Shock Factor

by Jack Coughlin

  Sergeant Kevin Homestead, a member of 3/5’s scout sniper platoon, shot him dead with three shots from his M4 before the insurgent could get the car into gear. When a patrol from Kilo Company, 3/5 went to secure the car, they discovered the rifle inside it was one of the M40s taken off the Marines killed in Ramadi in 2004. The enemy sniper had dumped the expensive Unertl scope the rifle originally carried, replacing it with a cheap Tasco. Other than that, the weapon was intact.

  Countersniper operations consumed both sides as the struggle for Ramadi unfolded. Jim Gilliland scored the most impressive countersniper kill in Ramadi, and quite possibly the Iraq War. The previous September, as his Shadow Team occupied the Ramadi Inn, an al-Qaida sniper killed one of Gilliland’s friends and fellow NCOs from the 2/69 as he helped lead a patrol. With the men in the street pinned down by the enemy gunman, they radioed for help, telling Jim that the sharpshooter was using a hospital for his hide. Gilliland was 1,250 yards from the hospital—technically out of the M24s performance envelope. Yet desperate times call for extreme measures. He glassed the hospital and found the enemy sniper lurking in the shadows of a fourth-floor room. He was partially concealed, giving the American only a waist-up shot.

  Gilliland was using a Leupold scope accurate to a thousand yards, and his weapon was considered accurate out to seven hundred. To kill the sniper, he had to make a rough series of calculations in his head. Gilliland’s M24 was the only one the team possessed that hadn’t been painted. As a result, the men called it the “Black Gun.” This was the sort of shot the M82 Barrett would have been more suited to take, but Gilliland had the Black Gun already against his shoulder and he didn’t want to expend critical time maneuvering the heavier .50 cal into place. In that interim, the enemy sniper could kill another American.

  He took aim at a point twelve feet above the sniper’s lair, then pulled the trigger. The 7.62mm bullet arced across the city and struck the insurgent in the chest. He grimaced and fell over out of sight. A subsequent patrol found him dead, the single 7.62 bullet center mass his only wound.

  At the time, Gilliland’s shot was the longest 7.62 kill of the Iraq War. It did nothing to deaden the pain of losing Staff Sargeant Jason Benford, the al-Qaida sniper’s victim and close friend of many in Shadow Team.

  Layered into countersniper operations in Ramadi were raids conducted on known al-Qaida hideouts. American intelligence developed information on where some of these snipers hunkered down between missions, and U.S. patrols went after them in their lairs. In one attack, an al-Qaida sniper was killed in a safe house northeast of Ramadi. When the Americans searched his dwelling, they discovered a pile of videotapes documenting all the shots he’d taken on Coalition troops.

  The enemy also made a point of going after American snipers. In September 2006, Chris Kyle’s sister platoon from SEAL Team Three had kicked out a four-man sniper element to overwatch a section of Ramadi. In the morning of the twenty-ninth, the element’s snipers killed two insurgents. The enemy made a concerted effort to drive the SEALs off the rooftop. The Americans came under heavy small-arms fire, and an RPG narrowly missed them. Mike Monsoor, a machine gunner with the platoon, took up a firing position between the two snipers and returned fire.

  Suddenly, a grenade sailed over the parapet, thrown by an insurgent who had carefully crept toward the SEALs position until he was virtually beneath it. The grenade hit Mike in the chest and bounced to the roof between his brother SEALs. Shouting a warning, he dove on the grenade as it detonated, shielding his teammates from its blast with his body. He died thirty minutes later. President George W. Bush later awarded Mike Monsoor the Medal of Honor for his supreme, selfless act of bravery.

  Mike was Team Three’s second casualty in a matter of weeks. On August 2, 2006, part of Charlie Platoon had sortied into central Ramadi to provide overwatch support for an Iraqi Army sweep of a particularly dangerous neighborhood. Chris Kyle was part of that element, which bounded forward to establish a position in a battered apartment complex. Moments after getting on the roof, Chris and his fellow SEALs came under accurate small-arms fire. As they scrambled for cover, an al-Qaida sniper fired a shot at Chris’s friend Ryan Job. Job was manning a machine gun that morning. The sniper’s bullet struck the Mark 48s upper receiver and fragmented. Parts of it ricocheted into Ryan’s right eye and cheek, knocking him over. The SEALs quickly administered aid and evacuated their wounded brother.

