Service: A Navy SEAL at War

by Marcus Luttrell

  When we got back to camp, Master Chief walked our snipers through an analysis of what had taken place.

  “So what do you make of this? Do you think that was really a grenade in his hand?”

  No one had any reason to doubt the shooter’s sincerity, but Master Chief didn’t get an answer.

  “Well, in the end, I think it’s fortunate that he missed him,” Master Chief said. “Judging by what I heard, I think we wanted to see a grenade.

  “Think about it. Even if it was a grenade, what was that one kid going to do? There were no American forces in the area, and he was no threat to our or any other position.”

  One of our snipers suggested that the shot might have served to deter Iraqis from picking up hand grenades, if that’s what it was, or from acting suspiciously in restricted areas. Maybe this was a dangerous insurgent who needed to be shot. Maybe shooting him would give a second thought to anyone planning to gather ordnance for money.

  Master Chief said, “Okay, let’s say that one of those things was the goal, and we shoot this guy, because it’s going to keep Iraqi kids from picking up grenades and, we suppose, save an American life somewhere in the future. So now the kid’s dead, and the grenade’s still lying there on ground. We’re not going to go out and take the grenade off the street, are we? No, we aren’t. So very likely it will just end up in an insurgent’s hands again. Meanwhile, how did an average Iraqi see what just happened?

  “They’re going to see a dead boy,” he said. “And they’re going to say, ‘The Americans shot this child for no reason. There lies an innocent boy, killed just because he was standing in the street, holding an apple.’ This is the word that gets around on the street, even if he really was holding a grenade.

  “If you make the wrong call, you can lose a whole neighborhood,” Master Chief continued. “And that grenade, or that apple, will still be lying there in the street. Either outcome harms our mission. If we take the shot, we have to be ready to get out there and influence the perception. I won’t ask you to hesitate, but we need to have tactical patience. We need to know the shot is necessary, and if you feel it is, then you have to make the hard call.”

  Master Chief was tough to beat in this kind of exchange, brilliant at breaking down complexity and casting aside bullshit. He had seen similar situations in 2005, when the rules of engagement allowed our snipers to shoot anyone seen holding a shovel or a bag of trash that could be hiding an IED. Men with shovels and heavy trash bags were suspected of being an IED threat—until it became clear that innocent shopkeepers now and then used shovels and dustpans when they would sweep their stoops clean, and that sad souls were sometimes coerced by the insurgents to carry sacks of rocks and drop them into a hole in the road to test if our snipers were nearby. He learned well from history, from his peers, from anyone who had seen things he hadn’t and he took it in to use with his men.

  If you couldn’t out-argue Master Chief, you were wise just to keep your mouth shut. He never raised his voice, and always grounded his lessons in reason. That’s what master chiefs get paid to do in the Navy, what sergeant majors do in the Marine Corps and Army, and what chief master sergeants do in the Air Force. They live by an idea that many folks hold dear where I come from: There’s no education in the second kick of a mule.

  As we saw it, a leader should always be ready to ask anyone under him: Are you preparing yourself to make the team better? Are you acting to make the team’s record and reputation stronger? Are you staying in good shape—in both body and mind—for the greater good? You don’t get people to follow you by demanding it with your words. You do it by commanding it with your example. In the chow hall at Camp Marc Lee, we put a sign above the door that read: IF EVERY SEAL WERE LIKE ME, HOW GOOD WOULD THE TEAMS BE?

  Team 5’s outstanding enlisted leadership kept me wanting to stay sharp, even as my body threatened to collapse under the weight of my plates. A feeling of competent, effective command was just exuded by our leadership and it trickled down from there. Success built upon success, and even after a bad day we felt motivated to get better. I think we all knew we were serving with some special people. Even our oldest frogs still say that about Task Unit Ramadi, all these many deployments later.

