Damn Few

by Rorke Denver

  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.

  After one patrol in the stifling afternoon, we were walking back to the construction site when a small skirmish broke out. Not a sustained exchange, but it reminded all of us we had to be on our game. We got back to the building we were using as our overwatch position. Lope and I took our body armor off and, even though we’d seen a small bit of action out there, we thought we might slip up to the roof for a short, shady nap. But things just didn’t feel right when we got there.

  “Let’s take another look,” I said as we put our body armor back on and started climbing down the stairs.

  Just as we reached the second floor, two mortar rounds—a 60 mm and an 80 mm—landed above and below us. The smaller one struck the roof. The larger one hit the ground right where a group of Marines and Iraqi Scouts happened to be standing. Together, those two mortars instantly killed two of the Iraqis and wounded three Marines. Lope and I rushed downstairs into a room that looked like a scene from a chain-saw movie. Bodies were everywhere. Two Marines were grinding through their pain stoically. One Iraqi was moaning with a missing arm. The entire room was covered in blood. A Marine was certain he had a sucking chest wound, which can cause the lungs to collapse. Corpsman Mike was all over him.

  Sucking chest wounds are actually quite rare, but they can be catastrophic if they aren’t treated correctly and quickly. The whole experience is panic-inducing. Mike applied an Asherman chest seal, a piece of medical gear invented by a former SEAL. It’s a large patch with a valve that is slapped over the wound and instantly balances the pressure in the lungs.

  One thing I noticed that day and not for the first time: The people screaming the loudest were those hurt the least. And it was causing pandemonium in that room. It reminded me of something I’d heard in SEAL training when a young officer was flipping out over some trivial mishap. A senior chief told him: “Sir, you’re freaking out and it’s making everyone else freak out. Let me pass on an important piece of advice: ‘Calm. Is. Contagious.’”

  I had two of my biggest squad members drag the loudest, wailing, noninjured Iraqis out of the room so our combat medics could get to work. Quickly, they got several Marines onto helicopters for medical treatment.

  That is how it was in Iraq. Some of the people we worked with were absolutely superb. Some were worse than incompetent.

  A couple of days later, I was on a roof with one of my snipers when I heard an AK-47 go off. I liked being on rooftops. It’s a good shooting position, and you can see a lot of bad guys from up there.

  “What the hell was that?” I barked over the radio.

  “You won’t believe this,” Red said. “You better get down here.”

  On the first floor, an Iraqi Scout was wailing. He was sitting in a chair holding his left foot. An Iraqi lieutenant and an interpreter were standing with him, and one of our corpsmen was examining the Iraqi Scout’s foot.

  We’d been taking the Scouts with us almost everywhere. SEAL Team One had boosted the Scouts’ basic competence as soldiers, but some of them had clearly benefited more than others. It was a wild mix we had. Some had been in Saddam’s military, not loyal to him but professional soldiers. Some were unmotivated conscripts. A few of them couldn’t wait to leave.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “He says he had an AD,” an accidental discharge of his weapon, the corpsman said. “But I’m not buying it. I think he shot himself in the foot to get out of here.”

  “So what’s the damage?” I asked.

  “Well, to be honest, it’s a perfect through-and-through. It entered the top of the foot, exited the bottom. I can’t speak to nerve damage. But there is very little bleeding. I think the area is still shocked from the flash round being so close to his foot.”

  The interpreter was repeating our conversation to the Iraqi lieutenant, who was quickly growing agitated. “He must be flown out immediately,” the lieutenant said. “We cannot wait. We have to medevac him right now.”

  The way the Iraqi officer was talking, it felt like a setup to me. I had the strong sense that they hatched the plan to get out of there. I remembered that when we had briefed this particular mission, the Scouts adamantly did not want to go. The area was too dangerous, they said. Too many insurgents.

  “How critical is it to get him definitive care?” I asked my corpsman.

  He shot me a look as if he knew what I was thinking. “He will survive for days,” the corpsman said. “He ain’t gonna be happy. He won’t be running anywhere. But he can sit right here for as long as we need to be in this building.”

  This was early morning on the first day of a two-day operation.

  “Sounds good,” I said. Turning to the interpreter, I said: “He doesn’t require any treatment that my medic can’t provide. We will extract from this target as planned forty-eight hours from now.”

  “And one more thing,” I added. “Tell him if he wants to give himself an injury to get out of his job, he’s gonna have to do better than that.”

  With any team, you have to establish yourself as leader, as the alpha prepared to make decisions and stick with them. If the Scout had been in any jeopardy, we’d have pulled him out of there. But I wasn’t having a quitter with a minor foot wound put an end to our day.

  For every faker we were cursed with, we were blessed with a real pro. Sam was the best interpreter our unit ever had. He was a southern Lebanese Christian who had fought in wars before and had the scars to prove it. He was a real Gunga Din. He always knew how to find cold water and extra food in the field. We trusted Sam to carry a rifle, a pistol, and a full combat load out. He was constantly urging me to come back and visit him in Lebanon for the world’s best French Middle Eastern cuisine.

