Service: A Navy SEAL at War

by Marcus Luttrell

  Cowboy was with this fire team. He came up over the wall, looking to draw a bead on the birdman, but the Iraqi saw him and dove down a stairwell to escape. Then, out of the corner of his eye, the SEAL saw something in the air, flying toward him from another direction. It wasn’t a pigeon. He ducked back behind the wall of the roof as a grenade flew by and exploded some distance away. Then the squad radio crackled with news from one of the other overwatches that all was not well.

  The guys at the other position—Lieutenant Clint (who had been switched over to Bravo Platoon), Dozer, Elliott Miller, Johnny Brands, and some others—had sensed a strange feeling in the air as their day began. As they set up their position, the family who lived in the house they were borrowing was behaving nervously. Then, from the loudspeakers on the mosques, came announcements that the terps thought were unusual, perhaps a coded message of some kind. It was around that time that an insurgent managed to creep up on their roof and toss a grenade through one of the spider holes. They reacted by the playbook, hitting the deck fast, with their arms covering their heads and showing their tails to the frag. It exploded amid them and ripped up their backsides. No one was killed, but Elliott took deep shrapnel wounds to the shoulder and arm. With an arterial bleed, he was quickly treated by his teammates.

  Then Lieutenant Clint called Camp Corregidor with a troops-in-contact report and a casevac request. The other sniper positions were directed to close up shop, collapse on his position, and await extract. A quick reaction force—Bradley Fighting Vehicles from the 1/77—was en route to pick them up. They were going home—at least, that was the plan. But as the SEALs moved from the rooftop to the first deck, they began taking heavy fire. Realizing that insurgents had infiltrated the roof, they took a head count and gathered their sensitive gear as the crack of small arms fire and blast of grenades sounded just outside the walls.

  To defend ourselves, there are certain measures we take as a last resort. In a worst-case scenario, such as the immediate threat of being overrun, we implement these measures, which include setting off explosions that we hope will kill or incapacitate anybody lurking in the alleys and streets outside. With grenades detonating in the interior courtyard and small arms fire popping everywhere, it was clear Bravo Platoon was at risk of being overrun. The platoon’s officer in charge, Lieutenant Chris, decided to blow the window-mounted charges, and his bomb technician, Shane Snow, did the honors.

  The explosion was more than the guys had bargained for. The wave of overpressure rebounded off the heavy wall of the house next door and slapped back at them, shaking the entire structure. The door leading outside to the front gate was jammed in its frame—definitely not what they needed as they prepared to bust out of that house.

  The guys were wrestling with the door when another explosion came. This one felt heavier than anything they had heard during their time in the city. Several blocks away, the Alfa Platoon squads from Camp Marc Lee, Gold and Blue, felt it as well. Fizbo thought to himself, I hope that’s nobody we know.

  Over the radio, Lieutenant Clint informed the other Bravo Platoon elements: “Mass casualties. Calling for extract. Move to extract position, our location.”

  There was no time to waste. Hearing the order, someone called out, “Time for a Mogadishu Mile.” To reach their teammates, they would have to make a two-hundred-yard dash through hell.

  Checking the open courtyard to their rear, they forced their way through the balky front door and pushed out of the house to the gate in the outer wall, which led out to the street. They formed their stack and the EOD, Shane Snow, used his shears to cut the zip ties securing the gate. When nothing exploded, they thanked God the insurgents hadn’t managed to booby-trap it with an IED. That was always a risk when you were camping in the enemy’s backyard.

  Pushing out into the street, the fire team found the situation beyond all contingencies. The scene was straight out of Black Hawk Down. A crowd confronted the small element of soldiers. In their midst, gunmen appeared. With Cowboy on point, the frogs pushed out and began moving toward their teammates.

