by Joe Klein
And then he looked down at Howey.
His legs were covered in blood, missing flesh. Jake would later write in an unpublished memoir, “His right arm lay at an impossible angle, mangled and charred and bloody. His flak jacket was torn open and scorched black, revealing a chest peppered with shrapnel. But all that still looked vaguely human. It was his face, Howey’s face, which no longer bore resemblance to the carefree California kid we all knew. The blast had warped the size and shape of his entire skull, cruelly leaving his features intact, so that what remained looked humanoid, but not human.”
The Humvee was engulfed in flames now, and ammunition began cooking off. Jake and Doc Camp moved Howey off the bridge and into a nearby field. They called in a medevac, and Jake stood in the field, half-warmed by the fires, half-chilled by the air, twirling a string of red warning lights over his head, a signal for the choppers. His shoulder ached, but he kept twirling until the birds came in a gush of wind and another splatter of mud. He got on the medevac with Sergeant Payne, Latcher, Doc Camp, and several others who’d been stranded on the far side of the bridge. He fingered his dog tag, thinking, “If they’d let me lead the convoy back to Reds, that would have been me.”
Back at FOB Viking, word of the attack was cascading and distorting through the camp. There were five KIA. No, there were two KIA, six WIA. Wood had burns over 90 percent of his body. Wood? Jeff Muir ran over to the operations center (TOC) and asked, “Who got hurt?” No one knew. Muir began praying, “Please don’t let it be Jake or Nick Roberts.” And then he thought, “How fucked is it that I’m praying that someone other than Jake or Roberts got hurt?” But he couldn’t stop praying. And he thought about Clay, who was out on a three-day dwell op with his squad: How would Clay handle it if Jake had bought the farm?
By the next afternoon, Muir had assembled the details—Jake was fine, but he was still at al-Taqaddum air base and wouldn’t be coming back to Viking for a couple of days. Muir was walking back to his hooch when Clay’s squad came in, and he told them what happened. The news was greeted by torrents of shits and fucks, but Clay didn’t say anything. He just stared straight ahead as if, Muir thought, he were trying to work his way through a complicated math equation.
Two days later, Muir found Clay sitting on his bunk, staring across at Howey’s empty rack—again, just staring at it. “Dude, you okay?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Clay said. “Fine.” But he didn’t sound fine.
That night Clay had moved down into Howey’s bunk. “I just want to be close to him,” he said.
It was that night or maybe the next that Clay called his dad, Stacy Hunt, back in Houston. “Dad, we lost a couple of guys a few days ago,” he said. Stacy couldn’t make out much of what Clay was saying; the connection was awful, and the call didn’t last very long. But Stacy heard a quality in his son’s voice that he’d never heard before. The boy was scared.
“This is hard, Dad,” Clay said. “Really hard.”
Ten days later, Jake and Clay’s platoon hit a village market at the corner of Routes Angels and Pirates. There was supposed to be a significant ammunition cache in the market warehouse; there was bound to be AQI (Al Qaeda in Iraq) security and resistance. But the mission turned out to be a dud at first, another false alarm, Iraq as usual.
Jake blew the lock on the warehouse door with his Benelli shotgun. There were no weapons inside, no AQI security. The other squads began to collect and interrogate the men in the market to see if any useful information could be gleaned from the wasted morning.
Lieutenant Clevenger told Jake to deploy his five-man team atop a house about two hundred yards above and behind the market. It was a standard Iraqi structure, cinder block, one story with the hope of two, rusted steel rods poking up from a flat roof, with a staircase leading to the top. It was amazing how everything looked unfinished or partially destroyed in Iraq. On the roof, Jake had his radio operator, Cartwright, set up a communications line with HQ and then sat there, sweating like a banshee in the stupefying dust-sauna, watching the heat ripple across the field to Route Pirates and beyond, past the ancient irrigation canal on the other side of the road, which brought water from the Euphrates River. The area was thick with reeds and bulrushes, biblical stuff: these lands between the Tigris and Euphrates had once, in legend, been the Garden of Eden. It wasn’t exactly how Jake had pictured it in Sunday school.