  Ryan lost his right eye and the vision in his left. Though blinded by the al-Qaida gunman, he returned to the States determined to live life to the utmost. He learned to hunt again and bagged an elk on one outing. In 2009 he climbed Mount Rainier, one of the most technical and difficult mountains in the United States. He became an inspiration to thousands of wounded warriors, only to die at the hands of a nurse during his final surgery to reconstruct his face. In post-op, a nurse administered an overdose of painkillers, taking the life of one of America’s most beloved SEALs.

  Through 2004 and 2005, the fighting in Ramadi had simmered and smoldered. When the American slow-motion offensive to capture the city once and for all began in June 2006, the fighting flared into full-scale kinetic warfare. There was no attempt at winning the hearts and minds here, it was a straight-up slugfest with the snipers on both sides shaping the nature of the fight and the tactics employed. In the months ahead, the Iraq War would be won or lost within the streets of the Al Anbar capital.

  And at this critical junction, SEAL Team Three rotated home after a long, bloody, and successful tour of duty. Replacing them in the city would be SEAL Team Five, an experienced unit whose ranks included legendary SEAL Marcus Luttrell, as well as a backwoods country-boy-turned-elite-sniper Adam Downs.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Pigeon Flipper

  SEAL Team Five arrived in Ramadi starting in late September 2006, set to replace Mike Monsoor’s Team Three. Composed of a solid backbone of veterans of both Afghanistan and Iraq, Team Five included perhaps the best-known SEAL in the Navy, Marcus Luttrell. Marcus had been severely wounded in Afghanistan during Operation Red Wings when the four-man reconnaissance team he was with was attacked by hundreds of enemy fighters. The other three operators assigned to the recon element were killed, along with eight more SEALs and eight air crew who died when an RPG struck their CH-47 Chinook helicopter. Thirty years old, standing six foot five, Marcus returned to duty with Team Five after only partially recovering from his wounds. He would endure agonizing pain throughout his Ramadi deployment, though he never let it stop him from getting back out in the field with his brothers.

  In Team Five, Marcus was reunited with one of his close friends from earlier in his Navy career. Adam Downs met Marcus when they attended a SEAL training school together. Though Marcus was raised in Houston, Texas, and Adam grew up in backwoods Illinois, the two formed a close friendship based on their mutual love of the outdoors and hunting.

  Adam prided himself on being a good ol’ boy, and the men in his platoon called him the “Redneck Mujahideen.” Rock-solid in a fight, devoted to his brother SEALs and to the mission, he’d gained a reputation for fierce loyalty and reliability on the battlefield during his first combat deployment to Iraq the year before. With Team Five, he could usually be found with a cigar in his mouth and a half-chewed old stogie stuffed away somewhere in his kit. He told Marcus and the other guys in the platoon that his old unit had not taken a single casualty when he carried that old cigar with him. It became his good-luck talisman, and he made a point of never leaving the wire without it in Ramadi.

  Though both Adam and Marcus were combat veterans, nothing they’d ever experienced approached the ongoing mental and physical grind they encountered in the killing ground of Ramadi.

  OCTOBER 2006

  RAMADI, IRAQ

  SEAL Team Five’s Alpha Platoon slipped through the gate at COP Firecracker and plunged into the darkened streets. It was after midnight: vampire hours for the men of Naval Special Warfare. The men wore their unit patch, a kicking bull, on their ri
ght shoulders. Mess with the bull, get the horns.

  Tonight, they would seize a building in south-central Ramadi that had been picked as the site of the Marine’s next COP. With ten snipers, Alpha Platoon’s mission would be to reach out and touch anyone who tried to interfere with the COP’s construction.

