Damn Few

by Rorke Denver

  I was too keyed up to sleep.

  When we landed at the Habbaniyah airfield and the huge ramp swung down, there was no mistaking how far we’d come. It wasn’t just the 102-degree furnace we were stepping into. It wasn’t just the dust and the fumes. There was a dull, mechanical roar on the tarmac that I would soon recognize as the grinding sounds of war. Gears catching. Jets overhead. Random pops in the distance. Half a dozen SEAL gun trucks pulling to a stop.

  I felt like I’d just stepped into the opening scene of Platoon, where Charlie Sheen and the other fresh soldiers arrive in chaotic Vietnam to the shocking sight of body bags and soldiers clearly ravaged by the horrors of war.

  It’s always the dumbest clichés people reach for at moments like these. “We’re not in Kansas anymore,” one of my teammates said. And we’d barely learned to pronounce Habbaniyah. Habba-KNEE-yah.

  We were dressed in light fatigues. Most of our guns and body armor were still packed away. The SEALs who came to meet us were outfitted for the apocalypse. Full body armor, helmets, gloves, assault rifles, and machine guns. They had their heavy gunners in the turret of every truck except for the open one where our gear would ride. Their radio-signal jammers were running full blast. They had come to collect the new class, but they were cocked and ready for anything.

  On the way out, we stopped briefly at the airfield’s heavily guarded exit gate. We spoke to one of the MPs who was standing there. He knew we were the new SEALs, come to join the fight.

  “Go get ’em,” he said. “Hope to see you on your return.”

  As we pulled out and I got my earliest glimpses of this country that would be my new home, the MP’s words lingered in my head. I’m sure I read too much into what he said.

  “Hope to see you on your return.” As if he weren’t entirely sure he would. As if the people he saw arriving didn’t always fly home alive.

  * * *

  I never felt so peaceful as when I finally got to war. The acrid smell of gunpowder was almost sweet to me. The random boom of mortar fire was oddly soothing. The sunsets in western Iraq, filtered through the smoke from burning buildings and scattered piles of trash, were some of the most stunning I had seen, and I came from California. The bite of the sandstorms, the three-figure temperatures, the knowledge that an IED or a sniper could easily be waiting around the next blind curve—everything harsh and unnerving about being in a war zone was energizing and exciting to me. Whatever the challenges, this was where I wanted to be.

  I had no illusions about the deadly business we had come to Iraq for or the godforsaken patch of that country where we’d been sent. I don’t believe in sugarcoating these things. We were there to kill or be killed, and that kind of agenda has a way of focusing the mind. From the moment we arrived, all the little complexities of life back home melted away. Twenty-six hours earlier, I was drinking a latte in Star-bucks and worrying about the cable bill. Suddenly everything was stripped-down, simple, and clear. I felt like I’d just been handed a free ticket to a wild and exciting adventure, a chance to roam armed to the teeth through one of the most dangerous and exotic places on earth. Here in Iraq, a different part of me was coming out.

  Camp Habbaniyah was an old Royal Air Force station on the banks of the Euphrates River, fifty-five miles west of Baghdad, a rugged place with built-up berms and crash walls around it and heavily armed guards at the gates. The Brits were forced to abandon the facility after the Iraqi revolution of 1958, and nothing much had been updated since. I knew Alexander and his Macedonians had come through this valley in the summer of 331 BC. They crossed the Euphrates and walked right into town. Just being there, in the same business as Alexander, elevated everything in my mind. It gave me energy. It made me hyperaware. It put extra pressure on me. You asked for this, I reminded myself. Only once can a warrior go to war for the first time.

  It was already brutally hot when we arrived—and I don’t just mean the temperature. Twenty-eight hundred coalition troops had been killed in the war already, more in the Sunni strongholds of Ramadi, Fallujah, and Habbaniyah than anyplace else. There were Saddam Hussein sympathizers everywhere. They pretty much had the run of the whole area. I didn’t know it yet, but Bronze Stars, Silver Stars, and a Medal of Honor—they would all come out of our time there, as the men of SEAL Team Three imposed our will on the region. Our deployment would become quite legendary and help shift the momentum of the war effort, as fierce and as violent as any SEAL deployment since the jungle days of Vietnam. And we truly brought it on ourselves.

