by Chris Martin
The Rangers were tasked with taking down a compound thought to house some particularly notorious insurgents near Samarra.
“SM,” the 3/75 sniper who was in overwatch for the operation, explained, “This was during the surge and everything was hot. We saw these guys driving around in trucks and they even had a DShK in the back of one, which they unloaded and hid under a tree near this little house. We were getting ready to do the hit later that night and we knew we were going to eliminate this threat.”
As had become the fashion at that time, rather than attempt to breach the house and take the target unaware, the Rangers simply took up a defensive position and ordered the men out via an interpreter armed with a bullhorn.
“We did the call-out and this guy sticks just one hand out of the door,” the sniper said. “He was speaking Arabic, saying, ‘I’m a hostage! I’m a hostage!’
“But the thing is, some of these guys have said that before blowing themselves up with a suicide vest or come out spraying an AK. Plus, we knew it was hot and the DShK was under the tree. These guys meant business.”
The man in the house continued to insist he was a captive and pleaded for the Rangers to hold their fire.
SM glassed the man and started to believe his story (“We’re totally in control. We had the house in an L-shape position where we could just obliterate it”), so he spoke up in his defense:
“Hey, I think this guy actually is a hostage.”
The HRT operator was set up alongside SM. The sniper attempted to tell the special agent what to have the interpreter say, but whenever the interpreter followed through, the shrill distortion of his amplified instructions would emit directly into the Ranger’s ears at a piercing decibel.
SM explained, “I was trying to tell them what was going on with this guy and I had the interpreter with a bullhorn, screaming into my ear. Honestly, it was comical. It was like something out of a comedy. I had the guy with the bullhorn behind me screaming at me and I was like, ‘Shut the fuck up—I can’t say anything.’”
The interpreter ordered the man to put both arms out.
(In Arabic) “I can’t—I’m handcuffed!”
Despite the fact that he wasn’t following through with the instructions, SM still urged the rest of the platoon to hold their fire for the moment.
“Hey, I got it covered. He looks like a hostage. If anything happens, I’ll just shoot him.”
The assault element proceeded to breach the door.
“All right, now come on out.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not? Now why can’t you come out?”
As it so happens, the man was handcuffed to a bed. He did his best to do as he was told, ripping the bed frame apart and running out of the shack with the bed’s broken frame dragging behind him.
“Hold up! Hold up!”
The sniper said, “We nearly took him out right there because he was freaking out. He was scared he was about to be killed.”
“Take off your man dress!”
The Ranger continued with a sense of exasperation as the scene replayed in his head, “It was cold as shit, but he took off his man dress. He’s butt naked, he’s handcuffed to one of those metal frame beds that he had just ripped to pieces, and he’s freaking out. Our guys were on edge. They wanted to kill somebody because we knew what was going to go down. We already knew there were two guys not far away that we’re going to have to deal with, so everybody was already amped.”
The man turned out to be the village’s mayor who had been stopped at an al-Qaeda checkpoint. He was not only being held captive, he was about to be beheaded.
The Rangers then turned their attention to the captors, who had attempted to hide in an adjacent field with little success. “They were thinking they couldn’t be seen because they were under blankets, attempting to hide their heat signature. So we sent the dog out and they started opening up with AKs and we just blasted them. We made Swiss cheese of them and pretty much destroyed these two guys.”
The sniper’s starring role in that evening’s macabre comedy wasn’t yet complete.
“Umm … they have suicide vests on.”
“Okay, well, just get them out of the ditch. Drag them out just to see if they’ve got anything on them.”
As an encore, SM and a Ranger squad leader tied a ten-foot rope around the feet of the corpses and pulled the bodies out of the ditch. “Nobody wanted to do it because of course, the vest is all strapped and ready to blow. Me and the squad leader are like, ‘Fuck it.’ We would have totally died. It was so stupid. We might as well have just carried them out. But the rope made us feel better. That’s all it was.”
