Service: A Navy SEAL at War Page 3

  The first phase of workup focuses on individual skills. I arrived in time for one of my favorite training blocks: the couple of weeks we spent at an automobile racetrack in the Southwest learning tactical driving drills. This was easily the most fun I’ve had in the teams. Fun wasn’t on the agenda for our instructors, though: they were dead serious about testing and sharpening our high-speed vehicular pursuit and evasion skills, which are so useful in an urban setting. They brought out a fleet of beat-up cars—Pontiac Grand Ams and maybe a few SUVs—and put us in situations that demanded a lot of finesse at the wheel. We wore helmets, face masks, and protection for sensitive parts, but the instructors took the air bags out of our vehicles, because they just got in the way.

  In these drills, we developed the reflexes we’d need to drive effectively under fire in a combat zone. We drove those old clunkers as though we were the Dukes of Hazzard. At one point I was barreling around the track, minding my own business in the driver’s seat, doing about eighty, when an instructor suddenly put a piece of cardboard in front of my face. A couple of my teammates heckled me a little, slapping me on the head, while I was speeding along blind. An unknown distance farther ahead, some orange traffic cones stood in my path. When the instructor pulled away the cardboard, I had a split second to see the cones, gauge their distance, and avoid them. It was a test of sight recognition, nerves, and reflexes. If I stopped more than ten feet away from the cones, I failed. If I hit them, I failed.

  If we passed a test during the day, the instructors upped the ante, sending us out onto the track at night with no lights, speeding around with night-vision goggles strapped to our faces. Amplifying ambient light from the stars or the moon, NVGs cast the night in a glowing green. No doubt they’re a great tool. The only drawback is that they leave you with almost no depth perception at all. Objects in the windshield are much closer than they appear. It was almost enough to make me miss the air bags. When the instructors sensed that the novelty was wearing off, they broke out the rifles and we all started shooting at each other as we veered around the track. We’d take an M4 carbine and replace its barrel with one designed to shoot “sim rounds,” plastic bullets that contain a load of paint to mark hits. This wasn’t paintball—police use weapons like these to suppress riots. But although all this was crazy, it was also fun as hell. It was thrilling to get back into the game.

  Our instructors had tactical skills to match those of anybody on the planet. It was no fun to be in their sights, getting hit with paint rounds as we barreled around the track. The rounds left contusions, even through heavy clothing, and they could do worse if you were unlucky or not careful. It was a full-contact sport, as close to real-time life and death as we could get without actually killing each other.

  After we finished with the full-size sedans, we graduated to armored Suburbans and Tahoes. The heavier SUVs were much tougher to take through the high-speed turns in motorcade and getaway drills, but the exercise got us ready for a type of work that SEALs often do in a combat zone: escorting dignitaries to extremely dangerous places and running tactical convoys. Our instructors chased us, shooting and ramming into our vehicles, trying to knock us off the shoulder or flip us over. Without warning, they’d pull out in front of us in their clunkers, forcing sudden evasive action. Our job was to get our valuable cargo out of harm’s way. You have to think fast. Do you have enough space to swerve around the roadblock? Should you plow straight through or drive right over it? Sometimes they trapped us so well that there was nothing left to do but dismount and shoot it out, the instructors closing in, guns blazing. This was no mindless romp. It was a thinking man’s game, a test to see if we had what it takes to get our principal out of harm’s way regardless of our own safety. And it really opened our eyes to what works.

  In these drills, we pushed our aggression levels to the limit. We didn’t miss a chance to drive up onto another driver’s hood, or to rip out the sun visors and throw them at each other. At the end of the day, our tires were flat, our fenders were caved in, and we were stained with paint from head to toe. When we ran out of working cars, a new fleet was at our disposal in the morning. The welts stayed with you for a while. So did the lessons.

