by Rorke Denver
Mark was a warrior, one of the best, and a good friend of ours. When we heard the news, all the guys were smoked and tired and just done. But no way were we skipping Mark’s memorial. We stopped quickly at the base. We fueled up the trucks. We reloaded the guns.
“Let’s go,” I said.
We hauled ass to Ramadi as fast as we could.
That took us along one of the worst IED roads in Iraq, and it was light outside as we began the drive. You’d rather do this drive at nighttime. Barreling along in the morning, you could see a lot of suspect people wandering around.
Half a mile out of Ramadi at a sharp bend in the road, someone had dumped a pile of garbage. This was a common trap. You swerve to miss the garbage and drive across an IED. Ka-boom! The front of your vehicle is suddenly pointing skyward.
We knew enough not to fall for that one. Plus, we had our jammers going full blast. Those high-powered electronic signal-blockers had been protecting us on the roads pretty well, interrupting the enemy’s ability to signal their remote-controlled bombs. We plowed right over the trash. What we didn’t account for in all our cleverness were the two young gunmen, one fat and one skinny, both with beards, waiting for us behind a concrete barrier at the top of the bend. Their weapons were already up as we came through the curve. They both unloaded with AK-47s. But the shots weren’t perfect and missed our vehicles. Thankfully, one of our turret gunners was in our lead truck in a perfect position to respond. He engaged the shooters, hitting the heavier one in the chest with a burst from the .50-cal. The fat kid disintegrated. His gun went bouncing to the road. I couldn’t see what happened to the thinner shooter, but I can’t imagine it was good. The firing stopped, and we rolled on. We got to Ramadi without further incident and made the service.
The battlefield teams always wanted to pay their respects before their teammates’ bodies were flown back home. One of the things SEALs do—and thankfully, not too often—is sending off our fallen comrades right. We have our own special ways of honoring the ultimate sacrifice.
Mark’s service was held in a small planning space that was turned into a makeshift chapel. On a small platform at the front of the room was an empty pair of boots, a set of body armor, an upside-down rifle with a helmet balanced on the buttstock, and a table holding a picture of Mark.
His closest buddies from Task Unit BRUISER stood up front. We stayed in the back along with some friends of Mark’s from a couple of BRUISER’s sister units. Other American and Iraqi soldiers filled in the rows. Anyone who knew the guys from BRUISER wanted to be there.
The BRUISER commander spoke movingly about the warrior and friend Mark had been to so many people in the room. How he was always eager to be helpful. How he never backed down, not once. How selfless and loyal he was to his warrior friends.
Mark’s death must have been a special burden for the commander. Every action of Task Unit BRUISER was his ultimate responsibility. Standing in the back and listening to him perform this solemn duty, I couldn’t help but think what I’d say if I had to do that for one of my immediate guys.
When the commander was finished, a senior Army officer and a military chaplain both spoke. Then every single SEAL in the room, in pairs of swim buddies, walked up to the shrine and to Mark’s picture and said a short, quiet good-bye. When the service was done, everyone formed into a long procession and escorted Mark’s casket onto an aircraft for the long flight home.
After all that was finished, we sat together for chow, Mark’s closest friends from ALPHA and BRUISER, before our dicey daytime ride back to our base camp.
One of the members of BRUISER asked to have a quiet word with me.
“We’re going to get some payback,” he said.
“Payback?” I asked.
“We’re going to get some payback. You guys in?”
I love the fight. I love getting into gun battles. I’d been in dozens already in my time in Iraq. It becomes exciting and addictive, both at once. You start to crave the action when you are over there.
But I don’t believe that revenge is the best motivation for a gunfight. It is corrupt fuel. The people who killed Mark might have been savages. They certainly caused a lot of pain. I understand how any member of TU BRUISER might feel they had a right to vengeance. The people who did this were evil and would do far worse if given the opportunity. Mark was a friend, and someone had pulled the trigger to kill him. But to me, the idea of general payback driven by such immediate emotion wasn’t right. It wasn’t the ethos of the brotherhood. “We’ve been going for two days straight,” I told him. “Our guys don’t have the sustained juice to stay here, build that plan, and go out again.”
