Shock Factor

by Jack Coughlin

  A bolt of adrenaline struck Adam, the same way he’d get juiced when a buck appeared in front of his blind back home when he and Justin and Dale would bow hunt. All morning, these bastards had been mocking the Americans, but not anymore. Brown Sweater finally made a mistake.

  And signed his death warrant.

  Adam reached up with his left hand and set his dope to a hundred yards without ever taking his eye out of the scope. The Win Mag fired a one-hundred-ninety-grain cartridge at a flat trajectory with a velocity of twenty-five hundred yards per second. At this range, if he hit him, it would be like using a sledgehammer to drive a finishing nail.

  Adam forced himself to relax. Brown Sweater secured the RPG and stuffed it under his clothes.

  Adam centered his crosshairs just below the man’s heart. He was standing with his right side angled toward the school, with just enough of his chest visible for Adam to get a good target picture.

  He slid his index finger into the trigger guard. Brown Sweater hadn’t moved, but he wasn’t going to stay there all day. This was the moment. Adam pulled through and felt the trigger break. A split second later, the Win Mag kicked against his shoulder.

  Shit! I didn’t breathe through the shot!

  The 7.62mm round streaked downrange, leaving a faint vapor trail in its wake that some snipers can detect. The bullet struck Brown Sweater just above his heart, probably right in the breast bone.

  Damn. Too high. Was going for his pump house.

  Seemingly, in slow motion, Brown Sweater turned and looked up at the school’s fourth floor. It felt to Adam as if the two made eye contact again. This time, the anger and malice and cold hate radiating in those dark eyes were gone, replaced by a mix of surprise and utter despair. His eyebrows drooped, and his mouth opened.

  Then he toppled over a few feet from the door.

  Adam racked his Win Mag’s bolt. The spent casing spun out of the rifle and tinged off the desk before rolling off the edge and coming to rest on the floor below his hide. He slid the bolt back in place, jacking a fresh round into the chamber. The smell of gunpowder filled the room.

  Adam watched Brown Sweater as he lay in front of the door. Whoever had been inside was nowhere in sight now, leaving his insurgent buddy to bleed out on his front porch. He was down, but had he killed him? Adam wasn’t sure. He thought about taking a second shot to finish Brown Sweater, but realized that was a revenge impulse born from all the rage and frustration the morning had brought.

  Be professional. Keep it to that one shot.

  A flurry of moment caught his eye. From across the street to Adam’s left, another insurgent sprinted from the cover of an alleyway. He was going straight for Brown Sweater, AK-47 in hand. He wasn’t fast—in fact the man was pudgy and overweight. But he had courage to run after his downed comrade across an open street, something his pal in the doorway most certainly did not. As he ran, Adam recognized him as another one from the intersection gaggle.

  After shooting high with his first shot, Adam adjusted his aim slightly and put the crosshairs a little lower on the running man’s body. He tracked the insurgent as he reached the other side of the street and stopped beside Brown Sweater’s bloody, twitching body.

  The minute the pudgy Muj halted, Adam had him cold. He pulled the trigger, felt the Win Mag’s kick. An instant later the bullet punched through the Muj’s right side. It broke the man’s ribs and probably clipped a lung. Adam had hit him just below the mid-axillary line. Was it enough to kill him? The sniper wasn’t sure.

  Damn. Too low. Just a little too low this time.

  The second Muj dropped his AK and tumbled to the ground. Part of the building that jutted out toward the street blocked Adam’s view of where he fell so he couldn’t tell if his target was still alive or not.

  Movement in the doorway wrested Adam’s attention away from Brown Sweater and where his pal might have fallen. He shifted the scope slightly just in time to see a woman step outside. She saw Brown Sweater and began wailing. Even from his position almost two hundred yards away, Adam could hear her cries of anguish.

  She bent down and grabbed Brown Sweater’s now-still body, her own form wracked by her sobs. She pulled him toward the doorway, leaving a bloody streak on the ground in his wake. With a furious tug, she dragged him through the door. The last thing Adam saw were the man’s shoes vanish into the darkness beyond the doorway.

