Service: A Navy SEAL at War (5 page)

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.

Sometimes, as our training wound down, thoughts of that mountain would back up on me. Exhausted from the bone-crushing pain, I’d suddenly feel the slash of shrapnel and the burn in my lungs, the labors of a body under assault in thin air.
Sometimes the memory of that pain gave way to numbness. I’d find myself feeling as though Operation Redwing hadn’t actually happened, that it was a story I had read somewhere.

I was still learning to keep those memories in a box. When things slowed down, the rage and feelings of futility would sometimes well up in the face of the reality that there was nothing I could have done. Sometimes I’d take a walk through the utility area behind the team house, chewing things over. For instance, I’d learned that when rescuers found Mikey and Axe, they saw that each of them had been wearing some kind of bandage. I was proud that in their last minutes they still did all they could to stay in the fight. But what could anyone say about me? I was the doc and it was my job to see to their wounds. They had each needed help, and I just couldn’t make it work. I knew there was nothing I could do while bullets were flying, just send bullets back the other way. But my thoughts would circle this track as I wandered among the big steel MILVAN containers that held our gear ready for quick loading and shipment overseas. Sitting down among them, I’d let some of the emotional overpressure of the past year flow out of me.

When I realized how little I was sleeping, I told Morgan I didn’t know what was wrong with me. “Nothing is. Suck it up,” he said. And I tried. Morgan was the one person in the world who could always reach me. In his many deployments in the teams, he’s done almost everything there is to do, several times nearly losing his life. But even Morgan hadn’t been through something like Redwing.

One day it came to a head. Morgan went to Lieutenant Commander Thomas and told him that he and I had talked and agreed that something needed to be done. He and Senior Chief
Steffen pulled me in to see Skipper and Master Chief. We talked about the workup, about Iraq, about what Team 3 was doing, and reviewed our plan for taking their place. Soon enough someone broached my own state of readiness. Long story short, it was agreed that I needed a break. Physically and emotionally, I was basically spent. They took me off-line and sent me home for a while. They told me I could reengage when I got back, and the timetable would be up to me.

As Team 5 finished running through its paces, I returned to Texas. Back in the Lone Star State, at our family’s horse ranch outside Huntsville, near Sam Houston National Forest, I found a quiet world, a place where people didn’t run around the country from training block to training block, practicing house runs, crawling through brush with instructors in pursuit, driving cars like madmen on racetracks at night. I don’t sleep much now and I didn’t then. But there, in the wind-rustled silence, away from Coronado’s constant press, I found time for prayer and rest. I looked to the Lord and my family for strength.

As I took sanctuary in the East Texas piney woods, the story of what I went through in Afghanistan was beginning to get out. I never thought that news of such a sensitive and classified operation would leak out. But the families of my lost teammates were understandably pushing for it to be told. The Navy seemed unmoved until the media started doing its thing. When stories, many of them inaccurate, began to surface, my command decided the NSW community needed to get out in front of it. They decided I should write a book about the mission. I’m glad they allowed it, because I felt a powerful calling within me to honor the memory of some great warriors I once knew.

Over several weeks during my downtime, I went to Massachusetts
and sat down with a writer and pulled together my part of the story. When I was done, I sent the manuscript to the Navy so they could make sure no classified information was published. The process was cathartic—painful, but necessary. And also strange: as SEALs, we’d been taught to hold our stories close, to say nothing to outsiders, especially the press. But we also knew how to get something done when the chain of command spoke. So I put my heart into it, mostly because, more than anything else, I wanted to let people know what, and who, America had lost.

Back in Coronado, the head shed did a good job of keeping my absence inconspicuous. Workup was often a circus anyway, with everybody moving around all the time, missing various training blocks when opportunities for more important work came along. When my medical appointments had pulled me away from the team, or when I was in Massachusetts, people were too busy to notice.

Back in Texas, I found time to see old friends. I walked in pastures and woodlands, and horsed around with my most loyal friend in the world, a yellow Labrador retriever who had been given to me as a puppy after I came home. She was a service dog, selected for her calmness and gentleness, traits that settled and grounded me. I named her DASY, an acronym for my lost team—Danny, Axe, Southern boy (me), and Yankee (Mikey).

As we sometimes say in the teams, if you have a bad day in the pool, get back in the pool. After calming my nerves, all I wanted was to be around team guys. I returned to the Silver Strand centered and refreshed. Alfa and Bravo Platoons were in the final stages of workup.

The last evolution the higher headquarters had in store for us before we went overseas took place at a base outside San Diego.
It was a certification exercise that would officially validate our squadron’s readiness to deploy. We basically put ourselves into deployment mode, and then jumped into a no-joke combat simulation that lasted for a while. This exercise hit us with everything we’d find downrange except for real bullets and roadside bombs. In this dry run for taking on Iraq, we worked through our concept of operations, the whole counterinsurgency scenario. It was two tough weeks, but a great training exercise, with all the bells and whistles. More than anything else, it was good to have everyone together, working on the same objective. Our new guys showed some initiative right off the bat. They bought one of those plastic backyard kiddie swimming pools, set it up on the training range, and invited some women from a supporting Army unit over for a makeshift pool party right there in the California desert. (I’m still getting over the fact that, as someone with a leadership position, I wasn’t entitled to an invite.) Thinking outside the box—Bravo Zulu, guys.

