by Couch, Dick
Inside the perimeter of the new COP, engineers and soldiers alike worked at a fever pitch, laying concertina wire, moving supplies, and carrying sandbags amid the drone of generators. Outside the outpost grounds, between the new concrete-barrier walls and the tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles on the outer security perimeter, soldiers patrolled the streets, carefully searching the upper stories of buildings for insurgent activity. Skirmishes happened often. Overhead, F/A-18 fighters and drone aircraft circled the new COP while keeping human and electronic eyes on the surrounding area. At night, there were AC-130 gunships overhead as well. And well outside the foot patrols and the armor, Lars Beamon and his snipers kept watch on the streets of Ramadi, specifically along the routes the insurgents might take to get to those building COP Falcon. This was a relatively new game for the SEALs and the insurgents, and a learning experience for both.
SEALs train for this and know how to conduct sniper overwatches, but usually in the context of covering a single special mission like a raid or an assault, or to protect a conventional force patrolling in the street. They also train for these overwatch operations with the idea that they would be shooting from positions unknown to or hidden from the enemy. And for the most part, their training is for short-duration missions. Now they were going out sitting in shooting positions from two to four days at a time.
The insurgents knew the city and the neighborhoods far better than the Americans. If they didn’t intuitively know the location of the best and most likely shooting perches the SEALs might use, they quickly learned. They also learned how to move in the dead spaces where they were screened from their enemy’s fields-of-fire, both from the COPs and from the sniper overwatch positions. For the insurgents moving on the street, these were life-and-death lessons in trigonometry; those who didn’t master this skill, or were careless or less nimble, were quickly killed. They learned from bitter experience just how accomplished these sailors with sniper rifles could be. The SEALs took a grim harvest of insurgents in Ramadi, especially early on during the building of the initial COPs. In many cases, each of these insurgent deaths was a mistake on their part—and a lesson learned. They soon began to understand the methods and tactics of these skilled urban shooters and to develop countermeasures.
“Shooting these guys was very easy at the beginning,” a SEAL sniper said. “They were careless. One time two insurgents were heading for a new COP on a motor scooter. One had an AK-47 and the other an RPG launcher. One of our snipers got them both with a single round—one shot, two kills. But it gradually got harder. It was a Darwinian thing. We shot most of the stupid ones, and that left the smarter ones to evolve and survive. But we evolved as well. And even for some of the hard-core fighters out there, all they had to do was make one wrong move at the wrong time or take one too many chances. When they crossed an open area, we might not get the first one, but we’d get the second—and the third if they were dumb enough to try it. We’re SEALs and we were very good when we got to Ramadi. For the insurgents in Ramadi or who came to Ramadi, they became good or died in the process.”
This was the first time in their history that SEALs had operated in direct and continuous support of conventional forces in combat, and the SEALs had nothing but admiration for the soldiers and Marines. SEAL Lars Beamon said, “The bravest and noblest men in uniform are those Army specialists and Marine lance corporals. They’re our most courageous and patriotic fighting men, and they’re out there day in and day out. For many of them, it’s becoming year in and year out. We SEALs are honored to call them brother warriors.”
The respect went both ways. Army Captain Mike Bajema said, “When those SEALs first came back into COP Falcon, some of them had been out there seventy-two hours on sniper overwatch. They were hot, hungry, and dead tired. Still, they would join a line of Army soldiers to carry endless supplies of sandbags to the rooftop fighting positions before eating and resting. Now that’s what really makes them special—they don’t act special. We worked with the SEALs of Charlie Platoon of SEAL Team Three in Ramadi for those first three terrible months, and they were always there for us. And we’d go anywhere in Ramadi to help them out if they got in trouble. They were our brothers.
“I think what made us a big fan of the SEALs,” Bajema continued, “was the respect they showed us. Here we were a company of dogface Army soldiers, and here they were these BTFs—big tough frogmen. I think they secretly liked it when we called them that. Right from the start, they treated us as equals, and they’d been in the battlespace longer than we had. They had tremendous intelligence assets and resources, and they went out of their way to share information with us.”