The heat seemed to intensify, radiating off the black tar roof. The dust raised by their convoy hadn’t yet settled, or maybe it had; everything in Iraq was sepia-toned. Communications were hard, too—his radio on the rooftop was the only connection with HQ. Jake could raise Lieutenant Clevenger by unit intercom, but that connection was sketchy at best. So his team was it, the only contact with the rest of the world.
He heard children singing and laughing. He looked down from the roof and saw two little girls—the children of the house—playing and eating the candy that his squad had given them, their innocence blatant, egregious. The intercom was scratching on and off with orders and info. Jake heard that one of the prisoners collected in the market was talking; Clevenger wanted a gunshot residue (GSR) test kit to check if the guy had recently used a weapon. Jake watched a Marine get out of one of the Humvees, two hundred yards away, and struggle to open the rear hatch in search of the kit.
The Marine—Jake couldn’t tell who it was—jerked suddenly, a marionette pantomime, he would later write, “as if an unseen string attached to his right shoulder had been violently pulled.”
Then, instantaneously, crack—the sound of the rifle shot. The Marine seemed to crumple in slow motion. He was still standing upright, but as he brought his hands up to his neck, his knees began to fold, and blood geysered through his fingers. And now there was gunfire everywhere. The noise was hellacious, ear-crushing, as if someone had just turned on the car stereo, full volume, to AC/DC at its most suicidally stupid loud. Jake saw three, maybe four enemy machine-gun positions across the road, camouflaged by the heavy vegetation. He saw the four turret machine gunners in the Marine Humvees turn in unison and begin firing back into the reeds. Then, to his right, he saw a white sedan pull up on Pirates facing the convoy; the doors swung open, and two men began firing.
He ordered Cartwright, the radio man, to call in a 9-line medevac request1 and told Bullard, who carried the M-249 SAW machine gun on the northeastern corner of the roof, to light up the sedan. There were machine-gun rounds flying over their heads, punctuated by gorgeous, luminescent red and green tracers—and he ordered Arguello to go to the back of the house and make sure there wasn’t fire coming from their six, from behind.
Jake had always wondered about actual combat. He was surprised that, in the noise and chaos, everything seemed to be moving in slow motion—and in good order. He was jazzed, but clear. He felt great.
Bullard wiped out the sedan with his SAW. Jake, staring at the disintegrating spiderweb tracery that used to be the windshield, ordered him to cease fire.
Cartwright called in the medevac.
The helicopters were on their way to the intersection of Pirates and MSR Mobile. But there was a problem.
They couldn’t raise Clevenger to tell him about the medevac.
Well, Jake thought, we’re going to have to go down there and tell them ourselves. They were going to have to get down there eventually, anyway, to get out of Dodge.
He organized his team into two groups. He ordered them to bound the two hundred yards down to the convoy. He and Cartwright would lead on the left flank; the other two men would follow on his right.
“Moving!” he yelled. And he was racing across the field of fire. Eight-step bounds: left-right, left-right, left-right, left-right, down. “Set!” he yelled.
“Moving!” the right flank yelled and bounded past him.
“Set!” They dropped.
“Moving!” Jake yelled.
Machine-gun rounds were snapping the air above Jake’s head. When he got closer to the convoy, there were machine-gun rounds sk
ipping through the dirt beneath him. This was it: actual combat, like in the movies. The sort of thing that almost never happened in Iraq. He wasn’t panicked. He was flying with each bound.
His foot didn’t hurt. He wasn’t even aware of it, which, after five surgeries, was a rare blessing. For six years now, his foot had defined his level of physical competence, which was central to Jake’s life as a football player—and as a human being—and then as a Marine. It made him a mediocrity in close order drill, which was important but not that important—he had been named Guide, the top recruit in boot camp and then, again, in the School of Infantry. Mesmerized by the constant pain, he had even screwed up handing off the damn guidon at his graduation ceremony. But he wasn’t thinking about his foot at all now; combat was liberation from that particular ball and chain.