  Indian Country, we called the territory outside the wire, like back in the Old West. Dusty. Lawless. Rugged. Wide open. We used that term respectfully. I always felt I had a special connection to Native American culture. Lacrosse, the sport that got me through college, came from Native Americans, who believed it was a gift from the Creator and engaged in contests for the purpose of preparing for war. Our patch of western Iraq was a haphazard mix of rural and urban, and the bad guys we faced were far better armed than the forces of Cochise, Crazy Horse, or Geronimo.

  Nothing about the terrain was hospitable. There was sixty feet of green on either side of the Euphrates, but everything else was parched and dry and gray. The newer houses were built from tan cinder block. Almost all of them sat behind high walls, even the side-by-side row houses. Whatever life was happening inside, you couldn’t see or hear much from the street. Clearly, the people felt vulnerable and they had for a long time.

  In the daytime, the heat never eased much. At night, the electricity was often out and, with it, all the streetlights. We were either squinting into the glare of the desert or seeing the world through the pale green glow of our night-vision optics. Either way, the place felt surreal and otherworldly, with dangers large and small.

  You always had to be careful where you stepped. That brownish puddle might be a brownish puddle or it just as easily might be the outflow of an open sewer. One afternoon with waste-caked boots and soaking socks was all it took to teach me always to walk carefully. Mangy dogs were everywhere. At first I couldn’t put my finger on what made Iraq’s stray dogs different from the ones I’d seen back home. Then I figured it out. The Iraqi dogs had been barking so long and with so little relief, their barks had all grown hoarse. They sounded as forlorn as the landscape looked.

  If our goal was changing the battle space, we knew our commitment had to be intense and relentless. So every day, we’d go out on operations, the Iraqi Scouts and us. Walking from palm grove to palm grove. Taking fire from bad guys who could be almost anywhere—across the Euphrates, in a cluster of houses, from places we couldn’t even see. We’d find the bad guys. We’d make sure they knew we were there with our invisible targets on our backs. We’d just start getting into fights. It really was the only way to smoke the enemy out. We weren’t fighting the Iraqi people. We were fighting for them. In a war zone like this one, you can’t simply open fire on the first scary-looking person who strolls along. Just by looking, there was no way to tell who was on what side. But there was one line that was easy to recognize: When someone began to shoot at us or was clearly about to, we quickly started shooting back—with overwhelming firepower.

  Our idea of patrolling in the daytime was highly unorthodox for SEALs. Back home, our approach was a source of some controversy among armchair military critics, including some retired SEALs. Special operators, they said, go out under the cover of darkness. The light of day, they said, is for conventional troops. Daytime patrols, they said, are a waste of the SEALs’ special talents. But in western Iraq before the Tribal Awakening, daytime was where the action was. So daytime was where we made our stand. If SEALs were going to be problem-solvers, the most creative warriors on the modern battlefield, we had to go where the problems were. Hell, we’d have patrolled in our pajamas if that’s what got the job done. We briefed our senior leadership. To their credit, they said yes. And the results were impossible to argue with.

  The first month we were there, 160 mortar rounds landed inside the
perimeter of Combat Outpost COWBOY. The second and third months, it was down to forty. By the fourth month, the number was down to two. We had taken away the gunners’ free-fire license. Already the momentum was beginning to shift.

  There was nothing as quiet as the courtyard of a house at the end of a dark road before BRAVO Platoon rammed its way inside. As we made our stand in the daytime, we didn’t ignore the challenges of the night. The night in western Iraq was a whole different world.

  The stars above. The moon reflecting off the Euphrates. The light rhythmic breathing of the U.S. Navy SEALs and Iraqi Scouts.

  If you didn’t know what was coming, you’d never expect anything until, without a hint of warning—and that was precisely the point—the night exploded in stomps, screams, and the sound of busting hinges and shattering glass.

