parked protectively over my family jewels.
That wouldn’t have saved my life if an IED exploded, but at least I’d be intact for the funeral.
The bridge was all of ten feet long, but it must have taken me an hour to get across that thing. When I finally reached the other side, I was soaking wet from sweat. I turned around to give the other guys the thumbs-up. But there was no one there. They’d all ducked behind some rocks and brush, waiting for me to blow up.
Even Tony, who, as point man, should have been right behind me.
“Motherfucker!” I yelled. “Where the hell did you go?”
“There’s no reason for more than one of us to get blown up,” he told me matter-of-factly as he came across.
Terps
Fallujah had been taken in an all-out assault, moving through the city in a very organized fashion. While it had been successful, the attack had also caused a lot of damage, which had supposedly hurt support for the new Iraqi government.
You can argue whether that’s true or not—I sure would—but the top American command didn’t want the same thing to happen in Ramadi. So, while the Army worked on a plan for taking Ramadi with minimal destruction, we went to war in the area nearby.
We started with DAs. We had four interpreters—terps, as we called them—who helped us deal with the locals. At least one and usually two would go out with us.
One terp we all really liked was Moose. He was a bad-ass. He’d been working since the invasion in 2003. He was Jordanian, and he was the only one of the terps we gave a gun. We knew he would fight—he wanted to be an American so bad he would have died for it. Every time we got contacted, he would be out there shooting.
He wasn’t a great shot, but he could keep the enemy’s heads down. Most importantly, he knew when he could and couldn’t shoot—not as easy a call as it might seem.
There was this little village outside Shark Base we called Gay Tway. It was infested with insurgents. We would open the gates, walk out, and hit our target. There was one house we went to three or four times. After the first time, they didn’t even bother putting the door back.
Why they kept going back to that house, I don’t know. But we kept going back, too; we got to know the place pretty well.
It didn’t take too long before we started getting a lot of contact in Gay Tway and the village of Viet Ram. An Army National Guard unit covered that area, and we started working with them.
Targets
Among our first jobs was to help the Army reclaim the area around a hospital along the river in Viet Ram. The four-story concrete building had been started and then abandoned a few years before. The Army wanted to finish it for the Iraqis; decent medical care was a big need out there. But they couldn’t get close to it to do any work, because as soon as they did, they came under fire. So we went to work.
Our platoon, sixteen guys, teamed up with about twenty soldiers to clear the nearby village of insurgents. Entering town early one morning, we split up and started taking houses.
I was at point, carrying my Mk-12, the first guy in each building. Once the house was secure, I’d go up to the roof, cover the guys on the ground, and look for insurgents, who we expected to attack once they knew we were there. The group leapfrogged forward, clearing the area as we went.
Unlike in the city, these houses weren’t right next to each other, so the process took longer and was more spread-out. But soon enough, the terrorists realized where we were and what we were up to, and they put together a little attack from a mosque. Holed up behind its walls, they started raining AK fire at a squad of soldiers on the ground.
I was up on one of the roofs when the fight started. Within moments, we started firing everything we had at the bad guys: M-4s, M-60s, sniper rifles, 40-mm grenades, LAW rockets—everything we had. We lit that mosque up.
The momentum of the battle quickly shifted in our favor. The soldiers on the ground began maneuvering to assault the mosque, hoping to catch the insurgents before they could slide back into whatever sewer they’d emerged from. We shifted our fire higher, moving our aim above their heads to allow them to get in.
Somewhere in the middle of the fight, a piece of hot brass from another gun—probably an M-60 machine gun next to me—shot against my leg and landed in my boots next to my ankle. It burned like hell, but I couldn’t do anything about it—there were too many bad guys popping up from behind the walls, trying to get my people.
I was wearing simple hiking boots rather than combat boots. That was my normal style—they were lighter and more comfortable, and ordinarily more than enough to protect my feet. Unfortunately, I hadn’t bothered to lace them up very well before the battle, and there was a space between my pants and the boot where the brass happened to fall after it ejected.
What had the instructors told me in BUD/S about not being able to call “time out” in battle?
When things quieted down, I stood up and pulled out the casing. A good wedge of skin came out with it.
We secured the mosque, worked through the rest of the village, then called it a day.
Different Ways of Killing
We went on patrols with the Army unit several more times, trying to reduce resistance in the area. The idea was simple, if potentially risky: we’d make ourselves visible, trying to draw fire from the insurgents. Once they showed themselves, we could fire back and kill them. And usually we did.
Pushed from the village and the mosque, the insurgents retreated to the hospital. They loved hospital buildings, not only because they were big and usually well-made (and therefore protective), but because they knew we were reluctant to attack hospitals, even after they were taken over by terrorists.
It took a while, but the Army command finally decided to attack the building.
Good, we all told them when we heard the plan. Let’s go do it.
We set up an overwatch in a house some two or three hundred yards from the hospital building, across a clear field. As soon as the insurgents saw us, they started letting us have it.
One of my guys shot off a Carl Gustav rocket at the top of the building where they were shooting from. The Gustav put a big ol?? hole there. Bodies flew everywhere.
The rocket helped take some of the fight out of them, and as resistance weakened, the Army punched in and took the building. By the time they reached the grounds, there was almost no resistance. The few people we hadn’t killed had run away.
It was always hard to tell how many insurgents were opposing us in a battle like that. A small handful could put up a pretty good fight. A dozen men fighting behind cover could hold up a unit advance for quite a while, depending on the circumstances. Once the insurgents were met with a lot of force, however, you could count on about half squirting out the back or wherever to get away.
We’d had the Carl Gustav with us earlier, but as far as I know, this was the first time we’d actually killed anyone with it, and it may have been the first time any SEAL unit did so. It was certainly the first time we used it against a building. Once word spread, of course, everyone wanted to use them.