He had no idea how long it took to bound the field. Minutes, certainly; it could have been five or fifteen. Finally they reached their destination, the berm that rose up to the elevated road. They dropped down and began firing their weapons at the unseen enemy through the ground level crevices of the convoy. Jake and Bullard looked at each other and smiled guiltily with the same thought: that shit was fun.
The firefight was still very much on, but Jake knew the convoy would be leaving soon to move the wounded Marine to the medevac. He led his squad down the convoy, back to the truck that had brought them, an armored deuce and a half. They sat in the truck, giddy, swapping stories as bullets pinged off the outer armor. Jake’s doubts about the quality of his fellow Marines had evaporated in combat. His fire team had done everything right. They had been fabulous, perfect. He totally loved them.
But, he realized, the convoy wasn’t moving. The medevac helicopters were going to arrive down the road, at Pirates and MSR Mobile, the main highway between Fallujah and Ramadi, and they wouldn’t hang around for very long. Jake got out of the truck and ran up to the front of the convoy, where Lieutenant Clevenger was with the wounded Marine who was being worked on by two medics. There was still heavy fire incoming. He looked down at the wounded man—the Humvee had been turned around to protect him from the incoming—and it was Nathan Windsor, face white, lips blue, a gurgling sound coming through the hole in his neck.
He told the Lieutenant they had to get out of there; the birds were on their way. Clevenger said Windsor had to be stabilized before they could move. They were still under intense fire. Jake dropped down and studied the field across the canal, trying to figure out where the machine-gun nests were. He saw movement in the reeds on the right . . . and, using the passenger-side seat of the Humvee as a vault, climbed up and slapped Wherry, the turret gunner, on the helmet and directed him, “Move your sector to the right.” Wherry couldn’t hear him. Jake cupped his hands and yelled, “Right flank!” Wherry got the message and moved his sector to the right, and Jake clambered down, missing a step, stumbling and falling to the ground, his hand landing in something wet. Windsor’s blood. He looked at his bloody glove and wiped it on his camouflage tunic. Then he took it off and threw it away.
“I think I have him stabilized,” Lacea, the medic, yelled over the machine-gun fire. Windsor could now be evacuated. But, Lacea warned, they had to lay him flat, or the wound would rip open again. They had a highback Humvee with a flatbed and up-armored sidewalls farther back in the convoy. They tried to contact Little, who was in the highback, but the coms were just not working very well—and Jake decided to run back and commandeer the vehicle. More running. But he flew and jumped into the driver’s seat—into the most insanely refreshing air-conditioned chill—and drove through a tracer-beaded curtain of bullets to the front of the convoy, where he helped get Windsor on board. Then he sped to the LZ—praying that AQI hadn’t planted IEDs in the road as part of the ambush—just in time to meet the medevac.
Windsor was still alive. The medic was holding his hand and saying, “Hang in there, Windsor.” They loaded him onto the Chinook, but he died in the air.
* * *
1. The nine lines were location, radio frequency (call sign), urgency, special equipment needs, number of patients by type (litter or ambulatory), security of pickup site, method of marking the pickup site, nationality and military status of patient(s), and presence of nuclear, chemical, or biological agents at the landing zone.
Chapter 4
THE COMPLETE WARRIOR
“They don’t want you back in Seal Team One,” Eric Greitens’s SWCC commander Michael Lumpkin told him when he returned to Coronado from the Philippines in the fall of 2004.
“Why not?” Eric asked, stunned. This was a gut punch.
“You’re considered a distraction,” Lumpkin told him. ST-1 was having drug and behavior problems back home, as many of the other teams were. Eric’s superiors believed he had done the right thing in Thailand, but too many of his fellow SEALs thought he was a snitch who might call them out for untoward behavior. “It’s a tough situation and Sam Russell considers you an ‘irritant.’ ”
“What can I do?” Eric asked. He respected Lumpkin. He was one of the honorable guys.
