Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.
—Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Mogadishu Airport, March 1, 1995
The last tank rumbled away in the early dawn, its low clatter echoing across the tarmac. Then there was silence. Alex Morrison and his team watched and waited. One senior Pakistani officer had predicted that it would take just fifteen minutes from this moment before the looting began. He was wrong.
It took a little over an hour.
At 0745 Alex spotted a head pop up briefly over the wall that surrounded the runway. A few minutes later, he glimpsed another. Then more, every minute or two, wide-eyed Somali faces appearing just for an instant to scope out the grounds and then ducking down again. He could almost see what was going on behind those eyes. Was the place really vacated? Was everyone really gone?
Then a trickle of people started slipping over the walls. The trickle turned into a stream, and soon they were everywhere, ripping off roofing material, stealing water, food, anything that they could pull up and take off with. In this poverty-ravaged country, anything they could get their hands on was worth something. There was no formation to it, no sign of any warlords or organized factions. Not yet, anyway.
That took just over an hour, too.
By 0900, as the looting continued, the warlords showed up.
First it was just a lone jeep coming in from the west. It headed toward one knot of looters, across the runway to the west, where the airport tower and the buildings of the main complex were located, and then someone in the jeep began shooting into the crowd—Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Civilians scattered everywhere.
Then, about a half mile to the southwest, Alex noticed another group of Somalis taking over an abandoned camp at the southern end of the runway, tearing everything apart.
Oh boy. Warlord Gang B.
At 1000 hours a deuce-and-a-half started gunning it down the runway with a quad antiaircraft gun mounted on the back, manned by a big dude sitting up on a chair. Behind the truck came a series of smaller Toyota trucks, each with 106mm recoilless rifles in the back, and then more jeeps, with Russian .51 cal DShKs mounted on them, and about fifty more guys on foot, running alongside the vehicles. The whole convoy was making a beeline for the site at the southern end that had been taken over by the other gang.
Warlord Gang B, meet Warlord Gang A.
As the convoy reached to within a hundred yards of the southern camp, it suddenly started taking heavy fire—not from Warlord Gang B to the south but from above them, off to the west, from somewhere within the large hillside that rose up beyond the runway, a dense urban area completely covered with buildings and narrow alleyways.
What the hell, thought Alex. Armed militias? Warlord Gang C?
The convoy swiveled to face the hillside and returned fire, launching their recoilless shells up onto the hillside, their quad antiaircraft gun stitching up every compound they could find. Then they did a quick about-face and started heading back up the runway toward the main airport complex to the north.
This was getting crazy. The SEALs were watching some kind of civil war/gang war shoot-out playing out right in front of them.
Still, it was clear that the shooters in the convoy had been very careful the whole time to keep their weapons trained away from the Coalition forces, both when they went roaring down the runway and when they went roaring back up again. None of this slugfest was aimed at Alex and his buddies. Not yet, anyway.
That didn’t take long, either.
Shahikot Valley, March 9, 2002
When an American helicopter finally managed to get a resupply to the group on their sixth day in the Shahikot Mountains, it was a huge relief to everyone. Food, water, other critical supplies … and more ammunition. Finally, the Canadians could go back to what they were there to do: locate dangerous people and shoot them.
Except that the ammo was not what Rob and Tim expected.
They had radioed in and requested more of the ammunition they had deployed with: Hornady A-MAX match grade 750-grain .50 cal. This is a unique, very distinctive-looking round, its multiple colors reflecting the different types of metal used in its manufacture. Rob and Tim naturally expected that they would be resupplied with more of the same.
When they opened the box—surprise. A solid-colored, plain copper-jacketed bullet.
Fuck! This was not the ammo they deployed with, the ammo they had trained with, the ammo they were used to.
You don’t just load your long gun with any available ammo. That’s not how it works. Every load has its own specs, its own powder, pressure, shape of bullet. Its own personality. Which translates into a unique performance profile. And variability in .50 cal rounds could be particularly dicey. The bulk of military .50 cal ammo was manufactured to be used in big machine guns, which means it’s intended to be shot in a general pattern, not necessarily with bull’s-eye accuracy.
Hell.
They had no idea what this ammo would do. But, hey, it was ammo. Whatever, they thought. If this was what they had to work with, work with it they would. They had a job to do. So they got back to it.
Husaybah, April 17, 2004
When Jason Delgado woke up on the morning of April 17, his first thought was, Shit. He sat up on his cot, swiveled around to plant his feet on the floor, and looked over at Mavica and DelFiorentino in the next room, sitting on their bunk beds and shooting each other on their Xboxes. “You guys don’t get enough of that shit in your day job?” he called out. They laughed at him and kept shooting.
