The Operator Read online

  They got off about six shots each. The bathtub, never again to hold water, ceased all resistance. Breaking the unique silence that follows the cacophony of a gunfight, one of the guys said, “Holy shit, we’re actively engaged in a gunfight with a bathtub!!”

  We gathered our emotions for a second, as we all contemplated how close we’d come to an unnecessary death. Then with one of us covering the crack, we gingerly lifted the tub out of the floor. Beneath it was a dug-out cavity and lying dead in it was the insurgent. Beside him was a machine gun and a stack of grenades. He’d dug that fighting position with the intent of martyring himself in a fight just like this. Fortunately, he hadn’t managed to martyr us along with him. Sometimes, it’s better to be lucky than good.

  We knew we shouldn’t have landed right next to the houses, but we’d done it anyway. Maybe next time we’d remember a lesson that came very close to being written in blood: Complacency kills.

  The guys in the other house were able to grab the last insurgent without firing a shot. They could have justifiably shot the a-hole because he was armed, but they showed restraint. After all, the bosses had asked nicely.

  We loaded up the weapons and incriminating documents and brought the prisoner back to Baghdad Airport. Here you go. Time for breakfast.

  *

  THE MAIN DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RAMADI and this new gig was mobility. We had it in spades.

  We could use the Little Birds when we needed and also had that fleet of armored vehicles, including Pandurs. They were lightly armored, highly maneuverable, small, fast, and relatively quiet. We were able to load an assault team plus a sniper and an interpreter in each and could quietly drive anywhere in Baghdad. While I was never a fan of driving in Baghdad, Army Special Forces had proven that for chasing bad guys in congested neighborhoods, Pandurs were the way to go. On the downside, they’d also proven to be death traps when hit by IEDs. In tactical situations, one needs to ask, “Is the squeeze worth the juice?” Sometimes it is, and you roll the dice.

  One such day, we were targeting a terrorist whom we believed to be a high-value target (HVT). He wasn’t that high-value, but he was one to go get if he popped up. And he just had. It was the middle of the day, our night, so we shook ourselves awake and ran to the ready room to put on our gear. We boarded the Pandurs and headed out the main gate toward the house. We brought four Strykers full of Army Rangers for some extra security.

  We knew where the house was, and we were on our way. We surrounded the place and carefully cleared it, rounding up the men inside for interrogation. The target wasn’t there. We left the guys we’d rounded up in mid-interrogation and went after the elusive HVT.

  The new house we thought he’d fled to was only a few blocks away, so we decided to go on foot. The Pandurs and Strykers could catch up with us a few minutes later. We split our patrol into two lines, one on each side of the street. This way one side could cover the other. Patrolling in Baghdad was dangerous in 2007, especially when the sun was up.

  We quickly made it down the street and around the corner to the house. We surrounded it and had the interpreter shout commands through a bullhorn. He told the inhabitants of the house that we were coalition forces and everyone should come out. They all did, mostly women and children, plus two military-age males. We separated them, and had our guys start to interrogate as the rest of the team began to clear the building. This was tense as always because bad guys didn’t always come out when asked politely. Some wanted to fight and die.

  The house proved to be empty, but as we were working through it, the HVT popped up again. This time he was three blocks away. It was uncanny how he was keeping a step ahead of us. Guys were taking this personally, and it only made them more determined to get him. We hopped back in the Pandurs and raced toward the new target. On the way there, the HVT disappeared again. A few minutes later he popped back up in a house about five blocks away. This time he stayed up; he didn’t disappear. Let’s get him!

  We all jumped in our Pandurs and rolled again at top speed. All of the operators were excited. We were getting closer by the second, and this time, he wasn’t getting away. As we turned the corner about two blocks out, we could see the target building. We were almost there. And then we saw a bridge between the target and us.

  “All stop, all stop, all stop!” our troop commander, Rich, shouted over the radio. “Turn around, we’re going home.”

