by Thom Shea
WHAT IT FELT LIKE TO BE THERE!!!!
At 0200 hours, I was tired … dead tired. We had crossed two streams, my feet were wet, my damn sock had sunk down into my freakin’ left boot, and I could feel wet sand and dirt digging a hole in my left heel. Typical, I thought to myself as I looked through the green hue of my night vision goggles at my men scattered around the Target Set Point. This was our last opportunity to gather our thoughts and get one last update from the silent bird at 20,000 feet.
What the fuck is a forty-two-year-old man doing out here in the mountains of hell, surrounded by rubbery young killers who never felt pain? I thought.
“Hey, Ridge Boss,” my point man nudged my left arm, which for some reason hurt, too. “I smell a cooking fire or something from compound one, and I can see two guys walking around inside. Can I shoot them?”
“Jesus, Nike, we haven’t even got the thing surrounded yet,” I whispered.
“Well, damn it, I won’t be in position to shoot them cause I will be first one to enter; I don’t want All Around to get them,” he pouted.
Youth, I thought to myself.
Over the radio, the boss said, “OK, Chief. Take it.” Again, I must have some sort of Pavlovian response from years of training and saying words that call up an alert response, because for the next hour, I didn’t feel that heel being skinned, nor my arm, nor any other pain. We must have some silly hormone or something released to make our senses keen, too. When we started moving, the world slowed down and every detail and danger popped out, clear and distinct.
Off to my left, three of my men took positions to cover their side of the target, and four others moved right to cover, as well. I am always amazed how the men find the right angles and places to go to get after the enemy. As I watched All Around get into position as the assault force, with Nike moved to lead the primary entry, I moved up under him knowing full well Nike had pegged it, and All Around was going to either take them, if they were carrying weapons, or tell me there were two guys in there. Time always slows way down for me; I could see how this was going to play out, and kept wondering WTF was taking everyone so long.
After what seemed an hour, but was only a minute and a half, I heard the lock snap, and simultaneously saw All Around’s feet slide to brace himself. I heard the safety click to fire and saw three flashes of his suppressed rounds leave the barrel.
Over comms, All Around said, “OK guys. You’re good to the first door on your right; after that, I have no idea.” In reply, Nike muttered, “Prick!”
I could hear the brushing of pants and the opening of several doors inside the compound. After about three minutes, the men left and right of the compound sorta faded toward building two, as Nike said, “Ridge Boss, we’re good. Coming out.”
I moved, with several others, quickly to building two, to find a twelve-foot wall surrounding the compound. Ladders were pushed up, and the men got eyes on the inside. The entry point was passed to the assault team. Two men stayed behind inside building one to set up a possible marshaling area for women and children, who were the usual suspects during the last ten missions we had conducted. So I moved from my position outside and picked up rear of the assault force, just in case I was needed inside. The compound turned out to be a twisted maze, so “Ridge Boss in,” was called. I have to admit: going into a compound when you know problems need to be solved, and solving will include, but isn’t limited to, shooting and fighting for life or death, is an awesome sensation.
The damned door to the huge compound was only three feet high, and eighteen inches wide. “Are you kidding me? Who builds shit like this,” I grumbled, bending over to squeeze through. And, for some reason, the inside was built like a labyrinth. I couldn’t see over the walls, each alleyway was three feet wide, and, after making what seemed eight right turns, I still had not found the assault team. Finally, after a bit of searching for the centaur, I turned the final corner and found four of my men looking down into a hole.
As I walked up to them, Nike laughed and said, “Well, Ridge Boss, at least two women climbed down there. What do you suggest?”
I said, “You four leave it, and move to building three.” I pressed my radio button and called, “LT, I need two to hold on a problem as we move to next target. And tell the two coming in to just follow the maze, it leads to me.”
