Honor and Betrayal : The Untold Story of the Navy Seals Who Captured the Butcher of Fallujah -and the Shameful Ordeal They Later Endured (9780306823091)

by Robinson, Patrick

  And at that height the Navy pilots accelerated to their 168mph cruising speed and raced through the darkness, SEALs with assault rifles sitting in each doorway, feet dangling outside, and strapped in, left and right. In the lead helicopter Matt was peering through his green-tinted night-goggles when he saw up ahead a hard black line in the desert floor.

  At least he thought it was a hard black line, but it was harder than that. “Holy shit!” breathed the Echo Team leader, “TELEPHONE WIRES!”

  And he yelled at the top of his lungs, futilely against the howl of the turbos: “BANK RIGHT! ... CLIMB RIGHT NOW!”

  He recalled, “I doubt that I called it, the pilot would have done it anyway. But that Seahawk lurched sideways and up. I nearly fell out, and I saw the wires pass right under us.

  “The other two helos were staggered at the left echelon, a couple of hundred yards apart, and they climbed too, over the wires. That would have done it, right? If we’d all turned a cartwheel in the middle of the desert and ended up upside down on the sand! Guess we’d planned for every crisis except that—getting brought down by the local phone company.”

  Regardless, they pressed on, with the huge Seahawk rotors swirling up a sandstorm below them as they hurtled above the flat wilderness of Iraq, where not even Bedouin tribes spend much time these days.

  Staring at the charts in the TOC was one thing. But out here in the real world, where it’s really happening, none of the SEALs could dismiss the thought that somewhere down below them in the darkness some tribesman was leaning against his camel and phoning Al-Asawi: “Sir, I have just witnessed three of those American airplanes with no wings flying right over my goatherds, and they’re heading straight for you ...”

  Worse things have happened. One of the great dreads of US Special Forces involved with the War on Terror has always been betrayal by local people, who almost all have cell phones. It was three mountain goat herders who finished Operation Red Wings in Afghanistan in 2005, in the worst day ever for a US Black Operation.

  Everyone learned from that, and these pilots transporting Echo Platoon were taking a few wide sweeps, not making a dead straight line for the al-Qaeda compound. Nonetheless, these tribesmen are sure footed and enormously cunning, and they know this land better than any Westerner could ever understand.

  Matt and his men may have been well under the radar, but they sure as hell were not above suspicion, not to some desert nomad being scared half to death by six turbo-shaft engines screaming above his head in the middle of the night, shattering the quiet of these biblical lands.

  None of the doorway gunners saw anything for the next twenty-five minutes, at which point the pilots assessed they were “ten klicks out”—that’s military speak (one klick equals one thousand meters or one kilometer—or .62 of a mile).

  So the pilot now assessed they were 6.2 miles out from the target zone. He immediately dialed down the engines, slowing for the landing, and everyone heard the scream of the rotors subside and the so-familiar sound of a Navy helicopter coming into a flight deck, the turbo’s lower-tone BOM-BOM-BOM.

  Carefully they edged down toward the sand, with the pilots letting the landing wheels gently touch down on the surprisingly hard surface before releasing the full eight-ton weight of the Seahawk to settle on the desert floor. In that instant Matt and his gunners hit the release button and charged out of the helicopters, M-4 rifles ready to spit fire.

  They took up defensive formation, armed to the teeth, surrounding the aircraft. Any enemy making any kind of advance on those Navy helicopters had approximately four seconds to live. The on-board machine gunners were at their posts, fingers on the trigger until the helicopters took off, rising instantly in the same split second the last man vacated the aircraft and took formation.

  Out there on the sand, for several minutes, no one moved, the dust died down, and the night seemed to grow darker. The navigation Team, led by Petty Officer Eric, went into a huddle, checking compass bearing, GPS, maps, and diagrams. Jason and Rob, who would both walk in column two, listened carefully as their communications controller, Carl (call-sign Hammer Zero-Two), tuned into their close air support, which was currently flying a couple of miles above them (they hoped).

