Thirteen Soldiers

by John McCain

  Monsoor walked just behind the platoon’s point man on patrol, where the machine gunner is positioned to put out cover fire in the event the patrol is attacked, as it frequently was. He also served as one of the platoon’s communicators. On patrols where he served as both machine gunner and communicator, he carried a hundred pounds of gear into combat, in temperatures in excess of 120 degrees Fahrenheit, while wearing body armor. He never complained. Everyone in the platoon remembered that about him. He didn’t seem bothered. He was always alert, usually quiet on the job, but not in a way that made him seem stressed or tightly wound. He was one of those guys who appear easygoing not because they are lackadaisical or acting cool but because they are quietly self-assured and competent. That was the impression he made on his friend, the platoon skipper, Lieutenant Stone, who called him “a fantastic warrior.” “He was always there, 110 percent and all business, yet in a nice way,” another officer in the platoon remembered. “When Mike was around, things seemed to go better, easier.”

  MacFarland was a counterinsurgency veteran when he got to Ramadi, having served in Tal Afar in northern Iraq under a master of counterinsurgency operations, Colonel H. R. McMaster. And he brought with him a number of veterans from the northern Iraq campaign. There was little doubt MacFarland would avoid a full assault on Ramadi, like the one in Fallujah. First, Ramadi was a lot larger than Fallujah, too large for the force he had to be everywhere at once. Second, that kind of assault often turns into a “destroy the village to save it” affair—counterproductive, to say the least, to the civil and economic progress necessary to preserve gains toward a stable peace.

  In a counterinsurgency’s “take, hold, and build” strategy, you liberate territory piece by piece, getting civil institutions such as a capable police force up and running as you go. You also cause far fewer noncombatant casualties. “My intent,” MacFarland later told a reporter, was “to take this city back without destroying it.” His plan was to establish secure areas throughout the city, which American and Iraqi soldiers would garrison and slowly expand, initiating reconstruction projects and strengthening civil institutions as security improved.

  MacFarland’s first move was swiftly setting up four combat outposts (COPs) deep in insurgent strongholds in neighborhoods under al Qaeda control. These were complicated, daringly confrontational, all-hands-on-deck operations, using marine and army infantry, armor, air assets, engineers, construction, and, in a volunteer capacity, the SEALs. Once the COPs were established, they were manned by Americans and Iraqi soldiers, and the neighborhoods where they were located were cleared of insurgents a block at a time.

  Willink’s task unit had been sent to Ramadi to train Iraqi soldiers and engage with local tribes. Both tasks were useful to MacFarland in the long term, but not particularly relevant to his immediate intention to plant his forces in enemy territory. The SEALs could be a great asset, but they were not MacFarland’s to command. Instead Willink asked MacFarland how the SEALs could help. And MacFarland, Willink recalled, “basically wanted one thing from me; he wanted me to kill insurgents.”

  Thus it was decided that the SEALs would provide operational security. They would still train and work with the Iraqis and hunt and kill the targets assigned them. But now the SEALs would also work with conventional forces securing areas in advance of the engineers rushing in to set up defensible combat outposts. They would also provide overwatch security from Ramadi rooftops as conventional forces cleared the neighborhoods around the COPs building by building.

  SEAL snipers were MacFarland’s favorite asset for intimidating the enemy. One of them, Chief Petty Officer Chris Kyle, was so feared and notorious the insurgents called him “the devil of Ramadi.” He was reported to have killed two insurgents on a motorcycle with one round and to have killed another at more than a mile’s distance. Kyle served four tours in Iraq and fought in many of the major battles of the war, including the 2003 invasion, the Battle for Fallujah, in Ramadi, and in the fight to pacify Sadr City in 2008. That violent 2006 summer in Ramadi would be his fiercest and longest battle, where he would claim more than ninety of his 160 confirmed kills. He went home in September, shaken up by the losses the SEALs suffered, and returned in 2008 for his fourth and final tour. In 2013, retired from the navy and back home in Texas, he was murdered by a disturbed marine veteran he was trying to help.

