The Operator Read online

  On these visits, we’d leave our interpreters outside until the houses were clear; it was too dangerous to bring them in with us. I remember talking with intelligence folks and analysts about this. They questioned how we could communicate with our captives.

  “You don’t speak Arabic,” they’d say.

  “Yeah,” I’d respond, “but everybody speaks ‘gun.’ ”

  *

  ONCE AGAIN, AS WE KNOCKED off one target after another, the al-Qaeda population seriously thinned. Commander Rich was asked if we wanted to be moved from Ramadi, which was slowing down, to Baghdad, where we’d be working directly for an Army Special Forces commander. The Army commander was the same rank as Rich, but this was his territory, so he’d be in charge. Most SEAL officers would have respectfully turned down the opportunity. Certainly, there were times in the past when SEAL commanders refused to work underneath other units. Believe it or not, SEALs can be a touch arrogant sometimes.

  No, it’s true.

  Rich, however, didn’t need arrogance because he was so deeply self-confident. He felt he could work with anyone. Rich understood what this collaboration could accomplish for his men and, more important, for the overall mission. So when the question was posed, he didn’t bat an eye. We were lucky to be invited into the belly of the beast. The tide was beginning to turn, and we were helping to turn it.

  Our small task force packed up once again for a flight to Baghdad International Airport, or BIAP. It was impressive, getting off the helos and looking at the hardware arrayed in front of us. We were used to fighting in remote outposts, but here we were in the heart of American military might. Arrayed before us were cargo planes, jets, attack planes, and bombers. Abrams tanks stood sentry near the perimeter walls. Talk about muscle; I’m glad we have those things, and the bad guys don’t.

  Also available were smaller armored personnel carriers, the Strykers, primarily used to drive badass infantry or Rangers into the fight. And then there were the Pandurs. Pandurs were even lighter, smaller, and more maneuverable. Army Special Forces loved using those for missions into the city, but I had my reservations. By this point, lots of Americans serving in Iraq had been killed and maimed by Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs), and I didn’t care to be one of them. I felt better flying or walking, but our counterparts claimed that this was the way to go. We’d find out that they were right.

  Meanwhile, we were more than reassured by all the helicopters on hand: Chinooks, Black Hawks, Kiowas, and several Little Birds. Little Birds were the coolest because they were small, fast, and maneuverable, and best of all, had benches on the outside of the fuselage. Shooters would literally ride outside the bubble of the cockpit, next to the pilot, hooked in by a small lanyard. No matter the mission—“dry-hole” or straight-up Wild West shoot-out—a guy always felt cool riding on a Little Bird. Every time I took off on one, I’d say to myself, Yep, chicks dig this.

  We grabbed our gear and had an escort show us to our new living quarters. They were located inside a huge warehouse-type structure that had been sectioned off to create long hallways dividing large living areas. Army Special Forces had been here awhile, and they were pretty much set up for success. Their homesteading instincts were as well developed as ours—in fact, the Army Special Forces closely resembled us in the way they fought and played. They had individual bedrooms, living rooms with stadium seating and flat-screen TVs, snack bars, and a coffee mess. Besides all that, they were flat-out cool. We were, after all, SEAL Team ****, but I did catch myself thinking a few times, Wow, that’s fucking Army Special Forces.

  We were starting from scratch again. All we had was space. Our bedrooms had six beds in open-bay format, and that was about it. No desks, no couches, and no TVs. We didn’t even have sheets or pillows. This would need to change.

  We had a two-step process in mind: 1) find someone with abundance; 2) commandeer. Sometimes this meant sweet-talk or using the “cool-guy” factor. If you find a group of support folks who rarely leave the wire, or never leave the wire, they may agree to hook up some operators just to feel like part of the team. Of course, this can backfire. Some of these folks have been around actual cool guys for so long that they think it has rubbed off on them. Those are the ones you steal from.

  Don’t feel bad for them. There is actually a name for these folks coined by someone funnier than I: Fobbit. It’s a blend of two words, FOB and Hobbit. How that breaks down is simple. FOB is the acronym for Forward Operating Base. Hobbits are a fictional race famous for sloth and the accumulation of creature comforts. Put the two together: Fobbit. Fobbits are known for going to the personnel exchange, or “PX,” and buying up all of the good stuff before the men and women who actually fight can get any. We’re talking about tobacco, coffee creamer, video games, snacks, electronics, and magazines. Fobbits don’t work out, they eat all the high-calorie junk food and drink up all of the soda and Rip Its. Since they don’t have to fight actual enemies, they put all their strategic effort into being first in the chow line or soaking up all the hot water in the showers. Then they call home and talk about being in “The Shit.” They love to use words like “Down Range” and “War-Fighter.”

  Lame, those Fobbits. Don’t feel bad that we stole from them.

  If the Fobbits fail you, find the construction guys. Most of my time over there, this meant going to the Navy’s Construction Battalion or Seabees. Seabees kick ass. They are generally some of the hardest working folks in the US military. They make it work for you, even if they don’t have the supplies. And they do it outside the wire and fight people, too. Plus, they have beer. Not in a war zone, of course, that would be illegal. Just sayin’.