  A few minutes later, she stepped outside again to dump a bucket of soapy water onto what amounted to her front porch. The soap bubbles turned crimson as the water mingled with the blood drying there. She stood alone, staring down at the mess, still sobbing. Then she turned and went back inside, closing the door on all the violence that had gripped her neighborhood for months now.

  Who was Brown Sweater to her? Husband? Son? Brother? No way to tell. The Marines had their hands full all over the sector that morning and a squad could not be spared to investigate. Whoever he was, he’d been trying to kill the Americans in the streets around the new COP. No doubts there, and Adam would spare no sympathy for him. By dropping Brown Sweater, he knew he’d saved American lives.

  His life for saving some of ours.

  The sniper’s cold equation.

  Shouldn’t have been doing that, buddy.

  Adam and the rest of his platoon never saw what happened to the second Muj he’d shot. After he fell out of his field of view, the man was probably dragged off as well. Did he survive? Not likely. If he had, he would have had a long recovery ahead of him.

  After Adam took those two shots, the gaggle never returned. Neither did the pigeon flipper. Message received. You mess with the bulls of Team Five, you get the horns.

  There were four attacks against the COP that day, though. Several Marines were wounded; fortunately nobody was killed. All day long, the insurgents harassed the Americans with hit-and-run small-arms-fire attacks. They shot at the Humvee patrols with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. Other attacks were designed to draw attention away from teams of dedicated IED emplacers. Team Five learned that day how al-Qaida would do anything, use anyone to get those bombs in position.

  At one point, Marcus Luttrell, who had been hunkered down in a nearby room, spotted three terrified women pushing a handcart with an oil drum stashed inside it. Behind the women, a single armed Muj male moved with them, shielding his body with those of the women. Adam’s fellow snipers put a round into the oil drum, and one between two of the women that struck the ground directly under the Muj.

  The Shock Factor worked to the letter here. Precision fire, even when not fatal, can destroy an enemy’s morale. The three women froze, then panicked and ran back down the street. Their panic infected their Muj captor, and he bolted back into enemy territory as well, his flip-flops flying off his feet as he fled. The Marines investigated the oil drum and discovered an IED within it. Two shots from Team Five’s snipers served to foil what could have been a fatal attack.

  The SEAL platoon stayed at the 17th Street COP for five days. Altogether, they killed four insurgents, while one Marine on the roof of the building took a bullet in the back that passed down his leg and exited out at his knee. Adam was credited with the team’s first kill of the Ramadi deployment.

  The 17th Street COP gave the Americans a foothold in the Qatana District. For two years, the Qatana neighborhood had been a backbone of al-Qaida’s presence in Ramadi. Now the Coalition had just stuck a knife in it. But gaining the foothold was one thing—seizing control of the neighborhood would be a totally different challenge, one that would come at a heavy cost to Team Five and Adam’s circle of friends.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Sniper with a Rocket Launcher

  NOVEMBER 19, 2006

  RAMADI, IRAQ

  Heroic restraint.

  That’s what they called the courage needed to stay within the ROEs. With the new counterinsurgency doctrine now fully adopted, our strategy in Iraq had changed from one of overwhelming firepower to a kindler, gentler type of fighting that l
ooked more like neighborhood law enforcement with heavy weapons than a military operation. It took guts not to shoot on sight anything that resembled a legitimate target in a city where threats lurked around every corner, hid in every alley. Bombs, snipers, mortar barrages—the enemy practiced no heroic restraint, just suicide attacks, hit-and-run raids, and massive assaults on the forward COPs.

  Every time SEAL Team Five’s snipers pulled their triggers, the shooter reports had to be filed, investigations carried out. The men got to the point where they hated those things, and hated the sight of the JAG officers seemingly ready to second-guess every battlefield decision. After his first report, Adam told his OIC, “Boss, I suck at paperwork. Hell, I wouldn’t even know how to write my own name if it wasn’t stenciled on my gear.”