“What are you talking about?” he asked.
“I think we’ll take a pass,” I said.
He let it hang. But I don’t think he was too happy about my answer. We shook hands, and my team drove straight back to Habbaniyah.
I am confident that, in the end, TU BRUISER made the right decision and returned to the battlefield appropriately. That fight wasn’t for us.
11
MOMENTUM SHIFT
No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.
—GEORGE PATTON
* * *
Our gun trucks were like Humvee tanks. Armored doors. Plated glass. Reinforced undercarriages. Run-flat tires. As long as you were in the vehicle, you were actually pretty safe.
Safe and sealed off.
That’s unless you were the turret gunner. The turret gunner was neither of those.
When you were up in the turret, you could feel the heat, the wind, the dust—everything. You had a perfect, 360-degree view. You were the only unprotected guy in the truck and were also by far the most exposed. But your hands were on the biggest gun in the truck. You were the only one who could respond directly to any kind of aggression.
I was in Vehicle Two. Our trail vehicle—Vehicle Four with the turret gunner and the .50-cal—was forty yards behind. I heard what sounded like a concussion grenade or an IED. I couldn’t see anything.
Before I even asked, my trail turret gunner was on the radio: “Give me a second, LT, I’m working some things out.”
Then, “We had a suspicious vehicle coming up on us,” he said. “I cut the front end off it. He won’t be an issue any longer.”
I loved riding in the turret every rare chance I got, which meant every time my guys let me. As an officer, my job was to lead. But when I got the opportunity, I was a pit bull in a steakhouse.
“Why don’t you get down into the truck, sir,” one of the gunners would tell me eventually. I knew if he was calling me “sir,” he was messing with me.
“Leave it to the pros, will you?” he’d say. “I got it from here.”
* * *
The intel sounded solid. Some financiers, some bomb makers, maybe a couple of sniper cells were safe-harboring north of our operating base in the northeast section of Habbaniyah. A small unit of Marines had already gone in there, hoping to disrupt the cozy operation. They confronted the insurgents they expected, but the operation didn’t go as planned. The second time the Marines went in, a roadside bomb severely injured four of them and destroyed some of their equipment. Doubling down, the SEALs got the call: “Take your shot.”
We were heading into dangerous territory, although that was becoming a given in western Iraq. As far as we knew, no SEAL team had made its presence felt in that part of Anbar, no special-ops guys from any unit. There was no way to drive in. Not with such narrow roads and easy overlooks, perfect ambush perches. Even with the signal jammers in our vehicles, we’d be an easy target for the RPGs and IEDs. So we made our way in on foot—ten SEALs, fourteen Iraqi Scouts—not that walking provided much protection.
This was only June. But the midday temperatures were already topping out between 100 and 125. By early afternoon, the whole region was a sauna with desert mantises and sand flies. All the combat gear and body armor didn’t
make walking any cooler. We had our weapons, bullets, food, and water—and that was about it. We weren’t taking anything to stay. Top of the list: confronting the enemy explosives team that had banged up those Marines. We didn’t know when or where we might find them. But whenever and wherever we did, we knew they would have the home-field advantage.
Iraq before the Tribal Awakening was a dangerous, out-of-control place. Safety and success could never be guaranteed. I had bouncing in my head something one of my dad’s law partners, a Vietnam vet with two Silver Stars and a Bronze Star, once said. My dad had been telling him how great I thought SEAL training was. “True,” he answered, “but it still doesn’t make ’em bulletproof.” Damn right. None of us was bulletproof. What we were was better prepared than anyone else on that battlefield. And that meant a lot.
“Ready to move, Lou?” I asked my point man, one of the great all-time SEALs to have on a patrol as dicey as this one.