  Cowboy went right. A teammate who followed directly behind him, carrying an M60 machine gun, went left. When his teammate fell, hitting the ground hard, Cowboy thought he had been hit, but then the frogman scrambled back to his feet. Fanning out, guns at the level, they moved purposefully and precisely, just as they had practiced a thousand times. Determined to reach their brothers, who had just suffered some kind of catastrophic event, they gave no quarter to their enemy. They knew the only way to stay alive was to move, and move fast. With every step, they earned their Tridents all over again.

  The insurgents owned the rooftops, and they were firing madly. Whipping down at Cowboy and the others, bullets smacked into the street, the popping of small arms fire now and then yielding to the occasional hissing rush of an RPG or the blast of a tossed grenade. The bullets were way too close—as Cowboy said, “They were saying my name.”

  I learned early in my career that when things go south, you milk your cover for all it’s worth, shoot often but sparingly, and keep moving fast. That was how these guys worked. They survived on quick reflexes and cool nerves. As they advanced down the street, leapfrogging to cover each other at road crossings, Cowboy, running point, took the long angle, scanning for targets straight ahead. His teammates behind him each took a different angle to the side. Shane Snow did his best to move fast and provide covering fire, but mostly he did what a good bomb tech is supposed to do: sweep his eyes over the ground close ahead, looking for command wires and pressure plates. Their hard-charging train fought together as one, making the two-hundred-yard dash to their brothers. Not many enemy fighters who raised a weapon against them lived to tell about it.

  Turning a corner and running down the street, bound for the extract point, they saw a couple of Bradley Fighting Vehicles in front of a house. One faced north, the other south. One of them was lashing out with its turret-mounted 25mm chain gun at a building across the street. Return fire was spitting and sparking off its armored hull like a medium rain. As they neared Lieutenant Clint’s overwatch house, Shane noticed smoldering fragments of some kind in the street. There was a large circular black stain on the wall outside the house, about three feet in diameter: an RPG impact. The chief of Bravo Platoon, Crossman, was outside the front door, firing into buildings across the way. Another operator was working a crew-served M48 machine gun on the same targets. The team moved up to the wall outside the front of the house and used the Bradleys for cover.

  When Cowboy stuck his head into the Bradley, it was full of smoke. Then it came rushing at him, the horrible smell and sight of an inert human form lying there in the crew compartment. The dead man was an Iraqi, one of Lieutenant Clint’s jundis. He was missing both of his legs and had terrible burns on his stumps. Baling wire was wrapped around what was left—apparently someone had tried to stop the bleeding. There was no saving that dude. As bullets continued to strike the vehicle, everyone kept calm and focused, counting on their training to tell them what to do. But not even our down-man drill with the pigs could fully prepare a man for a moment like this.

  Someone yelled, “Get in the house!” Turning, Cowboy saw Lieutenant Chris motioning him inside the door. There was a large puddle of blood on the ground between them. From the deep red trail that led from it into the house, it was obvious that something had been dragged out of the puddle. Following the bloody smear inside, through more heavy smoke, Cowboy found another pool of blood several feet across. In the middle of it lay an M4 rifle with a torn sling.

  Feeling his way farther inside, he stumbled across something that yielded only slightly against his foot. It was one of our own: Elliott Miller. When Cowboy bumped into him he let loose a primal howl. His legs were an utter ruin. A light wisp of white smoke seemed to be rising from him.

  A short distance away from him, another man was down. This was Johnny Brands, screaming as several of his teammates tried to apply battle dressing to his feet. They were doing
the best they could, given that the platoon medic, Elliott, was in no condition to help. Every frogman is trained up in basic trauma, but it never helps that it’s all too often the medic who gets hit.

  What had happened to them was revealed in fragments to Cowboy and his teammates as they jumped into the mix, trying to save those two frogmen’s lives.