  In this particular case, the Seabees had minimal guys and supplies and were overworked on other projects, but they happily gave us access to their salvage yard. It consisted of cut-up 2 x 4s and 4 x 4s, miscellaneous hand-me-down office furniture, and other handy items. I even found a practically new French assault rifle amid the clutter: never been fired and only dropped once.

  So we grabbed what we could out of the yard and started building. Having no carpentry skills myself, I helped with picking out good materials and bringing them to the measuring and cutting station. It turned out that good carpentry skills didn’t matter. “Can-do” attitude coupled with a little bit of bullshitting trumped that. The best at this tactic was Cole. He was one of the six men in our room and he convinced us that we had nothing to worry about. As long as we cut him the material and found him some tools, he’d take care of us.

  Cole only had one speed, full throttle. I would and did trust him with my life. In fact, if my hands were freezing I’d let him pee on them—Cole was the fellow BUD/S trainee whom I’d asked for that special favor all those years ago during Hell Week. On top of being a fearless, aggressive SEAL, he had a funny quirk. He was always eleven minutes late for everything. On his very first training assignment with our squadron, we were driving through town to the site of the exercise with only five minutes to spare when he said, “Oh, look, a Boot Barn, let’s stop and look for boots.” I looked at him cock-eyed and said, “You’ve got to be shitting me. We’re almost late and you want to … no. We can stop for a can of Copenhagen but we’re not shopping for boots.”

  From then on, I tried to get everyone to call him Boots, but nobody liked it. Whenever he was eleven minutes late for something and the boss would ask where the hell he was, I’d say, “Shopping for Boots.” Still nothing. It frustrated the hell out of me that nobody could see that this was the perfect nickname.

  Until this deployment. On one of the missions near Ramadi, I was on a rooftop in a gunfight, and I saw him run into a house by himself, which he shouldn’t have done. A massive gunfight ensued. From what I could hear, there were at least three shooters, which meant he was outnumbered. I kept a bead on the exit, but when the shooting stopped, he came out alone. I said, “What the hell just happened in that room?”

  He said, “Oh, I had to go in there and deliver the boots.”
/>   Now it stuck.

  Boots may have been habitually late, but he couldn’t be faulted for his work ethic. He worked on his construction projects around the clock. And his products were hilarious. He built a desk that would have made Shaquille O’Neal look like an undernourished grade-schooler and matched it with a chair that might have been stolen from Verne Troyer. A guy would put his computer on the desk and sit in the chair. Even if his hands could reach, and most couldn’t, it didn’t matter because he couldn’t see the screen.

  We complained to Boots about this so he remedied it. I came into the room and saw a bizarre contraption—a rickety old office swivel chair mated with the bottom of a lawn chair. To make it high enough to reach the huge desk, he’d added a nailed-together mess of 4 x 4s as a base, upon which the swivel chair/lawn chair combo appeared to be precariously balanced.

  I walked over to inspect it and maybe tell Boots that it was unsafe. To make my point, I attempted to pull the chair off the 4 x 4s but, sure enough, it was thoroughly connected. It was one big, glorious, ridiculous chair. It smelled like a Dumpster and barely fit through the door. But at least we could see over the top of the desk.

  We lived like this for a while, stoically; we’d become accustomed to not having Xbox and didn’t have time for movies. There was a very nice gym full of everything we loved: CrossFit, heavy bags and pads, free weights, plenty of cardio machines, and lots of room to stretch or utilize the foam rollers. There was also a big latte, espresso, and cappuccino coffeemaker in the Tactical Operations Center (TOC) and a great chow hall. The other stuff we could do without. We were here to hunt.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  When people think of SEALs and Army Special Forces, they probably imagine a fierce rivalry. Well, they wouldn’t be wrong. As I said, a lot of SEAL commanders would have balked at an assignment in which we were, nominally at least, reporting to their commander. But from the start we were glad to be working with them, and we benefited from their expertise in the most exciting (and fun) style of attack, which they were doing daily while crushing the enemy.

  On one such adventure, they hit a convoy of bad guys that included too many vehicles for them to handle. Two of the cars got away. Fortunately, we had several assets in the sky, and the Air Force was able to watch and follow the vehicles to their safe house. Both vehicles parked, and five insurgents went into one of three adjacent houses.

  Back at the Baghdad Airport, we were in the operations center monitoring the houses as the higher-ups decided what to do. The bosses were discussing the possibilities: Should we send in an assault team? Army Special Forces had killed all of the other insurgents so it might well make sense to interrogate someone to find out more about their cell. Should we “go kinetic,” which means drop some bombs on the house? That would certainly kill all of them, but we’d get no further intelligence.

  As the conversation went on, someone suggested a third option: “Send in TF Blue,” which was us—Task Force Blue, as in Navy Blue. The idea was batted around for a bit when finally an officer from the Special Air Service (SAS) announced, “Yeah, send in TF Blue. It’s just like going kinetic. Only you can tell them to bring one out alive!” He was semi-joking. But the commander actually said to us, “Hey, you guys have been killing everybody. Try to bring one back alive so we can interrogate him.”