  Two welcome developments occurred just before the operation launched. First, the butcher Zarqawi was killed. More immediately useful for MacFarland’s purposes was the Ramadi insurgents’ misreading of his intentions. The Ready First had more than 150 M-1 Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, as well as hundreds of armored Humvees, enough armor to make it look to insurgents as if the brigade was readying for a Fallujah-style assault. As MacFarland began setting up a security cordon around Ramadi in advance of setting up the outposts, many insurgents, and thousands of noncombatants, decided discretion was the better part of valor and left Ramadi before the assault began, likely planning to return and lay claim to the rubble. Those who remained, and a good many did, were caught by surprise when the infidels were suddenly in fortified outposts in their backyards.

  The Battle for Ramadi got under way on June 17, 2006, with the establishment of two combat outposts, Iron and Spear, in the southeast and southwest of the city. The construction of COP Eagle’s Nest near Corregidor started the next day, and COP Falcon, in one of the most dangerous places in the city, followed the next week. Dick Couch, the author of a fascinating study of the battle, The Sheriff of Ramadi, wrote a detailed description of the outposts’ construction (jokingly named “COP in a box” by the men who built them), which we summarize here.

  The day before the operation launched, final briefings were held, and the armor, vehicles, and materials to be used were staged. The SEAL teams, who did their own night reconnaissance of the sites a few days prior, were inserted before dawn with a small contingent of conventional forces, including interpreters and Iraqi scouts. They carried enough ammunition and supplies to last them several days. When they got to the site, they claimed the building to use as the COP, paying off and brusquely evicting the families living there. Then they set up their shooting positions on the upper floors and rooftops.

  The Dagger teams (IED clearance specialists) were next, with armored vehicles designed to detonate mines. If the SEALs had managed to clear the site and get in position undetected, the noisy Dagger teams would alert insurgents something big was happening. Once the Daggers had finished, the armor (Abrams tanks and Bradleys) rolled in and set up a security perimeter around the site encompassing a block or more. They were immediately followed by at least a company of infantry, who provided additional security. Then came the occupants of the new COP, a company-size or larger unit that usually included several infantry platoons, a mortar platoon, an engineering platoon, a headquarters element, and tanks.

  Once the outpost occupants arrived, the SEALs switched to an “area denial mission,” repositioning to buildings on the outer perimeter to protect routes into the site. Couch described the mechanics of sniper overwatch in Ramadi, which again we summarize. A suitable building was chosen and entered either relatively politely or forcibly, depending on whether or not its occupants were hostile. Friend or foe, they were paid for their trouble and not permitted to leave. Iraqi scouts guarded the families on the lower floor while the SEALs set up their shooting positions on the upper floors and the roof. Inside positions were preferable as they were usually less vulnerable than rooftops. If the windows and roofs didn’t offer good angles or protection, the SEALs blew shooting holes in the walls and paid the residents for the damage.

  The construction work began once the SEAL snipers were in place. Convoys of army engineers and navy Seabees in full combat armor rolled down the streets, carrying concrete barriers, sandbags, concertina wire, and other building materials, to a site ringed by armor, where soldiers and marines and Iraqi scouts cleared buildings inside the perimeter and F-18s and drones circled overhead. I
f insurgents hadn’t yet contested the foray into their territory, they usually wanted to start when the convoy alerted them to the purpose of the operation. By then, though, it was too late. They usually managed to snipe at the convoys and fire RPGs at the site, but in that first week, by the time they realized what was happening, the coalition presence in their midst was too strong to repel. Thirteen more COPs and several Iraqi police stations were established in every contested area of the city over the summer and fall of 2006. The enemy got better at contesting the operations as they became more familiar with them, but they never stopped an outpost from being established wherever MacFarland determined he needed one. They had to settle for making life miserable for the inhabitants of the outposts, who lived under regular assault from rockets, mortars, and small arms fire.

  As the insurgents became more familiar with SEAL overwatch teams, they got better at assaulting them too. In the beginning, as those first COPs were built, SEAL snipers may have seemed invincible to the insurgents. But the smarter insurgents, the ones who learned from watching others die, became tougher adversaries as the summer wore on. They learned how to locate the positions of the overwatch teams and, knowing the area better than the SEALs did, move unseen by snipers. “The overwatch often became nothing more than an elevated, covered position from which to engage the insurgents in a sustained gun battle,” Couch explained.

