Service: A Navy SEAL at War

by Marcus Luttrell

After Johnny and Elliott got hit, our bomb techs had been itching to take down the “emirs” who oversaw manufacture of the IEDs. Our assaulters had killed or captured plenty of triggermen and emplacers, but the HVTs—high-value targets—eluded us. The assholes who designed and built the IEDs were like the cookers in a drug ring, simmering the meth. With college degrees and professional training, they were smart enough to feel the heat coming when we were after them. They ran when they sensed trouble, and that was probably why the mechanics of the bombs our EOD guys found seemed to change so often.

  Andy and Shannon had a hunch that the area west of town known as the Five Kilo district sheltered some of the people we were after. It was quiet out there, sparsely built and rural. We had never run an op out that way before, but I trusted their hunch and passed it up the line. That’s how we ended up targeting that neighborhood for a midnight visit.

  Within the city, we almost always drove a safe route to one of our combat outposts before setting out to our objective on foot. This time, we did it old-school. We drove out into the unknown streets to the actual target instead of patrolling from the COP. The motorized assault consisted of two ten-man squads, one under Lieutenant Austin with Salazar on point, and the other under Chief Marty Robbins. Each group had a trio of jundis as well. Lieutenant Nathan and I had the mobility force: the vehicles. The two squads piled into our two-and-a-half-ton troop carriers, and we left Camp Marc Lee after midnight and turned west onto Route Michigan.

  In the desolate area west of town, this heavily potholed main road was known to be full of big IEDs. Buried in the road, they were like speed bumps packed with homemade explosives. As our convoy moved, we noticed different symbols painted on the wall running along the road. They were said to be warning signs to locals that IEDs might be buried along their path. The houses out there were built of mud and straw, scattered around a flat, sun-baked area. One might have taken it for a farming community, if growing dirt could be considered farming.

  About five hundred meters from the houses we were going to hit, we stopped the trucks and our two squads dismounted. They formed their trains and begin sprinting forward parallel to the road, offset by a healthy distance to avoid unwanted fireworks. It was a full-on rush to hit the targets: three houses, each suspected of having some involvement in the bomb-making trade. Battle-wise as our guys were, they ran almost silently though they carried a full loadout.

  The assaulters split into their two elements. Their point men led them to the doors and the breachers came forward and sledged the bolts. Marty Robbins, the chief, pushed everybody forward, running up their backs, keeping the train moving fast. Piling in, they hoped for resistance and expected a jackpot. Instead, there was nothing. No resistance, no fight. And no bomb materials, explosives, wires, or emplacing tools, either. Instead, the lieutenant and I, who were in charge of the trucks, got a call from the pissed-off operators asking for extract. When we kicked it into gear and drove to the set point, where they had dismounted not twenty minutes ago, the frustration of the anticlimax was vented in the obscenities they unleashed upon the world for hitting a dry hole.

  You can’t make movies out of raids like Operation Going South. Not every target is what you think it’s going to be. There was no drama in this anywhere, except in the full day preceding its kickoff. The preparation of the force list; the infil and exfil routes that we drew up, debated, and redrew; the coordination with the Iraqis; the staging of vehicles; the time-on-target calculations; the shootout procedures and contingencies identified and game-boarded; the comms plan; the QRF plan—all of it prepared with a rushed special operations tempo, the checking and rechecking of gear: rifle cleaned, mags and frags packed, batteries, flares, radios, and so on. The adrenaline surge is even stronger when you’re going into a new area. The sense of anticipation and tight nerves—that’s war, too.

  Truth is, every mission is big, and the fight isn’t always where you expect, which is why a warrior’s first challenge is to be ready for it, especially when there’s no reason to think it will appear. You prepare so you don’t have to fight, not so you have to fight. You don’t always get what you wish for. If you love the fight too much, sometimes she won’t love you back.

  As inconsequential as it was, this mission was a turning point for me, and I knew it. Or, actually, I should say I knew it as soon as Senior Chief Steffen pointed out to me what a turning point it was. There was no hiding my physical decline from a leader as well attuned to his men as he was. He sensed my pain and my exhaustion. None of it was useful to the squadron.

