Shock Factor

by Jack Coughlin

  There were the occasional exceptions. Adam had long since grown accustomed to switching roles depending on the mission demands. One night, he’d go out with his SR-25 and cover American patrols. Another, he’d be blowing doors for an entry team assigned to a kill or capture mission. Even after the hard fight on November 19, Adam continued to volunteer with both the Blue and Gold Camp Lee elements.

  One night, during a kill or capture mission against a particularly ruthless IED maker, Adam set a strip charge on the man’s front door, stepped clear, and blew it. At the same time, the IED maker had heard the entry team reach his house and had pushed a couch in front of his door in hopes of slowing them down. As he stood in front of the door, the charge went off. Normally, these are such small explosions that only the door suffers damage. This time, in what had to be a moment of supreme karma, the bomb maker happened to be standing in the most optimal place and distance to the blast to suffer from it.

  The SEALs pushed through the door, finding the splintered couch in their way and their target lying toward the back of the room. As part of the team cleared the house, Adam, functioning now as the element’s corpsman, crouched next to the wounded insurgent and assessed his condition. The strip charge had blown off three of his fingers and studded his face with wooden splinters from the door (and probably the couch). His legs were torn open and bleeding as well.

  Whatever fight he had in him was gone now. The SEALs secured the house and kept the rest of the family safe while Adam worked on the wounded Muj. One of the chiefs with the team that night then had a moment of inspiration. Part of the SEALs role in Ramadi was to help prepare the Iraqi Army and Iraqi Police to function independently. They were a long way off from that, but they had made significant progress since the previous spring. To the chief, this seemed like the perfect moment to help mentor the Iraqi medic who had accompanied the Jundi scouts that night.

  The Iraqis knelt beside the Muj and as Adam talked them through each treatment step. They applied direct pressure to his worst injuries, then placed a battle dressing on his legs and hand. The Iraqis carried him to a waiting Humvee and evacuated him to the combat support hospital outside the city.

  When the team reached the hospital, the Muj was carried inside after being identified to the staff as an enemy combatant. As he was taken into an operating room, an officer assigned to the hospital approached Adam and asked, “Why didn’t you just kill him?”

  Thoughts of courts-martial, shooter statements, and moments of uncertainty on the battlefield floated through Adam’s mind as he struggled to answer that.

  Blow me! You think I want to go to prison, asshole?

  The words started to form, but Adam managed to hold them in check. His outspokenness within the platoon had already caused some to label him a problem child, and picking a fight with a REMF—a rear echelon motherfucker—would only make things harder on him.

  He toned his response down a notch, “Well, I didn’t really want to be court-martialed.”

  The officer thought this over, then asked, “How’d it happen?”

  “He got hit on a breach.”

  The officer nodded. “Okay, is the breacher here?”

  “Also me” was Adam’s curt reply.

  The officer grew agitated. “And you didn’t clean up your own mess?”

  Adam’s temper flared. The son of a bitch was getting on his case for not killing an unarmed man because it meant more work for him. From a rear-echelon type, this was insufferable.

  “Look, we didn’t use anything unusual. Just a strip of C-two. He was trying to barricade the door. We had no idea he was on the other side when I clacked off the charge.”

  The officer scowled, then vanished into the hospital’s interior. The Muj lived, but he damn sure never made a bomb again.

  Such moments were a reminder that as chaotic as combat could be, the politics and consequences of every decision and action would be scrutinized by a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacks. That scrutiny made each decision in the field harder to make. At times, the Muj capitalized on those moments.

  Not long after the November 19 firefight, Blue Element from Camp Lee sortied into the city again to conduct another overwatch operation. They returned to the neighborhood of grenade-pitchers, where the Corregidor SEALs had been hit in November and Mike Monsoor had been killed the previous summer. This place was guaranteed action—nobody had any illusions otherwise.