When I looked up, the four assaulters had moved away from the labyrinth and wisely chose to climb over the wall. Waiting always takes longer in my mind than in actual real time, so I stared, wondering what was down the hole. I even cracked a chem-light and threw it down, down, and down. “Oh for Christ’s sake, does that hole have a bottom?” When the two men arrived, we laughed about the maze, then I explained maybe two women had climbed down that rope into a bottomless pit. And, by the way, I assume a room is down there.
I made clear, “You will not, for any reason, climb down, throw a grenade, or cut the rope … period. Now, repeat that back to me, damn it.” They both looked at me like I had said something confusing, nothing was registering. “Hey, just stay here, OK?” I finally said.
By the time I climbed the wall and shimmied down the other side, our side of the target was secure. I told everyone to hold in position as we sorted out our next move. Even though I had worked with these men for two years or more, it is always a problem to really know exactly who you’re looking at through night vision. All the SEALs look the same, for God’s sake. After searching with my eyes, I found LT on a rock overlooking the target area. Now a reverse Pavlovian phenomenon kicked in, and I stumbled nimbly up the ridge to LT. The rush of pain in my heel, the sore lower back from carrying extra weight in body armor, and the oppressive tired feeling all surged through my body like a wave.
Finally reaching LT, I said, “LT, we have a problem. Although the buildings would be a great place to set up for the battle sure to come tomorrow, the damn hills look right into them. We will be sitting ducks for sure. We have a well Nike says two women climbed down. I left two of the boys there. We are going to wait for Echo to get done. But I can tell you these compounds are not our final overwatch positions.”
“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing,” he said, frowning because he knew I had made a mistake in planning.
After another five minutes we heard over comms Echo’s boys were target secure and “No joy for tactical advantage in any compound.”
LT pushed out, “Leaders, Consolidate on C2.”
We located the C2 element about 100 yards to the rear, and when I stood up, I silently yelled, “Ouch. Ouch. Ouch,” with every step.
We all sat looking up at the mountains and out at the valley, and a sinking feeling really swept through me for some reason. SEALs hate to ask for “extract early.” Doing so is an unexpressed form of saying, “Pussy.” Many suggestions were made, such as, “Well, let’s continue clearing compounds until we find one further away from the mountains.” Another suggestion was to separate forces, and move some of us to high ground for some sort of tactical advantage. Finally, the only solution was doing both, once we secured a good compound in the valley floor.
Oh, my sinking feeling was ominous. My hands shook because I knew we had no way to get to all the high ground positions necessary to give us a tactical advantage—damn. The boys cleared the rest of the valley floor, only three more compounds. Again, the compounds themselves were perfect, but the high ground was now 700 yards away instead of 100 to 300 yards. I met up with the troop so the overall plan would be set. Bravo platoon would remain in the valley with one squad from Echo, and the other squad from Echo and C2 would press up the closest hill to get some sort of tactical advantage for the day of fighting to come.
As Nike and I walked away, he stopped me. Because our night vision was turned up, I could see his eyes. We looked at each other for a moment; no words were ever uttered. I had never before, and probably never will again, have a louder conversation.
Time was short at this point; we had tons of work to set up our sniper overwatch positions o
n top of the hill and in the compounds. This work seems to be the most arduous, and definitely makes everyone pissed. Filling sandbags, building the hides, filling more sandbags, and on and on and on. Once everyone was set, and the area somewhat secured, I noticed I was totally spent. I would normally be completely exhausted by this point in every operation due to spending the prior thirty hours planning and talking with the pilots and coordinating something or other. Now, I was even more exhausted due to the release of depression and stress before the mission. Getting shot at during landing didn’t help.
Yes, I know you are asking yourself how I could sleep in those conditions: impending combat, hot as hell, and many other reasons that seem important to people who have never seen sustained combat. Problem was, I was and am still to this day, someone who can fall asleep anywhere when I stop moving. So this was MY time—ol’ Ridge Boss gonna catch a catnap, boys. Wake me at your own peril.
