“Brother,” I told him earnestly, “I’ll bring you back as soon as you can stand. But you have to go and get yourself healed up.”
“I’ll heal up here. I can work in the TOC,” he argued, referencing our tactical operations center, where we monitored combat missions via radio and television screens that displayed overhead video feed from aircraft, both manned and unmanned.
“Listen,” I told him, “that won’t work. This wound is no joke. You’re going to need real rehab—and we don’t have that here for you. Go home. Heal up. Get back on your feet and I’ll get you back over here. I promise.”
I meant it. Whether he kept his leg or not, once he was stable enough, I would do all I could to bring him back.
“Okay, sir,” he replied, convinced that it wouldn’t take long, “I’ll be back soon.”
“I know you will, brother. I know you will,” I told him.
Soon he was being loaded onto a medevac1 helicopter and flown to a more advanced medical facility where he would get the surgery he needed—a place where they might be able to save his leg.
I went back to my camp, a compound of tents and buildings we called Sharkbase sandwiched between the large U.S. military base of Camp Ramadi and the Euphrates River.
I went to my room on the second floor of the building that housed our TOC, a once lavish structure with ornate columns that had previously belonged to members of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Now it was our headquarters and barracks, with sandbagged windows and makeshift furniture. I sat down on my crude bed, constructed of plywood and two-by-fours.
Reality set in: we were only one month into our deployment. My guys were getting in gunfights on a daily basis. The city of Ramadi, where we operated, was crawling with insurgents. And the insurgents were good: they were well equipped, well trained, and well disciplined. They fought with tenacity and ruthlessness.
Of course, we were better. Our training, gear, and attitude were among the best of any combat troops in the world. We were in Ramadi to make the city safe for the local populace by taking the fight to the enemy—to hunt the evil insurgents down in the streets and kill them. All of them.
But we weren’t bulletproof. We couldn’t run around this city day in and day out and not expect to take casualties. If you cut wood, you get sawdust. When you wage war, especially in violent urban combat, you take casualties. That was the nature of the business. Oddly enough, up until this point, SEALs in Iraq had been very lucky. Three years into the war, only a handful of SEALs had been wounded—and none had been killed. The incidents were fairly random, often more bad luck than anything else.
But we weren’t going to get lucky this whole deployment. The proof was evident, as I’d just witnessed, seeing my wounded SEAL, pale from blood loss, hazy from morphine, and lucky—so extremely lucky—to be alive.
The wounded SEAL was a young man. This was only his second SEAL platoon and his second deployment to Iraq. He was an excellent SEAL operator and a crucial member of the team. A great guy to be around: Faithful. Loyal. Funny.
Although all the SEALs in the task unit were different, they were also, in many ways, the same. Sure, they had quirks and little personality traits that made them individuals. Of course, they were far from perfect. We all are.
But at the same time, all of them, individually, were amazing people. Patriotic. Selfless. They were in “the Teams”—what we SEALs call our community of Naval Special Warfare SEAL Teams—for the same reasons: to serve, to do their duty, and to offer everything they had for the task unit, the team, and our great nation.
And I was in charge of them.
But being “in charge” fell short of explaining the way I felt about these men. All of them. They were my friends, because I joked and laughed and carried on with them. They were my brothers, because we shared the common bond of our fraternal order. They were also like my children, because I was responsible for what they did—good and bad—and it was my job to protect them to the best of my ability: I had to overwatch them as they overwatched the city from rooftops and moved through the violent streets.
They gave me everything they had. At work, in training, and now on the battlefield. In turn, they were everything to me. In many ways I was closer to them than I was to my own parents, my siblings, even my wife and actual children. Of course I loved my family. But the men in this task unit were also my family, and I wanted nothing more than to take care of them.
But as much as I wanted to protect them, we had a job to do. A job that was violent and dangerous and unforgiving. A job that required me to put them at risk—tremendous risk—over and over and over again. This was an example of the Dichotomy of Leadership, perhaps the ultimate Dichotomy of Leadership that a combat leader must face: it is a combat leader’s duty to care about his troops more than anything else in the world—and yet, at the same time, a leader must accomplish the mission. That means the leader must make decisions and execute plans and strategies that might cost the men he loves so much their very lives.