  The reports and ever-present reminders that one wrong move in combat could destroy a career, or even land a sniper in prison, affected Adam and everyone else whenever they went into the city. They grew cautious on the trigger, and at times males they were almost certain were enemies escaped their wrath simply because whatever they were doing did not fall into the narrow range of the ROEs.

  As difficult as these restrictions were for the SEALs and front-line troops, there was a point to heroic restraint. The civilians caught in the middle were the key to this fight, and the change of strategy began to make a difference to them. In one neighborhood, al-Qaida drove truck-mounted mortars into the streets almost every day to fire a few harassing rounds at the Coalition outposts nearby. The Coalition sometimes launched counterbarrages if the trucks could be pinpointed before they broke contact and sped away. The destruction the counterbombardment did to the neighborhood actually turned the locals against al-Qaida, not the Coalition. They rose up and tried to stop the enemy from launching their attacks from their neighborhood.

  Al-Qaida did not take kindly to such a rebellion. They stormed into the neighborhood and burned the sheik’s house down. They caught a sixteen-year-old boy, beheaded him, and delivered his head to one of the sheik’s police units. Then, in a wave of terror, they grabbed locals, trussed them up and tied them behind their vehicles. Shouting Jihadist slogans, they drove around the neighborhood with impunity, dragging their victims sometimes to their deaths.

  After al-Qaida beheaded more children, the local imam used the neighborhood’s mosque to declare holy war against the holy warriors. The sheik went to the Americans and solidified an alliance with the Coalition. American troops, with the help of the locals, swept the neighborhood and captured numerous insurgents. After that, al-Qaida entered that part of Ramadi only at their extreme peril.

  After that, more and more neighborhoods followed suit. They raised their own militias, their tribal leaders sent men to join the Iraqi Police (IP). More stations were established, and though the IPs left a lot to be desired with their professionalism and resistance toward graft, they started to show courage and heart. Dozens were killed manning checkpoints designed to foil vehicle-borne IED (VBIED) attacks in the city.

  As the Iraqi policemen died to protect their neighborhoods and the population slowly began to turn on al-Qaida, the flow of intelligence to American forces increased. This played to SEAL Team Five’s strengths as a surgical force, and the operators soon had plenty of specific individuals to hunt down on kill or capture direct-action missions.

  Adam volunteered for missions with both elements of the platoon. As long as he was in the city, he wanted to contribute as much as possible. During direct-action missions, he usually functioned as the team’s breacher, blowing doors with small strip-charges. He’d carried out many such missions in Mosul during his previous deployment, where he had learned never to assume what lay on the other side of the door. The bad guys they encountered inside these houses never offered serious resistance. The team caught them asleep, or overwhelmed them with sheer violence of action before they could find a weapon. But at times, as they were being detained, those they captured would take a swing at an operator. That never ended well for the insurgent, who usually ended up bruised and battered, facedown, and zip-cuffed.

  During one direct-action mission in Ramadi, the platoon hit a house harboring a known IED specialist. Taking out these bomb makers was one of the team’s top priorities, so the men were juiced for this mission. Adam breached the door, the operators flowed inside—only to find their man was not at home.

  Fair enough. In Ramadi, the Americans had to think on their feet and improvise. The operators faked an extraction, leaving behind a small contingent that included Adam. While he and a few others hunkered down in the house, one of the SEALs hid inside the family’s outhouse. Thinking all was clear, the bomb maker slipped into the courtyard sometime before dawn and decided to go relieve himself before he entered the house.

  He opened the outhouse door to find the barrel of a SIG Sauer pistol pointed at his forehead.

  Game over, Fucker.

  Except he didn’t know it. As one of the operators tried to zip-cuff him, the bomb maker bit him on the hand. Adam and a couple others came over to help, but the man refused to go quietly. He fought and struggled until the SEALs knocked him off his feet and kneed him in the face. After that, compliance was his watchword.

  Between the direct-action missions, Team Five’s snipers played a key role in expanding the Coalition’s hold on Ramadi. They covered the construction of new outposts and kept watch over Army and Marine patrols as they swept into hostile neighborhoods. Such missions helped take the pressure off the forward COPs and push the Coalition’s presence deeper into al-Qaida-held territory. These were risky missions, and the team faced new threats from a cunning and capable enemy who knew the terrain and had eyes everywhere.