  The building selected had been an Iraqi Army facility at some point. Before that it had housed a small college before the war forced its abandonment. Most recently, it had served as a base of operations for al-Qaida in this section of the city. Surrounded by an oval stretch of road, it looked like a typical concrete government building in the middle of a traffic circle, which the Americans had dubbed “the racetrack.”

  Adam Downs loped along with the rest of his squad. They kept about twenty yards spacing between each man—just in case somebody triggered an IED or the element suddenly took automatic weapon’s fire.

  This was Adam’s first mission as a sniper. He’d been a machine gunner and a medic with his first platoon in 2004. He’d spent that deployment protecting Iraqi politicians, which he and the rest of his team hated. Politicians were bad enough, but the Iraqi ones were a particular brand of self-serving, loathsome cowards, and the SEALs came to detest their charges.

  At the end of their deployment, Adam’s platoon was finally unchained from protecting “public servants” and turned loose on direct-action missions in northern Iraq around Mosul. Those ops lead to his first firefights.

  On this night, Adam had done what a lot of rookie NFL players do before their first game: they’ll overload themselves. They put on way too many pads and get so armored up that they lose the agility that attracted their coaches in the first place. Easy to do. In Adam’s case, he’d taken too much gear along. He was a jack-of-all-trades for Alpha Platoon, a sniper, a qualified and experienced breacher, as well as a combat medic. Each specialization required specialized gear, and on his first time out in all three roles, Adam tried to carry everything. His utility belt sported more gizmos than Batman’s, including two breaching explosive charges, an emergency airway kit, six tourniquets, and a radio.

  He’d slung his .300 Win Mag bolt-action rifle over his back, then strapped his assault pack over it. The pack was full of more gear—40mm He rounds for the M203 grenade launcher mounted under the barrel of his M4 carbine, more medical stuff, batteries, his ghilly suit, the olive drab screens he planned to use to camouflage his hide, plus MREs and a single bottle of water. “I didn’t want to look like a pussy,” he later recalled about the minimal amount of water he carried.

  “But I did have a Satanic amount of ammunition—something like eleven or twelve magazines.” Altogether, with his body armor, helmet, Rhodesian vest (or chest rig) that held his spare ammunition, and two weapons, Adam probably lugged close to ninety pounds into the city that night.

  Marcus Luttrell, who was his team’s acting chief, checked on him. The two had been friends for years, and had come together in Team Five after Marcus became the Lone Survivor of a Seal Team Ten fire team from Operation Red Wings in Afghanistan the previous year. They’d gone through 18 Delta Combat Medic school together, and Adam always credited Marcus with getting him to graduation. “Marcus,” Adam later said, “taught me how to study. He pulled me through all those classes.”

  “How ya holdin’ up?” Luttrell asked him.

  Another thousand yards and I’ll be ready to turn a gun on myself.

  No way was he going to complain or show weakness. Marcus was setting the standard for toughness within the platoon. He was a walking case study of ground-pounder injuries—his back was jacked up, his thumb and wrist and knees were all in various states of agony. While some guys would be content with Med Hold, or a desk gig, Marcus sucked it up, never bitched, and stayed at the tip of the spear.

  Adam exhaled sharply and whispered, “I’m good to go.”

  Next mission, he was going to prioritize all this shit. It felt like his spine was compressing.

  Gunfire rang out in the distance. Through his night vision, Adam could see the greenish flares of fires burning somewhere in the city. They cast an eerie glow over the man-made horizons of the buildings that flanked this battle-damaged avenue.

  As they approached the target building, the platoon peeled off into a narrow alley. They’d come at it from an unexpected quarter—unfortunately this meant scaling a wall. The SEALs climbed over it one at a time. When Adam hauled himself over it, all the extra weight caused him to lose his balance. He slipped and fell hard against his assault pack—and the .300 Winchester Magnum rifle beneath it.

  Fuck this Ninja shit.

  He picked himself up and kept moving as he cursed under his breath. He hoped his Win Mag and its Nightforce scope were okay.

  This section of the city had once been a ramshackle slum. Trash lay everywhere in stinking heaps, and abandoned, half-ruined dwellings lined the alley.