And this was incredibly difficult for me. Because in Ramadi, it wasn’t a matter of if we would lose someone. It was a matter of when.
This is not to say I was fatalistic. I wasn’t. It doesn’t mean I thought we had to take casualties. I prayed we would not. We did everything we could to mitigate the risks we could control in order to prevent casualties.
But it did mean that I was facing reality. The reality was that U.S. Army Soldiers and Marines were being wounded and killed every day in Ramadi. Every day.
We continually attended memorial services for these fallen heroes.
I recognized that this deployment to Ramadi was completely different from my first deployment to Iraq in 2003–2004, where things had been much more controlled and much less kinetic. In Ramadi in 2006, the violent, sustained urban combat held risks that were beyond our control. And every day that my men were in the field, which was almost every day, I knew it could be The Day.
That was the heaviest burden of command.
And then The Day came.
On August 2, 2006, Leif and his Charlie Platoon SEALs, along with the Iraqi Army platoon for whom they were combat advisors, teamed up with our U.S. Army brethren from Team Bulldog2 for a large clearance operation in South-Central Ramadi. The operation kicked off in the early morning hours, and for the first hour or so, all was quiet.
Suddenly, a single shot rang out, quickly followed by a frantic “man down” call over the radio. Ryan Job, an outstanding young Charlie Platoon SEAL machine gunner, had been hit in the face by an enemy sniper’s bullet. He was gravely wounded. All hell broke loose in South-Central as insurgents started shooting from multiple directions. Leif and Charlie Platoon fought to get Ryan evacuated, and Team Bulldog M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles and M1A2 Abrams tanks came to their rescue with heavy firepower. Charlie Platoon loaded Ryan into a medevac vehicle and sent him off the battlefield to proper medical care. Then Leif and the rest of Charlie Platoon and their Iraqi soldiers patrolled back to Combat Outpost Falcon (or COP Falcon), a fortified U.S. Army position several dangerous blocks away. But the fighting in South-Central Ramadi only escalated as enemy fighters flooded the area. Charlie Platoon could hear the gunfire as their U.S. Army brethren from Team Bulldog—Main Gun Mike and his Soldiers—were still engaged in a vicious gunfight that spread across multiple city blocks. Leif and the leadership of his platoon discussed it briefly, and finally Leif called me on the radio and requested permission to go back out and take down some buildings where suspected enemy fighters were holed up. “Do it,” I told him.
Leif and his platoon did everything they could to mitigate risk. They rode to the suspected buildings in heavily armored Bradley Fighting Vehicles. They had the Bradleys soften the target buildings with fire from their powerful 25mm chain guns. They even had the Bradleys ram through the walls of the compounds so that the platoon could get off the open street and have some protection from enemy bullets as they moved toward the buildings to breach the entryways. But even that
couldn’t mitigate all the risk. And it didn’t.
I watched on a live video feed from a drone overhead as Charlie Platoon dismounted from the Bradleys and entered a building. I could tell the gunfire was heavy. Once my SEALs entered the building, I could no longer see what was happening.
A few long minutes after they entered, I saw a group of SEALs carrying a casualty out of the building and back to a waiting Bradley nearby. It was one of ours. A lifeless body.
As I watched from the TOC, a horrible pit opened up in my stomach. I wanted to cry and scream and throw up and shake my fists at the sky.
But I had to stifle those emotions—I had a job to do. So I simply stood by the radio and waited for Leif to call me. I did not call him, because I knew he had work to do and I did not want to interfere with what he was doing.
A few minutes later, he called. I could tell he was forcing himself to sound calm, but I heard a flood of emotions in his voice.