  This was Boeing’s AC-130/U Gunship, known in the trade as Spooky, a one hundred-foot long, heavily armed warplane with four turbo-prop engines. It’s capable of swooping in from nowhere and raking surgical fire into a target from its side-firing weapons, all of which are integrated with sophisticated sensor, navigation, and fire-control systems.

  The sight of Spooky coming in for the kill is extremely bad news for all illegal combatants who might have raised a hand or a gun against the United States of America. The AC-130 packs an enormous amount of firepower that would crush and devastate any enemy.

  And they’re excellent in the desert. Spooky played hell with Iraqi troops on the ground during Operation Iraqi Freedom, New Dawn, and Enduring Freedom, often in direct support of US troops engaged with enemy forces.

  The onboard infrared sensor and radar systems allow it to identify anything, any place, any time. It can attack two targets simultaneously. Should Carl so desire, big Spooky would be right there, if necessary, to pour in devastating area-saturation gunfire.

  Everyone hoped this would not be necessary, as the summoning of the gunship would inevitably mean that a vastly superior force had pinned them down, that they had suffered casualties, and that Al-Isawi had probably gotten loose.

  The idea was to move in fast and silently locate the target and then grab him with maximum force and minimum fuss. Nonetheless, Air Comms Chief Carl swiftly had his frequencies tuned in on a direct line to Spooky’s flight command, ground to air, and they would stay in touch throughout the night while the gunship flew its holding pattern high above them.

  The second radio would keep Carl in constant communication with the two SEAL assault Teams, and he would walk in between the two columns, with Sam and Lieutenant Jimmy, the overall officer commanding.

  And now they ordered the Iraqi SWAT to take their places in both columns, and still they did not mention the name of their quarry. They also never mentioned the fact that they were headed to a highly classified area. Matt and Rob, the two column leaders, were both nearly certain no coalition forces had ever been out here before. Certainly no Americans had ever been inside the compound, where the latest intel still confirmed Al-Isawi was definitely in residence.

  Out on the left the column-two recce man, Jon, began to move well forward of the main group, walking softly into the dark, all alone, wearing his night-vision goggles, with his assault rifle ready and his radio tuned for instant contact with the leaders.

  You need steel nerves for this. And every last sense of the big recce man from Virginia was heightened because of the quiet, because of the plain and obvious danger, and because of the unknown. If there’s a booby trap, trip wire, small minefield, ambush, or volley of gunfire designed to protect the infamous Al-Isawi, then Jonathan Keefe, son of Tom and Dawn, brother of Tommy, would be the first man to die, right out there on the left flank, all alone.

  Out in front of the right-hand column walked Eric. Like Jon, he stepped carefully across the rough sandy ground, peering through the green images of his night-goggles, listening for the slightest sound to betray an enemy. Like Jon, Eric was all alone, segregated from the main assault columns. But he was always within shouting range in case of an emergency.

  Behind him, Matt McCabe, carrying the breacher’s industrial gear and with his rifle angled forward, led the assault column, followed by his Iraqi SWAT and, in the center, Carl, Sam, and Lieutenant Jimmy, all with their separate tasks, two of them murmuring into the radios.

  For more than an hour, under the heavy assault gear, they marched softly across these outer reaches of the Syrian Desert, and as they pressed on, the sand beneath their combat boots seemed to become deeper, no longer hard packed. And the going subsequently got tougher. Jon later said, “It was like moon dust, or snow, an
d we were sinking in. Hell! It slowed us down.”

  But then, as they came within a mile of their objective, the ground hardened up. Out in front Jon and Eric were now crossing very rough ground, studded with what looked like bomb craters, like a testing site for army ordnance. And all around Jon and Eric could see wrecked hardware, hunks of metal, smashed trucks, and shells.

  “No one,” said Jon, “could have reached any other conclusion. This was either an al-Qaeda training camp or a scrapyard. The military decision had to be the former.”

  And right then a fast message came in from Spooky’s crew, high above, watching every move, their eyes in the sky. There was a suspicious car approaching the SEAL patrol, driving across the sand in defiance of the government’s all-embracing curfew in this part of Iraq.

  Carl came across on the inner-squad radio: “HAMMER TWO! There’s a car two hundred to three hundred yards away coming straight toward us. Find concealment and stand by.”

