Chapter 60
According to the chief, I had been chosen for the unit partly because I was qualified to be an LPO, but mostly because I was a sniper. They were pulling snipers from all over the country for the operation, though he had no details of what was being planned. He didn't even know whether I was going to a rural or urban environment.
s.h.i.+t, I thought, we're going to Iran.
It was an open secret that the Iranians were arming and training insurgents and in some cases even attacking Western troops themselves. There were rumors that a force was being formed to stop the infiltrators on the border.
I was convoyed over to al-Asad, the big airbase in al-Anbar Province, where our top head shed was located. There, I found out we weren't going to the border, but a place much worse: Sadr City.
Located on the outskirts of Baghdad, Sadr City had become even more of a snake pit since the last time I'd been with the GROMs a few years before. Two million s.h.i.+tes lived there. The rabidly anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr (the city had been named for his father) had been steadily building his militia, the Mahdi Army (known in Arabic as the Jaish al-Mahdi). There were other insurgents operating in the area, but the Mahdi Army was by far the biggest and most powerful.
With covert help from Iran, the insurgents had gathered arms and started launching mortars and rockets into Baghdad's Green Zone. The entire place was a vipers' nest. Like Fallujah and Ramadi, there were different cliques and varying levels of expertise among the insurgents. The people here were mostly s.h.i.+tes, whereas my earlier battles in Iraq had been primarily with Sunnis. But otherwise it was a very familiar h.e.l.lhole.
This was all fine with me.
They pulled snipers and JTACs, along with some officers and chiefs, from Teams 3 and 8 to create a special task unit. There were about thirty of us altogether. In a way it was an all-star team, with some of the best of the best guys in the country. And it was very sniper-heavy, because the idea was to implement some of the tactics we'd used in Fallujah, Ramadi, and elsewhere.
There was a lot of talent, but because we were drawn from all different units, we needed to spend a bit of time getting used to each other. Small differences in the way East Coast and West Coast teams typically operated could make for a big problem in a firefight. We also had a lot of personnel decisions to make, selecting point men and the like.
The Army had decided to create a buffer zone to push the insurgents far enough away that their rockets would reach the Green Zone. One of the keys to this was erecting a wall in Sadr City-basically, a huge cement fence called a "T-wall" that would run down a major thoroughfare about a quarter of the way into the slum. Our job was to protect the guys building that wall-and take down as many bad guys as possible in the process.
The boys building that wall had an insanely dangerous job. A crane would take one of the concrete sections off the back of a flatbed and haul it into place. As it was set down, a private would have to climb up and unhook it.
Under fire, generally. And not just pop shots-the insurgents would use any weapon they had, from AKs to RPGs. Those Army guys had serious b.a.l.l.s.
A Special Forces unit had already been operating in Sadr City, and they gave us some pointers and intel. We took about a week getting things all worked out and figuring out how we were going to skin
At this point, we were told we were going to foot patrol into Sadr City at night. A few of us argued that it didn't make much sense-the place was crawling with people who wanted to kill us, and on foot we'd be easy targets.
But someone thought it would be smart if we walked in during the middle of the night. Sneak in, they told us, and there won't be trouble.
So we did.
SHOT IN THE BACK
They were wrong.
There I was, shot in the head and blind. Blood streamed down my face. I reached up to my scalp. I was surprised-not only was my head still there, but it was intact. But I knew I'd been shot.
Somehow I realized that my helmet, which hadn't been strapped, had been pushed back. I pulled it forward. Suddenly I could see again. A bullet had struck the helmet, but with incredible luck had ricocheted off my night vision, slamming the helmet backward but otherwise not harming me. When I pulled it forward, I brought the scope back down in front of my eyes, and could see again. I hadn't been rendered blind at all, but in the confusion I couldn't tell what was going on.
A few seconds later, I got hit in the back with a heavy round. The bullet pushed me straight to the ground. Fortunately, the round hit one of the plates in my body armor.