  I once heard DQ say, “The day will come when the fight for the city will just seem to tip. One day, victory came from putting an artillery round into a building. The next day, victory will come from not doing it. The key to success will be recognizing as quickly as possible when that change has taken place.”

  Every man in Task Unit Ramadi can point to the day when that change came and our fortunes fell clearly into alignment with the people’s. It was the day after Thanksgiving, when we copied a desperate radio call on the tactical net.

  “My people are being killed. I need your help!”

  11

  My Enemy, My Friend

  The man who sent the message was an Iraqi sheikh named Jassim Muhammad Saleh al-Suwadawi. The leader of the Albu Soda tribe, he controlled the sparsely populated northeastern part of Ramadi, the Sufiyah district. It was the same tribe that Travis Patriquin had identified to Commander Leonard as a likely key ally against Al Qaeda.

  Our recent history with them wasn’t good. They had been a thorn in the side of the men at Camp Corregidor ever since Americans had been there. Just about every day, Al Qaeda–linked insurgents roamed freely in that neighborhood, firing mortars at the camp from the backs of pickup trucks, then driving like hell to get away before our radar-directed return fire arrived. On some days early in our deployment we could mark time by the cadence of the mortars they lobbed in. Sometimes they came in volleys of five or six at a time. More than a few soldiers were killed on the chow line. You didn’t go anywhere in the camp without a full kit and body armor.

  We knew that Al Qaeda terrorists were responsible for a great many of these attacks. We also knew, because there was hardly ever a letup, that the terrorists had made a deal with Sheikh Jassim and his tribe.

  Then, it seems, their infernal little bargain fell apart.

  Sheikh Jassim resented the way his homes and his people were always caught in the crossfire. Al Qaeda militia often fired at Camp Corregidor from schools and hospitals in his area, probably hoping it would deter us from shooting back. Sometimes it did. But sometimes, too, there was collateral damage. Sheikh Jassim didn’t care much for Al Qaeda’s brand of cowardice, and the loss of life and property it inflicted upon his people, so he tried to put an end to it by banishing them from his neighborhoods. He set up checkpoints to keep the terrorists from getting in. He only had a force of about fifty men in his tribal police, but it took them no time, using their well-placed checkpoints and ability to distinguish locals from troublemakers, to shut them out.

  The terrorists issued grave warnings. “Take the checkpoints down within seventy-two hours or we will kill you and everyone in your tribe.” But the sheikh stood his ground. That’s when Al Qaeda made its move: a huge attack on the Sufiyah district, aimed at wiping out Jassim’s people.

  The terrorists began by overwhelming the police checkpoints. With just a few dozen rounds apiece in their weapons, the tribal cops on duty didn’t stand a chance. Then the killers turned on the tribe’s women and children. It was a shocking and deliberate slaughter of innocents. The tribe’s population of military-age males was quickly decimated by the attacks—but that wasn’t enough for Al Qaeda’s killers.

  The Americans had long feared that something like this would happen. Captain Patriquin had the foresight to give the Sunni chief a satellite phone and his own personal phone number. That’s how Sheikh Jassim was able to reach American forces directly, through a personal phone call to Patriquin. “My people are being killed. I need your help!”

  Aerial surveillance gave us a grim real-time picture of what was going on. The terrorists were killing everyone they could find. They shot them dead in their yards, in their houses, and in the streets. They slaughtered their livestock, poisoned their water, and destroyed the
ir electrical generators.

  The brutality and scope of the attack was quickly followed by an explanation, thanks to our intel shop: the top commander of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Ayyub al-Masri, had come to Ramadi to organize it personally. I guess the success of the counterinsurgency mission and the Anbar Awakening was reflected in the desperation of the response.

  As the closest commander on the scene, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Ferry of the First Battalion, Ninth Infantry Regiment (the 1/9), ordered his tanks and infantry to move out of Camp Corregidor and enter the neighborhoods that not a month before had been virtually off-limits to them.