Colonel MacFarland, the Army brigade commander during the Battle of Ramadi, recalled, “I didn’t know what to expect—I had never worked with SEALs before. The SEALs were exactly what I had hoped for and in some ways, even more. They were very interested in working as a part of a team, as well as being incredibly good at what they do. I won’t say that their competence surprised me, but I wasn’t sure just how adept sailors with guns would be in a counterinsurgency fight. It quickly became evident to me that they were tremendously effective and versatile warriors who were highly motivated and thoroughly professional. I can honestly say that with the exception of our Army SOF components, I had never worked with warriors of such high caliber. My soldiers and junior leaders came to respect the Big Tough Frogmen and would do anything for them. The losses that the SEALs suffered in Ramadi cemented that relationship in my mind. Anyone who shed blood, sweat, and tears in Ramadi with us will always be a part of our band of brothers. The names of those SEALs lost in action were inscribed on our [division] memorial plaque in Germany when we got home. We like to think that this respect was mutual.”
Colonel MacFarland explained of the SEALs, “I gave them a wide range of missions, all of which they accepted without complaint and executed superbly. They helped us establish our COPs by sending in small kill teams to help seize the buildings we wanted, then they moved out to positions outside the perimeter in order to disrupt any enemy counterattack. At COP Falcon alone, they killed some two dozen enemy fighters in those first twenty-four hours as they attempted to disrupt our COP construction. We also employed SEALs as part of our counterfire fight—inserting them near historic enemy mortar points of origin. The enemy feared snipers above all else and for good reason. Our sniper teams were incredibly lethal. I tried to put them in the seams of the battlespace—places where they could go because of the small size of their patrol elements and the places where we couldn’t go. They also helped us to train new Iraqi army and Iraqi police recruits at Camp Ramadi after they returned from their basic training, raising the competence level of the soldiers and policemen in Ramadi to well above their peers elsewhere. Finally, the SEALs conducted targeted raids on individuals on which they had developed target folders. They shared their intel with us at intel-fusion and targeting meetings, and were happy to pass over targets best suited to conventional forces.”
A driving force in the emerging Army/SEAL partnership in Ramadi was the need for precision shooters in the battlespace and the ability of the SEALs to shoot. It requires talent and a great deal of time and training to create a combat sniper. And it’s not just a matter of pure precision shooting. There are the issues of patrolling through hostile territory to get into position, and adjusting to the difficult and imperfect conditions found in a combat environment. This is not match shooting; it’s combat sniper work—precision, long-range killing. Competition shooters often make poor snipers, and a good sniper is sometimes an average marksman in long-range match competition. A military sniper must be able to shoot, but he has to be a functioning member of the patrol and the combat team. As a group, the SEAL snipers are among the best combat snipers in the world. In short, the SEAL Teams have talent and the weapons, and their shooters are given a lot of time on the gun.
The most successful SEAL sniper in Ramadi was also one of the greatest snipers in U.S. military history. He was a burly
, affable, soft-spoken Texan, a former professional cowboy named Chris Kyle.
Petty Officer First Class Chris Kyle was the lead sniper in Charlie Platoon and in Ramadi. He was also a shooting legend in the SEAL Teams. This was his third combat tour and second tour as a platoon sniper. On his first tour he was among the first SEALs in Iraq, serving as an M60 gunner on a SEAL desert patrol vehicle during the pre-invasion operations to take and hold the Iraqi oil terminal junctions and petroleum pumping infrastructure. On his previous rotation, he was one of the SEAL snipers in the Battle of Fallujah in 2004. He was wounded there and was still being treated for that injury, but that didn’t keep him from taking part in the Battle of Ramadi. It was in Ramadi that his shooting took him into the ranks of the military sniper elite.
Chris Kyle grew up on a working ranch in Texas. He was used to hard work, dealing with cattle, and shooting on the open range. A solid work ethic is a key ingredient for a sniper. It’s a difficult and hard-won skill. Eyesight, nerve, judgment, and patience all have their place in the making of a sniper, but to be really good, you have to work at it. SEAL sniper training is a popular and sought-after school for the platoon SEALs, yet few SEALs who enter this training realize just how hard they must work. It’s a mentally and physically demanding calling.