  Our platoon was hitting a bunch of targets, doing house raids off the daily intel and getting bad guys every night. Then, all of a sudden, we started getting dry holes. We were doing the raids as usual, but at every house, the targets we were looking for turned out not to be there.

  The intelligence reports still smelled reliable. Everything else was similar. I couldn’t figure out what was going on.

  I pulled Sam aside one day when he wasn’t in the rotation. I had an idea. I asked him to dress in full SEAL gear, including faceguard, and join us on the next raid. “No matter what you see, no matter what you hear, say nothing until we’re back,” I told him. “Pay attention to everything the interpreters say.”

  Sam kept his mouth shut during the raid. But when we got back, he was fuming.

  “You were telling the interpreter, ‘Put pressure on.’ And the interpreter was saying, ‘This is the name of the person they’re looking for. Don’t admit to being that person and they’ll let you go.’”

  We got rid of the corrupt interpreter immediately. I don’t think he knew Sam ratted him out. But all of a sudden we were back on our former pace again. And the progress kept building on itself. While the insurgents weren’t sending up any white flags, the support they were receiving from local civilians seemed to narrow a little more each week. The zealous anti-Americans were just as committed. But even their numbers did gradually seem to shrink.

  That was what we were there for, changing momentum in the country by changing momentum on the battlefield.

  When I think about my time in Iraq, no incident defines the experience more eloquently than the death of our friend Mikey. That was the single most painful loss we suffered and the most inspiring example of courage, sacrifice, and brotherhood I have ever experienced. And most telling of all, Mikey didn’t act after long, drawn-out deliberation. He wasn’t nudged, pushed, or pressured. He was one man acting in the flash of a moment, reflecting a value syste
m built over years in our brotherhood, epitomizing everything that we stand for.

  Even today, I can’t talk about Mikey without getting emotional.

  A talented machine gunner and a fun, loose guy, he arrived in April 2006, about a month after I did. A member of Task Unit BRUISER in Ramadi operating about twenty miles to our west, he spent his days and nights patrolling Indian Country and preparing Iraqi soldiers for the inevitable day the Americans would leave. Almost immediately, he showed what he was made of and the kind of teammate he was. He’d been in-country just a few weeks when another SEAL was shot in the leg during a chaotic urban patrol. The bullets were still kicking up dirt. The wounded SEAL lay vulnerable and exposed in the street. Mikey ran out to rescue him, dragging his wounded brother back to safety. He got a Silver Star for that, and his tour had only begun.

  He seemed to be at the front of every firefight. When the duty was toughest, he was among the quickest to volunteer. He had only one speed, and that was fast-forward. He was ready for anything.

  One terrible Friday, his platoon had just engaged four insurgents in a firefight, wounding one and killing another. Expecting further attacks, Mikey and three SEAL snipers, along with three Iraqi Scouts, took up a rooftop position as a mob blocked off the street below. A nearby mosque broadcast an urgent announcement, calling faithful warriors to fight the American and Iraqi soldiers. The crowd in the street looked up at the roof and opened fire with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades, or RPGs. A grenade smacked Mikey in the chest, pounding off and landing near his feet.

  “Grenade!” Mikey yelled to the two SEALs closest to him, about fifteen feet away.

  But there was nowhere for them to go. Standing closest to the stairway, Mikey was the only one who could have rolled down the stairs or leaped to safety. He did exactly the opposite. He threw his body on the live grenade. A couple of seconds later, the grenade went off in a loud, concussive explosion. Mikey’s two teammates were injured. But he absorbed the majority of the blast. Though evacuated immediately, in thirty minutes Mikey was dead.

  I don’t pretend to know exactly what was going through Mikey’s head when he was thumped by the hurled grenade and saw it land on the rooftop in front of him. But I know the man he was, how he was trained, and the kind of teammate he had always been. He didn’t think of his safety first. He decided instead: “I’m gonna eat that thing and take care of my buddies,” who didn’t even realize what danger they were in. He easily could have saved his own life. Mikey was the only person on the roof, American or Iraqi, to die that day. That’s a place no one can force anyone to go. That’s the kind of warrior Mikey was. That’s the kind of warrior we’re looking for. Mikey got all the honors the U.S. military can give including, posthumously, the Medal of Honor. He was only the second Navy SEAL, and the fourth U.S. service member, to earn the military’s highest commendation since the War on Terror began. His parents accepted the medal for him at the White House from President George W. Bush. Soon afterward, Donald Winter, secretary of the Navy, announced that the second ship in the Zumwalt class of destroyers would be named the USS Michael Monsoor. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs honored Mikey with a new name for one of the streets at San Diego’s Miramar National Cemetery: Monsoor Avenue.

  Those are all rare tributes. But I think the one Mikey would have most appreciated was what his brother SEALs did after his funeral in San Diego.

  As the pallbearers carried his coffin from the hearse, the SEALs lined up in a long column of twos, all the way to the grave site in Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery. As he was reverently passed down the center of that long line, each SEAL slapped down a gold Trident he had removed from his own uniform and pressed the medal hard into the wooden coffin. Step by deliberate step, the slaps rang out across the cemetery. They could be heard by everyone who was there, including President Bush. “The procession went on nearly half an hour,” the president said later, still obviously moved. “When it was all over, the simple wooden coffin had become a gold-plated memorial to a hero who will never be forgotten.”

