by Mark Owen
During every deployment, we pushed to change tactics and techniques as quickly as our enemy did. We never rested on what worked in the past; instead we pushed to develop what would work in the future.
I closed my eyes and let the hum of the helicopter’s engines wash over me. Some of my teammates were already asleep. I rested my eyes and went over the mission in my head. I tucked my hands between my body armor and my stomach, trying to keep them as warm as possible for as long as possible. It wasn’t Alaska cold that night, but it was still cold enough that I could feel it through my gloves.
We were used to this routine. At this point in the war and our careers, we had become somewhat numb to the pain, suffering, and sacrifice of going on missions. I rationalized it all as “just part of the job.” Some people had chosen different professions, but this was ours and we were getting really fucking good at it.
I felt the helicopter dip down and heard the engine pitch change as it landed. A mix of dust and snow greeted us as we dashed off the back ramp. I got about fifty yards from the helicopter and started to piss into the dirt. I’d been holding it for the hour-long flight and I knew once we got moving I wouldn’t have a chance to go. All around me my teammates were doing the same thing. As the helicopter’s engines faded away, we got into patrol formation and started toward the compound.
No words had to be spoken. No order given. This was another day at work for us. Everyone knew what to do, where to go, and what was expected of him. Sure the bureaucracy and bullshit rules from senior officers were always there, but we always worked with them and around them and otherwise did our best to block it all out of our minds.
In the green hue of my night vision goggles, I could see my teammates spread out before me. We had been patrolling toward the target for about an hour when the radio crackled to life.
“We’ve got two MAMs [military-age males] coming out of a door on the west side of the compound,” I heard over the radio. “They just moved over to a door on the east side.”
Shit, the fighters were still awake. If people in the compound were awake, it meant we would have to use different tactics on the assault. We wouldn’t be able to silently pick the lock and slowly make our way into their bedroom and catch them by surprise.
As it stood, based off the latest report from ISR, we’d have to call them out, giving up our element of surprise and allowing them time to arm themselves to make a stand. I’d been around long enough to know that folks who really had no clue what was happening on the ground made most of the rules we operated under.
But we still had a long walk ahead of us. I hoped by the time we got to the compound the fighters would be asleep. I kept scanning for threats and focused on the long patrol. As we got closer, the ISR pilot was on the radio again.
“The two movers just returned to their original doorway and went inside,” the pilot said.
We patrolled over a few small hills and into a thicket of trees near the compound. This was our final set point before we assaulted the target. From the trees, I caught a glimpse of the compound. At night and in the dark, it looked like just another compound in Afghanistan. It had high mud walls and a heavy wooden gate.
Since the last warning, the compound had been quiet.
No movement.
No more sleepwalkers.
We waited a few minutes to make sure no one got up again. Finally, the troop chief made the call to continue with the assault. Because of the freezing temperatures, our troop commander made the decision to sneak over the wall instead of conducting a callout because a callout would only expose the women and children to the bitter cold. Plus, if the Taliban decided to fight, the women and children would be stuck in the crossfire.
We quietly moved into position. My team fell in behind the snipers and we made our way to the front gate of the compound. I watched the snipers scale the walls and set up overwatch positions.
The gate was made of wood with an old iron latch as a handle. The point man tried the latch, but it was locked on the inside. He called to one of the new guys who was carrying the extendable ladder on his back. We placed the ladder against the wall and the point man slowly climbed the giant mud wall. Another ladder was passed to the point man as he straddled the ten-foot-high wall. As we passed the ladder up to him, he seemed to wobble a little and quickly reached down and got his balance.
We were wearing more than sixty pounds of gear and the point man was doing gymnastic-style moves on the top of a ten-foot-high wall with a room full of sleeping Taliban fighters thirty feet away.
Rung by rung, we passed the ladder up. It was tense because silence, not speed, was the most important thing. It was pitch-black outside. The wind was picking up, blowing the ladder around a bit. A few times I was afraid the point man was going to lose his balance and tumble into the compound.
All I could think about was the sleepwalkers. The report was of two movers, but ISR was tracking between five and seven fighters altogether. We all knew which door the two movers had come from and then later gone back into, but nobody knew exactly where the others might be sleeping. If they were to walk through the compound again, the snipers would drop them. But that would likely wake up the other fighters still sleeping inside. My hope was that we could get inside the house before the fighters had any idea we were there.
The point man finally got the ladder up and delicately lowered it into the compound. Then he and his swim buddy climbed down into the compound. I waited by the gate, ready to enter. A few seconds later, I could hear the bolt of the gate slide back, and the heavy wooden door slowly swung open.
The point man stood in the opening with a shit-eating grin on his face.
“Too easy,” he whispered.
We now had the front door open and it was time to go to work. We all crept through the gate and into the compound, which opened up into a small courtyard with buildings along the perimeter. Everybody moved as quietly as we possibly could. The “don’t run to your death” rule always applied. After all, this wasn’t a video game. You can’t just get shot and re-spawn in place.