  It was the relatively minor wound Elliott had received earlier on—grenade shrapnel to his arm—that led the team to call for extract. When the QRF arrived outside with a couple of Bradleys, the squad moved quickly downstairs and lined up to break out of the house. They tossed two smoke grenades outside to cover their exfil, then burst through the door. Two Iraqis were in the lead, followed by Elliott, hobbling along with help from Johnny Brands. The jundis had just hit the street when the world went dark. The IED might have been dropped down on them from the roof in a backpack. Or it might have been planted in the ground or hung on the gate while they were inside. All we know for sure is that it was a trap set by enemies who were obviously wise to everything we were doing and how we were doing it. They knew that straight-on firefights were losing propositions. So they snuck around and planted their bombs where they thought we’d be. They sure got it right that time. An enormous explosion engulfed our guys as they exited the house.

  The explosion killed the two Iraqis leading the way; the first man simply disappeared, evaporated by the blast, his scant remnants drifting away in the air, a pink mist, while the second, partly sheltered by the leader, was nearly sliced in half at the waist. The blast still had enough force to devastate Elliott. It tore into his body wherever it wasn’t protected by body armor. His legs were shredded from about midthigh down. He had a hole in his right shoulder and the parts of him that weren’t covered by plates were being eaten into by a terrible chemical residue.

  As we learned later, the insurgents had probably made this weapon from a 122mm artillery shell and an 82mm mortar round with a white phosphorus payload. So-called Willie Pete rounds are one of the nastiest weapons on God’s great earth. When that chemical gets blown all over you, it sticks and burns, eating through metal, clothing, skin, and flesh. White phosphorus can’t be put out, and it was all over Elliott. There was nothing they could do but watch as the chemical slowly burned all the way through him. I know the guys in Bravo were losing their minds as this happened. But Elliott is a tough SOB; he just took the pain. It was a while before he finally stopped smoking.

  Johnny was better off, but that wasn’t saying much. Both his feet were attached to his ankles only by the Achilles tendons. The blast had wounded one of the crew on the Bradley, too. When notified of this, the commander of the QRF evidently decided he needed to get his wounded crewman to a casualty station, and ordered the Bradleys to return to base.

  Alone for the moment, without a means of extract, the boys of Bravo Platoon groped through the smoke for their brothers, homing in on their screams. When Dozer found his down teammates—two of his closest friends—he checked a surge of grief, then realized, You’ve got to get them the hell off the street or you’re gonna get shot in the face. Whoever set that bomb by their gate might still be watching. He could have secondary charges ready to go.

  Looking down at Elliott, Dozer saw that his friend’s legs seemed loose and detached in the bloody mess of his pants. The steel rifle magazines stored in his front vest pouches had been dished in by the blast. Elliott’s watch was charred and black but, amazingly, still kept time. Only his body armor saved him from being killed instantly. Dozer ran his hands under Elliott’s plates, checking his torso for wounds. As he removed Elliott’s gear, Dozer realized he didn’t have the first idea where to begin treating such a seriously wounded man. That was when he heard another explosion, a smaller one, go off in the courtyard. A grenade. The insurgents were still out there, probing them, probably planning another attack.

  Elliott was one of the heaviest guys in the teams, a good 240 pounds, not counting his kit, loadout, backpack, and corpsman’s gear. Dozer grabbed Elliott by the shoulders and started struggling to move him toward the foyer of the house. When one of Elliott’s legs got snagged in the door frame, wrenching around at an unnatural angle, Dozer tried to go back through the doorway to untangle him, but found himself blocked by his teammate’s broad shoulders. Dozer shouted to another guy to help, and together they eased Elliott free of the jam.

  With two men down and several more focusing on treating them, it would have been easy for a gunman to come in and kill them all, Dozer thought. They continued to be very vulnerable until the guys from the other overwatch positions arrived. Even then, the handful of frogmen—the rest of Bravo Platoon—was hard-pressed to keep the enemy at bay. There were too many avenues of incoming fire. They couldn’t see what was going on outside, or on the roof.

