Everyone always carried their own “blowout kit,” a small set of medical supplies. You always carried the bare necessities to treat a gunshot wound—bandages for different wounds, IV, clotting medicine. It had to be readily accessible—you didn’t want the person helping you have to search for it. I put mine in my right-hand cargo pocket on my leg, under the holster. If I’d ever been shot, my buddies could have cut out the bottom of the cargo pocket and pulled out the kit. Most guys did it that way.
When you treat somebody in the field before the corpsman or a medic gets there, you always use the wounded man’s kit. If you use your kit, who’s to say you’ll have it for the next guy—or yourself—if you need it?
During the first deployment, my SEAL body armor had the MOLLE system attached to it. (MOLLE stands for Modular Lightweight Load-carrying Equipment, a fancy acronym for a web system where different pouches and gear can be attached, allowing you to customize your webbing. The word
On the deployments that followed, I had separate body armor with a separate Rhodesian rig. (Rhodesian describes a vest that allows you to set up a MOLLE or MOLLE-like rig. Again, the overall principle is that you can customize the way you carry your stuff.)
Having a separate vest allowed me to take my gear off and lay it down, while still wearing my body armor. This made it more comfortable to lie down and still be able to grab everything I needed. When I was going to be on the sniper rifle, lying behind it and peering through the scope, I would unclip the strap and lay out the vest. This made my ammo, which I had in the pouches, easier to access. Meanwhile, the vest was still attached to my shoulders; it would come with me and fall into place when I got up.
(One note about the body armor—Navy-issued body armor has been known to fall apart. In light of that fact, my wife’s parents very generously bought me some Dragon Skin armor after my third deployment. It’s super-heavy, but it’s extremely good armor, the best you can get.)
I wore a GPS on my wrist, with a backup in my vest and even a backup old-fashioned compass. I went through a couple of pairs of goggles per deployment; they had miniature fans inside to keep air circulating so they wouldn’t fog up. And, of course, I had a pocketknife—I got a Microtech after graduating BUD/S —and Emerson and Benchmade fixed blades, depending on the deployment.
Among other equipment we’d carry would be a square of a VS-17 panel, used to alert pilots to a friendly position so they wouldn’t fire on us. In theory, at least.
Initially, I tried to keep everything off my waist, even going so far as to carry my extra pistol mags in another drop-leg on my other side. (I cinched it up high so I could still access the pocket on my left leg.)
I never wore ear protection in Iraq. The ear protection we had contained noise- canceling circuitry. While it was possible to hear gunshots fired by the enemy, the microphone that picked up those sounds was omnidirectional. That meant you couldn’t tell what direction the shots were coming from.
And contrary to what my wife thinks, I wore my helmet from time to time. Admittedly, it was not often. It was a standard, U.S. military–issue helmet, uncomfortable and of minimal value against all but the weakest shots or shrapnel. To keep it from jostling on my head, I tightened it up using Pro-Tec pads, but it was still annoying to wear for long stretches. It added a lot of weight to my head while I was on the gun, making it harder to stay focused as the watch went on.
I’d seen that bullets, even from pistols, could easily go through a helmet, so I didn’t have much incentive to deal with the discomfort. The general exception to this was at night. I’d wear the helmet so I had a place to attach my night vision to.
Otherwise, I usually wore a ball cap: a platoon cap with a Cadillac symbol adapted as our unit logo. (While officially we were Charlie Platoon, we usually took on alternate names with the same letter or sound at the beginning: Charlie becomes Cadillac, etc.)
Why a ball cap?
Ninety percent of
Besides my Cadillac cap, I had another favorite—a cap from a New York fire company that had lost some of its men during 9/11. My dad had gotten it for me during a visit, after the attacks, to the “Lions Den,” a historic city firehouse. There he met members of Engine 23; when the firemen heard that his son was going to war, they insisted he take the hat.
“Just tell him to get some payback,” they said.
If they’re reading this, I hope they know that I did.
On my wrist, I’d wear a G-Shock watch. The black watch and its rubber wristband have replaced Rolex Submariners as standard SEAL equipment. (A friend of mine, who thought it was a shame the tradition died, recently got me one. I still feel a little strange wearing a Rolex, but it is a throwback to the frogmen who came before me.)
In cool weather, I brought a personal jacket to wear—a North Face—because, believe it or not, I had trouble convincing the supply mafia to issue me cold-weather gear. But that’s a rant for a different day.
I would stick my M-4 and ten mags (three hundred rounds) in the front compartments of my web gear. I would also have my radio, some lights, and my strobe in those pockets. (The strobe can be used at night for rendezvousing with other units or aircraft, ships, boats, whatever. It also can be used to identify friendly troops.)
If I had one of my sniper rifles with me, I would have some two hundred rounds in my backpack. When I carried the Mk-11 instead of the Win Mag or .338, then I wouldn’t bother carrying the M-4. In that case, the sniper rounds would be in my web gear, closer at hand. Rounding out my ammo were three mags for my pistol.
I wore Merrill high-top hiking boots. They were comfortable and held up to the deployment.
Get Up, Kyle
About a month into my tour with the GROM, I was woken by a shake on my shoulder.
I jumped upright in bed, ready to deck whoever had snuck into my quarters.
“Hey, hey, it’s cool,” said the lieutenant commander who’d woken me. He was a SEAL, and my boss. “I need you to get dressed and come to my office.”
“Yes, sir,” I mumbled. I pulled on a pair of shorts and my flip-flops and went down the hall.
I thought I was in trouble, though I wasn’t sure what for. I’d been on good behavior working with the Poles, no fights to speak of. I searched my mind as I walked toward his office, trying to prepare a defense. My mind was still fairly blank when I got there.
“Kyle, I’m going to need you to get your sniper rifle and pack up all your gear,” the lieutenant commander told me. “You’re going to Fallujah.”
He started telling me about some of the arrangements and threw in some operational details. The Marines were planning a big push, and they needed snipers to help out.
