by Mark Owen
Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in event of success.
I would have signed up for Beckwith’s Project Delta and Shackleton’s expedition.
I never wanted to do anything normal. I can’t be average. No one involved in special operations can be average because our missions are never easy or routine. Both Shackleton and Beckwith were looking for a shared sense of purpose and a common mind-set among all their people. If anybody on their crews wasn’t there for the right reasons and for the team’s needs, there was a higher chance of failure. And failure in the special operations community is never tolerated.
Most nights in Iraq, I was perched on the landing skid of a Little Bird—an MH-6 helicopter flown by the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment—racing over the rooftops. I’d fast rope to the roof of a building and clear the top floors while my teammates in the trucks on the street cleared the lower levels. The missions were exactly what I signed up to do, but I was doing them with the Army instead of my SEAL teammates. We were waging a massive campaign to dismantle al Qaeda in Iraq.
We called it “Baghdad SWAT.”
But some nights, we didn’t have the Little Birds. If we were going to the roof, we had to climb.
As I crested the parapet wall, I looked back over my shoulder and saw that Jon had reached the roof. I turned and headed for the opposite corner, scanning for any targets. Tile covered the roof and a small two-foot-high parapet wall ran completely around the edge. A door sat in the middle of the roof and a myriad of satellite dishes of all makes and models were attached to the corners of the building. Bundles of thick black power lines ran from building to building, sagging over the road and alleyway.
I had a map of the area in my head and knew the target we were looking for was on the other side of the roof. Over the radio, I heard the ground team searching for the correct door. The enemy safe house was in a duplex, but from the radio traffic the ground team was unsure which door to breach and enter.
From my perch three stories up, I could see the ground team’s trucks. I heard a muffled boom, and the Army operators on the ground started to move into the house. I kept watch on the house, waiting for any sign of movement.
Then word came over the radio. The boys hit the wrong side of the duplex. They were going into the other side of the duplex now. I heard a burst from an AK-47 and some yelling.
“We’ve got squirters,” I heard over the radio.
From our vantage point, I knew that the squirters had to be close, but they were out of sight. We couldn’t see into the alley located to the north of our location because of the building in front of us. We needed to cross over to the other building, but there was no time to go all the way down to the ground floor, move over to the next building, and then clear our way back up three floors to the roof of the other building.
Nearby on the roof, I noticed a ladder. It looked long enough to reach the parapet wall on the other building. From that roof, we’d have a perfect angle down on the alley the enemy fighters were using to escape.
I looked at Jon, but he was working the radio, which was jammed with reports of fighters on the run. The guys inside the building also found a cache of weapons and explosives.
I wanted to get into the action, so I ran over to the ladder. It was made of discarded pieces of wood nailed together. A single nail and some wire held some of the ladder’s rungs on. I grabbed the ladder and put it on my shoulder and ran over to the edge of the building where my teammate waited.
“Think this haji ladder will hold us?” my teammate asked.
We were three stories up. I stood on the lip of the parapet wall and looked across the open space between the buildings. It was about fifteen feet across.
“If we lay it flat and crawl across, I think it will,” I said, hoping more than believing it.
“Either way, we’re about to find out,” he said with a smirk.
We both wanted to get in the fight and stop the squirters from escaping, or worse, setting up an ambush. We gently slid the ladder across the alley. My teammate went first. Lying flat, he slid across the ladder while I held it and kept watch on the other building. When it was my turn, I slung my rifle around behind me so it rested on my back and started to crawl across.
My mind went back to thin ice in Alaska. The only way to get across thin ice is to spread your body weight out as wide as possible. If you stand up, all your body weight is in one spot, and the next thing you know you fall through into freezing-cold water. Like crossing thin ice, crawling across the ladder was very dangerous. We were three stories off the ground, enemy fighters were running around, and we were about to trust this piece-of-shit Iraqi ladder to keep us from falling.
At least in Alaska I hadn’t been wearing the additional sixty pounds of gear.
I took two deep breaths and tried to stay focused. This was one of the many times staying in my three-foot world kept me going, because I still hated heights.
Inch by inch I crawled across the alley. Below, I saw a massive pile of trash. Most of it looked like kitchen waste, with rotting food and various food containers. Plastic bags were blown around the alley, and it looked like a car or truck had hit the waste pile, scattering trash into the middle of the alley.
I never stopped moving and finally made it to the other building. Back on my feet, I raced over to the corner, looking for the squirters. The enemy fighters would have easily gotten away had we hesitated or decided not to use the ladder. I picked up the squirters running at a dead sprint just as we got to the edge of the building and looked into the alley. Both men were carrying rifles.
I could see my teammate’s laser stop on the fighter on the left. I zeroed in on the fighter on the right. We both opened fire and cut the fighters down before they could get to the mouth of the alley. They had gotten lucky when the ground force hit the wrong side of the duplex, but that’s where their luck ran out.
