The Operator Page 17

  He’d participated in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. His sixty-strong squadron was assigned to drive six hundred miles to the Tigris River in lightly armored Land Rovers and accept the surrender of Iraq’s one-thousand-strong 5th Division. I know that looks like a misprint, but coalition intelligence had concluded that the 5th was demoralized and simply looking for someone to surrender to.

  When Andy and his guys arrived at their objective, the 5th Division, instead of greeting the coalition forces with a white flag, opened a heavy barrage of artillery and automatic weapons fire and even anti-aircraft weapons. The whole surrender story had been a ruse, one our intelligence had unfortunately fallen for. Andy and his mates had been lured into a trap. Vastly outnumbered and outgunned, they had no option but to retreat. Just as that grim reality sank in, so did the Land Rovers. Eight of their eleven vehicles bogged down in the soft black sand. The men set ninety-second-delay charges on each of the now-useless vehicles, and all piled into the three still-drivable Rovers as the charges detonated around them, at least creating a diversion.

  One of the men later told London’s Sunday Times, “The enemy fire was devastating and relentless and remarkably impressive. Looking around at the guys dodging bullets and tracers reminded me of the film The Matrix.”

  The fleeing coalition forces hung over the sides of the overcrowded Land Rovers firing rifles and grenade launchers, wanting only to give a good account of themselves until they were killed, but somehow they made it to the cover of a dry riverbed where waiting Chinooks evacuated them.

  So maybe it wasn’t really Andy’s fault. Bad intelligence had nearly gotten them all killed. I had to think we’d made some strides in that area since the beginning of the war.

  We had people working around the clock—a day shift and a night shift—in a room with big screens everywhere trying to figure out who the hell was doing what. They’d identify a house that aroused suspicion, put a drone above it, and keep watch for days or even weeks. All activity was duly logged: A truck showed up, this many people got out, they stayed this long, made this many calls, discussed this.

  It was a huge intelligence process that didn’t really involve us until they had identified someone significant in the al-Qaeda-assisted insurgency and located him in a specific house.

  At our briefings, the intel people would say: Here’s a house where we think there’s a bad guy. Here’s his picture. Here’s a list of his relatives and the aliases he uses. Here’s what we think he’s doing, and here’s his big spiderweb network that could lead to the No. 1 target, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.

  Zarqawi was a forty-year-old Jordanian who’d sworn allegiance to Osama bin Laden and led a particularly brutal leg of the Iraqi insurgency, specializing in hostage beheadings and suicide bombings, and turning the Iraqi conflict into a civil war between his Sunni sect of Islam and the Shias, who’d long been oppressed under the fallen regime of Saddam Hussein. A few months before we arrived, Zarqawi had masterminded the coordinated bombing of three Jordanian hotels frequented by Western diplomats, killing 60 and wounding 115. With bin Laden gone to ground, Zarqawi had become the most wanted seemingly obtainable prize, with a $25 million price on his head.

  In this deployment, we were working up the lower reaches of the terrorist pyramid that would lead, ultimately, to Zarqawi. (The search eventually led to a safe house in an isolated village about thirty-five miles north of Baghdad, where, on June 7, 2006—six months after we arrived—two five-hundred-pound smart bombs put Zarqawi permanently out of the conversation.)

  After laying everything out at our wake-up briefing at sunset, the intel crew chief would say, “Here’s what we think. There’s the probability, do you want this target?”

  The answer was almost always, “Yes.”

  Then we’d start putting our game faces on. Everybody made sure their gear was good to go; batteries were changed out and everything was confirmed clean. The guns and night vision equipment, I mean. (Our clothes were filthy. Some guys—okay, a lot of guys—rarely washed out their operational cammies. We were superstitious about it. They’d gotten us through a lot of tight spots, so why rinse away good juju? As a result, we smelled like shit.)

  While we got ready, the leadership would huddle with the pilots and come up with a plan, then we all came together for a twenty-minute brief with the commanders and laid it all out down to which of our combat dogs we were taking. Then we put on our gear and walked from our room to the helicopters, which were right outside, not more than fifty meters from our door. And we’d launch.