  12

  SEVEN MONTHS

  The dance of battle is always played in the same impatient rhythm. What begins in a surge of violent motion is always reduced to the perfectly still.

  —SUN TZU

  * * *

  If I came back from a gunfight without leftover ammo, I was doing something wrong.

  I carried a heavy load any time we left Camp Habbaniyah. That meant seven, thirty-round magazines for my primary battle rifle, the M4, six of them in a chest rack on my body armor. Plus, I had one magazine already loaded and a round in the chamber ready to go. And I wasn’t scared to open up. But if you are the officer in charge of a gunfight and you’re constantly on your gun, you are no longer running the gunfight.

  There is an elemental connection between a shooter and his weapon. Shooting is the fun part. There is no denying that. But it doesn’t leave room for much else. When I am in that moment—looking down my sights, assessing my target, breathing calmly, squeezing smoothly, deciding whether I need to reengage—for that time at least, no one is running the shooters. No one is asking, “What would be a better position to fire from? Where am I moving the squad next? Is anybody hurt? Am I passing appropriate information back to higher authority? Do I have good verbal and radio communication with my squad? How long have we been in this fight? Is it time to break contact and move on? Do I need to toss some ammo to anyone? I’ve got extra.” That’s how you run a gunfight.

  This can be a difficult lesson for junior officers to learn. These are aggressive, hard-charging young men. They want to be shooters and gunfighters. But in my platoon, pretty much everyone had more kills than I had. I took tremendous satisfaction in that. I ran the gunfights where they got those kills. Every mission success meant I had done my job right. Their success was my success. We were a team.

  * * *

  Before I climbed into the gun truck for a mission, I liked to go back to my room. Very deliberately, I put on my gun belt and then the rest of my gear. Then my body armor. I checked my pistol—was it cleaned? Was it oiled? I did a press check to be sure a round was loaded and ready. Then I closed my eyes and touched every piece of gear in my kit. I tried to think if I was forgetting anything: I threw a smoke grenade last night. I need a new one … Are all my magazines topped off? … Do I have fresh batteries in my GPS?

  I never put my helmet on until I was inside the truck. And right before I went outside, I read my letter of the day.

  Before I left for Iraq, Tracy wrote me fifty letters. Then she collected letters from my family and friends. Letters of encouragement. Letters of love and support. From college friends, high school friends, distant relatives, all kinds of people I knew.

  If I opened one a day, I decided, I would have enough letters to last me almost my entire deployment.

  People wrote regular stuff. Things they remembered we did together. Restaurants I should definitely go to when I got back. Movies I had to see. “We’re thinking about you,” they wrote. “Please let us know if you need anything. We are so proud of what you are doing.” Those letters always brought me back to a normal place in my life.

  But then Mark and Mikey got killed. And I had a friend from college pass away back home. I looked at that big box of letters, and I started to think, What a shame if I don’t come back from some mission. I wouldn’t get to read them all.

  I had never peeked at the letters in advance before. I had stuck to one a day. I liked the surprise of that. But now I had this terrible quandary. Would it be a total breach of my own plan to read the letters early? I’d feel really guilty if something went wrong, if someone had taken the time to write a letter and I never even opened it.

  So midway through the deployment, I started reading two or three letters a day. I still kept them in order. I still read each one carefully.

  Then I walked out to the gun truck and put my helmet on.

  We have an expression in combat units. “The bi
ggest gun in any platoon is the green radio.” An Mk 48 machine gun is a powerful weapon. But a 105 mm howitzer round from an AC-130 gunship can take out a building.

  That’s why all SEALs learn the language of aviators. A little air support can turn a challenging gunfight into a hands-down triumph. So when we want rockets, bombs, and missiles raining down on our enemy, we have to communicate clearly with the warriors in the sky.

  We have our own system for calling in close-air support. Most units make a nine-line call, providing nine specific data points to the pilot. We abbreviate that to a five-line, including the unit’s location, the enemy’s location, details of the target, some visual signal, and a description of the impact after the strike. It’s not quite as thorough, but it gets the action started that much faster.

  And to be helpful, an experienced pilot doesn’t even need weapons.

  One day in early fall, my teammates and I were conducting a scout mission, finding the right spot for a new combat outpost. As we patrolled close to the Euphrates, we started taking fire from a known enemy hot spot. You couldn’t really call it a gunfight. We couldn’t quite tell where the bad guys were firing from. We knew the general direction, but it’s hard to hit a target you can’t see or locate.

  My radioman went onto the shared frequency, calling to any friendly aircraft nearby.

  One pilot answered immediately from the cockpit of an F/A-18 Super Hornet, a workhorse fighter jet.

  “I’m three minutes out,” he said. “But I’m Winchester. No bombs, no missiles. I got nothing left. Would a buzz help?”

  My guys and I glanced at each other.

  “Couldn’t hurt,” I said. And it wasn’t like we had many other options. We were shooting blindly, one round at a time.

  “Whatever you can do,” the radioman told the F-18 pilot. “Just flying by would be a help.”