I actually looked forward to combat for that reason … good God, I can finally get some rest. Moreover, I needed to let my brain go, let thoughts wander to other things, other places, other people. Oddly enough, I noticed after the eighty-fifth combat operation, my thoughts would always go to connecting things: things that encouraged me.
My own Internal Dialogue was reshaped during my post-assault, thirty-minute reset time. Never, not once, did my mind go to thoughts of doom, fear, bad times, or bad events from the past. Most often my thoughts went to Stacy, lying in bed next to her, touching her skin, touching, well, other parts. I suppose such thoughts must have been a common thing for warriors over the millennia. Again, I got a sense the Spartans knew the power of a great woman, as well as the relationship between intimacy, sex, and the performance of a man in hell. They surely lived it, and I agree—Stacy, and her power over and in me, created space for the outlet of my other intimacies, like violence and the desire to live in the hell of combat year after year. She actually encouraged and reinforced this side of me.
I lay, tucked soundly into a corner, while the world, while hell, raged outside. I vaguely recall waking to the sounds of Nike snapping suppressed sniper shots at some sad enemy who surely thought he was being sneaky. Nike had an eye for where to look and when to shoot. As I was listening to the comms static in my headset and the sounds of Nike etching his symbol into the next enemy, I rolled over, stretched, and came back from the image of Stacy, naked, into the sights and sounds of hell.
If you have ever slept on a hard floor then you know that, although you may have slept, the marriage of the pressure of your body pushing against your arm, and the ground not yielding, results in the blood to your fingers and hands being cut off. On that morning, this was the case for me, so I rubbed the night’s weakness out, stretched my legs, feet, and back, and rose silently. I donned my helmet, grabbed my SCAR-H, and began my crawl over to look out the window and get some sort of visual understanding of what was going on. I hated to use the radio, because only important info should be passed, and stupid questions like, “Hey guys, what’s going on?” sorta throws off the whole situation.
After a time, I determined all was safe, so I moved out into the courtyard and crossed to the ladder leading to the sniper position.
“Nike, what you have for me? Do you need anything?” I asked.
“No, we are good,” Nike replied.
“So tell me—what is going on out there in your field of view? Do we need to set a demo field or some claymores to protect any of your blind spots?” I encouraged him to answer.
“Actually, yes, come up and I will show you. Oh, and two dead guys are outside, so when you and EOD go out, see what they got on them,” he pronounced.
I scampered up the ladder, tucked myself up next to Nike, and surveyed the area, letting him speak until he was finished. Yep, we did have a blind spot to our front about 100 yards out. A nice place for some command-wired claymores and Bangalores we had made to look like tree branches. With that, EOD and a couple other of my men got what we needed and moved outside to set the trap.
The two dead guys were, well, dead, to be exact. Other than that, I had nothing to report except the dead were not enemy; they were from Chechnya, and they had comms and night vision devices as well as some military gear.
EOD looked at me after we turned them over. “These boys be trained, Ridge Boss, and they are the probes. We are in for some more of this, for sure.” I replied, “Yup. Trident 2 Zero, this is Bravo Zulu. I have two EKIAs here. Foreign fighters from Chechnya, I suspect, wearing military issued gear with comms and night vision. Recommend getting some overhead eyes.”
“Roger,” he replied, and that was that.
The four of us proceeded to lay the claymore field and hide Bangalores in the branches, while some rounds cracked over our heads. Nike and Texas immediately responded, sending someone else to that place the Islamic people think there are some number of virgins waiting. Never figured out why the religious leaders put that into their silly book. I surely wouldn’t want to spend eternity with any number of young virgins. Could you imagine the eternal drama of that? Better to stay alive and spend the next forty-one years with a woman who knows which part is for what, and what works, for God’s sake.
The next part of the day was more of the same. Each position engaged in random battles as the enemy probed us and formulated their battle plan. Nike and I had a sit down later in the day, talking about the inevitable fight.
“Dude, those hilltops over there, and there, and there are prime real estate, Chief,” Nike pointed out. “I would be up there just watching: seeing where people were dying and how we moved, and where those infidel Americans were shooting from,” he said.
