Service: A Navy SEAL at War

by Marcus Luttrell

  The plan to win Ramadi back from the terrorists was a mixture of traditional offensive operations—with our forces going block by block, doing “cordon and search” missions—and raids. It was a lot of police work, too: traffic control, ID checks, biometric screening, searches, and curfews. The goal in the end was to make the city livable again, leaving the place in the hands of its citizens for good and making sure the enemy never again found sanctuary there.

  In Afghanistan, the fight was mostly about muzzle velocity, windage, defilade, and time to target—that’s what it was about for our SEAL teams, at least. In Anbar Province, however, we would deal with a full range of targets, hard and soft. We targeted the enemy’s fighting forces, but we also never forgot that the security and confidence of the people were paramount. “You can’t kill your way out of an insurgency,” was an often-repeated bit of wisdom. (Though some of us sometimes felt the urge to try.) We needed to bring security to the people so that they could fend for themselves. Brigade headquarters put a lot of effort into shaping perceptions, too, including setting up a news service that broadcast to the locals.

  There always seemed to be enough bad guys to go around. Casualties were high from 2004 through mid-2006. President Bush remembered the summer of ’06 as “the worst period in my presidency.” In his memoirs he wrote, “I was deeply concerned that the violence was overtaking all else…. If Iraq split along sectarian lines, our mission would be doomed. We could be looking at a repeat of Vietnam—a humiliating loss for the country, a shattering blow to the military, and a dramatic setback for our interests.” I take my commander in chief at his word, no matter who he is.

  Yet confronted with a grim outlook and an impossible problem, what does our military do? We wade right into the middle of it and tell the enemy to bring it on. What other option was there? Quit? Politicians may go that route (see “Vietnam, war in”) but our military forces don’t.

  None of us thought it would be easy to square the circle of building a nation in a place as irredeemably violent as Ramadi. The SEAL who gave me that ominous advice at the team house—“Pray”—had been wounded in a hotly contested fight in the worst part of the city. On August 2, 2006, he and Chris Kyle were part of a squad supporting a U.S. Army tank unit, augmented by Iraqi forces, doing a block-clearance operation in the rough and untamed southeast part of the city, the Ma’laab district. Team 3 had helped install an outpost there known as COP Falcon. An Al Qaeda cell was discovered nearby, so that morning our tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles rolled out to tackle it before first light. Wisely, the insurgents in the neighborhood let the armor pass them by, hiding until they could turn their weapons on our infantry.

  Much as we’re eager to fight, most of our leadership would say it isn’t our job to do a block-clearance operation like this—that’s the work of the larger conventional units. But the Army was strapped for personnel and Team 3’s troop commander, Lieutenant Commander Willis, simply couldn’t tolerate Americans being put at risk without our support. Chris and two other SEALs decided to establish a sniper position in a building near the COP. They dismounted from their Bradleys, humped their gear up to the rooftop, set up a fighting position, and started scanning for targets.

  It’s hard to confront skilled enemy snipers who enjoy a home-field advantage—they tend to know all the angles. And sure enough, good as those boys from Team 3 were, they soon ran into trouble. As they scoped the streets, they began taking fire from the surrounding rooftops, windows, and streets. Chris was watching the area north of their position, another sniper had a sector to the west, and a third SEAL, Ryan Job, manned a machine gun and looked out to the east. When shots rang out from the east, nicking their parapets and raising clouds of dust, the SEALs took cover. Chris hollered to Ryan, “Did you see where that came from?” Hunkered down behind a parapet, the machine gunner didn’t answer. He had been hit. Actually, it was his rifle that took the hit. The metal shattered, throwing a spackle of lead fragments into his face.