  They went in as stealthy as possible. Departing from COP Eagle’s Nest, they patrolled toward their target building in the darkness, using no white light at all. They kept noise to a minimum and relied on their night vision to see the way ahead.

  When they reached the house they wanted, the front gate was locked. This neighborhood was like a fortress. Reinforced, nine-foot walls surrounded every compound, including this one. The gate off the street was wide enough to allow entry to a car or small pickup truck. One of the Blue Element SEALs carried a lock pick set, and he stepped forward to use it. A moment later, the gate swung open.

  Silently, the team flowed into the compound past laundry hung and fluttering in the soft night breeze. A small stand-alone garage stood nearby, a sedan parked inside. The Americans reached the front door. In Ramadi, the SEALs never knew who would be on the other side of the door. Taking a soft approach and knocking could be an invite to a hail of bullets from some die-hard zealot hiding inside. Conversely, blowing the door risked hurting the very people the Americans were here to protect.

  It was a devil’s choice.

  The SEALs knocked. A moment later, a sleepy-eyed middle-aged man opened the door and greeted the men coldly. The team’s commander and interpreter explained the situation. The SEALs needed their house for a few hours. The family would be free to go about their day inside, but they would not be able to leave until the SEALs exfilled. If any part of their property was damaged, the U.S. government would compensate them.

  The head of the Iraqi family reluctantly allowed the SEALs to enter his house. The women and children stayed close to him, but their fear and uncertainty was palpable. The fact was, no matter where their loyalties lay, the arrival of the Americans now made their home a target for al-Qaida.

  And in Ramadi, there were eyes everywhere, watching.

  The SEALs had tried to get into the house as quietly as possible. They’d encountered no opposition, seen no enemy during the infil. Whatever little noise they had generated during their patrol in was most likely masked by the sound of gunfire and explosions in nearby neighborhoods.

  Yet on every mission they’d always been compromised. Kids working for al-Qaida kept watch from alleys. Jihadist snipers lay in urban hides observing critical areas. Ordinary citizens revealed what they’d seen in hopes of sparing their families and themselves from al-Qaida’s wrath.

  As Adam recalled later, “No matter how low our signature, they always knew where we were.”

  This time the SEALs were determined to surprise the enemy. So far, so good. The team secured the house and set up shop. Some of the operators stayed downstairs to pull security and keep an eye on the family. Meanwhile, the Blue Element snipers climbed onto the roof to establish hide sites along with two machine gunners. The gunners set up to the north, keeping the rear of the compound under surveillance so the enemy could not sneak up on the SEALs from that direction. Adam and his spotter went to the southeast corner of the roof. The other sniper and his spotter took station on the southwest corner. Altogether, six of the thirteen-man element occupied the rooftop.

  After all he’d seen in Ramadi, Adam was determined to build a hide site that could not be seen. He wanted to catch the enemy unawares. No more fuck-fuck games of unarmed insurgents celebrating in the street and mocking the Americans. He wanted to catch them, armed and up to no good, then close them out. Surprise would negate al-Qaida’s manipulation of the ROEs.

  Like most houses in Ramadi, this one had a three-foot-tall parapet running along the roof’s perimeter. After what happened in November, popping u
p over the parapet seemed like a bad idea. As a result, the spotters had brought periscopes along, and the snipers planned to create loopholes in the wall.

  When I was in Somalia in 1993, we encountered the same situation. To stay out of sight and be unobtrusive, we would create loopholes in the parapets, then conceal ourselves behind them. We quickly found that knocking holes in concrete, even the substandard stuff used in the Third World, is no easy task. It took sledgehammers and chisels, or explosives to make the holes large enough to be usable. The problem was, either option tended to blow our low signature. Plus sledgehammers are very heavy, and carrying them around in a combat environment is not something any of us liked doing.

  We discovered a work around—long, hand-cranked drills. We used them to bore out a hole, then we’d enlarge it with other tools. The noise they made was minimal, and we could do it while remaining under the parapet and unexposed to the rest of the city—something we couldn’t do with the sledges.