“Roger,” Lou said.
In this heat with this gear, I knew we needed to move efficiently. “Navigate the route,” I told him.
It was always daunting—exciting and nerve-racking at once—to be stepping off a path and into the wilds of Anbar Province. You just knew: Sometime on that patrol, chances were you’d come into contact with armed insurgents. You knew on this day, today, that would likely happen, and that was a shot of instant energy for all of us. It was like walking onto the field for a sudden-death playoff game—only sudden-death wasn’t just a figure of speech. As we began our patrol, we couldn’t wait for the fire to start. We wanted the enemy to show himself as soon as humanly possible, and then we’d see who was made of what.
A SEAL unit, any SEAL unit, knows how to walk with care across different terrains. Rural areas, urban areas, wherever it is, over dirt, concrete, sand, or snow. If we don’t want people knowing we’ve been there, they won’t have an easy time finding out. All of us are trained, in BUD/S and later, not to leave tracks or traces or anything else behind. Hostile forces have to pay awfully close attention to know when we’ve been passing through.
It wasn’t direct confrontation we were trying to avoid. On this mission, direct confrontation was the whole point. It was surreptitious detection I was concerned about, especially anything that allowed the enemy to spot us first and predict where we might be heading—then lie in wait for our arrival. That could get ugly. We much preferred the element of surprise on our side. But this particular mission, like most, wasn’t SEALs-only. The Iraqi Scouts were patrolling with us. We knew without a doubt that the Scouts didn’t have our level of field craft. Actually, that’s being kind. They were learning, but sometimes they had a way of doing some undisciplined things.
“What the hell are you thinking?” I wanted to yell more than once after some especially bone-headed maneuver. “We’d all like to get out of here alive.”
When the bullets began to fly in one of our first firefights together, instead of seeking immediate cover and firing back, several Scouts shot in the wrong direction and began laughing nervously. When their heavy machine gunner tripped and fell on his back, he kept firing into the sky on full automatic. I had to kick the gun out of his hand.
But for better or worse, these were our Iraqi partners. Together, we had important business to conduct.
As we began walking down the road, I had a feeling right away that someone might be watching us. It was just a gut feeling, as far as I could tell. No one was in a posture to engage us yet.
About an hour and a half in, we came up to a canal with a small bridge across it. Three roads converged on the other side of that bridge. I knew immediately that was a dangerous location, a choke point that left us vulnerable as we pressed toward our planned turnaround location, a small cluster of homes. But as far as we could tell, that little bridge was the only way across the canal.
Our patrol line was about one hundred yards long. I was halfway down it with SEALs and Iraqi Scouts behind and in front of me. Just as we reached that choke point, the Scouts decided to stop for a food-and-water break. I thought to myself, This is not good business.
I got on the radio immediately with Chief Frank: “We’re at a vulnerable location. Let’s keep the stop brief. Don’t let them break out all their food. Five minutes, I want to be patrolling again.”
The chief was already on it. In four minutes, we were moving.
As we walked on, I noticed a handful of brightly colored M&Ms on the ground. I didn’t think much of it at first. But I could say one thing with utter certainty: No SEAL accidentally dropped M&Ms on the ground. Impossible. Would never happen in a million years. Our Iraqi Scouts must have snuck a quick snack at the rest stop and dropped a few candies before they left.
I was happy when all of us were through that dangerous spot. We kept going and didn’t stop until we reached the little village we were aiming for. We searched a couple of occupied houses and some outlying structures. We entered aggressively, like we always did. We made our presence felt.
That day, it didn’t look like we’d be getting any real action. Just another stroll through the three-digit heat and a few busted doors. We turned around and began to make our way back, following the route we’d come in on.
As we neared the bridge from the other direction, something caught Lou’s eye. Maybe it was a problem. Maybe not. “Sir,” Lou said, “I just saw a suspicious individual, who was pacing and looking over his shoulder, walk away from our position. He didn’t look armed. But he got into a vehicle and drove away from the spot you were concerned about earlier.”