Delgado was frustrated, and pissed off; worse, he was worried. In just the last few days he’d lost Thompson, one of his snipers; another marine had died; a third was back in the States in a coma; and there were a lot more IED shrapnel wounds going around than usual, even for Husaybah. To Jason, this did not feel like random attacks.
He reached down and grabbed his M40, taking it with him to the john. After brushing his teeth and shaving, he headed over to the COC (combat operations center) to find out what was on the day’s agenda. Did anyone want his boys for any ad hoc missions?
Nothing in particular. Just another day in Husaybah.
Suddenly the base erupted in chaos, dozens of men running back and forth, gearing up for some kind of response effort. Delgado caught only snippets of conversation; snippets were all that was happening.
“Where you going?”
“Hey, what are you guys doing?”
“What’s happening?”
Obviously something was up in the city. Before long Lima’s third rifle platoon, a weapons platoon, a recon platoon, and a CAAT had all saddled up and ridden out into the city. It wasn’t at all clear what was going on, but it had the smell of something pretty major.
Bits of intel started trickling in.
There’d been some kind of ambush in the northwestern quadrant. An IED had gone off somewhere in town and killed someone from one of Lima’s weapons platoons, a young marine named Gary Van Leuven, from Klamath Falls, Oregon. Others had been wounded, and the platoon was now fighting it out. That’s what all the react forces were going out there for. The focus of the fighting had moved toward the northeast, where a group of insurgents were using the old Baath HQ building as a stronghold.
Oh yeah. The Baath building. Where Jason had spent his memorable first night in Husaybah. He knew about that place.
Scattered reports kept coming in to the COC, where Jason and his sniper team stood waiting for orders.
At 8300 hours, Captain Gannon radioed Lieutenant Neal to apprise him of the situation. They’d succeeded in getting some of their wounded onto a bird and evacked. The situation on the street was a mess.
“I’m going off freq for a while to go develop the situation,” he said, signing off.
He was, in other words, going in there himself to get eyes on.
“Typical Captain Gannon,” says Delgado. “He was the FOB commander, for shit’s sake, it wasn’t his job to go out there and respond to this skirmish in person. But he went anyway.”
It was the last time Lieutenant Neal would ever hear from his friend.
When Captain Gannon’s react team reached the site of the firefight and dismounted their vehicles, they were immediately hit by an ambush, with a barrage of RPGs and small arms fire pouring at them from the Baath building. A marine named Gibson attempted to storm the building and was shot. Two others from the weapons platoon, Smith and Valdez, ran into the place, grabbed Gibson, dragged him into the courtyard within the building, where they engaged in a fight for their lives. It was not a fight they would win.
Captain Gannon went in after them. None of them came out alive.
That goddamn Baath HQ. As Jason and his team had learned in that first night, the place was not only the biggest building in the immediate area, it was built like a fortress. The marines fired a bunch of antitank rockets in there, but they could not make a dent in the place or shake out the mujahedeen who were hunkered down inside. They even tried smoking them out. No dice. Those sons of bitches were tough.
But marines don’t give up, and eventually show of force prevailed. There were nine insurgents inside; they killed them all and were finally able to retrieve the bodies of their four fallen comrades: Gibson, Smith, Valdez, and the commanding officer of Lima Company, Captain Richard Gannon.
First Lieutenant Dominique Neal, Gannon’s friend and second in command, was frocked to captain, the first time since Vietnam that a marine officer assumed command of a rifle company due to the combat death of his CO.
The day was just getting started.
Helmand Province, July 9, 2009
Nick Irving stood up, stretched, and yawned. He looked down at where he’d been sleeping: a spit of desert scrub with a small rock serving as his pillow. Not exactly the Hilton. Still, it was sleep. How long had he been out? He glanced at his watch. More than two hours. Amazing. Given that he’d hardly slept for the past ninety-plus hours it didn’t exactly make him feel caught up; more like giving a starving man a single oyster cracker.
He bent down and picked up Dirty Diana off the blanket where he had carefully laid her down, then walked over to a knot of marines who were playing poker.
“Hey,” said one of them, “we heard where you guys are heading. That’s some far-flung shit out there.”
Far-flung shit indeed. Operation Khanjar was now exactly one week old, and in those seven days the massive influx of American forces in Helmand Province had stirred up quite a bit of movement among the Taliban, which was probably why they were having such a convoluted time tracking down their HVT. The man now had apparently retreated deep into the Afghan hinterlands, in an area neither rangers nor, as far as they knew, any other American troops had ever ventured into before.
“Watch out for the Chechen,” said another.