  The guys in my vehicle were visibly angry at this point. They’d been hustling all day in 120-degree heat through a very dangerous neighborhood chasing a guy they really wanted to grab, or kill. Tempers were flaring. “Why the hell are we turning around?!” Boots said to me, “He’s right fucking there!! … Let’s go crush him!”

  “He’s right there across that bridge, bro,” I said. “It could be wired. This is a good call.”

  “I don’t give a shit if it’s wired, let’s nail that guy!” he said.

  It didn’t matter what we said in my Pandur, the call was made, and we turned around. We drove back to Baghdad Airport with a little bit of bitching going on. Most of the guys wanted to take the HVT down, bridge or no bridge, but they were fueled too much by emotion. The HVT could have been bait, intentionally luring us over a booby-trapped bridge. The commander had made the right decision. Eventually the guys would agree, just not right now. They all needed time to cool off.

  A week later I brought this up with three of my guys. We’d done several missions since the HVT, and I wanted to drive something home. I said, “Does anybody remember the name of that HVT we went after who was across the bridge?”

  They all said no. I said, “Do you remember the names of your kids?”

  I could see it sinking in.

  The point I was making was that you can’t fall in love with a target. You need to take a second, even if that’s all you have, to make sure you don’t make crucial decisions based on emotions. This is true not just in SEAL life but everyday life: Your first loss is your best loss, and it’s okay to take it.

  We never found out if the bridge was rigged, but the odds were definitely against us based on the HVT’s actions. What we do know is that nobody on our team got hurt. In the big view, missing one HVT was insignificant compared to the wins we’d been accumulating. In fact, we and Army Special Forces had been putting such a hurting on the Sunni terrorists that they were moving out. It was time for us to do the same. We were headed a hundred miles north of Baghdad to Baqubah.

  *

  OUR ENABLERS IN OUR NEW home were so efficient they were scary. Four tents, each the size of a large Ryder truck, materialized within hours in the middle of the desert in 130-degree heat. Then the enablers produced Pelican hard cases full of wires, screens, keyboards, and antennas and went to work. Soon after, we had an operations center up and running that included Internet access, both secure and unsecure, as well as the phones and communications we’d need to track terrorists. It was like a pop-up command post—impressive save for the fact that we only had one Porta John for the lot of us.

  Actually, they’d skimped on a few other amenities in our tent quarters. All we had were cots, sleeping bags, and ponchos. We hung the ponchos so we could get some limited separation and cranked up the air-conditioning—I recommend it for all camping trips—and that worked surprisingly well, thank God. The Seabees brought in massive A/C units and installed them. When the units break, it’s a nightmare—a waking nightmare because sleep is impossible. Also, we had great showers everywhere but here. We went thirty days with no showers. The A/C was our only relief.

  You can’t put up shelves in a tent, so we strung up 550 parachute cord to hang gear from. The tents were tan on the outside and white on the inside. I’m not sure if there’s a science to those colors, but it sucked for us. We worked at night and tried our best to sleep during the day, but the sun is dazzlingly bright during the Iraqi summer. We were fortunate, most of the time, to have access to Ambien; our medical folks were cool and understood the deal.

  While we got si
tuated, our intel folks coordinated info on targets. The first target would be the best one. There was a group of Improvised Explosive Device (IED) makers on a small peninsula. We loved targeting IED makers because those roadside bombs were responsible for the vast majority of American casualties in the war. When we killed the producers, we knew we were saving American and coalition lives.

  This group had chosen their hideout wisely. The peninsula was so small that it was practically impossible to penetrate without being noticed. In fact, no Americans had ever been there. There were too many women and children present to call in an air strike. The size made it too risky to fly into; the chances of being shot out of the sky were great. And because there was only one road in, it was littered with IEDs. A convoy would get blown up for sure. Result: Al-Qaeda had been able to run its operations there, totally unchecked, since 2003. They felt safe. We knew they were complacent.

  Our plan was simple: Don’t fly in, don’t drive in. Hell, we were SEALs. We’d swim in.