  Camp Lee didn’t have any hand-crank drills, so the only options available to Adam and the other snipers were sledgehammers and C2 charges. Using sledges took a lot of time, plus they made a unique sound that would have certainly alerted any insurgents or observers to the presence of the SEAL element. But in Ramadi, explosions shook the city constantly, even at night. The operators settled on using small C2 packets, known as Ghostbuster Charges. They figured the blasts would blend into the background cacophony. Plus, there would only be two used almost simultaneously, which would minimize the enemy’s ability to zero in on their location, should they want to investigate the source of the explosions.

  Adam set his C2 charge at the same time the other sniper team emplaced theirs on the far side of the roof. A moment later, they detonated them both. Adam’s charge created a perfect loophole, but the other charge must have been placed on a structurally weak spot of the parapet. It blew the entire corner off, which created great visibility, but Uncle Sam’s taxpayers would have to pick up the repair bill.

  The snipers settled into their spots and went to work improving their hides. Dawn was still a few hours away, so they had plenty of time before the insurgents liked to come out and play. Few risked moving around at night, knowing that the technology the Americans carried gave them a huge advantage in the darkness.

  Adam positioned his SR-25 on its bipod, its suppressor set back from the eight-by-eight loophole. Using 550 Cord, he strung a tan screen in front of the SR-25’s barrel and then built overhead concealment with his poncho liner. That way, when the sun came up, he would not be backlit to anyone looking at his loophole from ground level.

  To counter any insurgent attempt to get on the roof, as they had on November 19, the SEALs set up Claymore mines hung against the outside parapet. Any Jihadist who thought he was Spiderman would climb up the wall and trigger a hailstorm of seven hundred polished ball bearings, each precisely an eighth of an inch in diameter. Setting one of those off was guaranteed to turn a human being into a fine red mist.

  A few hours before dawn, Adam and his spotter, Bud, were in position and had already prepped their field of view. Using their PVS-22 night scope, they had eyes on an intersection two hundred twenty-one yards to the south. On the northwest corner of the intersection stood an abandoned school. Across the street to the south was a store of some kind that seemed to still be functioning. The rest of the neighborhood was composed largely of walled compounds, one abutting the other. Most shared at least one common wall. Alleys and side streets delineated each block.

  Adam’s loophole gave him a good, if narrow, view of the intersection. Around 0400, he detected movement at the intersection. At first, only one military-aged male appeared. He was unarmed, but he was looking around furtively. That made Adam instantly suspicious. He focused in on the man and watched him like a hawk. He didn’t seem to have any clue there were eyes on him. A few minutes later a truck pulled up and stopped half in and half out of Adam’s field of view. Three more military-aged males climbed out. They all stood together for a few minutes, chatting and looking around, then they went toward the back of the truck and out of Adam’s view. A couple of them reappeared as they walked into the store on the southwest corner of the intersection.

  Who makes deliveries in Ramadi at 0400?

  Nobody.

  This smelled wrong. Bud and Adam talked it over. Neither man had a good view of the truck, and they could only see the males in the street from about the rib cage up. And most of the time they couldn’t see their arms either. They were able to confirm they carried no weapons, but still this seemed very wrong.

  The men came back out of the shop, climbed into the truck, and drove off. Adam swapped out with Bud in order to catch a quick nap. The day would be a long one, and both men would take turns ensuring they had something of a sleep cycle.

  At 0500, Adam woke up and spelled Bud on the SR-25. The sun was starting to come up by then, so he pulled the PVS-22 off the SR-25’s rail mount and stuck his eye in the scope. Yellow-orange light was just starting to stream across the street and intersection below, casting sharp shadows created by the buildings to the east.