  One afternoon at the track, Morgan had a rough go of it. I was busy doing a shooting drill when it happened. I heard him before I saw him: the screech of tires, then the sound of metal grinding on dirt, then a series of heavy, crunching thumps. My brother rolled that brand-new Tahoe three times before it finally came to rest. Fortunately, like race-car drivers, he and the other guys with him were securely restrained, and were wearing helmets and other protection. When he opened the door and rolled out, he walked away to laughter, loud hooyahs, and applause. The disclaimers in those auto advertisements on TV always say: PROFESSIONAL DRIVER ON CLOSED COURSE. I don’t know who Mercedes hires to drive the cars in their commercials, but I’d take a job like that in a second.

  By the time that training block was done, we were flying around the course, catching all the straight-line angles and working the accelerator and brakes with no wasted motion in our feet or heels. Most people have no need to avoid armed pursuit, put a bad guy’s vehicle into a ditch, make a J-turn, or bust through a roadblock. But team guys live in a different world. What we learned there was applicable everywhere, from an urban war zone to downtown Houston. Whether SEALs are driving convoys, moving out in a Humvee jocked up for a raid, or escorting dignitaries in a BMW 7 series while dressed in a suit, driving skills are paramount. If you can finish a training block like this in one piece, you’ve gotten some valuable combat training under your belt and lived an overgrown adolescent’s dream all in the same program. Sometimes it was hard to turn the training off. Leaving the track, we would have to restrain ourselves from racing home in our badass minivans. The cops knew our psychology and were usually waiting for us along the highway. But sometimes the juice is worth the squeeze.

  Hollywood does a great job of making what we do look sexy. Jumping out of airplanes and locking out of submarines is pretty cool, but let me be the first to tell you: 90 percent of the time, all we’re doing is working from sunup to sundown, wearing our asses out practicing, practicing, practicing. Because it’s true: the more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war. Still, few training trips were as fun as driving school. It was like the best bumper-car track in the world (with no lawyers or insurance agents hanging around to keep the vehicles limited to walking speed).

  A SEAL team has three troops, or task units, each of which has two platoons. I got lucky when they assigned me to Troop 1, whose two platoons, Alfa and Bravo, were under our troop commander, Lieutenant Commander Ryan Thomas. He was a terrific combat leader, and his troop chief, Senior Chief Petty Officer Warren Steffen, was in my view one of the hardest, most experienced, and capable operators in the community, the consummate quiet professional. Because of his build and the slight gray streaks above his temples, I always thought he looked like Mr. Fantastic from the Marvel Comics superhero team the Fantastic Four. Standing a lean and strong six foot three, about 220 pounds, Steffen had served two years in the fleet before entering BUD/S in 1993. He’d served in the finest units in the special operations community, but, like the good ones, never talked about it. SEALs are hard to impress, but we all respected him. His presence was low-key, high-impact. He was always looking out for his teammates. The more quietly he spoke, the closer we listened.

  When Steffen mentioned to me that he considered Lieutenant Commander Thomas one of the most tactically sound officers he had ever worked with, I knew we were good to go. I was assigned to Alfa Platoon. Morgan was sent to Bravo Platoon, under Lieutenant Clint. We were both fired up to have been assigned to an outfit that was stacked from the top down with solid operators. We had a great mix of new blood with fresh perspectives and old hands with valuable experience. As we found our stride during workup, we developed an easy chemistry that made the natural competitiveness among us very productive.

  Boss was one of the training inst
ructors during workup. Our friendship didn’t move him to cut us any slack, however. Let’s just say that when you spend a few months getting tormented by a guy with Boss’s abilities, you come out the other side with your senses heightened.

  In the second phase of workup, we put our individual skills into a team context. This phase is all about the tactical basics. Making a fighting team out of skilled operators, bringing everyone up to the same level with the ability to understand what each man’s responsibilities are and how we need to fight, survive, and win. We were in the middle of a mobility training exercise when Senior Chief Steffen told me I had been promoted to LPO, or leading petty officer, in Alfa Platoon.

