Modern American Snipers (8 page)

Slabinski was awarded the Navy Cross for his actions, the second highest military award available to a member of the United States Navy, ranked only behind the Medal of Honor.

 

4

Three Seven Five

Barely a year after the Battle of Takur Ghar and the conclusion of Operation Anaconda, Britt Slabinski and his squadron were again the linchpin of a high-profile operation.

Far removed from the granite peaks of Afghanistan, 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters ferried a rescue force through the blackness of the early-morning hours above Nasiriyah, a city of a more than a half million people in southeastern Iraq.

While a Marine platoon provided a diversionary attack and an AC-130 circled overhead, the DEVGRU operators hit the ground and stormed Saddam Hospital, which had served as an improvised command post for the Iraqi military in these opening days of the Iraq War.

Backed by 2/75 Rangers of B Company and 24STS Air Force Pararescue Jumpers, the ST6 SEALs located and retrieved Pfc. Jessica Lynch without incident.

Lynch had been captured just days after the Global War on Terror expanded its boundaries. Her 506th Maintenance Company convoy wandered off course early in the invasion and drove directly into an ambush. Eleven American members of the company were killed and six others captured.

The rescue captured the nation's attention—and later suspicion—as detractors viewed the April 1 operation as a bit too neat and tidy. Combined with exaggerated reports of heroism on Lynch's part that served as a rallying cry for the escalating war effort, rumors flew that the operation was little more than a staged April Fool's joke.

In reality, the cynicism was largely unwarranted. While perhaps overplayed to the media, the operation itself had been genuine and its success very real, the first American POW rescue since Vietnam.

*   *   *

Delta Force too had been busy in the early days of the Iraq War. Well, before its earliest days actually, as B Squadron kicked off its invasion a day ahead of the larger coalition force.

Like ST6's Red Squadron, Delta's B Squadron had also shifted its area of operations (AO) following the standout performance of its recce operators in Operation Anaconda a year before.

However, it was still plagued by the operational friction that had prevented the vast capabilities of the special mission units from being fully leveraged in Afghanistan. Gen. Dell Dailey was still in command of JSOC and continued to prefer that Delta Force and DEVGRU prestage and wait for the call in the event that a high-value target was located. Meanwhile, the unit's squadron commanders sought to put their men in the mix more actively, rooting out those HVTs rather than taking on the more passive stance.

CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks had proven something of an obstacle for the SMUs in Afghanistan as well. Franks, Dailey, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld were later assigned much of the blame for allowing bin Laden to escape Tora Bora, primarily for not allowing the CIA/Delta-led force the operational autonomy and support it had requested.

One year and a new war later, Franks had been transformed into an ally and enabler, having witnessed the improbably large role a small handful of JSOC snipers played in ensuring Anaconda's ultimate success.

Rather than be confined to the Arar base in Saudi Arabia, B Squadron marauded across the border and launched multiple hit-and-run raids with a small armored component that allowed it to take on the appearance of a considerably larger force. The tactic struck fear into an already overwhelmed Iraqi military and forced it to tie up its forces, further enabling the broader invading forces elsewhere.

B Squadron commander Lt. Col. Pete Blaber immediately capitalized on this early success by requesting that Delta's C Squadron join the effort, as the coalition raced for Baghdad and toppled Saddam Hussein's regime in swift, convincing fashion.

While a promising start, Delta's situation in Iraq, along with its larger influence over the war, would soon be radically changed for the better.

*   *   *

Dailey's tenure as JSOC commander would come to an end shortly after the opening of the Iraq War and a new “Pope” would be appointed in the following months.

Dailey, an aviator with, and later commander of, the fabled 160th SOAR, was a much admired leader in many quarters. He was considered inspiring and thoughtful by his subordinates and later went on to be named Ambassador at Large as the State Department's Coordinator for Counterterrorism and was inducted into both the U.S. Army Aviation Hall of Fame and the Ranger Hall of Fame.

However, despite his assignment as a Ranger officer, JSOC's direct action components viewed Dailey as painfully risk-averse and too inflexible to obtain the most from them and their specialized skill sets.