  From out of the shadows came one of the military-aged males again. He was scowling with that tough-guy, I’m-in-charge sort of look that he’d seen on insurgents’ faces before. He stopped in the street, glanced around, as if he were conspiring to do something. The truck returned, and the others piled out again. They disappeared behind the truck, then reappeared briefly. Bud and Adam could only see them from the ribs up again, but it looked as if each man was carrying something heavy with both arms. They went into the store.

  The snipers talked this over. It looked like these guys were resupplying a forward cache, something al-Qaida did all the time. In the heat of a fight, the insurgents knew exactly which building, shop, or house to run to if they needed ammo, water, explosives, or medical supplies. The SEALs had seen it many times, those buildings became focal points of activity during sustained firefights.

  Two hundred twenty-one yards. An easy range, but a difficult shot since the men were moving around and Adam could only see them from mid–rib cage to the top of their heads. The elevation would not be an issue this time as the snipers were only two stories up. Wind was light to negligible.

  Adam and Bud decided it was doable. If any of the four revealed a weapon or military supplies, the insurgents would fall within the ROEs and they could take the shot. As it stood, they knew something was wrong with the unfolding scene down the street, but both knew if they opened fire, their shooter’s statement would be closely scrutinized.

  The military-aged men reemerged to gather in the street again. They stood together, talking and taking sidelong glances around the intersection for several more minutes. Adam watched through his scope reticle set on one of them.

  Just give me a reason.

  No weapons. No military supplies. What if they were bringing in wares for a legitimate business?

  As if there were any left in this place.

  Adam made the decision. He knew, sensed, and felt these guys were bad. Ordinary citizens didn’t act this way in Ramadi. Their scowls, the way they glanced around, the way they postured in that too-cool-for-school sort of way that he’d seen other insurgents mimic, plus their age—it all added up to al-Qaida.

  The neighborhood was another indicator. This place was bad karma, one of the P-Sectors that had always been contested whenever the SEALs had gone into it. They’d been given a little more latitude to engage in this area, simply because of the level of resistance typical there.

  Adam resolved to engage these guys and close them out. He told Bud, who agreed. The shooter statement remained in the backs of their minds, but this was the right call.

  Before they had a chance to open fire, the men by the truck scattered. The truck drove away without at least three of the men.

  Minutes passed. The street remained empty, the shop dark and seemingly abandoned.

  What were these guys up to?

  They hadn�
�t had any visible weapons. Adam started second-guessing himself. Should he have opened fire earlier? Where had they gone? His narrow field of view through the loophole left him frustrated. Bud swept the neighborhood with his periscope, but saw no sign of them either.

  Adam checked his watch. Fifteen minutes had passed since they’d last been in the street. Could the truck be going back for another delivery run?

  Something black sailed over the west side of the parapet. It hit Bud’s leg and rolled onto the roof.

  “Mother fuck! Grenade!” Bud shouted.

  Adam leaped to his feet to see the device right beside his spotter. Bud kicked it as hard as he could, and it skipped across the roof toward the north wall even as both SEALs flung themselves toward the second-floor doorway.

  Adam and the rest of the men on the roof piled into the second-floor main room, but Bud was still trying to get in when the grenade exploded. Shrapnel tore into his leg. He reached the doorway and leapt inside the comparative safety of the main room on the second floor.

  Another grenade arched overhead. It landed with uncanny precision in the other sniper team’s hide on the southeast corner of the roof, where it exploded.

  Adam untangled himself from the pile of pissed-off operators. As he stood up, Bud calmly asked, “Hey, dude, can you look at this?”

  Adam went over to his friend and examined his wounds. He’d taken shrapnel in his heel, and his leg had a nasty gash. It looked painful, but not too serious.

  “Yeah,” Adam said nonchalantly. “You’re okay.”

  He set to work bandaging his brother’s wounds.

  With their cover blown, their OIC made the decision to extract and get Bud medical help. The SEALs called back to the nearest Army outpost and asked for Bradleys that had been standing by again as a quick reaction force.