  As some of the guys stayed with Elliott, Dozer looked after Johnny. He was alarmed to see blood flowing from his teammate’s crotch. Fearing a femoral arterial bleed, he ripped Johnny’s pants open and was relieved to find everything still intact. He said to his wounded teammate, “I know you’re hurt, and I know this may not mean anything to you, but your dick is still there. At least you have that.” Johnny, somehow, managed a laugh. Dozer was finally able to find and stop the source of his bleeding—a cut just underneath his groin. “You’re good,” Dozer told him. “You’re gonna make it.”

  Then Elliott stirred and was conscious again. A SEAL through and through, the medic told his teammates to take care of Johnny first, then screamed and demanded some morphine. No one knew where the morphine had gone. When they found it, the frog who tried to inject it into Elliott had the device backward and injected it into his own hand. The sheer adrenaline rush of the situation kept him from getting too groggy.

  When Dozer and Clint were satisfied that Elliott and Johnny were stable, tourniquets secure, vitals stable, wounds under pressure, and at no risk of bleeding out, they had to figure out how to get them out of there. The time had almost come: Dozer had been on the radio, guiding some Bradleys to the house. But how do you move a man whose legs are a mess, whose feet are hanging off his body, and whose body is slowly burning from phosphorus? There was only one way to do it without a stretcher handy. You carry him.

  When the QRF returned, Cowboy leaned over Elliott and told him, “We’re going to get you out of here, amigo, but you’ve gotta cowboy up, because we’re going to have to hurt you to get it done.” Then he bent down and grabbed him behind both of his ruined legs and heaved him up while another guy lifted his shoulders. With his legs torn apart, and a bilateral tibia/fibula fracture and a shattered right forearm as well, Elliott was screaming the whole time they moved him to the street. “Stop, you’re killing me!”

  A couple of guys ran to the roof, cleared it, and one of them leveled his M48 light machine gun and laid down suppressive fire on the buildings with line of sight to the Bradley. Outside, Crossman scanned the perimeter around the front gate of the house, securing the extract point. Then Lieutenant Clint ordered his men to prep for breakout. As they moved to the front gate, he directed the Bradley to turn its main gun on the roof of their own building. That’s when the squad carrying Elliott made their move.

  Rounds were smacking into the Bradley as they eased Elliott inside. Running into and out of buildings and alleyways all around them, insurgents now and then peeked down from the rooftops and once in a while got brave, taking a haphazardly aimed shot. Looking up, Cowboy got a quick glimpse, barely eight feet above him, of a scarfed head ducking behind a parapet. Thank God that guy didn’t have any courage—or a grenade.

  Dozer, Cowboy, and the others ran back inside to get Johnny. The first thing to do was get him calmed down. Dozer grabbed Johnny by his shoulder straps. Cowboy took him by the legs. Dozer said, “If you have to bite down on something, I’d start doing that now.” What Dozer didn’t tell Johnny was that he feared his teammate’s legs would come right off when they moved him. But there was no other way. With a hand from two other guys, Dozer and Cowboy lifted
him. The wail of pain that issued from Johnny was a sound like none they had ever heard. But they stayed with the necessary task, taking him to the waiting armored vehicle and putting him inside. They all crammed themselves into the tight confines of the Bradley, then pulled the rear hatch shut behind them. Forward of the crew compartment, a soldier stood, manning the vehicle’s gun turret. Dozer could see only his lower half. The soldier’s legs were shaking hard with fear.

  Twenty or thirty seconds passed—an eternity—and still the Bradley did not move. The driver said something about needing authorization from command first. Cowboy grabbed the mike and told whoever was listening that “authorization,” whatever that might mean, was hereby granted. That was good enough for the driver. As grenades lit off on the street outside, and rounds ricocheted off the vehicle, the driver hit the gas.

  That was when Cowboy’s guts turned over. He had choked back as much of it as he could, but in that dark, confined space, the smell of burned flesh, blood, and shit was just too much. He and a teammate lost their lunches right near Johnny, still screaming as his shredded shins and ankles jostled back and forth in the crowded Bradley.