Service: A Navy SEAL at War (24 page)

When the F-15s arrived, Slab got on the radio and tried to guide them into the right groove to launch their weapons against the enemy, near the top of the mountain. From the pilot’s perspective, the SEAL was calling for bombs to be dropped right on top of his own position. The fast-moving plane never put its ordnance on target. After two passes, dropping bombs that fell wide of the mark, the pilot announced, “Bingo”—indicating that he was almost out of fuel—and left to find a tanker aircraft. Slab and his teammates were on their own once again.

The Ranger platoon that was on call as a quick reaction force consisted of twenty men in two Chinooks. Summoned to assist Slab and his team, they planned to fly from Bagram to Gardez, where they would stage for the rescue mission. Only one of the helos got airborne, however. And since they quickly realized time was running out, that bird flew straight into the fight.

As it made its approach just before dawn, the Chinook carrying the Rangers was riddled with gunfire. Somehow, though, the pilot managed to crash-land without killing anybody. Landing in a bowl of snow surrounded by enemy shooters, the Rangers were caught up in a firefight every bit as intense as the one that greeted Mako 30. Under the command of an Army captain from Waco, Texas, Nate Self, the Rangers soon found they needed to be rescued as well.

This is where Slab’s story took a personal turn for me. One of the Air Force pararescuemen (or PJs, as the elite combat medics are known) on that bird, Jason Cunningham, had gone to the
Army’s “18 Delta” medic school with me. He served with the PJ community’s elite Twenty-Fourth Special Tactics Squadron. While the Rangers assaulted up the face of the hill, Cunningham turned the crashed helicopter into a casualty collection point, treating several badly wounded men while under heavy fire from an enemy bunker just a hundred yards away. Mortars were landing all around the helo when, at 12:30 p.m., an enemy bullet struck Jason, tearing across his pelvis and inflicting serious internal wounds. He used the last of his energy to tend to wounded soldiers before he bled to death in the snow. Around 8:00 p.m. on the night of March 4, Jason Cunningham became the first Air Force PJ to die in action since Vietnam.

The QRF suffered four killed in action and nine badly wounded before their determined assault, along with heavy support from coalition aircraft, finished off the enemy in the area. Finally a pair of Chinooks came to pick up the battered Ranger unit. The first bird took the living, the second loaded up the dead, and they returned to Bagram.

Slab and his team waited six more hours in the cold. Triangulated by mortars, pinned down and bleeding in the snow, they were saved only by the shelter of the ice-walled ravine in which they hid. Somehow a pilot named Tom Friel, a member of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, returned well after dark and flew a Chinook toward Slab’s position. One of the SEALs flashed the laser designator from his weapon straight up out of the ravine toward the sky, drawing Friel to him. Hovering above the narrow gash in the rocks, the pilot lowered his big tour bus of a helicopter down into the ravine. With his rotors whipping
the air just a few feet from the rock, he steadied up well enough, maintaining a hover with an expert hand and enabling the crew chief to drop the ramp. The helo was just low enough to the ground that the three wounded SEALs could be heaved on board. When the aircraft charged up into the sky, the mission was over, leaving Slab and the other survivors to live with its echoes.

I listened to Slab the way a junior frog should: with my mouth shut and my ears open. I’d read the statements and the after-action reports, but hearing the story from him personally made me realize there was no way to come out of a situation like that without having a cross to bear. One thing Slab taught me: it’s easy after a disaster to dwell on the experience, to spend too much time with your mind stuck on it, and to let it define you. Slab showed me how to put something like that in a box, and to control how you think about it, and to turn a negative into a positive. It’s the people who focus on the positive that will come out on top. Afterward, your dominant thought about a bad experience shouldn’t be
I can’t get over this;
it should be,
I’m going to better myself because of it.