  It was perfect. The enemy believed they’d hear any Americans invading by air or land. The idea that we’d swim in would have never occurred to them. They’d totally forgotten to build a moat and stock it with crocodiles.

  There were a total of nineteen terrorists in ten houses on our hit list. We weren’t sure how many would be there, so we brought the whole crew: seventeen SEALs, two of our dogs, and a few enablers. We’d all get wet together.

  We loaded up our helos and made the short flight to our point of insertion. We walked a bit until the dry land turned into swamp. It wasn’t too bad; mostly swampy mud with a few points of deep water where we’d swim. Of course, I wasn’t the one carrying the poles and ladders—we always made the newest guys do that. For them it sucked. The dogs hopped through most of the mucky stuff. In the deeper water, we needed to lift them up—they had handles on top of their vests so you could carry them like a very squirmy briefcase. Our guns were packed in “shoot-through” bags. The guns fit in them snugly, with a built-in rubber glove so you could reach the trigger and “shoot through” it if you had to.

  We made it across in two hours and hit dry land again. The peninsula was pretty small, about the size of a couple of football fields, but packed with houses, huts, and narrow roads. It was obvious from first look why we’d have never been able to land there, and fast-roping would have provided the enemy with too much time to shoot as the helicopters hovered. But we were there now. It was 1:00 a.m. local time.

  We made our way to the primary target buildings. They were side by side. The one on the right was three stories tall. The one on the left, my team’s target, was two stories. Our plan was to surround both and get the snipers up high for security. Then we were going to enter both structures simultaneously and silently so that we could get the drop on the enemy. That plan didn’t last very long. A sentry on top of the structure to the right saw us. He didn’t know who we were for sure, but he knew we shouldn’t be there. He started shooting his AK-47 right down on top of us. My guys and I were in a narrow alley just below him, in between the two buildings.

  He missed us all somehow—I’m guessing because Allah was busy elsewhere—and we were all able to scramble to cover. Nobody could get a clear shot off, and we were disciplined enough not to randomly fire in his direction. You want to aim at what you shoot at and hit what you aim at. Plus, if we didn’t fire back, it could confuse the enemy. This guy was on a balcony and would fire quickly and blindly and then retreat back a few steps. That’s why we’d been able to get adequate cover.

  Greg, who was a lifesaver for us but the angel of death for al-Qaeda, did what Greg does: He saved the day. Luckily, when the shooting started, our snipers already had their ladders out and were preparing to climb. The sound of an AK-47 simply made our snipers do their ladder setting faster. Greg was able to get to the roof first, three stories up, and get an angle on the terrorist. The bad guy had his back to Greg, but his wife was standing right next to him. Greg’s problem was that the spot he’d climbed to was a small entryway into the house and there was a light on right above him. The illumination was bad news, so he crept over and started to unscrew the lightbulb. He turned the bulb off just in time because as it became dark again, the woman turned around and headed back for the entryway. She walked right up to Greg, stopped for a second face-to-face with him, then went inside. Greg had his night vision on so he was looking right at her the whole time. She never noticed.

  The sentry with the AK-47 took his last shots down at the alley and then bolted for the inside of the house to get more ammo. Just like the woman, he wound up face-to-face in the dark with Greg, only this time Greg didn’t just get out of the way; he put two bullets from a suppressed .45 into the guy’s head.

  “Rooftop, building 1-1 clear.” Damn he was cool.

  Because the fighters in our building had certainly heard the ruckus outside of their windows, my team decided that we needed to enter immediately while we still had some surprise advantage. We left cover and ran to the main entry of the building on the left, which was just around the corner at the exit of the alley. I found myself in the one-man position and stopped at the front door to see if it was open. It was. I waited less than a second until I got the squeeze from Mack, the two man.

  I went left, he went right. Right away we encountered two terrorists on their feet with AK-47s. One was off to my left in a bedroom with a woman standing next to him. I could see them through the open door. The other was coming out of a bedroom farther down the hall off to the right. He had some kids next to him. This is why we didn’t want to just bomb the place.