“Our only salvation is air and that damned mortar tube,” I told him.
As the day wound down, the sinking feeling wound up. We had about an hour and a half before the sun would set. Most of us were in the courtyard eating and watching our dog, Turbo, take his anger out on a pillow. I was so damned hot I had taken my body armor off and put it inside the room where I napped hours earlier. I was sitting on the ground, legs crossed, rummaging through the last bit of my MREs. All of a sudden my skin crawled and the hairs on the back of my neck literally stood erect and tall. Now, that sensation is nothing to laugh at. I looked up to the hill 700 yards away and stared at what looked like several red bees flying right at me. As they arched across the sky, it dawned on me to duck—you know, like in the movie The Matrix when Reeves bent backward, and the slow-moving bullets went over him. Well, that is just what occurred. Everything really did feel like slow motion. I arched backward. The tracer rounds from the hilltop, from a Russian-made Maug or PKM, hit the wall right where I was and tracked around the inside of the compound wall. I looked around and saw the men diving for cover, then found myself jumping through a window into my “nappy room” while nine RPGs informed us all we had been sloppy and overconfident.
The sound of the explosions was deafening. Dust flew everywhere. I somehow put on my body armor and SCAR H without even knowing it. I cleared my head and put on my comms headset and helmet, frantically trying to make comms and listen in. I recall saying, “Oh my God!” out loud. After five attempts, I became convinced—I mean really clear in my dumb brain—I was the only one still alive. Another volley of rounds hit the wall outside, and off in the distance, I could hear other battles raging. For the first and only time in my life, I said to myself, “I am dead.” My legs buckled and I lay there looking up into nothingness.
For a time I couldn’t move. Then my Internal Dialogue shifted from something dead to something new entirely. I heard Stacy say to me, ‘Do not fear dying. It makes you weak.’
So, in my thoughts, I formed a new dialogue, I ain’t dying without killing as many of them as I can. I would rather my wife and kids read I was dead on top of a pile of enemies, than have them find out I was taken prisoner.
The prisoner thing wasn’t gonna work for me, anyway. I had failed out of SERE (Survive Escape Resist Evade) training because I can’t take someone
smacking me in the face. When they did that in SERE, I warned the instructor: if he did that again, I would knock him out. Well, he did it again. As I stood over his unconscious body, the other instructors said, “Well, you can leave now. You’ve failed.” As I gained resolve in that second by reflecting on how capture was simply not going to work for me, I turned toward the window in time to see Texas fall from the roof above.
I really have to honestly say it sucks to see your men fall limply off a twelve-foot-high roof. I rushed to the open door and was met by a hail of those damned red bees again. I quickly moved to the window, and due to the angle of the hill above the window, I had to move inside the window frame. My head was kind of exposed, so as I tried to get my cross hairs on that hill, a round hit the window frame an inch from my face, spraying dirt into my eye. I went down, grabbing my eye, thinking for sure it had been taken out. What a pleasant surprise to find it still there. I moved back to the window and held up a pot I’d found in the room, and BANG. One single shot hit the center of the pot.
I am a sniper—have been since 1998—and I smiled because I knew I was up against a worthy shooter. Seven hundred yards is a tough shot. He had missed once, but now he knew the distance and wind, and he thinks he’s got me. I grabbed some blankets and pulled them over me. I laid on the floor with my body covered and moved forward slowly, in the shadows. I knew he would not be able to detect movement inside the shadows. I inched forward, constantly looking through my scope, until I could view the hill. I knew the distance and had already dialed 721 yards into the scope. I talked to myself, Calm down, Thom. Where would you be shooting from? He has to see me perfectly, but be hidden from the hilltop SEAL element. He is smart, so where would I be? Work it out. I concentrated on those words and worked the terrain with my scope. Then, I saw a flash. “Well, shit, there he is,” I said out loud.