I was stunned to learn later that Master Chief could easily have been on that op, too. At the time, he was serving in Slab’s squadron, but he was stateside, tasked to a training and support role for his command shortly before 9/11. It simply wasn’t his fate to be on that flight line that day. I suppose when your unit gets overrun, it’s not much worse to be the lone survivor on the ground than a survivor who had to sit it out far away. Either way, you live the rest of your life knowing you should have been out there in the mix with your men, and having no good answer to the question, What if? Master Chief told me it was some
consolation that he was on hand to help handle his fallen teammate’s homecoming and burial. He said he knew he was where he needed to be, he accepted the importance of his role back home, comforting the family after his teammate’s body was flown home. Sometimes the hardest part of being a SEAL is not being part of the fight.

Slab dealt with his experience by putting it in a box, extracting a few “never agains,” and pushing his high-speed career to the next level. He’s a thinker, private and introspective, a dedicated hard charger. But he said enough to me in our time together to show me how he continued to operate and why, how bad experiences strengthened his motivation, and how he learned to distinguish fear from the impostor,
being afraid.
Fear is a force that sharpens your senses. Being afraid is a state of paralysis in which you can’t do anything. It’s critical to understand the difference, but I never fully saw it until I spent time with Slab. You have to use your fear to keep from that deadly state of being afraid. Watching him go about his business, planning missions and dealing with his troop, had the same effect on me as being with JT, Josh, JJ, and Morgan after I got home from Redwing. He recharged me by his presence and commanded my respect without saying a word.

You don’t have to be an Adonis or a giant to accomplish feats of greatness. You have to have drive and commitment—as well as an honest sense of what is and isn’t possible. During my time with Slab, I realized there was very little I could have done to change the outcome there in the Hindu Kush. I felt my energy level and motivation surge in his presence—just as Master Chief knew it would. I have found that the best way to get through tough times is to surround myself with positive people. If you
spend time around people who are weak or always feel sorry for themselves, it’s bound to rub off on you. Always look forward, never back. Thanks, Slab, for all the help.

On February 19, I was still hanging with Slab and his teammates in Al Asad when Al Qaeda in Iraq revealed just how desperate it had become. That morning in Ramadi, a car full of explosives approached an Iraqi police outpost at a place called Tway Village and blew. The guardhouse and the gate were knocked flat, then another vehicle-borne IED—a big dump truck carrying about four tons of explosives and a tank full of liquid chlorine—rolled through the wreckage toward the police station. The extremists no longer cared about influencing the population. With the whole city turning on them, looking to drive them out once and for all, nihilism and murder were all they had left to offer. The truck plowed right through a concrete wall and exploded in the middle of morning muster. Sixteen Iraqi cops were killed and more than sixty were wounded.

“This is the choice that we gave them,” said Sheikh Sattar’s brother, Sheikh Ahmed. “You can either surrender to us or you can be suicided. They despaired of accomplishing any victories, so now they resort to suicide.” If they were chasing an early flight to hell, they caught it, and we were only too happy to help.

When I got back to Camp Marc Lee, my teammates let me know how busy life had gotten. The Army and Marines had been heavily engaged all through the city. Fizbo told me how he had gone out to overwatch a big clearance by the 1/9 infantry out of Camp Corregidor. They inserted into the Ma’laab district around three a.m. and Fiz quickly found a JTAC’s paradise.
With his faithful eyes in the sky, he could see the enemy on the move almost everywhere he looked.

For once, headquarters had loosened the leash. Fizbo was giddy as he told me about all the nine lines he had gotten approved. Sitting in a sniper hide with a group of operators, including my brother, he steered tons of air-launched ordnance onto enemy positions. The Army, meanwhile, made excellent use of their multiple rocket systems. Apache helicopters strafed and fired Hellfire missiles. And the big Abrams tanks weighed in, too. By the end of that three-day op, many enemy fighters had been killed. More important, after what happened the last time we went into Ma’laab, it was good to see every one of the boys roll through the gate again with a success under their belts.

Around that time, some encouraging news arrived concerning our recent casualties. Johnny Brands was doing well after surgery. The docs thought he might be able to jump back on the horse someday. Elliott’s prognosis wasn’t as good, but he was finally cleared to fly home from Germany to Texas for treatment of his burns.

Meanwhile, there was a feeling around Task Unit Red Bull that scores had been settled, and that the insurgency in Ramadi was wobbling on its last legs.