  On this night, we weren’t just raiding a house. We were looking for a sixteen-year-old budding insurgent named Kamal, who we had strong reason to believe had shot and killed an Army medic named Blakley. Kamal’s older brother, Abu Roma, was a well-known terror lieutenant suspected of running a sniper cell in Khalidiya. The way the story went, Blakley was with a group of Iraqi and American troops who had arrested yet another of Kamal’s brothers, and Kamal had gone out seeking revenge.

  We thought we knew where the young suspect was hiding. As we pulled up in our blacked-out gun trucks, we had a full escape team ringing the block and an extra set of eyes in the sky, an F/A-18 aircraft flying overhead with night-vision capabilities. Also invited along that night: Blakley’s major, whose name was Roberson. I knew the major took Blakley’s death extremely personally.

  Big D was such a skilled breacher, I swear he could have blasted opened a bank vault with half a roll of kiddie caps. With a well-placed charge and a click of the initiator, he blew the front door open. In a flurry of shouts and sharply barked orders, the four-man initial-entry team burst inside.

  What unfolded next was more a ballet than an onslaught. Okay, it was probably a bit of both. All of us could feel the whole team’s movement.

  “Clear left!” one of the assaulters shouted.

  “Clear right!” shouted another.

  “All clear!” came back the answer, as the entry team completed the initial search of the first room and moved on to the next one.

  Then, the other eight of us and the twelve Iraqi Scouts went rushing inside, clearing the house with businesslike swiftness and few spoken words. On nods, hand squeezes, and shoulder pats, we moved through every room. It was the same kind of nonverbal communication we’d learned back in diving training. Who needs words to talk?

  One team member opened a door. A teammate joined him to search that room. “All clear,” one of them announced. The assault team went like that from room to room, down each hallway, up the stairs, dominating every corner and section one by one. In a matter of a minute or two, we owned the house.

  “Target secure,” one of the assistant officers said over the radio.

  In one room we found three women, one older man, and six children. We separated the man from the women and children, carefully identifying everyone, being alert for weapons and for any intelligence that might be extracted. Even for experienced operators like BRAVO Platoon, so much is easy to miss. A false wall or a trapdoor hiding people or weapons. Explosives rigged into the house. We found none of that this time.

  And no Kamal.

  It was then that the F-18 pilot radioed my communicator, Lope, who was standing where he always stood, immediately at my side.

  “Squirter on the roof,” the pilot said, using the term for someone trying to escape. “Squirter on the roof.”

  Roberson and I raced immediately to the top of the building. My chief, Frank, beat us up there.

  Still no Kamal.

  The squirter team, which had the building surrounded, hadn’t reported anything, and there wasn’t much on the roof except for a large water tank. It was the only place up there a person might conceivably hide.

  Cautiously, Frank approached the water tank. He stood beside it and listened.

  At first he heard nothing.

  Then he heard something strange.

  It was the unmistakable sound of bubbles rising through the water.

  The chief had time on his side. He could breathe all night if he had to. But whoever was in the tank underwater could hold his breath for only so long.

  A few seconds later, the squirter came bursting to the surface, gasping madly for air.

  It was a dripping-wet Kamal.

  Roberson was elated. “I can’t tell you how much this means to me and my unit,” he said as the chief put the cuffs on. We gave Roberson the honor of walking the prisoner to the truck.

  We all had our ways of going into battle.

  “I want a couple of grenades right here beside me in the truck,” one team member said. “I don’t want ’em in the back. I want ’em right next to my water bottle and the patch from my buddy’s fire department.”

  We all had things that were special to us. There were so many variables on the battlefield that none of us could control. We had trained as a cohesive group. We were issued the same uniforms. But our dress, our weapons, the placement of our gear, our pre-battle rituals—those were individual choices.