The rescued mayor was loaded up with the Rangers on the Chinook for extraction and SM sidled up alongside. He put the interpreter to work once again.
“So, are you going to give me your daughter, since I just saved your life?”
“Umm … I don’t know.”
“Come on, man, I look just like Brad Pitt in Legends of the Fall with my long flowing locks.”
“I don’t know … I have to talk to her first.”
“But isn’t it part of your culture? You’ve got to give me your daughter or something because I saved your life.”
“I have to talk to her. I don’t know what she’s going to think.”
The Ranger laughed and said, “This guy had just won the lotto. It never happens. His head was going to be on the ground later that day. He should have blown me right there. It was like one big pain in the ass, but the guy is lucky he didn’t get killed.”
As the team was exfiltrating, they performed gun runs on the bodies. The suicide vests ripped what had remained of the dead insurgents’ bodies apart with impressive explosions, confirming the vests had still been very much live.
The HRT operator then spoke up:
“Congratulations. That was the first hostage rescue in HRT history.”
The sniper reflected, “Jesus, I thought they had been around for like twenty-five years. I guess he got some big award. We never get awards.”
* * *
Late in 2007, the 3rd Battalion scored another pivotal victory—and yet again it was almost by happenstance.
Delta’s B Squadron was tasked with taking down a house that was deemed a critical target. With the Unit laying claim to the Black Hawks, 3/75 split its platoon in half and took a pair of Chinooks to scout two related houses a few kilometers out in the desert considered a lesser threat.
Former Ranger sniper Isaiah Burkhart explained, “We didn’t think there was going to be anything there in this tiny house. We had seen cars go back and forth between them and this main target house a couple times so we figured we’d hit them just in case. Maybe they were storing weapons there or something.”
As soon as the Chinook settled down near the objective, an RPG rocketed out of the house and took a serpentine route in the general direction of the bird. A pitched gunfight broke out between the two forces—seventeen Rangers versus a dozen fanatical AQI terrorists—with hundreds of rounds cracking in each direction.
The house was actually teeming with weapons masked behind a hidden wall (“the same number of rifles as in an arms room at a Ranger Battalion”) and dedicated fighters willing to use them.
“They had everything,” Burkhart said. “There was a U.S. serial-numbered M4. They had night vision. They had a technical with a DShK under a tarp. We were in a major firefight.”
The Rangers were in no mood to play around; they called in the big guns: two 160th SOAR MH-60L Direct Action Penetrators (DAP)—a fearsome gunship variant of the Black Hawk bristling with weaponry, including M134mm Miniguns, Hydra-70 Rocket pods, and thermobaric AGM-114N Hellfire II missiles.
“We were in the middle of this field with no cover, and we were only about fifty meters away from this target,” Burkhart said. “We just laid down and had the fire support officer call in the DAPs. They came in and fired 2.75-inch rockets right over top of us and lit them up with the miniguns.
And then they even fired a thermobaric Hellfire into the building, which collapsed the whole thing.”
Unbeknownst to the Rangers, a handful of prisoners were chained to the floor in the makeshift al-Qaeda torture chamber/gun room and were killed in the assault. However, the compound’s defenders happened to be the complete courier network of Abu Ayyub al-Masri, the man who succeeded Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as emir of AQI following the latter’s slaying.
Initially, it was thought that al-Masri himself might have been present.
“Me and my sniper partner sat overwatch and then they pulled in everybody,” Burkhart said. “The CAG team that hit that other target came in and so did the spec ops PJs. They came in and took over.”
Inside more than ten computers were discovered, wrapped in plastic and stocked with sensitive intelligence detailing the ins and outs of the entire AQI network.
Meanwhile, the Rangers were saddled with the grisly task of sorting through body parts to speed along the identification process.
While Abu Ayyub al-Masri was not there, the strike killed him in an operational sense. Unable to effectively command AQI without his chief lieutenants, the coalition dropped the bounty on his head from $25 million to $100,000 in 2008.