The Chechen, one of the marines explained, was what they called a sniper who worked with the insurgency in the area. Nobody knew his name, but according to his reputation he went back to the days when the Soviets were the occupying force. Which meant he’d been out there doing his thing for more than twenty years.
“He’s good, man,” the marine added. “He’s racked up a helluva lot of kills.”
Yeah, yeah, thought Nick. They made this guy sound like the bogeyman. Nick knew how these stories got exaggerated, and he knew that by now “Chechen” had become American troops’ shorthand for “competent foreign fighter.” Still, the jihadist fighters of Chechnya did have a well-deserved reputation for being exceptionally disciplined and well trained, and they had a long-standing enmity with Russia, which would have made them prime candidates for Afghanistan’s guerrilla warfare against the Soviet Bear. There were Chechen and Uzbek fighters in the Shahikot Valley during Anaconda, way back at the start of this whole mess.
He made a mental note. Watch out for the Chechen, Irv.
As soon as night fell they headed out in those incredibly uncomfortable Amtracs. Nick could have groaned out loud. He was used to flying to ops in helicopters, where he could actually grab some decent rack time, but for this op helos were out of the question because they attracted too much attention. In those trucks, sleep was impossible.
The guys in Second Platoon were all pretty jacked up. Not Nick. By this time he was so exhausted that it took a constant effort to stay awake and alert. He found himself almost hoping they would get shot at. He figured the shot of adrenaline would wake him up. One look at Pemberton said he felt the same way. So did the four recce operators, and these were guys used to some pretty rugged conditions.
After about an hour of driving, they came to a sudden and unplanned stop. The terrain had gone from a rockier, hard-packed desert to a less rocky, softer surface. He looked out. The trucks’ tires had gotten bogged down in the sand.
They were stuck.
Shit. So much for all their planning. Nothing to do but get out and walk, which was exactly what they did. With miles still to go, they began slogging through the sand.
Among its many brutal PT traditions, SEAL training is famous for long runs through the sand in boots. (That city in Southern California that the rest of the world knows as San Diego? To us, it will forever be Sand Diego.) That was exactly what Nick and his group were doing now: hoofing, in boots, now carrying on their backs all the gear they’d brought along in the Amtracs, for miles. To Nick it felt like walking through mud, every step sucking at their feet and pulling at their legs.
He reached back to grab some water, and realized he was completely out.
There was something horribly familiar about this.
Oh, yeah. Ranger School. Exhaustion. George Foreman. So this was why they’d trained so hard. For exactly this night.
Save a ribeye for me, George.
Mogadishu Airport, 1995
As the firefight between the different warlord factions petered out, something shifted. Alex would never know exactly what caused it. Did the group camped at the southern end of the runway think the Americans were supporting the guys with the big antiaircraft guns? Or were they just anti-American? Whatever the reason, Alex and the others now started taking fire, too.
At first it was sporadic. Every five minutes or so, they’d hear a few cracks over their heads, someone from down at that southern site taking a couple of pot shots in their direction. It was just harassing fire, really, and nothing very effective—but it was definitely aimed at them. And it was slowly picking up its pace.
Then things got a little more complicated.
Glancing up toward the top of the hillside on the far side of the airport, well more than a thousand yards off, he noticed a truck speeding by along a road with one of those recoilless rifles on back. It zipped behind some buildings in an alleyway and he didn’t see it come out again. What was it doing back there? he wondered.
A moment later he got his answer. He saw a large plume of smoke rising from that location and an instant later heard that telltale screeching whistle.
Incoming!
Boom, the shell landed out on the runway in front of them. Not close enough for concern, but still. No one loves having 106mm shells lobbed in their general direction.
Alex spotted the truck moving to another spot, but it was visible for too brief a window to get a good fix on it. A few moments later, they launched again. Screeching whistle. This time, the shell landed in the ocean at the SEALs’ backs.
This was followed by a fresh wave of sporadic small arms fire from the hillside, joining that from the southwest.
Then he saw a plume of smoke from an RPG launching at them from the hillside. It, too, went long and exploded over the ocean.
Alex was on the glass now, searching hard, trying his damnedest to pinpoint the guys who were doing the major shooting. But these were no random trigger-happy Somali citizens. They were smart, and they’d been trained. With maybe 150 windows directly visible up there, a guy would pop out of one window and shoot—or launch another RPG—then scoot back in, move to some other location, pop out and shoot (or launch) again, and then move again.
The cat-and-mouse game continued on for an hour, then another, and then into a third, as the sun climbed at the SEALs’ backs. The shots still were not getting close enough to their bunker to be a critical threat. But they were getting closer.