  The intel folks in the Joint Operations Center (JOC) kept eyes on the target while we planned the hit. The house was quiet: lights off and no sign of activity. So we said, “You know what? It’s been a long deployment. Forget hiking in. Let’s just fly in and land right in front. We’ll clear the whole place in ten minutes and leave. The night will be over and we can come back and hang out with our weird furniture.”

  We chose a landing spot a hundred meters from the front door. It was dangerous because we knew they were bad guys, that they were armed, and that they were spooked. But even if they came out shooting, we thought we could get the drop on them. Our plan was complacent, overconfident. When things go so right for so long, you stop thinking about ways things can go wrong. This is how success can kill.

  We took off in three Black Hawks and beelined for the houses. We were only in the air for a short while when the call came from the pilots: “Ten minutes.”

  The doors were open, and I was on the left side of the rear helicopter, Dash Three, with my legs hanging out of the open door. This was always my favorite part, high on adrenaline and the wind whipping my face. I went through my checklist: double check NOD—Night Optical Device—and weapon … look forward to watch for movement.

  “Two minutes … one minute.”

  “Thirty seconds.” We all had the houses in our gun sights now. Sure enough, the bad guys had heard us coming and were running outside. They opened fire, and we returned it from the air. We were in a gunfight before we’d even touched the ground.

  The helos all hit the deck at the same time, and the teams jumped out. Because of the cover of darkness and our night vision capability, we were able to quickly eliminate three of the fighters while the other two split and ran into separate, adjacent structures.

  A small team inspected the bodies while Echo Team went to the house on the right and my guys, Delta Team, went to the house on the left; each contained one bad guy. My team covered the entrances and the windows and did what we called a “de-escalation of force.” Instead of rushing in with guns blazing, we took up positions outside and “called out” the terrorist.

  Just like in the cop shows on TV, we shouted the few phrases we knew in Arabic, “We know you are in there. Come out and no one else needs to get hurt!” Nothing.

  Time to let loose the hounds. Seriously. We had Toby the dog with us, and he was one tough son of a bitch. Literally. “If you don’t come out of the house,” we shouted, “we’re sending in a dog and he will bite you! Come out!!” Nothing.

  We gave Toby the signal, and he tore inside, unarmed with anything but his teeth and protected only by a working vest that had no bulletproofing, just a handle on the back in case his handler needed to pull him away. He raced around in the darkened rooms, using only his keen sense of smell. A few seconds later, he began to bark emphatically. We’ve worked out a complex way of communicating with these highly trained animals: If the dog is barking, we think he has found something. If the dog is barking, and there is a grown man screaming, we know he has found something. Not complex, actually.

  We had dogs on pretty much every mission. They were absolutely fearless and added an essential dimension to our capabilities. They’d enter a house near the back of the “train” with their handler and would come up when called. If there was a sensitive situation—barricaded people, or someone not coming out, or we just simply weren’t sure and had a funny feeling—we’d send the dog in. Sometimes the dogs had cameras and sometimes they didn’t but we could see the images real-time when they did. We also used the dogs to chase down “Squirters.” Those are folks who’re trying to run. The Squirters would either get run down by the dogs and crushed, or they’d find a hiding spot, and the dogs would locate them and tear them up. The dogs would charge heavily armed men without hesitation. The enemy was terrified of them. They thought of dogs as mangy scavengers, the lowest of the low, so to them these fierce and magnificent creatures must have seemed like some other kind of animal entirely. Whenever they could, they’d try to shoot them down.

  We lost quite a few dogs in combat, and mourned them as we would one of our brothers. In front of the SEAL Team **** headquarters in Virginia, there’s a huge, trident-shaped piece of steel from the World Trade Center and a large black wall with the names of the fallen. If you stand with your back to the wall, looking forward, a few feet ahead and to the right, there’s a smaller wall with the names of our fallen dogs. That’s where they walked: forward and to the right.

  When we weren’t on missions, the dogs would hang out with us wherever we were bedded down—kind of like pets, with a difference. When they don’t have their gear on, you can mess around with th
em, play ball with them—they like their ball more than treats. They’ll sit there and watch TV with you. But you can never forget they’re dogs of war. If they sit on the same level as you on the couch, you have to push them off. If they sit next to you and put a paw on your leg, that’s not to say I love you, but I’m dominant. You have to be careful. If you let them feel dominant, they might attack. Some are better than others. Some are friendly, and some are just straight-up dicks. Only one was like that actually, but he was a complete psycho.

  Toby, though, was a great dog. Confident that he was on to something, we cleared the rest of the house and worked our way toward the last room, where the barking was coming from. It happened to be a bathroom. In the middle of the room, there was a small, bathtub-looking basin. It was built into the floor and was serving as the drain right below a showerhead. Toby was scratching violently at it and barking right at the drain. We thought that was quite odd so we backed Toby off, and two of my guys, Boots and Mack, stood on either side of the tub with their guns pointing at it. Keeping as low and away as they could, they squatted down and each grabbed an edge of the basin and started to lift. As they did, bullets exploded out of the tub and flew inches from their faces. They dropped the basin as if it had suddenly become a writhing viper and returned fire as they backed away.