Abu Ayyub al-Masri was killed for real in April 2010—along with Abu Umar al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq—in a joint American/Iraqi SOF raid conducted southwest of Tikrit.
* * *
Kristofar Kosem—the B Squadron recce troop sniper who led the AFO team Juliet at Operation Anaconda for which he was awarded the Silver Star—was forced into retirement in June 2008.
Just one month after leaving Iraq for the final time, he was in Colombia, rehearsing for a potential hostage rescue mission. The rotor blade of a helo he was aboard struck the jungle canopy and Kosem was thrown from the bird, smashing into a tree branch headfirst.
Kosem survived but was later diagnosed with TBI (traumatic brain injury). While he suffers from symptoms commonly associated with TBI (mood swings, short-term memory loss, etc.), he continues to heal and adjust, relying heavily on his faith and with the support of his wife.
Incidentally, just weeks following Kosem’s training accident, Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, Americans Marc Gonsalves, Thomas Howes, and Keith Stansell, and eleven others were rescued from the rainforests of Colombia.
In what was coined Operation Jaque, members of a rescue force posed as aid workers, guerillas, and television journalists and tricked FARC rebels into handing over the hostages. The local FARC leader and another guerrilla were apprehended during the course of the rescue.
Despite Delta ultimately playing a crucial role in the rescue, full credit was given to the Colombians. The nation’s defense minister, Juan Manuel Santos, went so far as to claim that the mission was “100 percent Colombian,” and that “no foreigners participated in the planning or the execution of the mission”—likely to the Unit’s great satisfaction.
12
Reaper
JSOC’s Delta-spearheaded campaign in Iraq redefined the possibilities of special operations warfare and what a relatively small group of highly skilled men can accomplish when backed by virtually unlimited support, intelligence, and initiative.
The task force was estimated to have killed three thousand enemy combatants and captured nine thousand more, numbers totaling almost thirty-five hundred and twelve thousand when factoring in the intrinsically linked contributions of the United Kingdom Special Forces.
A confluence of factors—including the troop surge, the Anbar Awakening, and a ceasefire agreement with the Mahdi Army—led to a drastic curbing of the overall level of violence in Iraq by 2008.
However, JSOC’s central role is nearly undeniable, as the extraordinary results of its industrial counterterrorism effort devastated AQI. When journalist Bob Woodward later asked President Bush about this in an interview, the president famously replied, “JSOC is awesome.”
Gen. McChrystal’s influence and reputation swelled alongside JSOC’s; he was subsequently named ISAF and USFOR-A Commander, tasked with overseeing the reignited war in Afghanistan just as the nation pivoted its attention back to the Taliban and al-Qaeda proper. (McChrystal’s promotion would, of course, end prematurely and controversially following the publication of a semi-scandalous article in Rolling Stone.)
In June 2008, the void in the black SOF world created by McChrystal’s departure was filled by Navy Adm. William McRaven. McRaven, a onetime ST6 squadron commander Dick Marcinko, became JSOC’s first non-Army commander after a run of ten consecutive Army generals that dated back to its inception in 1980.
The articulate and erudite McRaven, a McChrystal protégé, was well versed in the history of special operations. In an earlier life, he wrote about it. Now, he was helping to write it. The Texan had played a critical role in overseeing the tactics, tempo, and technologies of this new age of SOF while serving as McChrystal’s chief deputy in Iraq. He not only embraced his predecessor’s methods, he strove to refine them and exploit them further, even if Afghanistan’s infrastructure was less conducive to the “industrial” approach.
* * *
Just as the under-the-radar wrecking crew that is the 75th Ranger Regiment began to slow its dismantling efforts in Iraq, they picked up the pace in Afghanistan.
While not as specialized in some specific and exacting areas, the Rangers had proven a reasonable approximation for JSOC’s special mission units for the large majority of their assignments. If not the scalpel, they were certainly no clumsy sledgehammer either. Perhaps a long sword is the more apt analogy.