In mid-2003, he was replaced by another legendary Ranger—onetime commander of 75th Ranger Regiment, Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

McChrystal, a tireless and pragmatic leader, brought a fresh outlook to the position and immediately implemented changes in how the secretive command would operate moving forward. He sought to better integrate and coordinate JSOC—and not solely internally between its elite, diverse components, but also externally with the wider network of units and agencies that it regularly interacted with (or at least should have regularly interacted with).

And while he strove to tear down artificial, ego-fueled barriers and transform JSOC's “tribe of tribes” into a “team of teams,” he also recognized the potential in empowering the individual units.

Among his first acts as JSOC commander was to travel to Delta's expansive compound at Fort Bragg and inform Delta Force's commander, then-Colonel Bennet Sacolick, that the Unit now “owned” Iraq. Delta Force would be the primary counterterrorist and direct action force in country until the battle was won. Additionally, a Delta officer would head the wider JSOC-led task force in Iraq (which rotated its names—TF 20, TF 121, TF 6-26, TF 145, TF 77, etc.—and exact composition as the effort evolved) and direct not only the Unit's efforts, but those of the Rangers, 160th SOAR, the ISA, and so on.

Delta Force wanted Iraq. Now it had it.

McChrystal's reasoning was not entirely out of step with the “total quality control” management philosophy that was utilized by Japanese firms to rapidly transform the nation into an economic power following World War II—in effect, counterterrorism the Toyota way.

This sense of ownership shifted the perspective of Delta's men. No longer were they a small, interchangeable part of a massive coalition effort. In their minds—and in large part, in reality—they were responsible for the overall outcome of the war.

The Unit's men readily embraced the challenge put before them. Operators would voluntarily stay in country past their scheduled deployments to help ease the transitions between squadrons, building uninterrupted institutional knowledge and fostering the innovation that would pay massive dividends in time.

Some of the earliest hints of what was to come were seen as a newly empowered and intel-enabled Delta Force showed greater and greater proficiency in hunting down the “Deck of 55”—the most wanted members of Hussein's toppled government who had since gone into hiding.

By the end of '03, the Unit had removed all four aces from the target deck.

The first man down was Lieutenant General Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti—the Ace of Diamonds. With 1st Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Division (Mechanized) scouts cordoning off an expansive compound in Cadaseeyah, a suburb of Tikrit, Delta operators breached and banged, taking Mahmud alive.

Up next were Hussein's notorious sons, Uday and Qusay—the Ace of Hearts and the Ace of Clubs. They were tracked to a safe house in Mosul, ultimately turned in by the keeper for being ungrateful and unpleasant houseguests.

Once the barricaded brothers were dispatched by Unit bullets (after a round of TOW [Tube-launched, Optically-tracked, Wire-guided] antitank missiles had more or less leveled the building), all attention focused on the Ace of Diamonds himself.

Following multiple takedowns of suspected accomplices, Delta Force captured a man who proved to be the key. He led them to a farmhouse in Ad-Dawr, a small village near Tikrit. There, in Operation Red Dawn, a Delta operator finally dragged a dazed and disheveled deposed dictator from his spider hole before handing him off to soldiers from the 4th Infantry Division (Mechanized) and fading from the scene.

*   *   *

When McChrystal put Delta in charge of JSOC's activities in Iraq, he simultaneously did much the same in Afghanistan, handing ownership of that AO to SEAL Team Six and the 75th Ranger Regiment (although the considerably larger Ranger force would continue to maintain a significant presence in Iraq throughout the war there as well).

In October of 2001, nearly two hundred Rangers from the 3rd Battalion jumped into combat from four Lockheed MC-130 Combat Talons near Kandahar, Afghanistan, to seize Objective Rhino. They continued to play a pivotal early role in Afghanistan—both by their absences at Tora Bora and with their arrival at Takur Ghar.

The opening days of the Iraq War took similar shape. In March of '03, 3/75 jumped to seize an airfield near the Syrian border and three days later conducted another air assault to lay claim to an Iraqi fighter base dubbed Objective Serpent.