“Okay, got it,” I said. “Keep moving—cautiously.”
There was no chance to engage anyone. Whoever that character was, he was gone now, and the area was mostly quiet. In the distance, a woman was walking home from the store. A couple of kids had biked off the other way. There was hardly any other activity in sight.
At moments like these, the hair on the back of my neck always stands straight up. I was paying laser attention. My senses were almost tingling. I felt like I was somewhere back in the animal world, tapping into some survival skill. Fifty yards from the intersection, Lou halted the patrol. This time, his voice sounded more urgent.
“Hold,” he said into the radio.
I moved up to the front with him.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “The area doesn’t look right. Let’s find a different route over the canal.”
That wouldn’t be easy. If the patrol had been SEALs-only, we could have just swum across. But none of the Scouts could swim.
Ten minutes later, Lou had a way we could bypass the little bridge that had us so concerned. He found a culvert that stretched across the canal. “We’ll tightrope everyone across the culvert,” he said.
Soon enough, all twenty-four SEALs and Iraqis were stepping gingerly along that pipe. The balance wasn’t easy with our weapons and sweat-soaked body armor. After we got to the other side, we paralleled down the bank, which was thick with high willows and canal grass. Lou and I, joined by a couple of our snipers, decided to get a closer look.
You can’t ever discount the highly intuitive nature of well-trained SEALs. Right where I’d seen the M&Ms, five young insurgents were hunched over together, looking at something, I couldn’t tell what. Concealed by grass, they couldn’t see us. One of them, Lou said, was the character from the car. A couple of others had machine guns and all of them were wearing ammo chest racks. One of them was holding what looked like an 80 mm artillery round, just perfect for crafting into an easily concealable IED. I couldn’t see if our names were written on the device or not, but they might as well have been.
Without waiting another moment, our snipers lifted their weapons and opened fire across the canal. Two of the insurgents went running at the first shot. The three others hit the dirt and tried firing back. They didn’t get off too many before our bullets ripped them apart.
Even from across the canal, we could see their bodies twitch with each n
ew volley, jerkily inching a few feet to the left. Our guys shoot better than anybody. In any fair gunfight—and most unfair ones—we’ll come out on top. This exchange didn’t last more than twenty seconds, and now our attention turned immediately to that IED.
We kept our distance for a moment.
The three on the ground would never move again, but one of the other two—or some yet-unseen person—could easily have been off in the distance, ready to hit a remote detonator the moment we strolled up.
“Don’t even bother touching that device,” I told my EOD chief. “Set a charge nearby on a timer and give us a chance to get out.”
We were a good two hundred yards away, moving through an open field, when we heard a huge explosion, enough to ring all of our ears, more than enough to destroy the IED.
I don’t know if those M&Ms gave us away or not. But I don’t think that IED was a coincidence. And I know it was extremely similar to the one that took out those Marines. If we hadn’t heeded our gut feeling, we would have marched into an equally bloody fate.
This was a win that built confidence in the whole leadership team, and it made us eager to keep returning to northeast Habbaniyah until that whole part of Anbar could be tamed.
Not all our missions involved seeking out the insurgents. Not directly. Ever since we’d started engaging the mortar boys, more and more insurgents were seeking us out. We were asked to spend four or five days providing security for a Marine construction crew. The Marines were building a new combat outpost deep in Indian Country. We set up several overwatch positions for our snipers to head off any threats. And we sent patrols around the area, day and night.
I made a point of joining most of the tougher patrols and assaults. That’s what a leader does. He doesn’t send his guys out on onerous duty he wouldn’t perform. No feet up on the desk in AC’d offices. That gets noticed in a hurry, even if you don’t think anyone is paying attention. Nothing undermines a leader’s authority like being considered a shirker by his troops.