Service: A Navy SEAL at War (7 page)

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.

O
n 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.

Tired of the same damn rock sticking up my backside, I stood up, removed my helmet and body armor, and went looking for Senior Chief Healy. Walking through a cut in the rocky ridge that resembled a bowling alley, then passing through a wooded area, then through another bowling alley, I found him holed up in brush and trees on the side of a cliff. I told him about the houses and the men I’d seen. Normally when we were set up on a recon mission there was no small talk and little or no movement. Any comms were done over the radio. It was good to make some conversation in the vast, lonely silence.

Senior chiefs, however, will only carry it on for so long before it’s time to get back to work. “Okay, Luttrell,” Healy told me. “Back to your rock.”

“Check,” I said.

Walking back to my position, where I planned to wedge my butt back onto that rock (I can still feel it after all these years), I was passing through the second bowling alley when the ground began ticking up violently at me. A spray of rocks scattered in all directions—
pfft pfft pfft.
I crouched down. Scanning the mountainscape, I saw three guys on the other side of a pile of small boulders, looking directly at me. They were barely fifty meters away. One of them had his AK-47 leveled right at me. As I ran toward them, seeking cover along the way, the other two opened fire, stitching the ground right across my path. I took another shower of shattered shale. But thanks to their lousy marksmanship, my shorts were still clean. I went prone and pulled my rifle
to my eye. I saw an insurgent swing over on me with an RPG. The fight was on.

I pulled the trigger a few times, then got up and moved. I sprinted as fast as I could, covering maybe thirty yards, then stopped to make myself small, hiding behind a wall of rocks. I rose to a knee and fired again. I don’t know how I wasn’t hit, given how exposed I was. Somehow the guy with the RPG circled around below me and unloaded on Senior Chief Healy’s hooch. The detonation turned that big tough bastard loose in a hurry, and he came out of the brush, angry and focused, looking for targets. Meanwhile, on the back side of the hill, Shane Patton had his radio out, calling, “Troops in contact.”

“Where the hell you at, Luttrell?” Healy shouted.

“I’m trying to find the sons of bitches who’re shooting at us,” I said.

Unholy ghosts, those bare-handed butt wipers. After that first dustup, they were swallowed up by the rocks. We never saw them again. The contact lasted no more than five or seven minutes.

Shane Patton’s radio call brought reinforcements, fast. At first an AH-64 came on station—an Apache attack helicopter. Then a Chinook arrived with a dozen more SEALs. Weary from four days of cloud-top air, constant vigilance, and little to eat, we were glad to let them take up the hunt. We climbed on board the helo and choppered back to base. Our relief would spend two more days looking for those insurgents, long enough for a huge thunderstorm to roll in and make their lives miserable for a while. No matter what you see on TV, frogs don’t like to be cold or wet, and our reinforcements got a double dose of it because of the storm.

As I sat in the huge C-17 on my way to Iraq, a lot of things were on my mind, memories both priceless and painful, pushing each other around in my head. As I looked around the plane and watched my teammates, my greatest hope was that every one of them would come home from Iraq, just the way they were now, nothing missing, nothing scarred. But in a place like Ramadi, what were the odds of that happening? The chances of losing someone were high, in spite of everything we did to minimize the risks. The workup. The constant advice and input from experienced senior operators. The pass-downs and intel from the team that preceded us. You put it all together and you tilt the odds in your favor. But bad things are likely to happen. It’s simply a fact; that is war.

After landing in Germany, we laid over for five hours, went wheels-up again, and touched down in Iraq’s desert city of Habbaniyah around 2:30 a.m. local time. We spent the night offloading and staging our gear for the drive west to Ramadi. In Habby, I got to see some old friends from SEAL Team 4, but as usual the time together was short. We hit the rack at about 5:30 a.m. The following afternoon, we loaded up, piled into our Humvees, and began the drive to Ramadi.