As the LPO in Alfa Platoon (E-6 pay grade), I did more than I ever did as a regular shooter, running and gunning with the rest of the E-5s (second-class petty officers) in the train. I briefed my teammates, filtered plans and reports back and forth between the leadership and members of the platoon, and helped draw up tomorrow’s plan. On one of our last training ops, one of those doors turned out to hold a surprise I’ll never forget.

We were ordered to hit a series of houses, clearing them of bad guys, rounding up detainees, and identifying people to interrogate. One of the buildings we entered was a wooden barn. When we stacked up on the door, breached it, and crashed inside, we discovered a scene of carnage, the smell of blood as thick as a mist.

Someone shouted, “Mass casualties! Medic! Medic!” Though I had been elevated to LPO, I am still a medic. As we entered the barn, my brain did a skip-step, then kicked into gear. Elliott Miller, a Bravo Platoon medic, was spot-on as he went around with me, triaging the wounded. “That guy’s gone, forget him! What do we have over there?” It was fast-paced and urgent. Elliott and I were all over it. I heard our platoon OIC call in the quick reaction force and request an extract.

The blood was real, so it was easy to miss the fact that its source wasn’t a room full of wounded men: the barn was full of pigs. In consultation with a veterinarian, they had anesthetized the animals, then inflicted wounds for us to treat. It was the most realistic mass-casualty simulation we had ever seen. We practiced a variety of procedures to deal with trauma, arterial bleeding, abdominal wounds, bone fractures, and penetrating or blunt-force internal injuries.

And before you judge it, know that exercises like this, though controversial, have saved thousands of American lives by giving our medics realistic live-tissue training. They are an absolute must for any combat unit heading off to war.

I had just come out of a surgery myself when we went through this evolution. My right hand was still in a cast. After it was over, I noticed that I’d have to get it changed as soon as we got back to the Strand. The plaster was soaked through with blood and mud. Back at the team house, I went to Medical to see about getting some new plaster. The facility was a busy place when a team was doing a workup. Someone’s always getting jacked up. Looking around for the officer on watch, I leaned into an exam room and saw some Navy physicians huddled around a guy. He was a blond-haired kid, muscular and stocky. They were tending
to one of his knees. If his manner and the look in his eyes were any indication, he’d just returned from a combat deployment. Poor dude was really white-knuckling as the docs worked on his left knee, which had been ripped up pretty good.

Our eyes met.

“Where you been, bro?” I asked him.

“Ramadi.”

“Team Three?”

“Yeah.”

I considered this as the docs probed his wound. When one of them moved out of the way, I wedged myself farther into the room.

“How y’all rollin’ over there?”

He didn’t answer.

“I’m with Five,” I offered. “We’re hearing wild stuff coming off the wire.”

He winced as the docs worked on him. He didn’t speak, and he really didn’t have to. The expression on his face was worth a thousand words. I remember that pain. Hell, just looking at him made my knees hurt.

We already had the big picture of how U.S. forces were taking on that city. A big base, Camp Ramadi, was set up on the west side of town. Our main compound over there, known as Shark Base, was like a little appendage to Camp Ramadi, nestled between the base and the Euphrates River, which traces the northern edge of the city. A smaller base, Camp Corregidor, sat on the eastern outskirts. That place wasn’t much more than an outhouse surrounded by walls. I felt bad for the crew that had to live there.

Though I knew this guy had other concerns at the moment,
my curiosity got the better of me. I wanted to hear it straight from the mouth of an operator who had just come back from this circle of hell.

“We’re fixing to go wheels-up,” I said. “Got any advice before we head downrange?”

With the docs continuing to treat his wound, he seemed to welcome the distraction I provided. He did have some advice for me, but it was just a single word. His pale face turned my way and he looked at me with weary eyes.

“Pray.”

A
s I go through my days, I’ve tried to make it a habit to lift my troubles to God. Some guys put their faith in their rifles. Me, I put it all in the grace of the Lord. I know who’s in charge and understand whom I serve. When all hell breaks loose and people start falling, God becomes priority number one. Still, the more I learned about the fight for Ramadi in 2006, the more clearly I saw that it might be helpful to take my prayer life to another level.

Soon enough, another Team 3 veteran turned up at the Strand, full of stories and good advice. It was my friend Chris Kyle. Thanks to his insane confirmed-kill total, the insurgents in Iraq knew him as al-Shaitan Ramadi, the devil of Ramadi. When he found out there was a bounty on his head, the sniper was flattered.

Chris has a fighter’s heart, and a little luck, too. Some team guys chase wars their whole careers and never experience the heavy stuff. He’s thrown out more lead than a pencil factory. When Chris ended his deployment a little early—guess he ran out of rounds—we took advantage of it to have lunch and he talked to me about the daily bump and grind in Ramadi.