  Not being a heavy-weapons gunner, I wasn’t on the Mk 48 or a .50-cal very often. My primary battle weapon, the one I’ve spent the most time with, was my M4. It became an extension of my body. The M4 is the standard, special-ops battle rifle—a gas-operated, air-cooled, magazine-fed assault rifle that traces its heritage to earlier carbine versions of the M16, all of them based on the original AR-15, designed in the 1950s by the visionary firearms engineer Eugene Stoner. The M4 is fast. It’s light. It’s accurate. It’s highly modifiable. It has a rail system that can handle lights, lasers, scope—you can dress it up like a Christmas tree if you want. It fires a .556-caliber round from thirty-round magazines, and it has a flat, predictable shooting trajectory. Mine was tricked out the way I liked it. I used several different sights. My favorite was an Aimpoint red-dot with very low magnification. Our snipers tended to use much higher mag. They needed that for their long-range targets. If I felt like I needed a little more magnification in the field, I would use a Trijicon ACOG scope. But most of the time I preferred a wider view.

  I wouldn’t say the M4 was my favorite gun. The gun I really liked was my teammate Rob’s M14, a World War II throwback that I used a lot of the time. On an overwatch from a rooftop or on any daylight patrol, I always carried Rob’s M14. He had it camouflaged. He had a red-dot scope with a little mag. I love that gun. It just has a lot more bang for the buck than the M4 does. The M14 fires a .762-round, a much heavier bullet. If I laid the two rounds right next to each other and asked, “Which would you rather be shot with?” you wouldn’t need to know anything about ballistics to say immediately, “I’ll take the one on the left,” the smaller M4.

  For most SEALs, the big Rambo knife is mostly a myth, and I never carried one. But like most warriors, I always had a fixed-blade knife with me, an SOG Desert Dagger with a six-inch blade or the slightly smaller SOG Pentagon with a five-inch blade.

  I have buddies who are knife pros. They’ve convinced me that a folding-blade knife is a broken knife, great in your pocket at home, not so great in battle. Fixed is just stronger. I used it to cut a line, open a package, slice open a mattress in a hunt for hidden weapons. That knife was in action many times a day. The handles and the grips are easy to hold whether hands are wet or dry.

  I hung my knife vertically on my body armor, handle up, blade down. That way, if someone came at me in close quarters in such a way that my hands were pinned against my chest, I’d still be able to grab the handle of the knife. It would have to be a highly motivated bad guy to still hang on as I was slicing at his hands or his eyes.

  We had the newest generation of Kevlar body armor. When we got over there, some of the team members were talking about the advantages of a body-armor system they called
chicken plates.

  “They’re thinner, they’re lighter, and they aren’t nearly as hot,” one guy said. “These plates will stand up to AK-47 fire even better than Kevlar does.”

  We’d been wearing the chicken plates in the field on and off for a couple of months when one day Ro said: “We should probably test these things. We’ve just been taking them on faith.”

  We took a couple out to the range and fired an AK47 straight on at the chicken plates. The rounds went through metal like a hot knife through butter.

  “Uh-oh,” Ro said.

  “All of a sudden, Kevlar’s looking very light and cool,” I said.

  My most useful tools of all? A big-ass black Sharpie pen and a little digital camera. I carried three Sharpies in a pouch right above my magazine. Once we got a house cleared, I took a count of all the people and all the material we found. Instead of writing on paper or writing on my wrist with a grease pencil like some officers did, I’d write on the wall or the floor of the house, every piece of information I needed to report from the raid. Everyone’s name, the broken door, the money on the counter, any documents lying around, whatever it was. Then I’d take a photo and when I got back, make it part of my permanent report.

  We were on our way in from a night op when we got word that Mark had been killed. He had been responding as part of a quick reaction force to fellow SEALs who needed help in a gunfight. Mark was a member of Task Unit BRAVO. But everyone at SEAL Team Three called the task unit TU BRUISER. TU BRUISER experienced the heaviest, most sustained combat of any SEAL Team Three Task Unit. Their base of operations was down the road from us in Ramadi.

  Our unit had been out for fifty hours straight. These grinding marathons weren’t as long as Hell Week, but they were tough. It was almost 9 a.m. when we were finally pulling our gun trucks back onto base and heard some disturbing radio chatter from higher headquarters. Word was that there’d been a gunfight and Mark was killed. A memorial was being held that morning in Ramadi, about twenty miles away.