  As MacFarland’s forces pushed deeper and deeper into Ramadi, the summer became long, hard, and very violent. Elsewhere in Iraq U.S. forces consolidated on big bases and reduced their casualties, but the Ready First was doing the opposite. The decision to surge forces to Iraq and authorize General Petraeus to conduct a counterinsurgency hadn’t been made yet, but MacFarland was running one in Ramadi, scattering his forces and Iraqi soldiers and police throughout the enemy’s territory, taking the fight to the enemy and staying there, tactics that can be and were costly. Baghdad didn’t second-guess him, though, at least not enough to make him change course, and he had the support of his superior, Lieutenant General Richard Zilmer, who had assumed command of I Marine Expeditionary Force in June.

  Some journalists who reported from Ramadi that summer rather than from Baghdad could see the counterinsurgency’s progress or at least understand its strategy. But most of the press thought Ramadi was a vicious, hopeless slaughterhouse, where an enterprising colonel and his brigade were doing the best they could to hold off the inevitable. That point of view appeared to be reinforced by the Devlin Report when it was leaked in September. When it was updated and leaked again in November, opinions about Ramadi hadn’t changed much, even though the battle, while not over, was nearly won.

  But winning or losing, there was no denying it was a bloody summer and fall in Ramadi. The killing increased as more outposts were built and American and Iraqi soldiers pushed insurgents out of the areas surrounding them. Roadside IEDs were the biggest killers, as they were everywhere else in Iraq. There were hundreds of them in Ramadi. MacFarland was nearly killed by an IED that detonated under his armored vehicle on Route Michigan as he was returning from visiting the wounded. But death came by other means as well. In the first week of July the marines succeeded in capturing the Ramadi General Hospital, which the insurgents had used as living quarters. When the marines searched the hospital, they found bombs planted everywhere and the severed heads of Iraqi soldiers who had been wounded and captured by al Qaeda.

  On July 24 insurgents staged a counterattack against various targets, but chiefly centered on the Government Center. Zarqawi’s successor, Abu Ayyub al-Musri, was reported to have been in Ramadi for the assault. The attacks were repulsed, and a hundred or more insurgents killed in the process, but it was hard, costly fighting, with many coalition wounded. As the Government Center would likely continue to be a focus of insurgent attention, MacFarland ordered the buildings surrounding it razed and a public park built in their place.

  On the morning of August 2, SEALs in Charlie Platoon provided sniper overwatch for Iraqi soldiers and a U.S. Army tank unit clearing neighborhoods near COP Falcon in south central Ramadi. Of all the areas where COPs had been established, the Ma’Laab district, where Falcon was located, was considered the most dangerous. Intelligence reports the day before identified two al Qaeda cells based in the area. They soon made their presence known, waiting for the armor to pass them before opening up from rooftops and windows on the infantry who followed.

  The SEALs had arrived at the scene in Bradleys before the shooting started. Chris Kyle, his platoon’s machine gunner, Petty Officer Ryan Job from Issaquah, Washington, and another SEAL sniper took up positions on the roof of a four-story apartment building. No sooner had they settled in than they started taking a lot of fire. A round struck Job’s M-60 and shrapnel ripped into his face, destroying one eye and severing the optic nerves of the other. Kyle and Charlie’s skipper, Lieutenant Leif Babin, rushed to Job’s aid and called in a Bradley to evacuate him. As Kyle helped the wounded man, who was choking on his blood, sit up, Petty Officer Marc Lee, a twenty-eight-year-old SEAL from the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon, reached the roof and started firing his machine gun to cover the evacuation. Kyle and Babin helped Job downstairs and into the Bradley, which sped him to the hospital at Camp Ramadi.

  After Job was extracted, Charlie Platoon and their Iraqi scouts, exhausted and low on ammunition, headed back to COP Falcon, about five hundred yards from the scene of the fighting. The army patrol continued to fight a running battle as more insurgents poured into the area. After a brief rest and rearming, Babin ordered the SEALs into the Bradleys and back to the fight.