  As I’ve said many times and will probably never say enough, in my opinion Senior Chief Steffen is one of the most effective individuals in the special operations community. Part of it is his ability to tell you things you don’t want to hear, and make you like it all the same. He has this rare talent for climbing into your ass, knocking around a little, and leaving you feeling grateful for the favor. He hammers you like a loving father. He’ll tell you that you screwed up, or that you’re not on your A game, or that there may be serious questions about your suitability to serve, but at the end of it, all you want to do is say, “Roger that, sir.” And go find a way to improve yourself. Our respect for him was commanded, not demanded.

  Still, when he came to me one day in early December and told me he thought it was time for me to quit going outside the wire, I wasn’t ready to hear it. I remember our conversation well. I pushed back on him. I told him I was still good to go, and that the boys would pick up my slack. We were a machine out there and it had a lot more miles on it. There was no way I entirely believed this myself, but I did my best to make the case. I didn’t want a bullshit op like Going South to be my swan song.

  I won’t describe the language that flew between us that day. When I flared up on him, it was the last gasp of a tired frog’s pride. I think he knew it, and I think he knew I knew it. But my pride had to have its say before I went along with what was right. As a member of an assault element, I was more a liability than an asset now. I’d been burning the furniture to avoid freezing to death in my house. It was the senior chief’s job to tell me I couldn’t go anymore.

  How do you get right with the idea, at the age of thirty-one, that the career you’ve pursued with every fiber of your being has come suddenly to an end? I can tell you it helped that DQ, our squadron operations officer, widely respected in the E-5 mafia, was on hand, visiting from Fallujah. He helped me own the decision. To have a gunfighter like him look me in the eye and tell me that the war can’t go on forever, that a young gun must always become an old hand, made this evolution feel natural to me. He forced me to be honest with myself. He asked me, “Marcus, if something happens out there and you have to vault somebody over a wall, or haul a badly wounded teammate to safety, are you the best man to carry the load for your team?” My back, my knees, and my exhausted mind answered the question for me.

  It was the path we all must take. All senior SEALs, including Master Chief, DQ, and Skipper, reached the point where they had to slow down as shooters before they could raise their game as leaders. DQ said there was a new job for me within the platoon, in the operations section. I would be, in effect, his counterpart at Camp Marc Lee. Talking with him made me feel like the ballplayer in John Fogerty’s song “Centerfield.” “Put me in, Coach.” I’d have to get right with the fact that I was no longer operational, but there was a game to play. When my BUD/S class had finished Hell Week, an instructor said, “We’ve all been there and done that. It’s time to get ready for the next step on the ladder.”

  It was time to be reborn again.

  Climbing that ladder involved standing face-to-face with my teammates and seeing how they took the change in my role. I was afraid of what I’d see on their faces. After word got around that I was coming off the line, I walked into the chow hall and a couple of guys came up to me and said they were sorry to hear it. They told me to use the time to heal up, and not to worry, everything would be fine in the train. In about ten minute
s, it was business as usual and we were all still tightly bound members of the team. There was always someone ready to fill your post.

  As I found a new home in the TOC, in the role as chief of the operations section, I wrapped my arms around the challenge of vetting our op plans, coordinating communications, getting aircraft and drones into the mix, designing routes into and back from our targets, making sure the operators never got their toes stepped on by other friendlies when they went outside the wire, and supporting the training mission. It’s easy to think you’re there to do whatever you want, and pursue a personal agenda of some kind. But of course we weren’t. Our duty is to serve the mission, and if we’re not doing that, then we have no right to call what we do service.

  Though I knew I was unlikely to carry a rifle into a war zone ever again, I didn’t want to be seen as a paper pusher. I wanted to stay close to the fight. So I kept up with what our operators were doing. I checked and rechecked everything. In briefings, I always wanted to be able to tell them, “It’s all there, everything you need. I know the route, because I’ve walked it.” I’d always remind them that only one thing was important: “From the minute you jock up, the mission’s not over until you’re back here, boots on the ground, mission accomplished, and back in your tent asleep. Bring everybody back. If you get into it, fight like you’ve never fought before. But bring everybody back.”