Several of the newer guys were in front of me as we slipped inside the compound. I watched them veer off to search animal pens and the north and east side of the compound. I could tell the younger guys were all amped up. They were doing their best to suppress their energy.
But the key was being in the right place, and after more than a dozen deployments, I knew where the fighters were sleeping by listening to the ISR pilot on the patrol to the target. As I listened to each report, I thought back to the compound layout. The movers came out of a door on the west side of the compound. I headed straight for the west door. If the ISR was correct, the lone door on the west side of the compound was where the fighters were sleeping.
I didn’t run.
I wanted to be not just slow, but super slow. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. I moved over to the west side of the compound and waited by the closed door. One of the new guys on his first deployment with the troop was on the other side of the door. I reached out and pressed the door handle down. The door was unlocked.
The door opened inward into a small anteroom. Two wooden doors were on either side of the room. A staircase leading to the second floor of the house was almost directly in front of us. Since I opened the door, the new guy was the point man and would be the first person to enter. He slowly stepped inside and I followed.
I saw from the doorway a whole bunch of men’s shoes in a pile next to the right door. The pile was a mix of big leather sandals and black Cheetahs. We joked that we’d never seen an innocent person wear a pair of Cheetahs. The black shoes equaled Taliban more times than not.
The opposite door had kids’ and women’s shoes stacked outside. I knew the instant we walked inside the anteroom where the fighters were sleeping. But the new guy, probably a little too amped to notice, went to the left door. I moved to the door on the right. As I
reached for the knob, I was one hundred percent sure the fighters were inside the room. My hope was they were sound asleep.
The beat-up, rusty, old hinges let out a long squeak. In the silence, it sounded like a freight train barreling through the mud hut. The room was freezing and it was pitch-black inside. I had my night vision goggles down and could make out man-sized lumps lying under blankets.
As I scanned around the room, a fighter just to the left side of the door stirred and sat up. He was about three feet away from me. He must have heard the door and was trying to make me out in the darkness. Looking beside him, I spotted a large belt-fed PKM machine gun. His vision quickly cleared. He could tell whoever was at the door was not friendly. His hands instantly shot out and he grabbed the machine gun. The problem for him was the PKM’s barrel was pointed away from the doorway.
I watched for a split second as he wrestled with the gun, trying to get it turned and facing my direction. He never got the chance. I leaned in and shot him twice in the face.
My rifle had a suppressor, but even the muffled shots seemed loud in the mud room. The fighter flopped backward like he was going back to sleep and disappeared from view. I raised my rifle to cover the rest of the room and saw AK-47 rifles leaning against the wall. Chest racks stuffed with magazines hung on the wall. The “lumps” under the blankets immediately turned into a blur of movement as all the fighters woke up and scrambled to get their guns.
I didn’t hesitate.
I started to shoot. Tracking from one fighter to the next, I pumped two or three rounds into each blur’s chest, pausing only for a second to make sure the fighter went down. There was no yelling or screaming, just the muffled sound of my rounds cutting into the enemy fighters.
The fighters crumpled or fell back to where they had been sleeping. Each shot sent a charge through the dark wool blankets, which looked like a wave rippling over a lake. As quickly as it began, it ended. I stepped into the room with a swim buddy behind me and we moved from fighter to fighter, making sure they were no longer a threat.
There were six fighters total. I counted five AK-47s and one PKM machine gun. We also recovered two RPGs and several rockets. The fighters were well armed. Their guns were in decent shape and they had good gear compared to a typical Taliban fighter. We also found first aid kits and Afghan and Pakistani money.
No shots were fired in any rooms other than the room I cleared. All of the fighters had huddled into the one room. The family living there likely had no choice but to let the fighters hole up inside their home.
As I consolidated the weapons, I could hear the women and children crying across the hall. As I predicted, the new guy had walked into the women’s sleeping room. They were startled when he walked inside. When I started shooting, they started to scream. When I left the room I’d cleared, I poked my head into the opposite room and saw him pulling security on a room full of unhappy women. He didn’t look thrilled.
Just before we started to patrol back to the helicopter landing zone to catch our ride home, the new guy came up to me.
“Motherfucker,” he said. “I knew I should have gone to the right.”
During a slow deployment, missing a chance to send some rounds downrange was painful.
“Don’t be mad at me,” I said. “You had first dibs on which door to take.”
“I’m not mad at you. I’m just pissed at myself for not catching that sooner,” he said.
“Always—I repeat, always—check the shoes,” I said.
I’d learned the shoe lesson the hard way on a previous deployment to Iraq. When you’re new, all amped up, and in a hurry, you miss the little details, like the shoes, that can be meaningless at first glance but are really a big clue. When you’re more experienced and have been in the car crash a million times, and have made mistakes and learned from them, everything slows down and something as small as shoes can stand out.