  They reached a building thick with insurgents about a block from where Job had been hit. An M-1 let rip with cannon and machine-gun fire, knocking down part of a wall. The Bradleys dropped their ramps and the SEALs sprinted into the building as sheets of machine-gun fire followed them. They secured the ground floor, and with Lee on the point, started ascending a stairwell. Lee noticed fire coming through an open window. He approached it and fired a burst from his machine gun, and was just turning to alert the SEALs behind him when a round struck him in the head and severed his spine. Again that day Charlie Platoon had to fight desperately to get a wounded SEAL off the battlefield. Babin was wounded too, but continued to direct the platoon. After the SEALs left and the exhausted army patrol withdrew to Falcon, M-1s and F-18s blew the place to hell.

  Lee was dead when he arrived at the hospital, the first SEAL to die in Iraq. His brothers in SEAL Team 3 were deeply shaken by the loss. They renamed Shark Base Camp Marc Lee and mourned as they fought.

  Job was blinded but survived. He spent time in a series of military hospitals. He got married, climbed Mt. Rainier, and moved to Arizona. He got his bachelor’s degree and was working on his master’s and expecting his first child when he went into the hospital for reconstructive surgery in September 2009 and died from postsurgical complications. His death was unexpected and indescribably unfair.

  THE FIGHTING IN RAMADI got no easier after the August 2 firefight, but later that month insurgents made what would be their biggest strategic mistake, not just in Ramadi but for the entire insurgency. They killed a local sheik who had encouraged his tribesmen to join the ranks of the local police. Then they hid his body so his tribe could not bury him within twenty-four hours, as Islam requires. That was considered a worse offense than his murder. On September 9, with funding from the United States, fifty sheiks from twenty Anbar tribes, some of whom had at one time been allied with al Qaeda, announced the formation of an anti-insurgent council called the Anbar Awakening. It was led by the first sheik in Anbar to turn against al Qaeda, Abdul Sattar Abu Risha, whose father and three brothers had been killed by AQI. It might not have looked like it at the time, but the outcome of the Battle for Ramadi and Anbar was determined on September 9, although it would require months more of hard fighting and many more casualties to secure.

  Delta Platoon’s last operation in Ramadi, a sniper overwatch mission, began in the predawn hours of S
eptember 29. The SEAL task unit was nearing the end of their six-month rotation in Iraq. They were scheduled to start making their way back to Coronado in less than two weeks, and most of their gear was already packed and staged for redeployment. Mikey Monsoor was making plans to attend an October Minot State University football game in North Dakota to watch his younger brother play. He had called home a few days before, typically cheerful and discreet about the war.

  Two squads from Delta Platoon and a contingent of Iraqi scouts set out on foot from Corregidor for a rail line on the southern outskirts of the city, where marines were going to string razor wire that day. Delta’s skipper, Lieutenant Stone, commanded one squad; a lieutenant j.g. was in charge of the other. They seized two buildings about a block apart. The scouts secured the ground floor, while the SEALs got in position on the rooftops. They punched shooting holes in a low stucco wall on the ledge of the roof. By three o’clock everyone was in position with good fields of fire, waiting for daybreak.

  “As soon as it became light,” the lieutenant in charge of Monsoor’s squad told Dick Couch, “we knew it was going to be a day of fighting.”

  The insurgents focused most of their attention that day on the SEAL teams rather than the more exposed marine platoon stringing the wire. Early on, each SEAL squad killed insurgents scouting their position. A loudspeaker in the minaret of a nearby mosque blared a summons for mujahideen to join the battle. Neighborhood residents blocked off streets in the area, and insurgents armed with AK-47s started taking potshots at the SEAL positions before speeding off in cars and small trucks. About noon Monsoor’s squad took their first RPG round, which exploded on the roof, causing no more damage than a shower of dust and debris. By then small arms fire on both locations was constant, but still mostly ineffective. The SEALs knew the attacks would continue all day but felt secure that their overwatch wasn’t in real jeopardy. Insurgents tried to maneuver closer to the SEALs, dodging in and out of the surrounding buildings. The snipers shot them or drove them back whenever they broke cover.