  They reached the racetrack and stacked up on the target building. A moment later, at an unspoken command, Alpha Platoon poured inside.

  The place had been a carnival of horrors, a base where al-Qaida abused the locals who had dared oppose them. Some were perhaps unfortunates who violated the Shuria Law al-Qaida had implemented in ’hoods they controlled. Caught smoking? Al-Qaida’s adherents would sometimes kill the offender on the spot. Other times they’d cut off his smoking fingers. Those who were beardless, or violated the dictates of al-Qaida’s dress code, would find themselves abducted off the street and tortured in a place like this one.

  The SEALs went from room to room, finding blood splatters on walls, dried blood pooled on floors, and more splashed across tables. Steel spikes, rusty iron rods, pliers and knives provided testimony to what had been happening here.

  Sickened by what they’d found, the men secured the building and began to establish overwatch positions on the fourth floor. Adam began to construct his hide in the back of what had been a science classroom of some sort. Bottles and bunsen burners, sinks and rows of work spaces dominated the room. The windows had long since been shot out or shattered, leaving an unobstructed field of fire to the south. This was the most likely avenue of approach the enemy would use should they try to stop construction of the new COP, and Adam relished the opportunity to take the fight to them. Mike Monsoor and Marc Lee had died only two months before; in Naval Special Warfare, the community was so small everyone either knew each other, or knew their reputation. Team Five had arrived in Ramadi eager to avenge the loss of Team Three’s beloved brothers.

  Adam set up his olive drab screens between the windows and the back of the classroom. Then he found some relatively undamaged—and nonbloodstained—tables that he dragged over to the far corner. He put two together and hefted a third atop them. Then he found a bench and slid that up there as well. When he climbed into his hide, he noted with satisfaction that he had a great view of the street and nearby buildings.

  He settled into his spot and began his turn behind the Win Mag. Before he’d left the COP for this mission, he’d covered his face with cami paint, a ritual that dated back to his days in southern Illinois hunting with his best friend Justin and his father, Dale. Now he pressed his eye into the Nightforce and glassed the street. No movement yet, but the hour was still early.

  He settled down and fell into his hunter’s zone: a combination of patience and alertness. He’d learned both in tree stands around Elko as a teenager. When he was ten, Dale had selected a Ben Pearson compound bow for Adam that Adam’s father then purchased as a Christmas gift for him. He and Justin spent hours sending arrows into paper plates taped to hay bales. Later, they went to archery tournaments—Justin was one of the best archers in his age group. Dale mentored both boys, and after they turned fourteen, he began to take them bow hunting.

  For Adam, sitting in a hide in Ramadi in his zone brought back the best moments of his childhood. Those tree stands. Hours and hours of nothing but quiet waiting and camaraderie. Except this time, instead of waiting for a buck to come by, he was keeping watch over young A
mericans and trying to keep them safe.

  The Army’s combat engineers showed up with all the material needed for the construction of the new outpost. They’d gotten so good at this that the troops referred to it as “COP in a Box.”

  Seize, hold, expand. That was the strategy, and each COP pushed al-Qaida that much further into a corner from which its fighters could not escape. Their days of operating at will within the city were numbered. The insurgents realized it, and the fight had become increasingly tenacious.

  The sun rose, and the new day began. People began moving around the city, and the insurgents were certainly reconning the new American position. Around the racetrack the engineers worked furiously against the clock to fortify the COP before the first attack inevitably came. Adam and “Dave” watched them work as Marine patrols arrived to provide extra security. They dismounted and moved out with a Humvee or two in support.

  Look at those guys down there. Half of ’em were dating the prom queen this time last year. Now they’re just trying to stay alive in this fucked-up place.

  This mission had meaning. In a war where orders often made no sense, and so much waste was evident everywhere, this moment, this place, had purpose. With his Win Mag, he could keep those Americans below alive. That was if the Rules of Engagement, the ROEs, didn’t get in the way. Even if they did, he’d pull the trigger and let the administrative chips fall where they may later if it meant saving an American life.