  As soon as I recognized the threat, I took two shots just to the left of the woman, hitting the armed man in the head. I could hear Mack taking his shots at about the same time. Both terrorists fell dead.

  We now had four of our shooters in the house, and we began to clear. I went to the bedroom on the left where I’d just shot the bad guy, and I now had Boots behind me. Mack cleared up to the bedroom where his guy had come from and entered with Delicious. Our last two shooters from D Team entered behind us and made their way to the stairs, which were at the far end of the main room.

  Our room was cleared quickly, we searched the dead guy for a body bomb, which he didn’t have, and grabbed the woman. We walked her out of the room and placed her in the far bedroom with the rest of the women and children. The two men killed were the only military-age males in the house. One of our shooters stayed behind to watch the women and children while the other five of us went up the stairs. We could hear gunfire coming from the other building. E and F Teams were eliminating terrorists they were encountering as well as those trying to escape outside.

  As we made our way up the stairs, we slowed our pace. It was still dark in the house so we might still have an advantage. If there were more fighters upstairs, we didn’t want to announce that we were coming.

  The stairs went up to a halfway point, and then you had to turn left to get up the other half. I was the third man going up. When the one man turned to get up the second part of the stairs, he noticed something that made the hair on his neck stand up: There was a hole in the wall right at the back of his head. He pointed his gun at it and turned on his white light to illuminate it. There was nobody there so we ran up the stairs and secured it all, then checked out the hole in the wall. On the other side in a closet was a mattress—a fine sniper’s nest. Had there been a shooter in place, the point man would have taken several 7.62 mm rounds to the back of the head.

  With the main building secure, we rounded up the women and children and handed them off to an enabler. The fighting in the buildings that E and F Teams were taking down was still noisy but our snipers had cleared the roof so we were good to make a move.

  By the time we got to the next target, building 1-3, all the terrorists were definitely awake. We entered slowly so we could get all of the angles through the doors and windows. If we could avoid getting into another gunfight, the slowdown would be well worth it.


  I found myself in the one-man position again, and as I began to clear the first room through the main door of the house, I spotted an armed man waiting for us. I dumped him with two shots to the head and finished my pan. Night vision and invisible lasers are such a great advantage. I entered as far as the crumpled body and stayed there, allowing the train to move into the interior. All five guys from D Team began to methodically clear. They ran into one more al-Qaeda operative in the room farther down the hallway and Boots shot him. The team finished clearing the floor and moved to the second floor. I was in the rear of the train, waiting to be needed and watching the guys go up the stairs. Delicious was the point man. He went to the top of the stairs, carefully panning the areas he could without entering the space. Pop! Pop! He’d found another gunman and sent him to hell.

  As we moved on to our next target, Nate was still up high on building 1-2. He’d been watching us shoot our way through the compound, and he was tired of watching. “Fuck this up-high shit,” he said over the radio, “I’m rolling with D Team.” He ran downstairs and out the door. He made his way to the back of our train and went to the next building with us.

  Cruz was in front this time, and he slowly made his way to the main entry that was near the right side of the building as we faced it. Nate went over to the left where there was a good place for him to climb just above a large window. I walked with him to cover his movement. Nate slung his sniper rifle and climbed to the roof. He reached for his .45, aimed at the large window, and shot three times. Out of my sight, there was a man with an AK-47 hiding behind a table, waiting for the entry team to come in so he could ambush them. Nate saw him at the last second and gave the guy three to the chest. Again, darkness was our friend.

  Cruz and the others cleared this structure quickly since the one dead guy was the only person in there, and, as it turned out, the last terrorist on the peninsula.

  In our after-action assessment, my boss and I were going through the list we’d made and started counting. With two dogs and seventeen SEALs, we’d killed all nineteen of the terrorists without hurting one woman or child, or taking any casualties.