  Moments later some wreck of an automobile came bumping and squeaking straight past them, pretty slow and utterly suspicious. But the driver saw nothing as the SEALs hunkered down in this al-Qaeda junkyard, remaining as deathly still and silent as only SEALs can.

  They watched its dusty wake fade off into the night, and then they pressed on forward, into Arab territory in which Jon and Eric needed to be even more careful. They each called their Team leaders and reported they were almost certainly on the outskirts of a terrorist stronghold, a real no-go area. And now they were walking on eggshells, aware that if the two lines of assault troops had been sighted, they could expect opposition.

  Slowly they made their way across the jagged approaches to what was an obvious al-Qaeda stronghold. And right there Jon realized they were being watched—not by Iraqi terrorists but by dogs, maybe twenty or thirty of them, surrounding him on all sides, intermittently barking.

  Petty Officer Keefe understood that if they attacked, he would be obliged to open fire, and he fervently hoped that if he shot and killed a couple, the others might run. If they didn’t, well, that was big trouble and would constitute a total uproar out here in the pitch dark, face to face with a pack of junkyard dogs.

  “That was just about the nastiest moment so far,” he recalled. “But they were standing off, maybe ten or fifteen yards away, and just barking a bit. I kept going, and none of them wanted to come much closer. But it was real creepy. Some of them were big, like German Shepherds. You could see their eyes glinting.”

  Jon called back and alerted the Team, but he decided to ignore the canine menace. And up ahead both SEAL point men could now see a line of sand dunes that had been dug and shaped into the outer defenses of a fortified camp.

  Through his night-vision optics Jon could now see tall guard towers on the corners. And right now he could not see whether they were manned. He and Eric fanned out and crouched through the dunes until they reached a massive barbed-wire fence, rolled up like the post and wire in front of the German trenches on the Somme in 1915.

  They cut the wires and flattened them, creating a gap through which the SEALs could enter. They both recalled making an extra large gap especially for the giant SEAL, Rob. Jon recalls that it still wasn’t that pretty watching the man-mountain from Pennsylvania bulldoze his way through between the spikes.

  By now both the recce men were certain the guard towers were not occupied, and in a soft voice Jon called in the two assault columns. He stood guard at the gap in the wire until Matt and Rob arrived.

  At this point the hot, oppressive cloud-cover was beginning to part, and the moon was rising high above the desert. Seeking the darkest spots, Jon and Eric once more went forward in front of the main group, crossing a perimeter road and heading for a long group of spaced concrete buildings that could have been houses or even low square bunkers, and these formed a defensive line.

  In any event Jon and Eric had no idea who was inside them and certainly not who might be looking out. Once more, they crouched low and slipped silently past, finally swinging right to come in between two buildings and through the central walkway into what looked like a small run-down US town. The streets were paved but potholed. There were street lights, some of which were switched on. It was just one of those regular, shabby, Arab townships, more like “the projects” in some fading US-city ghetto.

  Jon and Eric hit the radios and once more called in the assault Teams. Deep in the shadows they aimed a pinpoint flashlight at a diagram drawn from a recent satellite image. They checked the buildings they had prenumbered for this very moment of arrival.

  Matt led his troops around the corner and joined the recce men in the shadows. Rob brought his Team around right afterward, and the mission’s forward commanders took a long look at the geography. All of the buildings had a number, and the ones that mattered were eight and nine. In one of those was the (hopefully) sleeping Al-Isawi.

  “Remember, guys,” whispered Matt, “they want this maniac alive. So don’t, for Christ’s sake, shoot him. Not unless you have to.”

  Right now the SEALs took up position. Jon and Eric, the first men into the outside perimeter of the compound, identified the correct building, locked down on it with rifles leveled, and immediately summoned the assault Team to move up into the critical ground in front of the terrorist stronghold. Lieutenant Jason, with his men already on high alert in the vital blocking positions deep in the shadows, was ready to deal with any threat while the assault Team went in to snatch the most dangerous and wanted man in the Middle East.