Still, it left me dazed. Meanwhile, we were surrounded. We called to each other and organized a retreat to a marketplace we'd pa.s.sed on the way in. We started laying down fire and moving together.
By this time, the blocks around us looked like the worst scenes in Black Hawk Down. It seemed like every insurgent, maybe every occupant, wanted a piece of the idiot Americans who'd foolishly blundered into Sadr City.
We couldn't get into the building we retreated to. By now we'd called for QRF-a quick response force, a fancy name for the cavalry. We needed backup and extraction-"HELP" in capital letters.
A group of Army Strykers came in. Strykers are heavily armed personnel carriers, and they were firing everything they had. There were plenty of targets-upward of a hundred insurgents lined the roofs on the surrounding streets, trying to get us. When they saw the Strykers, they changed their aim, trying to take out the Army's big personnel carriers. There they were overmatched. It started looking like a video game-guys were falling off the rooftops.
"Motherf.u.c.ker, thank you," I said aloud when the vehicles reached our building. I swear I could hear a cavalry horn somewhere in the background.
They dropped their ramps and we ran inside.
"Did you see how many motherf.u.c.kers were up there?" said one of the crewmen as the vehicle sped back to the base.
"No," I answered. "I was too busy shooting."
"They were all over the place." The kid was stoked. "We were dropping them and that wasn't even half of them. We were just laying it down. We thought y'all were f.u.c.kin' done."
That made more than two of us.
That night scared the s.h.i.+t out of me. That's when I came to the realization that I'm not superhuman. I can die.
All through everything else, there had been points where I thought, I'm going to die.
But I never did die. Those thoughts were fleeting. They evaporated.
After a while, I started thinking, they can't kill me. They can't kill us. We're f.u.c.king undefeatable.
I have a guardian angel and I'm a SEAL and I'm lucky and whatever the h.e.l.l it is: I cannot die.
Then, all of a sudden, within two minutes I was nailed twice.
Motherf.u.c.ker, my number is up.
BUILDING THE WALL
We felt happy and grateful to have been rescued. We also felt like total a.s.ses.
Trying to sneak into Sadr City was not going to work, and command should have known that from the start. The bad guys would always know we were there. So we would just have to make the most of it.
Two days after getting our b.u.t.ts kicked out of the city, we came back, this time riding in Strykers. We took over a place known as the banana factory. This was a building four or five stories high, filled with fruit lockers and a.s.sorted factory gear, most of it wrecked by looters long before we got there. I'm not sure exactly what it had to do with bananas or what the Iraqis might have done there; all I knew at the time was that it was a good place for a sniper hide.
Wanting a little more cover than I would have had on the roof, I set up in the top floor. Around nine o'clock in the morning, I realized the number of civilians walking up and down the street had started to thin. That was always a giveaway-they spotted something and knew they didn't want to end up in the line of fire.
A few minutes later, with the street now deserted, an Iraqi came out of a partially destroyed building. He was armed with an AK-47. When he reached the street he ducked down, scouting in the direction of the engineers who were working down the road on the wall, apparently trying to pick one out to target. As soon as I was sure what he was up to, I aimed center-ma.s.s and fired.
He was forty yards away. He fell, dead.
An hour later, another guy poked his head out from behind a wall on another part of the street. He glanced in the direction of the T-wall, then pulled back.
It may have seemed innocent to someone else-and certainly didn't meet the ROEs-but I knew to watch more carefully. I'd seen insurgents follow this same pattern now for years. They would peek out, glance around, then disappear. I called them "peekers"-they "peeked" out to see if anyone was watching. I'm sure they knew they couldn't be shot for glancing around.
I knew it, too. But I also knew that if I was patient, the guy or whoever he was spotting for would most likely reappear. Sure enough, the fellow reappeared a few moments later.
He had an RPG in his hand. He knelt quickly, bringing it up to aim.