Shahikot Valley, 2002
Rob and Tim grabbed up the tools of their trade, including their untested new ammo, and set out to climb again, this time moving to perhaps 8,800 feet, pushing the upper edge of the safety box. Far enough, in other words, to get maximum range but not get shot at by any snipers from their own team.
Once again, they began setting up their position: range card and target reference points, pull out the bipod legs, situate the long gun, lay out their new ammo, go through the sequence.
They located a target. They set up the shot, squeezed. Missed. And not by a little. By a lot.
Did it again.
They quickly realized they were not just off, they were way off. All their dope, all the data they had for their usual .50 cal ammo was nothing more than a vague estimation. Whether this was a lighter round or not, whether it had faster-burning propellant or propellant packed under greater pressure, Rob didn’t know, but the moment he took his first shot with the new round he could tell it was different. It felt different. Different kick.
Adapt and adjust.
Starting with their 1,500-meter dope on, they started logging corrections and adjustments as they shot. Even as they were engaging targets, they were at the same time also collecting as much fresh dope as they could.
By the way, in the years since Anaconda it’s been widely reported that the Canadian snipers deployed with Canadian-made ammo, and that this new ammo was an American-made substitute, with statements like “American ammo burns hotter,” as if that were a de facto bit of proof of American superiority. Which of course is all utter horseshit. They were both American-made. There aren’t any Canadian ammunition manufacturers. (Goes to show: don’t believe everything you read.)
Whatever it was—the propellant? the bullet’s shape or weight, or both?—they were getting a lot longer range from these bullets. In terms of performance, shooting out to 1,600 or 1,700 meters now felt like they were shooting at 1,500.
They kept pushing it out, seeing what the new ammo could do.
According to the manufacturer, the McMillan TAC-50’s maximum effective range was 1,800 meters, or 1.12 miles. By now, they already knew they could shoot past that. Before they’d run out of their own Hornady ammo they had already been shooting out to as much as 2,000 meters—nearly a mile and a quarter. Now they found themselves engaging targets effectively at 2,200 meters (1.37 miles) and more.
They were already way past the point where dialing elevation was even an issue. There was no elevation dial that went to numbers like these. Once they broke the 1,800-meter mark, supposedly the outside limit of what this gun was capable of, it was all trial and error. And they weren’t hitting targets on the first shot anymore. In some cases it took three, four, even five shots (something a sniper would normally not do, but at this range they were scarcely concerned about giving away their location to the enemy). But they were hitting them. They were eliminating targets at unheard-of distances. It was amazing.
The shots were at such extreme ranges that they were the only ones shooting. Most of their guys were packing 7.62s and .223s, and there were really no targets within sight for them. There was a .50 cal machine gun set up back in their ad hoc admin area, and on day two someone had opened up briefly on a few targets, but it wasn’t that effective. Other than fast air, there wasn’t a lot of gunfire.
Yet these two Canadian snipers were knocking them out there, sending rounds downrange left, right and center—
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
After a while they heard an American commander’s voice come over their radio saying, “Hey what the hell are those guys up there doing? What are they shooting at?”
Rob and Tim were in an overwatch position, which meant in some cases that they were shooting directly over the heads of friendly forces downslope from them. Naturally, these guys wanted to know why bullets were flying over their heads when there weren’t any visible targets.
Rob thought back to those first lessons in sniper school on how the human eye sees: shape, contrast, shine, skyline, and the rest. One of the biggest factors is movement. The human eye is keenly sensitive to movement, especially at the periphery of its field of vision. But at distances like these, the naked eye doesn’t even pick up movement, unless it’s really obvious or there’s a shine or a glint or something that attracts your eye to that area. It’s just too damn far.
No wonder the commander wanted to know what the shooting was all about. As far as he was concerned, there wasn’t anything out there to shoot at.
Rob radioed back, “Sir, we know you can’t see it, but this place is crawling with enemy fighters. You can’t see them. We can, and we’re eliminating those threats.”
The reply came back: “Fire away.”
They knew they were pushing the envelope. What they didn’t know was that they were about to push it further than it had ever been pushed before.
Husaybah, 2004
Jason and his team knew none of the details of what had happened over at Husaybah’s former Baath Party headquarters building. In the chaos and confusion of developing events it took a while for the information to reach to command, let alone to filter out to the troops. But they knew two things: their captain had been killed, and the shit was hitting the fan. There is nothing so galvanizing as the death of a commanding officer—especially one so universally beloved as Rick Gannon.
They took to the tower.