This time, I read that situation perfectly. In our line of work, you can only hope to survive your first mistake and live long enough to never make it again. Thinking about it now, it was one of many lessons I learned that I still use today. On the practical side, it was about tracking the enemy, but the more universal lesson was about attention to detail in high-stress situations. In this instance, success meant life or death.
This was my thirteenth combat deployment. I had years of my life spent operating in Iraq, Afghanistan, and all over the world. This was no longer “theory” or “training.” For the first time in my career, I felt like I’d achieved my goal of becoming the SEAL operator that I’d dreamed about as a teenager in Alaska.
Years of training had led me to this level. No SEAL I ever worked with was content being average. We’d learned teamwork in BUD/S and we were experts in our individual tactical skills. After more than ten years at war, our skills were at their peak. We’d shot millions of rounds, blown thousands of pounds of explosives, and trained and fought in every situation and environment. We could spin up on an operation on a moment’s notice, no matter how complex. Mission planning was simple because we’d done it hundreds of times. We trusted each other and could almost read each other’s minds on target.
CHAPTER 12
Killing
Compartmentalization
Even though the command had given us a few days off after returning from the mission, I still found myself back at work. I needed to get back to the same routine as I’d had in past deployments.
I wanted to control something. It was comforting to pull up to the building, go to my cage, unpack all my gear, and zone out for a bit. I really wanted some solitude.
I’d never felt anxiety after a mission. I was always able to handle the stress, but now it was messing with me. I wasn’t sleeping. I was on edge. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, and I was even dodging calls from my family.
I heard a buddy who was also on the raid open up his cage just down the aisle from mine. The cage area was pretty quiet, so I gave it a second and walked over. He had his gear out and was doing the same thing I had been doing, attempting to hide in his work. He was slowly putting his gear away but looked up when I walked into his cage.
“Hey, bro,” I said. “What are you up to?”
“Not much, figured I’d clean up some of my gear,” he said.
I could see the thick circles under his eyes. He looked tired. The command is a tough place. To an extent, we’re a pack of wolves. A group of alpha males taught to never show weakness. I’d known this guy for years and we’d been in some pretty shitty situations together. I trusted him with my life, but admitting weakness was something else entirely.
“Can I ask you a quick question?” I said softly.
“Sure, what you got?” he said.
“Are you sleeping?” I said in almost a whisper.
He continued to unpack his bags, and after a long pause he looked back up at me.
“Nope,” he said.
He shook his head when he said it and then turned away.
“Me neither,” I said. “I haven’t gotten more than an hour since we got back.”
That was the single deepest conversation I ever had about combat stress.
I’ve been through shooting courses. I can go rock climbing, ride a dirt bike, drive a boat, and handle explosives. The government spent millions of dollars training me to fight in the jungle, arctic, and desert. I took language courses and I can parachute at night and land right on target. But I’ve never been trained to handle the stress of combat. We spent months learning how to be SEALs and hours of every day keeping those skills sharp, but we got no formal training dealing with any of the emotional stuff.
Before I joined the SEALs, I wondered if I would actually be able to pull the trigger. Could I defend myself? I only really thought about it before I became a SEAL because once I was on missions I didn’t have time to think about it. I was in my three-foot world.
&n
bsp; Everything I did overseas was considered work. I snuck into people’s houses while they were sleeping. If I caught them with a gun, I killed them, just like all the guys in the command. I’ve been in massive gunfights and I’d put guys down without thinking about it. I don’t regret my actions in combat. Everything I did overseas was done to protect the guys to my left and right, and my country. I obeyed the rules of engagement and never targeted innocents.
But that doesn’t mean it didn’t fuck with me. To this day, if you ask Phil about “the cat,” he’ll tell this story of a 2006 mission in Iraq.
The unmanned drone flying over the target reported seeing a half dozen men sleeping outside. It was summer in Iraq, and even at night it was too hot to stay inside without air conditioners. The village was really just a cluster of about ten squat, adobe-style houses. I didn’t see any power lines coming into the village as we patrolled, so we expected people to be sleeping outside.
We closed slowly on the village just before three in the morning. Since we’d gotten off the helicopter two hours before, it had been a long march to the village. The desert was flat and wide open and it was hard to see the horizon, even with my night vision goggles down. The village could have been on the moon. Nothing surrounded it for miles except sand and rocks. Above me, the stars were thick and bright. Now, close to the houses, the march was one slow step at a time.
It was 2006 and we’d been fighting in Iraq for three years. My troop was working in western Iraq. A tip brought us to the village. ISR spotted fighters and we spun up. The whole process was pretty simple by this point. We were doing it every day. Find, fix, and finish.
It was hot and I could feel the sweat pooling around my back where my body armor stopped. The troop chief gave the word and we moved into a large “L”-shaped formation and started to close on the village.
The base, or bottom, of the “L” was going to set up just outside of the village and, if needed, provide a base of fire and cover our movement. The vertical part of the “L” was going to move through the village searching for fighters. I was in the second group.