  As the Americans began arriving, Al Qaeda assassins were heading for the sheikh’s house. Jassim and his fighters abandoned their compound, falling back toward the Euphrates River. “We’re coming, we’re coming, hang on!” Captain Patriquin told him.

  Meanwhile, from many mosques rose the familiar shrill voices over the loudspeakers. The Sunni imams were calling their faithful to jihad. This time, though, the message was different. Our terps told us the jihad was aimed not at the “infidels”—usually, that was us—but against Al Qaeda.

  So here we were, Americans from several units, working together to essentially join a call to jihad. The world really had been turned on its head.

  Colonel Ferry ordered aircraft to make low-level runs over the neighborhood, looking to slow down the bad guys. Army artillery began targeting the terrorists. Other strategic air assets began arriving overhead, too, helping to win the fight. Despite its chaotic battlefields, Anbar Province was seen as a backwater by some higher commanders in Baghdad, and we’d never seen this kind of air support before. Still, not everybody wearing a black head scarf and carrying an AK-47 was a bad guy. There were tribal fighters coming over from other neighborhoods to support Jassim’s besieged people. But Al Qaeda fighters often stood out by their cruelty. As the terrorists fled the neighborhood in their pickup trucks, they tried to intimidate the locals by dragging bodies of the dead behind them, chained to their fenders. All this did was help our airborne watchers distinguish friend from foe. A Marine Corps F/A-18 Hornet was vectored to attack. The terrorists were blown into pieces, their last stain upon the earth. It was old-fashioned American shock and awe that finally stopped al-Masri’s murder brigade.

  Before U.S. forces took him to safety at Camp Corregidor, Sheikh Jassim instructed the elders in his tribe to cooperate with us. After all the blood we had shed in fighting the insurgency—taking, no doubt, a heavy price from Jassim’s own ranks—we all had second thoughts. But we are forged to adapt quickly to the battlefield. In Ramadi in 2006, we could sense that things were turning our way.

  The night of the attack, our officers at Camp Corregidor helped plan the mission to repatriate the sheikh back into his neighborhood. Most of the Corregidor boys piled into a helicopter and set out into this until-recently-off-limits part of the city. Making several false landings to conceal their location, they finally hit the ground in a rural area about five klicks from his compound and began patrolling it on foot.

  It was like entering a lion’s den. Jassim’s fighters and other allied tribesmen walked up and down the streets with weapons at the ready, while our guys studied them grimly. They were in typical Iraqi ninja gear: full black clothing and scarves, faces covered—the same dudes who had been shelling Camp Corregidor and staging attacks against us all the way west to Camp Marc Lee. There was bad blood going both ways—a couple of nights, while sitting around the campfire, our guys overheard Iraqis talking about how a week ago they were killing American soldiers. But now came the understanding that circumstances had changed and bygones needed to be bygones. It was the way of life out there in old Mesopotamia, a tried-and-true understanding rooted firmly in the ancient earth: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Everyone seemed to know what the deal was. War sure is crazy. Still, our guys kept their fingers close to their triggers.

  They all thought it was going to be a quick in and out, a three-day overwatch operation with a raid or two thrown in. As it happened, the undersized platoon of about a dozen guys spent most of a month out there, hanging out on a limb, calming things down and keeping the sheikh’s people safe from incursions by Al Qaeda. They set up at a power plant, then moved into the sheikh’s compound. The EOD tech, Shane Snow, decorated the outside walls of the compound with antipersonnel mines, concealing them with blankets and prayer rugs. Better safe than sorry.

  When they began training volunteers to join the Sunni police, our guys ran background checks on the recruits and created a biometric database—fingerprints, retina scans—keeping lists of who’d been naughty and who’d been nice. Several of them popped for having killed Americans. The most charismatic and aggressive of them, of course, had the leadership traits we needed, so we put them—arguably the most dangerous ones—in charge.