  In the early hours of November 19, 2006, SEAL Team Five’s two platoons moved into the city to support an upcoming major Coalition operation in the Second Officers quarter of Ramadi. Nicknamed by the operators as the “P-Sectors” for the designations on their maps, the Seconds Officers quarter included the Al Iskan and Al Andols districts—both firmly controlled by al-Qaida.

  The plan called for Marine and Army elements, supported by Iraqi troops and police, to surge into the P-Sectors and root out the enemy by going house to house in search of weapons caches, intel, and insurgents. The mission was aggressive and would strike at the heart of a key al-Qaida stronghold in the city. The SEALs knew they would be in for a fight.

  Team Five’s platoon at Camp Corregidor was assigned to protect the eastern flank of the Marine units involved in the operation. Staging out of COP Eagle’s Nest, they were to take fifty men (SEALs, specialists, and their Iraqi Jundis, or soldiers) and set up three mutually supporting sniper overwatch positions before dawn.

  In the meantime, Adam’s platoon at Camp Lee would stage out of COP Iron and cover the patrols from two hide sites in the Al Iskan District. They’d be rolling out light that morning, having only a dozen operators and specialists, plus five Jundis to protect the Army’s flank.

  The Camp Corregidor SEALs reached their assigned buildings without incident, only to discover they couldn’t see enough of the neighborhood from two of them. The nature of the buildings and streets in Ramadi were such that the high ground that provided good, unobstructed views was difficult to find. This made the three-hundred-sixty-degree protection of any site they did pick very difficult. Most every building would have blind spots—ones that the enemy frequently had already identified and knew how to exploit.

  The special operations snipers flexed and found two new positions that gave them better visibility on the neighborhood. They secured them, finding the families inside sullen and hostile—characteristics of areas long in al-Qaida’s control. But as the snipers set up their hides, they discovered that the teams could not see each other’s positions. There were too many buildings and obstacles between them. The original idea had been to pick three sites that could cover each other in case of attack. Now, each hide would be out on its own little island.

  Across the quarter, Adam and his platoon departed f
rom COP Iron at about 0200. They moved through the city on foot for over a kilometer and a half before reaching their two selected sites. The first, a three-story house, had already been secured by a squad of 1st Armored Division soldiers, which made things easy for the SEALs. Adam went up to the roof with his spotter and the team’s JTAC (joint terminal attack controller), whom everyone had nicknamed “Fizbo.” He was a Navy fighter-bomber pilot, and had already earned the SEALs respect for his dedication, professionalism, and repeated attempts to get bombs on enemy fighters during skirmishes with the enemy. Each time their chain of command had denied the request, but Fizbo’s persistence impressed the operators.

  The Camp Lee element’s other sniper team set up in a house about a block away from the initial hide. They had good visibility from both positions and could support each other easily, as only a ruined building stood between them.

  Adam built his hide on the third floor and started the morning spotting for “Mark,” another one of the team’s snipers. Adam had volunteered to go out with the Gold element of the Camp Lee–based platoon, as they were short-handed that morning, so he was working with operators he knew well but had not gone out into the city with many times yet.

  Mark had steadied his match-grade SPR .223 caliber rifle with a shooting stick instead of a bipod. This looks just like a big “Y” and the barrel of the weapon rests in its crook. Adam hunkered down beside him with a pair of binoculars. Together, they started mapping out their assigned sector, lasing the key features so they knew the ranges to them.

  Three hundred yards from their hide, the road dead-ended at a T-intersection. They couldn’t see much beyond the buildings on the south side of it, so that became the limit of their field of view to the south that morning.

  After sunrise, some of the other SEALs caught sight of numerous unarmed military-aged males. Some strolled around the street, trying without success to look casual and not like they were looking for where the Americans had set up shop. A few were even less subtle. They peeked out from around corners, or lurked in the alleyways where they stared at the rooftops. Adam and Mark listened to the chatter as their brothers reported what was going on, but they didn’t see any of this themselves. At least not at first.