Kyle spent a year on the professional rodeo circuit as a saddle bronc rider before joining the Navy at twenty-four for SEAL training. He graduated with BUD/S Class 233. Kyle was a big man, perhaps six-two and 230 pounds. Big shooters have an advantage with a higher human-mass to weapon-mass ratio. He had a soft manner, almost shy in explaining his duties. Early in this tour in Ramadi he worked with the Marines at Hurricane Point and trained Iraqi army scouts at Camp Ramadi. But when the battle started, he became a pure sniper in a very target-rich environment.
“We did a lot of shooting,” Kyle said of those initial months of the battle. “And there were a lot of bad guys to shoot at. I have to credit my teammates with a lot of my success. They spotted for me and provided the security, so I could focus my time and attention on the gun.” When asked which gun, he answered immediately. “Three hundred WinMag [.300 Winchester Magnum]. The best sniper rifle in the world—a Remington 700 rifle set up for the .300 WinMag cartridge. It’s a great round with a lot of punch—very heavy and a very flat trajectory. Its only downside is the noise and the flash. Even with a suppressor it has a loud bark, and it’s hard to mask the muzzle flash. It lets everyone know exactly where you are.”
In addition to the favored .300 WinMag, the SEALs also use two other sniper weapons. One is the SR-25, a semiautomatic rifle designed by Eugene Stoner and manufactured by the Knights Armament Company. The Navy calls it the Mk 11 Mod 0 Sniper Weapons System. This rifle uses the NATO 7.62 match-grade ammunition, combining this superb round with an accurate, semiautomatic capability. It’s a true sniper weapon that enjoys a great deal of utility in a standard firefight. The other is the Mk 12 Mod X Special Purpose Rifle, a “sniperized” version of the M4 rifle. It’s a highly accurate version of the standard SOF rifle with a sound suppresser and scope. The Mk 12 also has the option of frangible .556 ammunition that has applications for reducing collateral damage in long-range shooting situations. All of these weapons have their place in mission-specific environments. Some of the SEAL snipers favored the SR-25 in Ramadi since they seldom made a shot longer than four hundred yards, well within the capability of the weapon, but with the ability to quickly engage multiple targets. But most preferred the absolute precision and stopping power of the .300 WinMag. It’s a punishing weapon, for shooters as well as those on the business end. It has a brutal recoil, and SEAL snipers, perhaps more than other military snipers, put a lot of rounds through their weapons. The SEALs also have a .50-caliber sniper rifle in the inventory, but it had limited use in Ramadi. The SEALs have recently been looking at the next generation of special-purpose sniper weapons in the .338- and .408-caliber range.
“You can always tell one of our snipers,” a SEAL platoon chief said. “They walk around with one shoulder lower than the other. That’s why it sometimes helps to be a bigger guy; you can take the recoil from all those training rounds without developing an unconscious flinch-type reaction in anticipation of the kick.”
Chris Kyle estimated the number of enemy kills he made in Ramadi at well over a hundred, plus the nearly twenty he accounted for in Fallujah. “These were the confirmed kills,” he said in his quiet, precise way, “the ones who were shot dead on the street. We don’t count the ones who managed to crawl off and probably bled out. But I didn’t have too many of those.” His longest shot was “a little over 1,400 yards,” Kyle estimated.
In Ramadi, the insurgents came to know and fear Chris Kyle. They called him al-Shaitan Ramadi—the Devil of Ramadi. There was a reward out for Kyle and his fellow snipers. Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) would pay twenty thousand dollars to any insurgent who could kill a sniper and bring in his weapon. It has been estimated that something close to eleven hundred insurgents were killed during the Battle of Ramadi. A third of those have been credited to the SEAL snipers.
The insurgents also had snipers, and some of them were highly skilled shooters. Most of them use the Dragunov sniper rifle, a dated, semiautomatic 7.62 mm weapon of Soviet design. Neither the weapon nor the insurgents who had them were in the same league with the SEAL shooters and their guns, but they were still a threat for the Americans patrolling the streets of Ramadi. Ninety-six Americans died in the nine months during the Battle of Ramadi. All but two of those were soldiers and Marines. One wonders how many more would have been killed in the battle without the grim harvest of snipers like Chris Kyle. After Kyle left the SEALs in 2009 to devote more time to his family life, he wrote a bestselling book and was in the process of writing another when, tragically, he died at a Texas shooting range while trying to help a fellow American veteran of the Iraq War.