On the other building, Jon heard the shots. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see him hustling over to where we’d left the ladder. I turned back to the alley and kept scanning. My teammates in the house were still clearing rooms and finding weapons, but it was unclear how many fighters were in the safe house.
Above me, I heard AH-6 Little Birds crisscrossing in the sky. They were armed with rockets and machine guns, ready to engage if we ran into trouble. After the first reports of squirters, they started flying in ever-widening circles from the target, looking for fighters who might have escaped.
Then I heard an urgent call over the radio.
“We’ve got a man down,” the Little Bird pilot said.
A few seconds later, the pilot repeated the call.
“We’ve got a man down.”
At first I assumed that the ground force had taken a casualty as they finished clearing the target building. Then the pilot came back with a second report.
“We’ve got a man down roughly one hundred meters south of the target compound,” the pilot said.
That didn’t make sense. I was located one hundred meters from the target with Jon and my team. We’d made contact, but the pilot couldn’t be talking about us. We were fine. The fighters never got off a round.
I glanced over at my teammate. He shrugged. I turned back to see if Jon was on our roof so I could ask him about the radio call.
Jon was gone.
“Where did Jon go?” I asked my teammate. “He was just there talking on the radio.”
“Where’s the ladder?” my teammate said.
Shit.
We both sprinted over to the edge of the building. The ladder was gone. I looked over the side and saw Jon lying in the pile of garbage. His helmet was turned to one side and I could just hear a faint moan as he rocked in pain.
“Roger, I’ve got a visual,” I said over the radio. “He is
in the alley between the buildings located just south of the target.”
The helicopter saw him go down and must have called it in to the guys on the ground. Now the medics wanted to know how to get to him.
“Get on the GRG and let’s talk some people in to get him,” my teammate said. “We need to get down there now.”
We were still getting reports of additional fighters in the area. If they stumbled upon Jon, he was dead. I pulled out my GRG—a gridded reference graphic, which is a small map with the buildings in the area identified by number—and started to guide the guys on the ground to Jon.
GRGs are usually made of satellite photos of the area, and they are often used to call in air strikes by providing the pilots and the guys on the ground with the same point of view.
“Stand by,” I said into the radio. “He is down in the alley at the intersection of Echo Four and Delta Eight.”
The ground force immediately sent their medical team to the location using the coordinates off the GRG. We stood on the roof and covered him until our teammates entered the alley. Then we started to look for a way off the roof. We couldn’t go back to the original building because the ladder was lying in the alley in two pieces. The roof of the new building was identical to the roof of the first, with a door leading downstairs. It was unlocked.
I tried to focus and calm myself down. I was really worried about Jon. Over the months that I’d worked with Jon, he’d become a mentor and a friend. I felt like he and my other teammates were brothers, much like my fellow SEALs. I would hate for anything to happen to him. From my perch on the roof he didn’t look so good, but I could hear him moaning and with my medical training I knew that this was at least a good sign.
“Let’s go,” I heard my teammate whisper as he motioned toward the door that led down into the building.
I slowly moved down the staircase with my rifle raised and ready to fire. It was always a little shocking to enter buildings in Baghdad. From the outside, it was hard to tell what they looked like inside. Many times, we hit houses that looked run-down, only to find nice furniture and fixtures in the rooms.
I had no idea we were on a house when I shimmied across the ladder a few minutes earlier. The stairwell opened into a hallway on the third floor of someone’s home. My boots squeaked on the marble floor as we started toward a staircase at the end of the hall. I took a cursory glance in each room as we passed. I wanted to make sure no fighters were there, but that was it. We weren’t really clearing the entire house. We needed to make our way to the exit and to Jon.
We came down the marble stairs leading from the third floor to the second floor. The staircase kept going down to the bottom floor. We were on our way down to the second floor when I saw a man standing on the landing just below. He was dressed in a dishdasha, the long robe worn by Arab men, and sandals. His arms were out and half raised like he was making sure I saw he wasn’t armed.
“Can I help you?” he said in English and with only a slight accent.
I was about to start yelling at him to get down on the ground, but the near-perfect English startled me.
“We need to get downstairs,” I said.
“Follow me,” he said.
I got close to him and kept my rifle trained on his back as he led us down to the second floor. I didn’t trust him, but I also thought it was unlikely he had fighters in the house. I got the sense he just wanted to make sure we didn’t smash up his house trying to find a way out.
“I’m a professor,” he said.
I didn’t answer. I didn’t really care. I just wanted to get out of the house and get to Jon’s location. My mission started as a hit, but as soon as Jon got injured, the mission changed.
The professor led us down to the front door and undid the locks. He opened the door and stepped out of our way. My teammate told the professor to move away from the door and stay quiet. I stopped at the threshold and peered out, looking for any fighters. Confident we were safe, I led the way out of the door and into the alley.
In the alleyway, I could see a medic kneeling next to Jon. He was wide-awake and still moaning. He’d fallen three stories down into the alley and landed in the pile of trash. It was likely the only time a pile of Iraqi garbage saved anyone. Most of the time I worried about bombs planted in the piles that lined the streets and alleys of the Iraqi capital.