  I was thirty-one, but well aware that I was becoming an old man. And I’d earn the right to talk like one, if only those willful young bucks would let me. It helped that I was surrounded by great frogmen who had already made this evolution. As upset as I was by early December’s turn of events, I look back today and see that I was never prouder to stand in their company. My teammates from that deployment were, as a group, top to bottom, some of the finest I’ve ever served with. I loved seeing guys like Marty Robbins and Wink going to work, and doing it with a level of confidence and authority that they had earned as SEALs. Seeing them rise to the occasion, I was left with no doubt at all that our world doesn’t revolve around one man. No single person makes our world go round.

  Pearl Harbor Day was a terrible day in Ramadi. At least ten U.S. servicemen were killed in insurgent attacks. One of those attacks was particularly nasty and costly.

  Some American journalists were visiting town that day. They were interested in the story of the Sunni tribal awakening, and they wanted to see it up close, in the street, so a little embed operation was set up to accommodate them. Given the bad press the war had been getting, most of us saw how helpful it could be to have some truth in the papers. Among those members of the press were a twenty-five-year-old woman from a newsmagazine and a photographer who came to see how our work was transforming one of Iraq’s worst places. They were riding Route Sunset in a convoy, bound for COP Falcon. The road was secure, locked down with 24-7 patrols and surveillance. The only vulnerable spot was a road crossing near a newly reopened school. It was there that Al Qaeda managed to insert a bomb team.

  An officer riding in the convoy’s second Humvee saw the steel plate buried in the street. He tried to call a warning to the lead vehicle, but it was too late. A heavy rubber tire rolled over it, a fuse triggered, and after a short delay, the third Humvee in line was engulfed in a blast of flames. That vehicle contained four people: a driver, a turret gunner, a Marine Corps public affairs officer, and Captain Travis Patriquin, the Army civil affairs officer whose work with the Sunni tribes had done so much to pacify Ramadi.

  The explosion threw Patriquin out of the vehicle. He died on impact. Two others—the gunner, Army specialist Vincent Pomante, and the Marine Corps PAO, Major Megan McClung, were KIA as well. Major McClung became the first female graduate of the United States Naval Academy ever to be killed in action.

  Among those who mourned this loss hardest was Sheikh Sattar. Burning with anger and grief, he wept at the news of Captain Patriquin’s death. “For some reason when I make good friends with Americans,” Sattar would say, “they become my brothers, and they die.” The sheikh decided he couldn’t bear making any more American friends. “I don’t want them to die,” he said. At the memorial service for Patriquin, McClung, and Pomante, held several days after Patriquin’s body was flown home—and that was one of the largest “hero flights” anyone in Iraq could remember, attended by more than a thousand people—Sattar offered a traditional Muslim burial prayer to his slain friend. “O Allah, admit him to Paradise and protect him from the torment of the grave and the torment of hellfire. Make his grave spacious and fill it with light.” He also pledged himself to bringing righteous justice to the killers.

  Within forty-eight hours, tipped off by a relative, Sattar and his police got the intel that led us to the prize. In a series of raids conducted on December 19, our forces searched for the three assassins who planted that bomb. Gold team finally grabbed them. As we all suspected, they were your run-of-the-mill Al Qaeda hirelings, teenagers, greedy opportunists looking for a payday. They were turned over to Iraqi police. Sheikh Sattar boasted later on that he had “fed them to his dogs.” Was it true? I don’t know. It was his city, so I suppose that was his business.