He gave the report: as Charlie Platoon entered the building, they were engaged by enemy fighters from an adjacent building. As SEAL machine gunner Marc Lee courageously stepped into a doorway to engage the enemy fighters and protect the rest of his SEAL teammates entering the hallway behind him, he was struck by enemy fire and killed. It was over instantly.
Marc Alan Lee, an amazing warrior, friend, brother, son, husband, uncle, man of faith, comedian, and truly incredible spirit of a human being, was gone. This was on top of the fact that Ryan Job, another Charlie Platoon machine gunner and saint of a human being, had already been severely wounded and was in a medically induced coma and en route to surgical facilities in Germany. Ryan’s fate was yet unknown.
The burden of such loss settled heavily on my soul.
When Leif got back to base, I could see his heart was heavy with grief. His eyes were filled not only with tears but with doubt and questions and the solemn weight of responsibility. Leif never even mentioned that he had also been wounded: a bullet fragment had entered his back, just missing the protection provided by his body armor. He didn’t care about his wounded flesh. It was his heart that was broken.
A day passed.
Leif came to my office. I could see his soul was in absolute turmoil.
As the leader on the ground, Leif had made the decision to go back into the firestorm. I had approved that decision. But it was Leif who carried the burden that he had survived and Marc had not.
“I feel like I made the wrong decision,” Leif said quietly. “I just wish I could take it back. I wish I would have done something—anything—differently so Marc would still be here with us.”
I could see that this was tearing Leif apart. He felt that in all that chaos and all that madness, he could have made a different decision, chosen a different path.
But he was wrong.
“No, Leif,” I told him slowly, “there was no decision to make. Those Army Soldiers were in a vicious battle—a massive fight—and they needed our help, they needed our support. You gave it to them. The only other option would have been to sit back and let the Army fight it out by themselves. You couldn’t let Charlie Platoon sit inside the protected compound and let Team Bulldog take the risk and take the casualties. That’s not what we do. We are a team. We take care of each other. There was no other choice—there was no decision to make.”
Leif was quiet. He looked at me and slowly nodded. As hard as it was to hear, he knew I was right. He knew he couldn’t have sat on the sidelines while other Americans were in harm’s way and needed help, in what was probably the largest single engagement in the months-long campaign of the Battle of Ramadi. If he had, everyone in the platoon would have known it was the wrong decision. Leif would have known it was wrong, too. But with the weight of such a burden on his soul, he needed more reassurance.
So, I continued: “We are Frogmen. We are SEALs. We are American fighting men. If there is something we can do to help our brothers-in-arms, we help. That is what we do. You know that. Marc knew that. We all know that. That is who we are.”
“I just wish I could trade places with Marc,” Leif said, his eyes teared up with emotion. “I’d do anything to bring him back.”
“Look,” I said. “We don’t have a crystal ball. We don’t know when guys are going to get wounded or killed. If we could know that, then we wouldn’t go out on those particular operations. But we don’t know. We can’t know. The only way we can guarantee everyone will be safe is to do nothing at all and let other troops do the fighting. But that is wrong—and you know it. We must do our utmost to win. Of course, we have to mitigate whatever risks we can, but in the end, we cannot eliminate every risk. We still have to do our duty.”
Leif nodded again. He knew I was right. He believed it because it was the truth.
But it did not take away the punishing torment of losing Marc. Marc’s death was something Leif would carry with him forever. I already knew that. And so did Leif.
It was difficult to grasp, the hardest and most painful of all the dichotomies of leadership: to care about your men more than anything in the world—so much so that you’d even willingly trade your life for theirs—and yet, at the same time, to lead those men on missions that could result in their deaths.
Even back in the States in a non-hostile environment, SEAL training in preparation for deployment was dangerous. To mitigate every danger would mean that trainees could never conduct parachute jumps, fast rope from helicopters, board ships from small boats, drive vehicles in high-speed convoys at night using only night vision, or conduct live-fire training drills. Unfortunately, every few years, despite strong safety measures and controls, a SEAL is killed or seriously injured during this high-risk training. And yet to not take the risks inherent in conducting realistic training would put more SEALs in even greater danger when they deployed to combat zones not fully prepared for missions they would be called upon to execute. So even though a leader must care deeply for his troops—a leader must also put those troops at risk, in training and even more so in combat. Of course, it is incumbent upon the leader to mitigate the risks that can be controlled. But there will always be risks beyond the leader’s control, and the potential consequences can be deadly.