When we got there, the medic was talking to Jon.
“Can you stand up?” the medic asked him.
“Yeah,” he said.
Jon didn’t have any broken bones. He let out a long groan as we helped him up and walked him over to the waiting trucks. He slumped down into the back of the truck and let out a deep breath. He was hurting but didn’t want to show it.
“Dammit. That sucked. The fucking ladder broke,” Jon said.
Jon didn’t see us set up the Iraqi ladder, and in the moment, hustling to get to our position after he heard us fire shots, he thought it was one of our metal ladders that we carried on every target. All he had on his mind was getting to us to support in any way that he could.
He decided to walk across instead of crawling over the rungs on his stomach and spreading out the weight like we had done. He tried to walk rung by rung across the ladder, which had been lashed together with old wire and rusty nails. He was three stories in the air, wearing more than sixty pounds of gear, and looking through night vision goggles. Even our goggles, which were some of the best, made depth perception difficult.
The feat would have been hard during the day, and even on a metal ladder, but Jon attempted to do it at night, in combat. He made it halfway and probably would have cleared the entire distance without falling had the ladder not snapped in the center under his weight.
I was stunned listening to him tell us what happened. It took balls to walk across a ladder, at night, during a firefight. I started to kid him that the ladder broke from the weight of his testicles.
We wrapped up the raid soon after and drove back to the palace. Jon moaned each time the truck hit a rut in the road, and in Iraq all of the roads have ruts. When we got back, he didn’t go to the hospital. He sat through the AAR before going to bed. Jon took two days off and then returned to full duty. He’d suffered some bruises, but no serious injuries.
I was relieved to see him two days later on the skid of a Little Bird flying to a new target, but not as relieved as he was. There was no doubt missing a mission and knowing we were going into harm’s way without him was worse than any pain from his fall.
I still keep in touch with Jon to this day. In fact, I went to his retirement party last year. It was an intimate affair with only those close to him. Jon still had the thick chest, but no beard. Like me, he looked older. Not from the years, but from the mileage. He gave more than twenty years of service to his country.
Jon calls me his “favorite SEAL.” It is a distinction I take great pride in, since not only was he one of the best leaders that I ever worked for in my entire time in the SEALs, but he has also become a lifelong friend. Even after I returned from that deployment in Iraq, and despite our busy schedules, we managed to keep in touch. The conversations were more than just catching up on current events; we’d always compare the latest tactics and techniques used by our respective units. The competition between Army and Navy had officially ended in our minds, and we were one big team that always had each other’s backs. Jon was my swim buddy on the “green” side.
I’d arrived in Baghdad a nervous new guy who wasn’t sure I’d click with the Army guys. But I’d learned almost from day one that we had the same mind-set. We shared a common purpose, and that allowed me to become a member of the team. We didn’t get caught up in meaningless rivalry based on the color of our uniform. We may use different equipment and have our own selection courses, but we are all the same in our minds.
We all volunteered to go on the most dangerous missions, where, as Beckwith put i
t, “a medal, a body bag, or both” are common. We can all accept “low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness” like Shackleton promised, because we’d all rather die than fail.
But most of all, we always put the team over the individual and never accept anything but the best from everyone. Those words are easy to say and write, but hard to live by. But those are the kinds of men I served with in the special operations community, men who share a common sense of purpose and a nearly identical mind-set.
CHAPTER 6
The Setup
Trust
I stood in the operations center staring at a massive flat-screen TV. Next to me, Scott scratched at his beard and shook his head.
“Something isn’t right with this,” he said.
Scott was one of the older guys on the team. He’d been around enough to know what “right” looked like.
It had been roughly nine years since those first days of training and my first combat deployment in Iraq. The war had moved to Afghanistan and then back to Iraq and finally back to Afghanistan. I’d been on hundreds of missions and hit all kinds of targets. I’d been doing this long enough to know a good target, and nothing about this target made sense.
The compound on the monitor showing the drone’s feed looked like every other biscuit-colored house in Afghanistan. The walls—made of rocks and mud—were ten to twelve feet high, with a metal gate. The compound sat in the middle of an open field with farmland all around it. A line of trees bordered the field on one side. Several smaller compounds sat less than half a kilometer away.
No children played in the field. We didn’t see any women outside working in the courtyard. No one came in or out of the house. There were no goats or cows around grazing. No men in the nearby fields. The house looked deserted, except that we knew it might contain a high-level al Qaeda commander.
At this point in the war, it was rare to find an al Qaeda commander in Afghanistan. We were mostly tracking and killing little “T” Taliban fighters, who moonlighted between farming and getting their jihad on. The big “T” Taliban leaders were based across the border in Pakistan, where they stayed just out of reach. A legitimate bad guy was smart enough to know better. If an al Qaeda commander was hiding in the house, where was his personal security? No one came to the house to get orders or visit him. Why would an al Qaeda commander come across the border with no security and hang out in a deserted house?