  Matt and Rob swung off to the right and approached the apartment buildings through a line of bushes—staying low and out of sight of any possible guards in the windows. The dogs were still around, but they were not barking much. And now the assault group closed ranks, moving forward in a tight formation. A stone staircase separated buildings eight and nine, but the intel had stressed that Al-Isawi was in the ground-floor apartment in one of these two buildings.

  Matt took the one on the right and Rob headed left, both carrying sledgehammers. And still no one had raised any kind of alarm. Both Team leaders gave the signal to halt, and together they slammed into the doors with the sledges. The noise was shattering, and Matt gave the door one more stupendous thump, and it cannoned inward.

  The Echo Platoon leader charged in, conscious of movement on his left. He detailed his troops to secure the apartment as they went, surgically, methodically, like all SEAL assaults. And the first place was a big communal bedroom set behind a couple of stone pillars, with possibly a dozen sleeping Iraqis on the floor.

  To the right was a kitchen, and Iraqi SWATs assisted the SEALs as they stood guard, assault rifles raised. Matt went straight ahead until he reached two closed doors, one left, one right. He took the left one and, with a pile driver of a mule kick, almost ripped it off its hinges.

  He ducked back to avoid the possible volley of machine gunfire or even a booby-trap bomb, and then he crashed his way into the bedroom. Flat on the floor, on a mattress, was a tall male figure with a woman beside him. Next to her was a child.

  It was dark, but Matt could see a semiautomatic pistol next to the man’s right hand. And he rammed his own rifle one inch from the face of the half-asleep figure. This was potential history, and Matt swung around to his Iraqi interpreter, snapping a command and, only half-joking: “Gimme the Arabic words for ‘make my day’!”

  He ordered him to stand and, to his interpreter: “Tell him to get up right now, and get the cuffs on him.”

  By now the woman was screaming, and the daughter was shouting. Matt ordered two Iraqis to remove them. Then he slung his rifle around his back, took out his loaded pistol, and stared hard at the handcuffed Iraqi. The height was right—tall for a tribesman. Slim build. That was right too. He pulled out the pictures, and in the gloom it more or less confirmed the identification. But there was one more step.

  “Get him back on the floor,” ordered Matt, “face down.” There were three more Iraqi SWATs in the bedroom by now, and Matt told the
m to hold the prisoner still.

  Then he swiftly knelt down and grabbed the fingers of the man’s left hand. Sure enough, the little finger was partly missing.

  Matt, his adrenalin pumping, had his knee rammed into the spine of the most-feared terrorist in the Middle East, the Butcher of Fallujah. Echo Platoon’s assault Team had captured the mass murderer Ahmad Hashim Abd Al-Isawi.

  And Matt flicked on his radio and uttered the code word, which signified that the SEALs’ five-year-long search was over.

  Exactly forty seconds had passed since he had kicked in the door. “JACKPOT!” called Matt.

  By this time the initial chaos in the house was gone. The assault Teams were moving quickly, and they’d secured every room, lining up the other residents, separating women and children in one room from males in other sections of the apartment. Military-aged men were grouped together under firm SEAL security.

  Matt took charge of the search of one bedroom, and two SEALs held Al-Isawi at gunpoint. Outside there was a blue truck that the SEALs commandeered and disabled. Out where the SEALs had set up a defensive position, four other prisoners were taken because they were “unknown and suspect.”

  The prisoners had not been harmed—just grabbed, cuffed, and told to shut up. A couple of them found it difficult to comply with this latter instruction, so Jason’s guys taped their mouths shut, and now they were under guard. The good news was that no one had yet fired a shot at the SEALs.

  Rob arrived with the other assault column and took over the apartment, while Matt took three Iraqis and crossed to the opposite bedroom, the one where he had not caved in the door. He entered and discovered that two of his Team had established the three residents as Al-Isawi’s mother and two of his cousins.

  He ordered them out, into the holding area, and personally conducted a thorough search of the room, which yielded two bundles of US currency, totaling $6,000. Each bill had a little blue tracking stamp on it, which suggested Al-Isawi’s henchmen had somehow stolen it from a bank. Either that or it was counterfeit.