Shock Factor

by Jack Coughlin

  One block at a time, one neighborhood converted and secured. Al-Qaida fought for every inch of the city—they’d declared Ramadi the capital of the Islamic Caliphate of Iraq in October 2006. This would be where they made their stand, and they would stop at nothing to secure victory.

  And men like Adam? Every time they pulled the trigger, they had to write a report justifying why.

  As he settled down for his first watch that morning, Adam reflected on his encounter with the Iraqi family. He was a two-tour veteran of Iraq. He’d been in firefights large and small. In each, he fought to protect his brother SEALs, or his fellow Americans. For him, that was what the war here was about—keeping Americans alive so they could return to their families.

  Now it was something more. Everyone said we could not kill our way to victory in Ramadi. Al-Qaida always found more bodies to throw into the fight, and sooner or later we were going to leave this forsaken place.

  The only answer was families like the one downstairs. They needed protection. Their spirit and their belief that this nightmare would end only with America’s help had to be preserved until the Iraqis themselves could face al-Qaida on more than even terms.

  The Americans went into the Iraqi police station without incident. The engineers came out with all their equipment and gear—their COP in a Can—and set up the force protection. Another neighborhood saved from al-Qaida’s clutch. At least for now. The inevitable counterattack had yet to materialize.

  Days later, when Blue Element left the apartment and returned to Camp Lee, Adam sat down at his computer. He hated computers. He’d rather be stacking seabags than writing e-mails and had never gotten into games or video consoles. He’d spent his youth out in the woods with his pal Justin, hunting with their Rugers at first, later with bows. That’s the life he wanted again.

  But what will tomorrow bring?

  Adam brought up his e-mail account and pecked out a note to his mother back home in small-town Illinois. He thought of home, the church he’d attended until he left for the Navy and how his mom still attended it regularly. He wrote about the family he’d met and asked her to put the old man, his wife and children into the church prayer list that Sunday.

  Their salvation would be our victory.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Al-Qaida’s Graveyard

  The Iraqis worked under the summer sun, seemingly oblivious to the stench. They’d dug out the remains of the soccer field’s turf to find the bodies piled, one atop the other. Most had been tortured before being dumped at the stadium. Some had their genitals cut off and shoved into their mouths, others were found beheaded or beaten so badly their arms, legs, and skulls were broken.

  Guarded by Iraqi Police and American troops, “Operation Graveyard” disinterred dozens of corpses and laid them to rest elsewhere in the city. This stadium, used as an al-Qaida dumping ground for years, had long since become a place of death and despair, a symbol of Ramadi’s fall from one of the urban jewels in Iraq to a modern-day Stalingrad.

  This gruesome excavation was a symbolic, pivotal step toward normalization after four bitter years of warfare. In January 2007, attacks on American forces in Ramadi averaged about thirty-five per day. The snipers on both sides continued to play their shadowy roles, and both sides inflicted casualties on each other nearly every day.

  Yet after the Christmas Eve firefight, Adam and his fellow SEALs rarely saw the enemy again during overwatch missions and patrols. The population had turned its support to the Coalition so staunchly that if their tips didn’t result in immediate action, the people sometimes took matters into their own hands.

  In one neighborhood, an al-Qaida sniper opened fire on an American patrol. The local civilians figured out where he was before the Americans did. They stormed his hide, dragged him into the street, and beat him senseless until the U.S. patrol arrived and detained him.

  Those incidents, unheard of a few months ago, became increasingly common through the first months of 2007. In neighborhoods all over Ramadi, the local imams and sheiks banded together in what became known as the Anbar Awakening movement, a grassroots tribal revolt against al-Qaida led by a pro-American sheik. They sent tribesmen to join the police forces, despite the heavy casualties the Iraqi cops incurred from suicide bombers and vehicle-borne IEDs as they manned checkpoints in their districts or on the city’s outskirts. The police, once considered little more than a corrupt armed mob, helped turn the tide in the city. Their resolve stiffened even as they suffered terrible blows from al-Qaida attacks.

