the base.
“No,” I answered. “I was too busy shooting.”
“They were all over the place.” The kid was stoked. “We were dropping them and that wasn’t even half of them. We were just laying it down. We thought y’all were fuckin’ done.”
That made more than two of us.
That night scared the shit out of me. That’s when I came to the realization that I’m not superhuman. I can die.
All through everything else, there had been points where I thought,
But I never did die. Those thoughts were fleeting. They evaporated.
After a while, I started thinking, they can’t kill me. They can’t kill us. We’re fucking undefeatable.
I have a guardian angel and I’m a SEAL and I’m lucky and whatever the hell it is:
Then, all of a sudden, within two minutes I was nailed twice.
Building the Wall
We felt happy and grateful to have been rescued. We also felt like total asses.
Trying to sneak into Sadr City was not going to work, and command should have known that from the start. The bad guys would always know we were there. So we would just have to make the most of it.
Two days after getting our butts kicked out of the city, we came back, this time riding in Strykers. We took over a place known as the banana factory. This was a building four or five stories high, filled with fruit lockers and assorted factory gear, most of it wrecked by looters long before we got there. I’m not sure exactly what it had to do with bananas or what the Iraqis might have done there; all I knew at the time was that it was a good place for a sniper hide.
Wanting a little more cover than I would have had on the roof, I set up in the top floor. Around nine o’clock in the morning, I realized the number of civilians walking up and down the street had started to thin. That was always a giveaway—they spotted something and knew they didn’t want to end up in the line of fire.
A few minutes later, with the street now deserted, an Iraqi came out of a partially destroyed building. He was armed with an AK-47. When he reached the street he ducked down, scouting in the direction of the engineers who were working down the road on the wall, apparently trying to pick one out to target. As soon as I was sure what he was up to, I aimed center-mass and fired.
He was forty yards away. He fell, dead.
An hour later, another guy poked his head out from behind a wall on another part of the street. He glanced in the direction of the T-wall, then pulled back.
It may have seemed innocent to someone else—and certainly didn’t meet the ROEs—but I knew to watch more carefully. I’d seen insurgents follow this same pattern now for years. They would peek out, glance around, then disappear. I called them “peekers”—they “peeked” out to see if anyone was watching. I’m sure they knew they couldn’t be shot for glancing around.
I knew it, too. But I also knew that if I was patient, the guy or whoever he was spotting for would most likely reappear. Sure enough, the fellow reappeared a few moments later.
He had an RPG in his hand. He knelt quickly, bringing it up to aim.
I dropped him before he could fire.
Then it became a waiting game. The rocket was valuable to them. Sooner or later, I knew, someone would be sent to get it.
I watched. It seemed like forever. Finally, a figure came down the street and scooped up the grenade launcher.
It was a kid. A child.
I had a clear view in my scope, but I didn’t fire. I wasn’t going to kill a kid, innocent or not. I’d have to wait until the savage who put him up to it showed himself on the street.
Target-Rich
I ended up getting seven insurgents that day, and more the next. We were in a target- rich environment.
Because of the way the streets were laid out and the number of insurgents, we were getting close shots—a number were as close as 200 yards. My longest during this time was only about 880; the average was around 400.
The city around us was schizophrenic. You’d have ordinary civilians going about their business, selling things, going to market, whatever. And then you’d have guys with guns trying to sneak up on the side streets and attack the soldiers putting up the wall. After we began engaging the insurgents, we would become the targets ourselves. Everyone would know where we were, and the bad guys would come out of their slug holes and try and take us down.
It got to the point where I had so many kills that I stepped back to let the other guys have a few. I started giving them the best spots in the buildings we took over. Even so, I had plenty of chances to shoot.
One day we took over this house and, after letting my guys choose their places, there were no more windows to fire from. So I took a sledgehammer and broke a hole in the wall. It took me quite a while to get it right.
When I finally set up my place, I had about a three-hundred-yard view. Just as I got on my gun, three insurgents came out right across the street, fifteen yards away.
I killed all of them. I rolled over and said to one of the officers who’d come over, “You want a turn?”
After a few days, we figured out that the attacks were concentrating when the work crews reached an intersection. It made sense: the insurgents wanted to attack from a place where they could easily run off.
We learned to bump up and watch the side streets. Then we started pounding these guys when they showed up.
Fallujah was bad. Ramadi was worse. Sadr City was the worst. The overwatches would last two or three days. We’d leave for a day, recharge, then go back out. It was balls-to-the-wall firefights every time.
The insurgents brought more than just their AKs to a fight. We were getting rocketed every fight. We responded by calling in air cover, Hellfires and what-have-you.
The surveillance network overhead had been greatly improved over the past several years, and the U.S. was able to make pretty good use of it when it came to targeting Predators and other assets. But in our case, the bastards were right out in the open, extremely easy to spot. And very plentiful.
There were claims by the Iraqi government at one point that we were killing civilians. That was pure bullshit. While just about every battle was going down, Army intelligence analysts were intercepting insurgent cell phone communications that were giving a blow-by-blow account.
“They just killed so-and-so,” ran one conversation. “We need more mortarmen and snipers… . They killed fifteen today.”
We had only counted thirteen down in that battle—I guess we should have taken two out of the “maybe”