  Patriquin’s death was not in vain. You talk about one man making a difference—his role in the Anbar Awakening, from his work with Sheikh Sattar to his encouraging of Sheikh Jassim’s rebellion against Al Qaeda, was of enormous importance. Those sheikhs knew how to take care of business in their city: Sattar’s recruitment work was invaluable, and in his fight up in Sufiyah district, Jassim put Al Qaeda on the run, at a cost of just seventeen of his men. Jassim called his KIA martyrs. Call them what you want; they were heroes to the people of Ramadi. Our estimates put Al Qaeda losses in that fight at around sixty, though in the chaos of mobs, troop movements, and air attacks it was hard to nail down a final number. Afterward, many tribes that had been devotedly unhelpful to us and the cause of a new Iraq came on board and helped us with our police recruitment and training effort. It appeared that a turning point was near. Travis Patriquin’s hands were all over this success and his fine touch would be forever missed.

  President Bush had been conferring with Iraq’s prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, about our progress. In late November, at a meeting in Jordan, the president first broached the idea of a “surge,” pushing another twenty or thirty thousand U.S. troops into Iraq to improve security for the people. Around the same time, another American newspaper article was published claiming that things in Anbar were so bad that “U.S. and Iraqi troops are no longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in al-Anbar.”

  Actually, maybe that was partly correct, because the wave that was sweeping Ramadi clean of terrorists was only partly military in nature. When Iraqis saw that members of Al Qaeda were the real infidels, young Iraqi men everywhere rallied to the idea of defending a just cause. Captain Patriquin put his finger on it when he wrote in early December, “The promise of a life of adventure, steady pay, and being on the side of righteousness has proved to be the right mix.” It allowed peace-loving Iraqi men on the right side of the law to serve family, tribe, and nation. All of a sudden a lot of farmers and shopkeepers were up to their hips in marksmanship, assault tactics, checkpoint operations, rules of evidence, and techniques for handling detainees. Those who showed promise were sent to a detective school across town. The change was bubbling up from within. We played a role in helping it along, but we were far from being the conquerors of Anbar Province.

  On December 13, President Bush met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to discuss how to capitalize on our momentum. Five days later, the new secretary of defense, Robert Gates, was sworn in and went to visit Prime Minister al-Maliki. When he came home, Secretary Gates recommended the appointment of a new commander for all coalition forces in Iraq. The man selected was the Army’s premier counterinsurgency strategist, General David Petraeus. It’s clear from this that our success in Ramadi, building on previous successes in Tal Afar and elsewhere, was a blueprint for what could be done throughout the country. />
  Confronted with a citizens’ uprising, the terrorists seemed to know the days of their reign of terror were numbered. And at Camp Marc Lee and Camp Corregidor, Task Unit Ramadi was fully in its battle rhythm—another big problem for the bad guys. The surge in police recruitment was bringing us better intel all the time, and night after night, our assault elements went out and bagged a growing number of high-value targets. Some of the missions we ran were quite audacious.

  Consider, for example, a stay-behind operation. You move into a neighborhood in strength, with forces that have a “large signature”—tanks, vehicles, and a lot of men. You patrol around, entering and clearing houses, making a lot of noise. You plant your footprint on that neighborhood, let everyone know you’re there. Then you leave—or appear to leave. The tanks withdraw, the patrols load up into Bradleys and drive away. But not everybody goes home. A lot of guys stay behind. You can only do an operation like this when you’re comfortable working in your battle space, when the people and their reactions are familiar to you, when there’s a baseline level of goodwill in the streets, and you know basically how the enemy is going to come knocking.

  You leave a few platoons of riflemen dispersed throughout the neighborhood. They’ll sit quietly with their hosts, talking, being friendly, and explaining that they are there to stop the people who are killing their children and ruining their neighborhoods. The innocent residents of Ramadi are like good people everywhere. They don’t want fights going on around their homes. And they don’t want their families to be put needlessly into harm’s way. They bring out pita bread and their syrupy sweet chai. All the while, our guys are keeping an eye on the streets. Because the enemy, when they see our vehicles leave, is going to come back, looking to set up their IEDs and so on. It may happen at first light of dawn, or after the mosques let out. There will be movement, a gathering. The gunmen and bomb makers will awaken and assert themselves.