  It’s spooky to work with people who had been trying to kill you just a few days before. Team guys are raised from birth to deal with threats like that forcefully and permanently. I don’t need to tell you that my brother and his teammates slept with one eye open the whole time they were out there. Their days and nights were an endless episode of CSI: Iraq. But this was the strategy we and so many other units were working toward. It would change the landscape.

  Within days, most of our guys had learned enough Arabic to run a shooting range. “Hold the butt stock firmly against your shoulder!”… “Use your right eye to look through the sight!” Much as they didn’t care for this mission, they proved themselves in the training role. Afterward, sitting around a fire with the locals, sipping chai, they’d struggle along, telling stories in broken Arabic, with a lot of intense eye contact and frequent recourse to the phrase book. The Iraqi kids seemed to think it was the coolest thing in the world. The SEALs took special care to show respect for the kids’ mothers, who, like mothers everywhere, knew how their corner of the world worked better than anybody.

  Those who had a handle on Arabic made a real difference, getting good intel from their new friends. This allowed us to raid insurgent cells that otherwise would have remained well hidden. Sometimes they fooled us, dropping the dime on tribal rivals, saying they were Al Qaeda and hoping we’d ruin their day. We learned to vet their leads fast.

  Pretty quickly, the Army moved a whole company into the neighborhood—about 150 men—and kept it there for a while. The SEALs and those soldiers from Lieutenant Colonel Ferry’s command understood the score. In spite of official coalition policy, which frowned on it, they had clearance to bring in weapons and ammunition and helped arm the new tribal police to defend themselves. Though they were wary of creating a potentially dangerous militia, the greater need by far was to make sure we had allies who could get the job done. We didn’t always mind seeing business done that way, and never minded it when it worked as well as it seemed to here. It didn’t take long for something remarkable to happen: in less than two days, the daily barrage of mortars stopped raining down on Camp Corregidor.

  One day Shane noticed that one of his hidden claymores protecting the compound had been exposed when a strong wind gust blew the prayer rug hiding it out of position. He was watching when an Iraqi clad in black noticed this. Shane raised the scope of his M4 to his eye, steadied himself, and put his finger on his trigger, ready to take the shot. That was when the guy reached down, picked up the blanket, and put it back in place, covering the charge. Shane stood down. This enemy seemed to have become our friend.

  The fighting never completely stopped, and we always had to watch our backs, but after Sheikh Jassim reclaimed his neighborhood from the terrorists, with an assist from U.S. forces, it was clear that Al Qaeda in Iraq was on the ropes. We mourned the deaths of all the Americans who had died to put us in that position. We honored the sacrifices of the Iraqis, too. Anyone who was there at the time can testify to the impact of their steadfast and courageous service. We did it, and we did it together.

  12

  Going South

  As I flip through my
diary of those days, I see something I never fully realized in the moment: though we all lived it from day to day, from one mission to the next, the battle for Ramadi was epic. Our mission challenged us mentally and physically. It stretched our capabilities in new directions and sharpened our blade for wars both familiar and new.

  It stretched me a little, too—nearly to a breaking point, in fact. In early December, as Pearl Harbor Day approached, I knew my days as a door kicker were numbered.

  As the platoon medic, I was keeping busy helping guys with their injuries and ailments. But you know what they say about the cobbler’s kids wearing the worst shoes. My back and pelvis were busted up so bad that if I sat for more than twenty minutes, I lost all feeling in my legs, and eventually in my arms, too. The pain from the compression on my spine was getting worse all the time. With sleep seldom coming, I got by on little cocktails of Vicodin, Flexeril, Ambien, whatever combinations the doc thought might help. But I wouldn’t surrender to the forces that were trying to take me down from within. Staying on the line with the guys was more important than saving my body—and I was always willing to do whatever it took to stay on the line, always ready to do my duty when midnight came.

  The last mission I ran with Gold squad, on December 7, 2006, was named Going South—an appropriate name. And this one was going to be it for me.