A
s our time in that hellhole wound down, the rains became heavy and I suppose some part of hell froze over somewhere, too, because the press suddenly seemed to start noticing what had happened during our watch in Anbar Province. With General Petraeus arriving in Baghdad to take command of Multi-National Force–Iraq, reporters seemed newly willing to look at U.S. successes out west (though all too many of them seemed to think it had sprung from the desert unaided by American hands).

Please understand the bitterness I’m spitting here. During the time I’m talking about, my team took more than a dozen wounded—in addition to SEAL Team 3’s own heavy casualties, including two killed—and the conventionals serving alongside us had nearly one hundred killed in action, plus innumerable other casualties. U.S. forces inflicted upward of eleven hundred KIA on the insurgency and captured at least that number for interrogation. The success was there for all to see.

Compared to six months before, insurgent attacks against our forces and local citizens were down from an average of twenty a day to about ten. The total number of mortar and IED attacks fell by two-thirds. The number of insurgents participating in the
increasingly rare complex attacks was down by half, from twenty to ten.

The work that remained was to integrate the Sunni people into the Iraqi government at all levels. When Saddam was booted, the removal of his Baath Party from power pushed a lot of Sunnis out of government, so their leaders boycotted elections. With eighteen thousand more Americans arriving in country—five Army brigades to Baghdad, two Marine Corps battalions to Anbar—and with many soldiers’ deployment schedules being extended from twelve to fifteen months, President Bush’s “surge” was under way, and the presence of all that strength encouraged many terrified Iraqis to come in out of the cold.

In April—the end of our tour—the peace that settled over Ramadi was surreal. There had been about sixty violent incidents a day when we got there in October; that number was down to one or two a week as the two platoons of Task Unit Ramadi got ready to go home.

However, as our EOD commander, Paul Craig, said, “Being a day closer to going home doesn’t make you safer on any given day.” Our men in Fallujah ran some important but costly operations, too. In early April, a platoon from Team 4 carried out a capture-kill raid in northern Fallujah, targeting an insurgent cell that had reportedly been shooting down our helicopters with SA-7s—Chinese-made shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles. It was suspected that one such nasty little weapon had shot down a Marine Corps CH-46 cargo helicopter in March. When our intel finally fingered the cell’s location and a combined unit of Iraqis and SEALs hit the house, the enemy was ready, bunkered up behind fighting positions inside. In the shootout that developed,
one of our men was killed and all his teammates were forced back outside the house.

All his teammates but one, that is. The platoon’s chief, a tough frog named Dan, got pushed into the corner of the entry room. A twenty-one-year veteran with seven deployments under his belt, including two in Iraq, Chief Dan was alone with numerous enemy gunmen. They shot him twenty-seven times at close range. Eleven of the bullets were stopped by his body armor. You do the math. As he was falling to the ground, he managed to kill three of the enemy with bursts from his M4. Before they could finish him, his teammates regrouped and assaulted the house again, killing the insurgents and taking Chief Dan to safety. Fortunately, his wounds were to the lower extremities, and none of them were fatal. As for that insurgent cell, all he’ll say is, “After that night, they’re not shooting down any more helicopters.”

Shortly before we went wheels-up, we took another casualty. Studdard, my longtime point man, was walking outside Camp Marc Lee with forty-eight hours to go before punching a ticket to America. After running more than two hundred combat missions without a scratch, something hit him in the ribs. He thought it was a thrown rock at first. Looking around, furious and in pain, he realized his wound was deep and hollered for help. The whole camp emptied and we swept the premises looking for his assailant. What hit him was a 7.62mm round, a lucky Hail Mary that had come arcing in from somewhere across the Euphrates River, nearly a mile away. The bullet burrowed in close to his spine—so close that surgeons wouldn’t be able to remove it. By the time they took him away to the hospital, I didn’t have the chance to thank him for everything he’d done as
our point man. Doing that night after night in a hellhole like Ramadi wasn’t good for your life expectancy. But he never complained once. And now he still carries a little piece of the city inside him as a reward.