  The first few missions weren’t much different from the houses we’d rolled in on in Afghanistan. We were still learning how to interrogate. We’d never had any classes or formal instruction. The first time we conducted an interrogation we brought the suspects into the kitchen of the house we’d entered. We’d grabbed this twenty-two-year-old guy and had him on the ground. Four of us stood around yelling at him in English, and he was yelling back in Arabic. There was no interpreter, and one of our goddamn dogs was going crazy, barking and snarling at him. The dog got so excited he actually bit my boss on his leg. My boss stopped yelling at the guy, turned around, pointed at the dog handler, who pulled the dog away. The poor Iraqi kid was staring up like, “Oh, my God, these guys are so crazy. They let their own dogs bite them.” We got nothing out of him.

  As we gained more experience we honed our assault tactics. The old way emphasized speed: Hit the house fast, move through the house fast. Doing that meant leaving your night vision up—meaning, not using it—and using the high-intensity white light at the end of your gun so you could see everything clearly and move more rapidly. The problem was, the bad guys could see that light, too. We started thinking, Well, shit, let’s just keep our night vision down. We’ll use our lasers so no one else can see. We’ll be slower, yeah, but more methodical, and, most important, invisible. It would give us a huge advantage.

  Imagine shining a flashlight in a very dark room. Now imagine nobody can see it except you. That’s what you see through night vision. If you shine it at the ceiling it will light up the whole room. Every one of your buddies can see what’s being lit up, but none of the bad guys can see shit.

  We went out every night and gradually learned that war was really good training. It wasn’t as scary as the news makes it look and sound, and there aren’t bogey men with suicide vests around every corner. Not that we got complacent, we just got realistic and began to fine-tune our tactics. The only guys really “going hot” were our snipers, especially one named Greg. This was my first time working with him, but it wouldn’t be the last. He saved more lives and ended more than anyone I’d ever heard of. I’m not sure, exactly, how you “confirm” a kill. No one I worked with ever did. But Greg has hundreds of “non-confirmed,” though you’ll never hear that from him.

  When you go to SEAL Team ****, you specialize. You can be a sniper or an assaulter. Most of us were qualified to do either. “Sniper” is a qualification. If you go to the school and graduate, you’re a sniper. It’s the same as being a “breacher.” If you go the school and graduate, you’re a breacher. Ditto being a communicator, jumpmaster, range safety officer, and so on. You can think of these designations as being like merit badges—ones a SEAL earns but doesn’t necessarily use on every mission. Most assaulters are qualified as snipers but perform assaulter duties: They find a way to penetrate a house and assault. The snipers—many of whom are simultaneously qualified as breachers and jumpmasters—go up to the high ground and protect the assaulters. Ironically, given my ambition when I joined the Navy to become a sniper, I found that I preferred being on the assault team. When I told people that and they asked why, I’d jokingly reply, “Well, snipers kill more people, but assaulters kill more famous people.”

  We hadn’t killed anyone especially famous yet, but Greg was piling up the kills. While he shot, we worked on tactics. One night it changed for us all.

  *

  INTELLIGENCE CAME UP WITH THREE major compounds filled wit
h terrorists all in the same area. We decided it was a perfect time to try out our new ideas. It would be a huge joint operation. In the briefing we said: “We’re going to do an offset. We’re going to land five clicks away, all of us, and we’re going to walk in because they won’t hear us, and we can all sneak into the target compounds.” Everyone agreed.

  We landed at our remote spot in the pitch dark and began our hike. At first it was just sand, open desert. As we got closer, we could hear dogs barking. We didn’t worry about that because dogs bark on every target and never give us away. I’m convinced dogs don’t ever stop barking in the Middle East. As we got closer, the ground grew swampy, and we began to see some trees and even a few small vineyards. At about five hundred meters out, we could see the outlines of our compound. This was a set point, our last chance to get ready for the assault. I reached up and blindly changed the batteries in my night vision to be sure they weren’t going to quit in the middle of a gunfight. Fresh batteries, check. I was ready to go.

