for me. If I’d been a few feet closer to the blast I could have gotten blown up.

Shattered glass from the door crunched beneath our boots on the foyer’s slick tile, and my right foot rode one piece like an errant Rollerblade into a merciless angle that sent me hard into the marble. The unmistakable breeze through the crotch of my pants reassured me that I had just blown out yet another pair of cammies. Doc Crispin’s old ears probably heard that rip all the way in the turret. Old Murphy was laying down his law in full force on this raid. I jumped up quickly, still slipping all over the place like Gumby on roller skates. I cleared through the house. A long hallway with several rooms on either side was to my front. I knew by that point of my deployment that the hotter it was, the more likely the muj were to be sleeping on the rooftop. The room clearing went fast, and, as expected, they were all empty. We headed to the roof. Same shit, different day.

We busted onto the roof, and Bob peeled around the entrance straight toward an angry Iraqi in a full-on bull rush. Bob put him down with a highly effective left hook and the rest of us swarmed on him. Bob could have shot the guy and been well within the ROE. A man charging like that could be on his way to clack off a suicide vest and meet his virgins. Successful direct-action raids are determined by split seconds. The rest of our squad poured onto the roof behind us and secured two other men, slamming them to the ground and flex-cuffing their hands so tight they couldn’t move. There were several women and children, all of them very upset by the sight of us putting masks over the men’s heads and marching them downstairs.

Moose corralled the women and children downstairs as we dragged off the detained and searched the premises. The place was an IED factory. We found a cornucopia of bomb-making material. Intel had hit a home run with this op. The guy who caught Bob’s left hook
was the bomb maker we were after and apparently had a lot of product on-site. One of the other guys was his son, and one was his neighbor, who turned out to be an accomplice. We loaded up several trash bags full of evidence and intel and then waited in the foyer until the ground force commander was ready for us to consolidate on the vehicles.

As we waited, I stepped outside and looked at the car in the carport. Vehicle-borne IEDs were a major threat in Ramadi and a favorite muj tactic. I pulled out the old CRKT tactical knife and slashed the car’s tires.

“You’re a born Frogman,” Chris cackled as I moved back to the foyer.

“Thanks, Legend.”

“Great job, Dauber,” Uncle Bob said. “Make sure all the heavy weapons are cleaned when we get back, Meat. But seriously, good job.”

Newguy shit.
Gotta love it,
I thought.

After a five-minute wait for assault team 2 to finish business, we got the okay to move. We broke out of the building and headed to the ladders with our loot bags while pushing or dragging our prisoners along with us. The women stayed on target. We hustled over to Big Zev and loaded up our bad guys, about to make a clean getaway on another highly successful snatch mission. That’s when the .50 barked to life on the front vehicle.

The chug-chug-chug of the .50 got everyone’s attention. Usually, you’ll hear “Contact front!” before somebody opens up like that, but Crispin wasn’t wasting any time. A hundred meters from where I’d seen the guy in the alley on our approach, eight muj loaded up with machine guns and RPGs had been maneuvering around, trying to get into position for a hasty ambush. Unfortunately for them, we had night vision and they couldn’t be sure where we were because the alleyway was so dark. Meanwhile, our ISR eyes in the sky were tracking their approach, and Crispin had them dead to rights with his laser and .50-cal. The Mailman unleashed on our would-be ambushers, cutting
all eight of them to shreds with ruthless efficiency in a matter of seconds. I listened to the .50’s rhythmic chug-chug-chug and hustled our cargo onto Big Zev. As I climbed into the truck, Crispin came over comms. “Eight military-aged males with RPGs and PKCs down 150 m in front of Vehicle 1.” His voice was as calm as if he were about to cut his toenails. “Check,” came back as the trucks began to roll.

With the assault force loaded up, bad guys detained, intel in the loot bags, and eight muj lying in the dust, we backed out of the alley, turned around, and headed home. The chatter started up on our radios immediately, the voices disguised.