A misguided run on a dry hole—the Al Qadisiyah Research Center, aka Objective Beaver—resulted in serious injuries for two Rangers with B/3/75. The 160th SOAR helos that carried the assault team to the objective were waylaid by armor-piercing rounds en route to a suspected chemical and biological weapons facility in the (largely) futile search for weapons of mass destruction.

The 3rd Battalion next set its sights on Objective Lynx: the Haditha Dam—a massive complex on the Euphrates River over five miles long that fed a third of the nation's electrical grid.

The objective was later portrayed by CENTCOM—the regional command tasked with overseeing the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan—as a critical strategic target in order to prevent Hussein from self-sabotaging resources similar to his actions when faced with defeat in the First Gulf War. And while there was certainly some truth to that, the mission was cobbled together late as JSOC commander Dailey et al. sought out a significant operation to task to the Ranger Regiment and no other obvious targets were available.

“There was supposed to be nothing out there,” said Pete Careaga, one of four Ranger snipers assigned to the op. “It was supposed to be an abandoned dam.”

However, the Haditha Dam op certainly turned out to be significant. The Iraqi Army was well prepared in their defense, readied with men and machines of destruction awaiting the 3/75 Rangers, backed by Delta Force's C Squadron and other supporting elements. The battle for the dam erupted on April 1—the same day Britt Slabinski and the DEVGRU SEALs, backed by 2/75 Rangers, rescued Jessica Lynch on the opposite side of the nation.

Even after successfully seizing the dam, the Rangers could not breathe easily. They were forced to fight back heavily armed reinforcements for several days, repeatedly calling down devastating air strikes from the Air National Guard F-16s and A-10s supporting the operation.

The 3rd Battalion's top marksmen provided an outsized contribution throughout the multiday clash. A pair of two-man teams, each armed with a Barrett .50 caliber weapon, delivered a constant rain of precise fire throughout. Careaga and his teammate, “BT,” were attached to Bravo's 1st Platoon and on the near side of the military compound while Robby Johnson and another sniper were attached to 2nd Platoon and located on the dam itself.

“We were pretty much just direct action on that one,” Careaga explained. “We were right there with the guys, just engaging, and a lot of times calling for fire. There were just so many air assets there and we only had a couple TACPs [tactical air control parties]. Half the time they were out of range for us so I just called mortar strikes.

“It was pretty much direct action sniping—engaging targets from sub-100 meters to 2000 meters and calling for fire. Pretty straight forward. But it was a target-rich environment.”

Early in the assault, Staff Sergeant Johnson engaged a harassing Iraqi RPG team from a range of nearly a thousand meters with his .50-caliber sniper rifle. The heavy round ripped clean through its intended victim with enough velocity to penetrate a propane tank located directly behind him. The resultant explosion also killed the two other Iraqi fighters of the RPG squad.

In addition to the sniper platoon's pivotal involvement, CSM Greg Birch also demonstrated the shock and awe one sniper and his weapon are capable of delivering.

Already long cemented as a mythical figure in the realm of special operations, Birch had only recently returned to the Regiment to serve as the 3/75 Command Sergeant Major following a fifteen-year tenure with Delta Force.

At the Unit, “Ironhead” served as an A Squadron sniper team leader for several years before ascending to the position of Sabre Squadron Sergeant Major. In that role he distinguished himself during the Battle of Tora Bora for which he was awarded a Bronze Star for valor.

Even during his lengthy run with the Unit, Birch never forgot his Ranger roots and regularly kept tabs on the Regiment before finally returning in 2002. The Rangers hadn't forgotten Birch either. Now Rangers from both the pre- and post-9/11 eras pass along stories of this forward-thinking yet uniquely disciplined leader.

At the Haditha Dam, Birch showcased his well-practiced lethality with an SR-25 7.62mm semi-automatic, taking more than twenty enemy soldiers off the battlefield. He also came to the rescue of three wounded Iraqis during the clash while generally keeping the younger Rangers focused during the extended, multiday clash. He was later awarded a Silver Star for his actions.

Birch would be promoted to 75th Ranger Regimental Command Sergeant Major and later became the first Command Sergeant Major of the Army's fledgling Asymmetric Warfare Group (AWG).