  Batabatabata! Choppers zoomed overhead. It was fucking Army Special Forces coming in on little birds. They’d refused to walk in. They wanted to land on the X. The Brits did the same thing, only they came in a Chinook, which is way worse, louder than shit.

  Our guys were all cursing. Everybody and their fucking cousin knew we were there, and we had to hustle now. The snipers and ladder carriers sprinted to the nearest roofline to get up high. As soon as they got up there I heard some shots. Suddenly everybody was blasting. We moved on our objective—each unit had one of the compounds—going in and going dark, using the new tactic.

  My team got to the main entrance on “building 1-1,” our target. Because there was a gunfight all around us, we decided to put a charge on the primary entrance, the front door. Our breacher made his way up with my team leader holding security. The breacher placed the charge and moved to a safe distance and blew the door. Boom! We quietly entered and found ourselves in a long hallway. The charge had filled the house with dust while Andy, Jonny, two other guys, and I made our way forward in our usual CQB formation, only moving more methodically because you don’t sprint with the night vision down. I was the fourth man back. The infrared torches at the ends of our guns lit up the space. A guy with an AK-47 pointed right at us popped out of a doorway just like in one of those amusement park houses of horror. We were standing there looking at him, and he was looking right back at us, but he couldn’t see us. It was like we were ghosts. Before we could shoot, he disappeared back behind the door. Andy and another guy, a big tough guy, pushed through the door, and I heard the distinctive brraaatt of the big guy’s gun. Blasted him. We were all a little awed by the moment. This big, seriously tough guy had never killed anybody before, and now he’d just shot a guy in the face.

  I would learn that in a gunfight the combination of adrenaline, muscle memory, and super-human focus leaves no psychic space for fear. I wasn’t shutting it out. There was just no room for it. When we returned from a mission and let down a bit, a thought would sweep over me: Wow, I almost died! Then I might feel that chest-clutching, stomach-churning hand of fear reaching in. But my only emotion in the actual moment was … curiosity.

  We knew Andy had been in more gunfights than goddamn Jesse James, so when we came to that body in the room, we said, “Andy, go check that guy.” Andy walked over to the crumpled figure and shined a white light on him. The guy’s face was split wide like a melon dropped on a cement floor.

  All Andy said was, “Oh, he’s fucked, mate.”

  Okay, so we were officially in combat. We finished clearing the house. Jonny and I heard the snipers going hot outside. The two of us left the building and saw a sniper, a guy we called Dirty, up on top of one of the buildings looking down at us. That was good. His job was to cover us as we made our move. Jonny was ahead of me in a little alley between two of the buildings. We needed to move around the corner and had to assume there were enemy fighters on the other side. Jonny started moving forward. I knew by the angle he’d taken that I needed to split to the other side of the alley so I could cover in front of him, and he could cover in front of me, our fields of fire crossing at a point ahead of and between us. No words, no hand signals, just years of practice.

  We’d done it hundreds of times in training, and it had worked—with paper targets.

  We were both moving now. Then two bad guys popped up with guns and—braaapp—we both blasted them. It was instantaneous and simultaneous. Both gunmen dropped, lifeless weight. We’d both killed our first guys at the same instant.

  “Shit, Jonny,” I said. “I just killed that guy.” I pointed my invisible floodlight at the body. It wasn’t like you see in the movies. Guys don’t crash through windows or fly through the air when you shoot them. They just collapse on themselves in awkward positions. My invisible light was showing me this now: crumpled terrorist with an AK-47 by his head.

  I was still looking when Jonny said, “I just killed my first guy, too.”

  “What do we do now?”

  “Well, now we do one of those bounding things,” he said.