  Chris put out the call, “Man down, man down,” and right away reinforcements came up to the roof. When a SEAL corpsman finally got to Ryan, he noticed that the machine gunner’s right eye had been pierced straight through. Ryan told everyone he’d be okay, but few thought he’d make it with his eye socket and face shattered. He sat upright to avoid choking on his own blood. Marc Lee, a damn good SEAL, ran up and took his place on the roof. As Lee laid down suppressing fire to cover the extract, Chris threw Ryan over his shoulder and hauled him to the stairwell. About halfway down, Ryan began spitting up blood. He told Chris he couldn’t breathe and said he wanted to stand. Chris realized that Ryan’s chest was being compressed by its own weight pressing down on Chris’s shoulder, causing blood to pool up somewhere inside his chest. So Chris set Ryan down, resituated, and helped him hobble down the stairs. An armored personnel carrier was waiting on the street outside to evacuate him.

  As Chris eased him into the vehicle, Ryan asked for a shot of morphine, then went unconscious from blood loss. The docs eventually stabilized Ryan and arranged to medevac him out of the combat area. With their brother taken care of, Chris and his team returned to the COP to plan their next move.

  The Army stayed in heavy contact with insurgent forces throughout the day. Our guys had their hands full. Aerial reconnaissance revealed large bands of insurgent fighters moving toward our positions, bounding through streets and alleyways on either side, looking to envelop the Americans. As the battle was escalating, intel pointed to a certain house as a suspected location for the enemy sniper who had shot Ryan Job. There was no chance to get him if they didn’t move fast. So Chris and his guys decided to push out again, jumping into a couple of Bradleys and returning to the fight. They were powerfully supported by several tanks from an Army outfit that all the SEALs respected, Bulldog Company, First Battalion, Thirty-Seventh Armor Regiment, under command of a fast-moving captain named Mike Bajema. He stood out front; his own tank led the way.

  A block or two from where Ryan had gotten hit, the Bradleys stopped and the SEALs dismounted, taking fire almost as soon as the ramp dropped. As Captain Bajema turned his tank’s gun on the wall of the target building, blowing a hole in it, the SEALs moved quickly up, formed a stack, and poured inside. Hostile fighters were lighting them up from every angle. Nearby, unseen insurgent machine guns were making it rain with bullets.

  As Chris writes in his book, American Sniper, he believes they had been drawn into a trap. As the SEALs secured the first floor, Marc Lee led the way to the second deck, running up the staircase. Then, through a window on the stairs, he spotted an enemy shooter in the building next door. The insurgent saw him, too. Marc turned and laid down a burst of suppressing fire. He was opening his mouth to alert his teammates when the insurgent popped back up, drew on Marc, and pulled the trigger. The bullet went straight into Marc’s mouth and cut his spine, making him the first SEAL to be killed in action since Operation Redwing more than a year earlier, and the first team guy to die in Iraq. He went out with his boots on, fighting hard for his country. He’s remembered as one of the great ones. He died for his teammates. There’s no greater gift than that.

  The death of Marc Lee and the serious injury to Ryan Job, both in the same day, was a heavy blow to Team 3. No matter how many men we lose, it never gets any easier. They reported the casualties and called the Army for extract. The men of Team 3 had served the Army well. Now the soldiers returned the favor. A pair of M1A1 Abrams tanks, sixty-seven tons apiece, and four Bradley Fighting Vehicles moved into the neighborhood. They are built for one reason: to inflict total destruction on the enemy. At that point, they started doing what they do best. Captain Bajema’s tanks sealed the neighborhood so the enemy couldn’t escape or be reinforced. Trapped, the insurgents came out in force and presented themselves just as Big Army wanted them to: openly, wielding rocket-propelled grenades, heavy machine guns, and AK-47s. With help from an aircraft on station overhead, which carried excellent cameras, Bajema’s tankers saw them comin
g and turned loose on them. When a vehicle loaded with insurgents came barreling out of an alley and bore down on Bajema’s tank, he turned his fifty-caliber machine gun on it and cut them down like weeds in a garden.

  After wreaking this destruction, Bajema announced over the radio, “Winchester.” That meant his vehicles were out of ammunition. By the time they returned to their bases elsewhere in the city, the insurgent stronghold was coughing up a column of black smoke that was three blocks wide. One man was lost, another was badly wounded, and the angry city burned.