  The SEALs carried out kill or capture missions throughout the next three months, bagging bomb makers and financiers. The locals became so helpful that they sometimes led the SEAL team directly to the door of known bad guys. In one case, an informant knew the exact apartment where an al-Qaida sniper was living. He directed the kill or capture element to the complex, which was less than a quarter of a mile from a Coalition COP. The SEALs gained entry into his home so quickly that the gunman was caught completely by surprise. When the Americans reached his bedroom, they found the sniper having sex. He was so intent on his lady friend that he never heard the SEALs until they dragged him off the bed. Inside the apartment, the entry team found weapons, bomb-making material, and ammunition.

  Another enemy sharpshooter removed from the equation.

  Success piled on success. After that al-Qaida gunman was pulled from under his sheets, the SEALs never again took fire around COP Eagle’s Nest. Since October, the team had played a key role in degrading al-Qaida’s midlevel leadership network. Other teams went after the senior leaders with equal effect. Combined with the mood on the street turning against the Jihadists, and the rise of the Iraqi Police force, al-Qaida’s resistance in Ramadi crumbled by late spring 2007. By then, Adam and the rest of SEAL Team Five had packed up and headed for home.

  At the end of June, a force of some sixty insurgents tried to infiltrate into the city to reignite the fighting. Locals saw them coming and tipped off the Iraqi Police. They in turn warned the Americans in the area, who set up an ambush and wiped the force out. After that engagement, al-Qaida virtually gave up on Ramadi. What had once been named the capital of their murderous caliphate now became the safest city in Iraq. That summer U.S. forces did not sustain a single attack for eighty straight days.

  Almost every tribe had joined the Awakening by that summer. The population’s decisive turn made all the difference, and despite al-Qaida’s attempts to stop the movement by assassinating its leadership, they had lost their grip on the Iraqi people. By the fall of 2007, to be a Jihadist in Ramadi was a death sentence. The locals sought them out, and falling into civilian Iraqi hands was a far worse fate than capture by the Americans. Revenge killings finished off the stragglers.

  The caliphate had failed. By making their stand in Ramadi, al-Qaida shot its bolt. Though there remained pockets of fierce resistance throughout Anbar Province and elsewhere in Iraq, the Battle of Ramadi crippled the enemy. Never again would the Jihadists threaten Iraq or the American effort in the country. But like so many other crucial campaigns in military history, it had been a near run thing.

  The Marine, Army, and special operation snipers played a key role in ensuring ultimate victory. Month after month, they proved the effectiveness of precision marksmanship in a city battle. Urban warfare is the most intense and casualty-producing form of conventional warfare, and Ramadi illustrated that. Yet the snipers showed that they could affect the battlefield in significant ways. When the Rules of Engagement changed, curtailing the full use of the firepower available to the Coalition, snipers became even more important. Their precision fire saved countless civilian lives, and that was where the real battle in Ramadi was won. Once the civilian population came over to the Coalition’s side, al-Qaida’s days in the city were numbered.

  Snipers also saved the lives of countless American and Iraqi soldiers as well. In the worst days of 2005 and 2006, almost every patrol that sortied into the city took fire. It was often impossible to determin
e who was shooting at the patrols and from where. In the ruins of the city, there were just too many hiding places, and al-Qaida fighters were masters of camouflage and concealment.

  Those losses were mitigated by the presence of friendly overwatching snipers. From their perches atop buildings or in their upper stories, they could scan ahead of the patrols and help keep them safe by taking out threats as they developed. Other times their eyes on the battlefield provided vital intelligence, kept patrols from walking into ambushes, and stopped many an IED-laying team from completing their missions.