  Obviously, there were bad guys in the building up ahead, and we needed to move back to get more guys so we could take it down. Bounding meant a staggered retreat. We went back and grabbed some guys and cleared that building. There was one guy inside the house who had a nasty-looking leg wound. He’d managed to dispose of his weapon before we got to him so he was unarmed, but he was obviously a bad guy. We put a tourniquet on him and prepared him to be moved to one of our helicopters and then a hospital. I doubt al-Qaeda would do the same for us.

  When we came back out, there was gunfire everywhere. I could hear the bullets cracking above our heads. I was thinking, “Man, these guys are lousy shots.” What I came to understand was that most of the enemy truly believed that Allah would guide their bullets. So why bother to aim? Their faith is probably a key reason I’m still in one piece.

  But even poorly aimed fire was a threat, especially so much of it. Our snipers were all shooting toward a nearby mosque where the mujahideen had fled to make a last stand. I saw someone running for the mosque door and fired a round just as he was going in, but I couldn’t see if I hit him. We didn’t know what weapons they had in there, and we didn’t want to find out. Instantly, we thought of the Rangers who’d come in with us.

  Rangers are our big blocking force. Typically, they would defend our perimeter as we went in after high-value targets. When the time for fighting with precision is over and you need to fuck people up, you turn to the Rangers, who have black belts in fucking people up. We had one Ranger who was about 6′6″ and he carried the Carl Gustav, a Swedish-made shoulder-fired rocket launcher, like a bazooka. Another Ranger, who was about 5′5″, followed him everywhere. His job was to carry the backpack filled with the 84-millimeter rockets that the Carl Gustav fires. This poor son of a bitch, I don’t think he even carried a gun. For every step his giant of a partner took, he had to take two, lugging those goddamn heavy rockets. Who says the Army has no sense of humor?

  So yeah, the bad guys were in a mosque, but they were shooting at us. This was early in the war, and the rules of engagement were flexible. If you’re taking fire, you’re taking fire. So permission to engage, engage. “Fire that Gustav.”

  The big Ranger loaded the son of a bitch up and launched one right into the mosque. We told him to hit it again. He reloaded and—whoommph—another rocket goes to meeting. The mosque was dead silent at this point, a black cloud drifting from the door. We were about to go clear it when the little short dude said, “Can we fire one more?” One less rocket to carry? Sure, why not? So we launched one more.

  When we got in there, it looked like Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th had beaten us to it. Bodies were flung everywhere, sliced and diced. It was pretty bad. But the thing that haunted me a little wasn’t so much the gruesome sight—rather, it was the sound, a sound like water pouring out of a spigot. It was blood flowing from a severed arm.

  When we got ba
ck to the base we did a debrief. I told the story of Jonny’s and my cross fire in the alley, and the sniper, Dirty, related how he’d engaged those guys from the rooftop. Then the bosses said, “Okay, what happened in the mosque?”

  I said, “Well, we cleared it with the Rangers. I’m going to let this Ranger debrief it.”

  Most of the Rangers were young kids, and they never say anything in briefings. Now I was putting the kid on the spot. He stood up, and kept standing up, until he reached his towering 6′6″.

  “Well,” he said. “We made entry. The No. 1 man was Carl Gustav.”

  That was my first real gunfight and we all learned a lot: Walk in, don’t fly, because that’s what stirs up the hornet’s nest. Stay blacked out as you go in; don’t shine your white light, it could get you shot up.

  Maybe the most surprising thing I learned was, it’s exciting. I’d been training for so long to get into fights, and now we were in it, and it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. I was able to keep my shit together and make decisions that improved my position. My buddies and I were almost overqualified to fight these assholes. We were good at it.

  And I had my first kill. I don’t want to compare it to my first buck, and yet there was some similarity. I’d envied the guys who’d already killed an enemy fighter and bragged about it. Now I was part of the club. I felt no remorse. Zero. These guys would have sooner slit my throat than look at me. They lived a life dedicated to destroying Western culture and everything it stood for. They were part of a network whose biggest celebrations came when they managed to bring down a tourist hotel and kill men, women, and children who were doing nothing more threatening than trying to decide between the hot or cold buffet. They’d created a cult of death.