  Back home, as Team 3’s deployment came to an end, the situation in Anbar Province made for bad headlines. On September 11, a major newspaper ran an article with a headline that declared Anbar Province “lost.” This conclusion came from people who had read a classified Marine Corps intel report about the situation in Ramadi and thought they could use it to score political points by leaking it to reporters. The situation, readers were told, was “beyond repair.” Someone neglected to inform the U.S. military of this fact, because our guys in Ramadi saw things differently. And so did we, back on the Silver Strand, working hard to get ready for our turn downrange.

  For starters, even if there really is no way you can win, you never say it out loud. You assess why, change strategy, adjust tactics, and keep fighting and pushing till either you’ve gotten a better outcome or you’ve died. Either way, you never quit when your country needs you to succeed.

  As Team 5 was shutting down the workup and loading up its gear, our task unit’s leadership flew to Ramadi to do what we call a predeployment site survey. Lieutenant Commander Thomas went, and so did both of our platoon officers in charge. It was quite an adventure. They were shot at every day. They were hit by IEDs. When they came home, Lieutenant Commander Thomas got us together in the briefing room and laid out the details. The general reaction from the team was, “Get ready, kids. This is gonna be one hell of a ride.”

  I remember sitting around the team room talking about it. Morgan had a big smile on his face. Elliott Miller, too, all 240 pounds of him, looked happy. Even Mr. Fantastic seemed at peace and relaxed, in that sober, senior chief way. We turned over in our minds the hard realities of the city. Only a couple weeks from now we would be calling Ramadi home. For six or seven months we’d be living in a hornet’s nest, picking up where Team 3 had left off. It was time for us to roll.

  In late September, Al Qaeda’s barbaric way of dealing with the local population was stirring some of Iraq’s Sunni tribal leaders to come over to our side. (Stuff like punishing cigarette smokers by cutting off their fingers—can you blame locals for wanting those crazies gone?) Standing up for their own people posed a serious risk, but it was easier to justify when you had five thousand American military personnel backing you up. That’ll boost your courage, for sure. We were putting that vise grip on that city, infiltrating it, and setting up shop, block by block, house by house, inch by inch.

  On September 29, a Team 3 platoon set out on foot from a combat outpost named Eagle’s Nest on the final operation of their six-month deployment. Located in the dangerous Ma’laab district, it wasn’t much more than a perimeter of concrete walls and concertina wire bundling up a block of residential homes. COP Eagle’s Nest was named in honor of the Army unit that was making its mark in Ramadi: the First Battalion of the 506th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. Nicknamed the Currahees, but better known today as the Band of Brothers, these paratroopers had built a great legacy in World War II that included seizing Hitler’s last holdout, the fabled Eagle’s Nest on the German-Austrian border. That legacy meant something to all American servicemen. I think I’ve seen the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers at least fifty times. Watching it always fires me up.

  That night, Team 3’s snipers were ordered to set up in the urban high ground, in sniper overwatch positions supporting Marines who were stringing razor wire as a barrier to insurgent movement near the southern boundary of the city. It was around three in the morning when the SEALs got into position. Not long after daybreak, one of their hides began taking fire.

  Drive-by shooters fired small arms into the roofs and parapets around the Team 3 position. Then an RPG streaked in and exploded against the roof, casting a cloud of dust over the snipers. Faced with harassing fire for most of the next hour, they hunkered down, not worried much by the haphazard shooting. But not long after that, an insurgent managed to sneak in close. Using the urban maze of buildings for cover, he lobbed a single fragmentation grenade at the team.

  The grenade arced down and hit a young SEAL named Mike Monsoor in the chest, bouncing to the floor. In the seemingly endless few seconds that it rolled around at his feet, Monsoor—positioned next to a stairway that offered the only exit from the roof—knew he could have made a quick and easy escape. As the frag lay there cooking, Monsoor didn’t hesitate: he jumped on the grenade, smothering it with his body. When it exploded, it threw all of its immense force into him. Mikey took the entire blast and allowed everyone else around him to live.