  The leading petty officer works directly under the platoon chief and basically makes sure his will is carried out. I sensed they were sending a message that they wanted me to raise my game as a leader and invest myself in the team. As a petty officer first class, I had served as a leader of a small fire team before. Now that I was an LPO for an entire platoon, things were getting serious.

  The SEALs who run a platoon—the officer in charge (OIC), the assistant officer in charge (AOIC), the platoon chief, and the LPO—are objects of constant scrutiny. If anyone shows himself to be arrogant, or if it becomes evident that he cares more about himself than about his men, his reputation is history and soon he’ll be finished. As a leader, you either earn your place and keep your team aware of the connection between your capabilities and your privileges or things slide until you find yourself in a sorry place where you can neither lead nor trust your men. I wondered sometimes if I was up to it. Friends are friends but business is business. Good operators make the distinction and don’t let it interfere with work.

  As an LPO, I now stood in range of my teammates’ judgment of their leader. I sensed the change in my status the first time I walked into the platoon hut and noticed how the boys quickly hushed up. Lips tight, eyes on the walls, they no longer allowed me to be privy to what made their world go round. My promotion took me out of their community and turned me into management. I didn’t mind the job itself, but I hated the fact that I was separated from the boys.

  The men in Alfa were some of the best I have ever known. I never had to get onto them or tell them what to do. When I got orders of instructions from our chief, I passed them along, and by the end of the day they made me look good. That in turn made the chief look good, which made the officers look good, too.

  The synergy of Alfa Platoon was amazing. No matter how bad things got, we all stuck together. Everybody was a packhorse. Even our new guys were squared away, keeping their ears open and their mouths shut. They kept their problems to themselves and their minds on their jobs.

  Instructors often drew on past operations during training. If you can learn from past mistakes, your future will be a little less painful. This is part of a frogman’s ethos. A willingness to learn from the past is part of who we are—and part of the reason we can pull off some of the impossible missions that every now and again make it into the spotlight. Whenever an instructor went over something, I’d review my performance in Afghanistan and ask myself, “Did I do it that way?” I wanted to reassure myself that I hadn’t let my boys down. I wanted to be sure that if I ever got in that position again, everything would end differently.

  I learned at one point that some higher-ups wanted to leave me behind in a “beach detachment” when the team finally went overseas. But Master Chief enforced Skipper’s wish to keep me on the line. Their confidence in me was energizing. As we prepared to begin the final stage of training, I wanted nothing more than to reward them for their faith.

  2

  SEAL Team 5, Alfa Platoon

  When word came down that we were headed for Anbar Province, the boys were fired up. We had been following the work of the teams that had preceded us over there. Upstairs at the team house, after-action reports had been coming in daily. Ramadi was hot. It was a shooter’s field day for the team that had been there since April 2006. Team 3 was stacking up the shit bags as though they were cordwood.

  Since late 2005, Anbar had been the bloodiest part of Iraq. Its capital, Ramadi, was a hornet’s nest of terrorist activity. Located about sixty-eight miles west of Baghdad, the city of about five hundred thousand people, almost all of them Sunnis, had been a stronghold of support for Saddam Hussein. He cut deals with the tribal sheikhs to secure his control.

  After U.S. forces seized Fallujah in November 2004, killing most of the insurgents who had chosen to make that city their Alamo, the leadership of Al Qaeda in Iraq, including its supposed chief, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, fled to Ramadi. Even after al-Zarqawi’s death—a blind date with a JDAM—Al Qaeda had the run of the place and insurgents attacked coalition patrols and outposts almost at will.

  Ramadi sits on an ancient smugglers’ road, a dusty highway that leads from Baghdad west to Iraq’s border with Syria. In 2003, it was a terrorist pipeline. When coalition forces invaded Iraq that year, Syria and Iran, fearing they were next on America’s hit list after Saddam paid the piper, allowed throngs of foreign terrorists to enter Iraq through their sovereign territory. They came in the name of Arab brotherhood to fight the American infidels. Unfortunately for the Iraqi people, the terrorists didn’t mind slitting Muslim throats to influence their various agendas.