That dichotomy, of caring for your men’s welfare while simultaneously putting them at risk to accomplish the mission, is something felt by every combat leader—and was felt to the core by the leaders on the ground in Ramadi. Because while we were determined to do our utmost to close with and destroy the enemy to help secure Ramadi, we also knew that victory would be paid for in the blood of our most promising young American men and women.
And the blood continued to be shed by Task Unit Bruiser. After Ryan was wounded and Marc was killed, we took other minor casualties—small flesh wounds and little injuries—but nothing serious. Then, on September 29, only weeks from the end of our deployment, Leif and I were in our tactical operations center listening to the radio traffic while the other SEAL platoon of Task Unit Bruiser, Delta Platoon, was outside the wire on a combat operation. We listened as Delta Platoon reported enemy movement and passed updates on enemy fighters killed, all of which were part of an ordinary day in Ramadi. Then we heard Delta Platoon’s request for casualty evacuation. From the radio traffic it was clear that several SEALs were wounded. It sounded severe.
My heart sank. Immediate support from a U.S. Army Quick Reaction Force rapidly launched and headed to Delta Platoon’s position. A few minutes later, the U.S. Army tactical operations center radioed that multiple SEALs were wounded, with one SEAL described as “urgent surgical,” meaning he needed immediate medical attention and was at risk of dying. We continued to listen to the radio calls solemnly, with hopes that our wounded brothers, especially the critically wounded ones, would be okay.
A call from the battalion commander of the 1/506th3 shattered those hopes. He gave me the grave news. Three of the men were wounded, but each had injuries that would heal—they were not at risk of losing life or limb. But then this bold and professional battalion comma
nder grew quiet for a moment. He told me a fourth man was also wounded: Mikey Monsoor was hurt very badly. His voice trembled slightly. He told me he didn’t think Mikey was going to make it.
For what seemed like an eternity, Leif and I waited for an update. Finally, we got word from the field hospital that crushed our souls. Michael Anthony Monsoor, an exceptional young SEAL, beloved by everyone in the platoon and task unit, another saint of a human being—an unbelievably strong, determined, kind, compassionate, and inspiring young man—had died from his wounds.
Once the rest of Delta Platoon had been extracted from the field, I received a call from my friend Seth Stone, the Delta Platoon Commander, who gave me the details of what had occurred on the operation. He told me that an enemy fighter had tossed a hand grenade onto the rooftop of one of Delta Platoon’s sniper overwatch positions. In the most completely selfless act possible, Mikey Monsoor heroically dove on top of that grenade, shielding three of his teammates from the blast. He sacrificed himself to save them. The operation would likely have been Mikey’s last mission in Ramadi, just days before he was scheduled to fly home.
Just as Leif struggled with the loss of Marc, Seth bore the crushing weight of losing Mikey. Seth continued to lead missions and completed his turnover with the SEALs who had arrived to replace us, but I could tell his soul was tormented by the loss of Mikey. When we got back to America, only a few short weeks after Mikey’s death, Seth told me his feelings as we sat in our task unit office after work.
“I feel like it is my fault that Mikey died. I feel responsible,” Seth told me with tears in his eyes.
I thought about it for a moment and then told him the truth: “We are responsible.”
I paused for a moment. Seth didn’t say a word. He was surprised by what I had said.
“We are responsible,” I said again. “It was our strategy. We came up with it. We knew the risks. You planned the missions. I approved them. We were the leaders. And we are responsible for everything that happened during that deployment. Everything. That’s the way it is. We can’t escape that. That is what being a leader is.”
The Dichotomy of Leadership: Balancing the Challenges of Extreme Ownership to Lead and Win Page 3