  The number of lives taken by Coalition snipers during the Ramadi campaign will never be known. Nor will the number of Coalition and civilian lives they saved with their actions. In both cases, though, the snipers decisively affected the flow of the battle. Few battles in modern history were influenced so heavily by so few trigger pullers.

  When those men came home, they did so without fanfare. Their share of the credit in the Ramadi victory was largely ignored by the American press, who had long since moved on to other stories. They remain largely anonymous—these Marines, Army, and special operations shooters, despite the fact that they helped turn the tide in Iraq.

  Adam returned home with the rest of the team in April 2007. He was ready to call it a career, and dreamed of homesteading someplace. In Ramadi, he’d dreamt of a little farm, some cows and chickens, and mornings in a blind someplace, alone with his bow and his thoughts.

  He struggled with the decision right up to the last minute. Ultimately, he reenlisted and served four more years. He spent time in an assault cell and loved every minute of it. While serving with Team Ten, he married and had a son. Right after his son was born, Team Ten deployed to Nigeria to help stand up their new counterterrorism force. While Adam admired the Nigerian troops he helped to train, the separation from his young family proved especially hard on them all. For ninety days, he worked diligently at his assigned task. The poverty in Nigeria was a true eye-opener for him, and by the time the deployment ended, Adam never wanted to leave American soil again.

  In April 2011 he separated from the Navy and settled down on a farm. He’s at his happiest now in a tree blind, waiting for the perfect buck to come along. His son sits beside him, and as his best friend’s dad did when they were kids, now Adam imparts his outdoor skills to his boy.

  Ramadi is never far from his heart and thoughts, though. The battle for that city grew in importance until it became a test of wills between the United States and al-Qaida. The resolve of men like Adam and the Americans and Iraqis he served with in the city sustained the fight even in the darkest hours. It was that resolve that finally broke al-Qaida’s hold on the city, and eventually to all of Anbar Province.

  In September 2007, after a summer free from attacks and violence, the citizen of Ramadi began to dig through the rubble and salvage what they could. The process of rebuilding the devastated city would take years. But one symbol offered them hope. The soccer stadium, once the sight of a grisly mass grave, had been transformed by the Coalition. Once the neighborhood surrounding it had been secured and the bodies removed, engineers descended on it. They rebuilt the stands, laid turf, and striped the field.

  Every evening at five o’clock, the citizens would gather in the stands to watch local teams play on the grounds there, made hallowed by the blood of their neighbors. They cheered and reveled in this one aspect of normalcy among the ruins. Youth teams—the children of Ramadi—would play every week as well. Only a few months before, some of them had been the paid eyes and ears of al-Qaida. They had hunted for the Americans, for the SEALs and sniper teams all the while unwittingly working against the very people determined to secure a future for them. Now at last, they had the opportunity to be kids again.

  In 2013, four years after President Barrack Obama ordered a complete pull out from Iraq, forces opposed to the Baghdad government, some assisted by a wing of al-Qaida once again growing in strength, retook Ramadi and Fallujah. For the American veterans of both campaigns, the news came as the worst possible blow. For the citizens of those battle-scarred city, they once again faced wanton murder, oppression and violence. Only this time, they had little hope of salvation. The American troops had all gone home.

  PART II

  FRONT LINES

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Artist

  While precision marksmanship has been an enduring part of our military’s heritage, snipers have long been treated as the bastard stepchildren of the infantry. It has cost both the Army and the Marine Corps dearly over the years. But in Vietnam, the value of sniping finally sank in with the brass. In the Army, it started when the 9th Infantry Division established an eighteen-day sniper school in Vietnam during the fighting in 1968. By the end of the year, about seventy-five snipers had been trained. They were soon in action, and over the next seven months, the Army credited these men with over one thousand two hundred kills.

  In the Reagan era, the Army opened a permanent sniper school in 1987 that has become the foundation of its precision-shooting program ever since.