  The fighting in Ramadi was intense as far back as 2004. Street by street, block by block, our Army and Marines fought until their trigger fingers bled. After Al Qaeda declared Ramadi the capital of the worldwide Islamist caliphate in 2005, our forces twisted down the vise, relentlessly increasing the pressure on the enemy. But in spite of those heroic efforts, the enemy kept coming. The explosions, heavy gunfire, and terrible human casualties never seemed to let up. The murderers claimed the city as their own, an ongoing insult and a mounting threat to the stability of the region. Anbar Province was hell on earth.

  Which meant we would be right at home there.

  Alongside their Marine Corps and Army brothers, SEAL Team 3 took a greedy harvest from the ranks of the Al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents in Ramadi through the summer of 2006. Led by an aggressive, battle-hardened troop commander, Lieutenant Commander Willis, they were doing great work both in and above the streets. Working from rooftop overwatch positions, their snipers were scoring heavily. One of their best, Chris Kyle, was racking up a confirmed-kill record that surpassed that of every sniper the United States had ever sent to war. By the time he was done, it would reach an official count of 160, and I know it was far higher.

  I know Chris well, because we started our careers in the teams together. He’s down-to-earth and laid-back, a country boy with a huge love of family, God, and country. He has saved a hell of a lot of American lives in combat, too, hanging himself way out there under fire, taking the fight to a savage enemy. Chris Kyle is a hell of a warfighter. Team 3’s performance motivated us, and gave us a benchmark to shoot for, though our leadership kept reminding us that numbers meant nothing in the long run; what counted was the strategic impact of our work once our time in Iraq was over.

  The last phase of workup brought together all our supporting elements as a fully manned squadron, readying our entire unit to deploy into Iraq. Our medical teams, explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) technicians, intelligence crews—everyone—learned to function together as we would in Iraq. For months, our officers and senior enlisted had been getting briefed on unconventional modes of warfare such as counterinsurgency (COIN) and foreign internal defense (FID), in which U.S. forces help train another country’s military or police to fight an insurgency. This was the strategy our head shed was driving for our deployment, working to tie in our efforts with all the forces working our area of operations and across the region. This mode of war, dusted off and reengineered after years of disuse since Vietnam, was all about understanding the culture, developing a viable government and security force, taking care of the local people, and giving them the confidence to fight for themselves. It isn’t as sexy as kicking in doors and laying on a sniper
rifle, and it wasn’t what most SEALs bargained for when they joined the teams. We weren’t wearing Tridents to go out into a cold, hateful world to train others to fight and build churches and schools. But it’s how real progress would be made, we were told. You can kill bad guys all day long, but they will always find someone else to step up, even their kids. When you really break it down, the locals are the key to everything. It’s their job to take their country back.

  Soon enough, word came down that Team 5’s two Iraq-bound troops would set up shop in two of the biggest hellholes in Anbar Province: Habbaniyah and Ramadi. Troop 1 drew Ramadi. Skipper and the head-shed boys would locate in Fallujah, close to their higher headquarters, the I Marine Expeditionary Force (or I MEF). Commanded by General Richard Zilmer, I MEF oversaw all thirty thousand U.S. personnel serving in Anbar Province. Locally, in Ramadi, our operations would be conducted under a U.S. Army brigade that reported to General Zilmer’s headquarters.

  The rough company of Team 5 was my family and fraternity, and Skipper, Master Chief, Lieutenant Commander Thomas, and Senior Chief Steffen were our patriarchs. Overseas, we would fight in the name of God and country. We would do it in support of the Army and Marine Corps infantry, tankers and engineers who were each doing their part to clear out an Al Qaeda hornet’s nest in the middle of Mesopotamia. And never far from my mind was something else: I would do it in the names of Mikey, Danny, Axe, and everyone on the rescue op who lost their lives on June 28, 2005.