  The SEALs at the other sniper positions were moving to support their brothers at the first report of contact. The gunfire that greeted them was so insistent that the Iraqi troops who were working with them refused to go along. (This was all too typical.) As the SEALs sent a troops-in-contact alert to the tactical operations center (TOC) at Camp Marc Lee (prior to August 2, the SEAL compound had been known as Shark Base, but the boys from Team 3 had honorably renamed it in memory of our fallen brother), and a man-down call as well, they requested vehicles to evacuate their casualty. Meanwhile, the guys from the other sniper element raced toward them through the gunfire. They arrived within minutes.

  Securing the perimeter, they provided overwatch and covering fire for two Bradleys dispatched from COP Eagle’s Nest. As the vehicles took Mikey away, no one failed to understand what he had just done—and that the price he paid was the ultimate one. By the time the casevac vehicle reached the base hospital at Camp Ramadi, that twenty-five-year-old frogman, that hero, was already gone.

  Never forget.

  Mikey was a great kid and a solid operator, a guy everybody liked. He was a hard worker, young, just starting his career. His example reveals why certain guys make it into the SEAL teams and others don’t. I think the guys who make it are the ones who are willing to give their lives for their teammates. It’s not all about muscle, stamina, or brains. It’s about heart. You can’t train a person to react as he did to danger. It comes from your heart, because it all boils down to love of your teammates and the commitment you’ve made to protect the freedoms of your country. There are no questions to ask—you act because you could not do otherwise, because you know your teammate would do the same for you, because this is all about more than one man. What is service? Mike Monsoor is the answer.

  4

  Into the Hornet’s Nest

  On Saturday, October 14, 2006, I went to Naval Air Station North Island in San Diego to jump onto a bird headed for the Sandbox. An Air Force Boeing C-17 Globemaster III airlifter was waiting for us. Sixteen months ago, they’d flown me home in a plane like this one. Now at long last it was time to return to the war. The commander of Naval Special Warfare Command, Rear Admiral Joseph Maguire, was there to see us off.

  Everyone has his reasons for serving. Sometimes the reasons we often give to people are kind of flip—“I can’t do anything else”—maybe because the real reason is beyond words. It’s not just the thrill of shooting automatic weapons and blowing things up; my reasons are deep in my heart. I can’t tell you how much the sight of the flag means to me, or the heritage of the military men who came before me. It’s about this country, and its people. Mostly now it’s about the company of my teammates, those men whose values track mine and whom I would die to save.

  The memories of my service alongside these great men runs deep. When I tasted the cold air in the aircraft’s cavernous fuselage and felt the power of its engines hauling us aloft, and I caught my first sight of the distant peaks of the Rockies, I
had a little moment of déjà vu. I remembered an op we had done in 2005, right before Redwing.

  Up there in the Hindu Kush, three of us—Dan Healy, Shane Patton, and I—had loaded into a Chinook helicopter with two other recon teams and risen through the clouds toward a snowcapped mountain. After a short flight, we landed and found ourselves on the nose of a promontory maybe two miles from the border with Pakistan. Once the helo inserted us, we quickly began building our hides.

  I remember the commanding views we had, six thousand feet above sea level—an unbroken curve of horizon in three directions. Taliban insurgents were set up in these mountains, working over an Army forward operating base (FOB) near the border with rockets and artillery. Our mission was L&E—locate and eliminate. We were supposed to take them down. Our radio call sign was Irish 3.

  From my vantage point on the end of a long, narrow ridgeline in the clouds, I could see the Army FOB to my west. To the east, I could see a cluster of primitive buildings, well camouflaged as natural features of the land, stone built into stone. We kept an eye on things, watching every side for signs of enemy movement. Every now and then we stretched our legs a little and went to check on each other.

  It was on the third day that we finally found them. A barrage of rockets came raining down toward the American base. The enemy was beyond our reach, so we did the next best thing: Shane radioed the grid coordinates to the Army’s artillery guys and waited. We saw the impact of the Army artillery hitting the mountainside, then its muffled thud. From down in the valley came the delayed thrump of the muzzle blast. Shane passed down corrections until the big guns weren’t missing their marks anymore. At a distance we saw insurgents running on mountain trails and a train of camels slugging along behind. Let them all die.