  The Corps developed its own, very stringent sniper program after the Vietnam War as well. The schoolhouse at Pendleton became the nexus of America’s most proficient shooters. Over the years, the school has evolved in ways to meet the challenges on the battlefield. Most recently, the Scout Sniper Basic Course was shortened slightly, “Basic” was dropped from its title, and stalking was deemphasized. The current syllabus devotes nine of twelve weeks to precision shooting. This reflects the lessons learned on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, where stalking targets has proven the exception, not the norm. Instead, combat experience has showed us that a wide variety of different and demanding shooting was taking place in every imaginable environment and terrain. Those dynamics became the core of the new Scout Sniper School in 2010.

  The vast majority of the Army and Marine snipers emerging from these schools go straight to line battalions to fill the ranks of the scout platoons. In the Corps, each scout platoon includes roughly twenty snipers and observers, or ten teams. They function as an integral part of each Army and Marine infantry battalion, serving as their commander’s eyes and ears. They are true scouts, the best light infantry in the United States military who are capable of sneaking forward to find the enemy and protect the battalion’s infantry companies as they advance. They operate in the front lines, and often ahead of the front lines during conventional battles, such as the drive into Iraq in 2003. During the chaos caused by an insurgency, where there are no front lines, the scout platoons have been used to overwatch key areas, interdict enemy rat lines, and ambush IED teams.

  Jason Delgado experienced that evolution from conventional warfare to insurgency while serving as a Marine sniper. Dark eyes, a wiry five foot nine, with an easy smile and a wicked sense of humor, Delgado made friends everywhere he went. From behind his scope, he saw it all, from force-on-force in his first combat encounters, to the wild west of the Iraqi-Syrian border where the insurgency mingled with smugglers, drug traffickers and organized crime syndicates. He scored dozens of kills, including one of the most remarkable snap-shots I’ve ever encountered.

  Not bad for a city boy who’d never fired a rifle until he joined the Corps.

  * * *

  When Jason was five years old, he watched a junkie shoot his uncle in the head. Gang wars, drug violence, and pure thuggery defined his world and became his norm long before he’d grown old enough to realize how dysfunctional his Bronx neighborhood was compared to the rest of the country. When he was seven, a turf war broke out on his block, and his house was riddled with bullets.

  A sense of hopelessness pervaded the neighborhood, but Jason’s dad struggled every day to provide an honest living for his family as a handyman. Part mechanic, part plumber, part carpenter, Jason’s dad grabbed hold of any job that came along, but was never able to earn enough to achieve escape velocity from the violence consuming their Bronx neighborhood.

  As Jason reached his teen
years, few options presented themselves. His school was a zoo, the trips between it and his house were almost like running the gauntlet through a war zone. Instead of working at the local fast-food joints between school semesters, the local kids sold crack or served as mules for the drug gangs. These were called “summer jobs” in the ’hood.

  Jason took another path. He joined a cadet corps created and run by U.S. Army and Marine Corps veterans. The cadets learned basic infantry skills, absorbed military discipline, and were taught some of the finer points of leadership and scouting. The veterans showed their protégées how to create standard five-paragraph operations orders, and how best to report on enemy forces.

  With the city of New York as their backdrop, they went out and executed simulated combat missions.

  Jason recalled later, “We were pretty much an urban militia.”

  The veterans would assign teams, give them missions, and work with other such organizations. They clashed with paintball guns and crept through heavily wooded areas like Van Cortland Park or Orchard Beach to report on “enemy activity” there. Often, the intel given to them by their veteran mentors would be false, which would force the cadets to improvise and adapt on the fly.

  Many of those sneak and peak missions took place at night. Jason and his comrades would sleep out in the parks, establishing bivouacs before launching raids on known “enemy” positions. They’d find their tent areas, surround them, and initiate with a barrage of M-80 firecrackers and magnesium blocks thrown into their campfires. The explosions created mass confusion, and as their simulated enemies ran around trying to get organized, Jason’s team would storm into the chaos to snatch booty or key pieces of intel.