The rules of engagement, or ROEs, are the restrictions and guidelines that govern military activity and combat engagements, and they apply to the snipers as well. These rules can vary from region to region and situation to situation. In Ramadi, the ROEs allowed for an enemy combatant to be taken under fire if he was armed and moving with tactical intent, or clearly presented a threat to soldiers or civilians. There were finer points to these ROEs, but their purpose was to allow for the killing of bad guys while safeguarding innocents. An insurgency is a battle for the people, and killing an innocent civilian may do far more harm than the good that comes from killing an insurgent who deserves a bullet. This becomes a complex issue with the insurgents hiding among the people. In the early days of the battle, when the first combat outposts were being established, there were more than enough targets in the form of armed insurgents moving tactically in the streets.
In Iraq, it was SOF policy regarding snipers that for every enemy KIA or WIA there had to be a statement from the shooter and a statement from a witness, usually the sniper’s shooting partner or spotter. Accompanying these statements there had to be an operations summary that outlined the tactical and operational conditions that accompanied the shoot. Given the heavy toll of human life taken by the SEAL snipers in Iraq and Ramadi, these measures were put in place to protect the shooters should there be a question of impropriety.
It really all comes down to the decision of the man on the gun. He must decide whether a shooting is justified—as to whether the man in the reticle of his scope qualifies for and deserves a bullet. It also goes much deeper; it goes to the heart of the shooter—his instincts and his judgment, even his compassion. Few warriors have the opportunity and burden, on an ongoing basis, to end a human life. To a man, the SEAL snipers in Ramadi were serious and professional about their duties, and proud of the fact that they had not exceeded their moral or statutory boundaries.
THE FIRST SEAL TO die in battle in Iraq was Marc Lee, who made the ultimate sacrifice on August 2, 2006, in Ramadi.
By the first week in July 2006, Ramadi was blazing hot. The temperature often reached 120 degr
ees, even as the battle raged for control of the streets. Five new combat outposts had been established as the Americans and the Iraqi army edged into the city, the last of these being COP Grant on July 5. The insurgents now knew the strategy of the Americans and were determined to stop them. But another player was beginning to show itself on the battlefield of Ramadi—the Iraqi police. The Americans and the new Iraqi army continued their push into the city, reclaiming neighborhoods and doing what they could to keep them insurgent-free and safe. The tribal sheiks began to see that the Americans were serious—that they were successfully executing their battle plan and beginning to bring parts of Ramadi under control. So the tribal leaders began to encourage their young tribesmen to join the fledgling police force in Ramadi. On July 17, the Jazeera Police Station was established. This was one of the few functioning police stations in Ramadi since the insurgency began, but others would follow.
The COP strategy, as SEAL Commander Collin Green put it, was to “isolate, seize, clear, hold, and build.” In Ramadi, in July, “hold” was the operative term. Once the new COPs were put in place, they had to be held and defended. To do this, the area around each COP had to be purged of insurgent elements and the streets had to be patrolled—to keep them clear of insurgents and to let the people know that those streets now belonged to the Americans and the Iraqi army. The plan called for the police to be the most visible force in the streets, but that would come later. Most of July was taken up with patrolling the streets around the COPs and beating back insurgent counterattacks. In addition to keeping patrols on the streets, there were cordon-and-search operations to flush out the last of the insurgent presence in the cleared areas. It was on one of these operations that the first SEAL was killed in action in Iraq.
During the early morning hours of August 2, an element of Navy SEALs and their Iraqi scouts were engaged in a cordon-and-search operation. They had launched from COP Falcon. The SEALs were working with the Army, who had roads blocked with tanks and Bradleys. The drill was to set up security around a dwelling, knock on the door, and ask to search the premises. This permission was granted in most cases, with the scouts conducting a thorough search. They were looking for insurgents and evidence of insurgent presence. The first block of their assigned area was cleared without incident. On the second block, the SEALs in security positions were taken under fire by small arms, including sniper fire. The insurgents had chosen this day to come out in force against the American and Iraqi patrols.