“Well, you can spend the last six months of your tour here as a SWCC,” Lumpkin began. “Then you’re going to have to re-up and join another team. If you really want to lead SEALs in combat, you’re going to have to be patient.”
Eric was thirty; his four-year commitment was almost over. Kaj Larsen had already decided to leave the SEALs; he was going off to do a master’s at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Politics. Eric had options, too: he had applied and was soon accepted as a White House fellow.
He and Kaj left the SEALs frustrated, but there would be a second act for Eric as a SEAL reservist. He began to arrange his next deployment even before he started his year as a White House fellow. Lumpkin agreed to help him, as did several of the superior officers who had been impressed by his skills.
As soon as his year in Washington ended, he was headed to Iraq.
He would not go there as the leader of a SEAL unit; he would never command men in combat. That possibility had been foreclosed when he chose not to reenlist. He was going as an intelligence officer; in effect, he was a human switching station, operating out of the air base at Balad, sending the latest intel on the whereabouts of high-value Al Qaeda targets to special operators in the field, and forwarding their requests for help to the proper commands. It was important work, but it still wasn’t combat, and when an opening came in January 2007 to run an Al Qaeda targeting cell in the embattled city of Fallujah, he leaped at the chance.
Fallujah was an ancient place dating back to Babylonian times—it had been a center of Babylonian Jewry and of Jewish Talmudic academies until 1000 AD. It had a population of approximately 300,000, which made it the second largest city in al-Anbar province, the heart of the so-called Sunni triangle—Ramadi, with 500,000, was largest—but Fallujah had achieved legendary status since 2003 as a place of unparalleled hostility to the American invaders. Indeed, it could be said that the full-fledged Sunni rebellion began with an unforgettable act of brutality, the hanging and torching of four Blackwater Security contractors from a bridge over the Euphrates River in 2004. Two major battles had been fought for control of the city after that, in 2004 and 2005. By the time Eric arrived in 2007—about the same time that Jake Wood and Clay Hunt arrived at FOB Viking on the outskirts of town—Fallujah was occupied by American troops, Marines mostly, but it was still difficult to control.
Major Joel Poudrier, the ranking Marine intelligence officer in Fallujah, considered Greitens a godsend. Intelligence was notoriously stovepiped; special operations forces didn’t share their sources, and the Marines either got the scraps or were left to patrol blindfolded through the rubble of the blasted city. Lieutenant Commander Greitens—he had been boosted a rank for this operation and was the Naval equivalent of a Marine Major—was different. He was happy to share targets with Poudrier, though not the top secret high-value ones, which were reserved for the SEALs. He was very professional, Poudrier thought, very smart but also friend
ly and, unlike some of the other SEALs he’d met, not at all full of himself. They began to roll up some pretty bad actors together.
Eric thought Poudrier was a hoot, always easy with a laugh, a storehouse of snacks sent from home by his wife—and, more seriously, a creative officer who was willing to try new things. Most days, Poudrier stayed at his desk in the depressingly dusty warren of Camp Fallujah, sorting through the intel streams that came his way. Greitens could have done that as well, but he was finally on the front lines, and he wanted to see what the war was all about. He began to go out on patrols in order to understand the operational restraints and opportunities, and he advised his team in the targeting cell to do the same. Early on, Eric went on patrol in Ramadi with Army Rangers, a very well-trained and capable force, but none of them spoke Iraqi-dialect Arabic (their one translator spoke a Lebanese dialect, which the locals struggled to understand). They barged into a house where they believed Al Qaeda operatives were hiding and forced the family members down on their knees with their hands behind their backs and their foreheads against the wall, while the translator questioned the kneeling head of household. Eric understood that these procedures had been developed for the safety of the troops, but they seemed brutal and counterproductive all the same.