This fact allowed for the widespread initiation of JSOC’s ambitious global strategy, as the Ranger Regiment—while small and elite by almost any practical standard at around two thousand soldiers—was roughly four to five times larger than the combined forces of Delta and DEVGRU.
This allowed the Ranger Regiment to literally be in two places at once and was heavily deployed in both theaters throughout.
McChrystal helped to push his old unit further to the fore. The Ranger Regiment had rotated commands with SEAL Team Six in Afghanistan, and the units regularly coordinated their efforts, running joint ops and alternating HVT hits. They were not precisely equal partners in this arrangement, but in the majority of circumstances, they were effectively so.
However, a number of Rangers noted that it generally lacked the big brother/little brother dynamic with DEVGRU that it shared with Delta Force (which does, it should be noted, recruit a large percentage of its operators from the Regiment). The SEALs were more likely to treat them like the “blocking force to the stars”—the outdated BHD image that infuriates so many modern Rangers.
One Ranger noted that he’d taken part in high-profile operations in the Afghanistan theater alongside SEAL Team Six (“stuff that made CNN Headline News”) that ended up getting credited solely to DEVGRU.
The Navy has always shown a rare talent for marrying merit with marketability, and the SEALs have long been a powerful recruitment tool.
So it wasn’t all that unusual that a skinny kid raised by a military family in the Northeast wanted nothing more than to become a SEAL someday.
Nick Irving was a schoolyard sniper-in-training: he made his own ghillie suits and practiced stalking the other kids in the playground while in middle school. He devoured all the Carlos Hathcock books and DVDs and read all about Vietnam-era SOF.
But once he saw the Charlie Sheen flick Navy SEALs, his future was set.
Irving joined the United States Naval Sea Cadet Corps and went through “baby SEAL” training where teenagers receive coaching from SEAL instructors and even take the actual SEAL PT test.
However, there was one problem that he couldn’t see. Literally. He couldn’t see—at least not colors the way the armed forces require.
He only discovered this when it was time to sign on the dotted line. Straight out of high school, Irving was ready to take his first official steps toward becoming
a career SEAL in 2004.
And then it was time to take the test for color blindness. “The only page I could read in that book was the page you’re not supposed to read,” Irving said.
A motivated Army nurse heard what happened and pulled the defeated wannabe-SEAL into her office.
“Hey, you want to be in the Army?”
Irving retook the test, only this time he aced it—fourteen out of fourteen. He didn’t prove he could differentiate colors so much as he could follow the finger of the nurse as she traced the invisible numbers, but either way, he was now in the Army.
He was then introduced to an Army Sergeant who had also been made aware of Irving’s dilemma.
“I heard you wanted to be a SEAL. Well, we have something like that called Rangers.”
“What the fuck is that? Is it hard?”
“Yeah.”
“Do they have snipers?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, sign me up.”
* * *
Despite his obvious desire, Irving not only struggled to get into the military, he also struggled to even make it through Basic Training. He wasn’t in BUD/S, he wasn’t yet in RIP, but he was shocked to find himself pushed mentally and physically right from the very start.
It was a dilemma of his own making. Irving had overtrained prior to joining up in anticipation of the strain that awaited him and suffered from stress fractures to his tibia and fibula.
It didn’t help that he came to the Army with the nickname “Stick Figure”—which at five seven and 110 pounds he well deserved.
However, he gritted it out. He made it through Basic, and then Airborne. Next up—RIP—the Ranger Indoctrination Program. He kept on fighting and in the end he was one of just seven out of an original eighty to be standing at the end.
Oh well, that just left more food for Irving. “I went into Ranger Battalion and our chow hall was just fucking epic. All you could eat buffet set up and it was just exclusive to us.”
Irving quickly filled out, packing on fifty pounds of muscle. “I wasn’t used to eating three meals a day,” he explained. “Dinner for me would sometimes be a box of candy or something because we didn’t have that much money. Usually on either Friday or Sunday there would be an actual dinner. Other than that was like scraps of whatever left over.”