There were two sentry towers at Camp Husaybah, one by the entrance, and one they’d built recently out back by the border crossing. Jason and his snipers grabbed their heaviest guns and ran up the tower facing the city to start scanning for anything worrisome. Their first thought was that there might be an organized effort to storm the camp itself.
But once they got up there and looked, they realized it wasn’t about a localized attack on the camp. The entire city was going off like a long series of lit fuses. They’d thought the main action was the skirmish that had happened out on the other end of Market Street, by the Baath building. But when they turned their spotting scopes eastward onto the city, they saw men in those telltale black robes practically everywhere they looked. It seemed like every rooftop within a thousand-yard distance had men in black pajamas brandishing AK-47s and RPKs.
“I’ve got guys over here!” shouted Mavica. “Guys over here!” echoed DelFiorentino, who was looking in a completely different direction. “Black pajamas over here!” “Black pajamas over here!”
They were on rooftops. They were in windows. They were running across the street with AKs and Russian Dragunov SVDs. It was crazy. Something was happening, all right, something on a scale and level of coordination nobody in Husaybah had ever seen before. This wasn’t just random trouble in the streets and local dustups and pissed-off Saddam loyalists. This wasn’t a series of skirmishes. This was a full-blown military attack.
This shit was organized.
This shit was war.
The observation towers were only three stories high, like many of the taller buildings in the city itself, but they gave the snipers a fairly good line of vision down the east–west-running alleyways of Husaybah.
They started sighting, aiming, and squeezing triggers, picking off targets at practically cyclic rate, that is, the maximum speed at which their weapons were capable of firing.
It was about six hundred yards from the edge of Camp Husaybah, where the towers stood, to the western edge of the city, which meant that however far into the city their targets were located, they had to add another six hundred yards just for their rounds to reach the edge of the city itself. Soon they were shooting out to 1,200 yards, 1,300 yards, and farther. On some shots the trajectory was so steeply arced to compensate for the extreme distance that their rounds would hit overhead power lines.
Jason started out on his M40, but soon swapped it out for one of the SASRs. The Barrett M82 is a monster, a .50 cal with a theoretical effective range out to a little over 1,900 yards.
They spotted a knot of fighters at 1,800 yards, way out in the middle of the city. At that distance, they figured the best they could do was make the insurgents stop shooting and keep their heads down. But their SASR was loaded with Raufoss rounds, which have both explosive and incendiary elements, and those rounds were exploding on the ledges and on entry points to the rooftops where these guys were hiding, so even some who kept their heads down were being killed by these 1,800-yard shots.
One of Jason’s snipers pointed south (to their right) and yelled, “Truckload of black PJs—just crossed the border by the 440.”
Jason swung his SASR around to the right, thudded it down on a south-facing sandbagged wall (the thing weighs thirty pounds empty, more with its ten-round mag attached), and sighted through the scope. There it was, a blue Bongo truck with a shit-load of dudes stacked like rounds in a magazine, all of them with AKs. The cavalry from Syria, coming in to reinforce their boys in the city.
Jason opened up on them with the SASR. The M82 is a recoil-operated semiautomatic and can pump out those .50 cal rounds, one after the other, at quite a rate. The Raufoss .50 cal round is capable of taking out a small aircraft; its explosive-incendiary tip can ignite jet fuel. It isn’t gentle with human targets. Jason took all their heads off at the shoulders, shrouding the truck in a spray of pink mist. A strange image flitted through Jason’s mind, of a gardener taking a weed whacker to a field of strawberries.
“Hey, snipers!”
He looked down and saw a lieutenant he knew, Aaron Awtry, waving up at them.
“Come with me!”
Awtry was a mustang officer, that is, a former enlisted man who circled back to come in on the commissioned officer track. Mustang officers tended to be especially well respected by their troops, and Awtry was no exception. Jason knew him as a solid guy and an excellent leader.
Stacked up behind Awtry was his platoon, Lima 2, getting ready to head out, along with first platoon from Kilo Company under Lieutenant Neal. They were the last two rifle platoons left in the base; everyone else had already been mobilized into the city to the northeast sector where the attack had happened.
By this time command had gotten a bearing on what was going on and realized that they were dealing with a full-out offensive. Under Lieutenant Colonel Lopez’s command, the entire battalion was coming in from Al Qaim, and they wanted all available forces at Camp Husaybah to start squeezing in from the west.
“All available forces” meant Lima 2, under Awtry, Kilo 1, under Neal, plus Jason and his two PIGs, Mavica and DelFiorentino. There was no one else.
Roger that, thought Jason.
The three snipers scrambled down from the tower and headed out with the two platoons.
Helmand Province, 2009
For a while, Nick slept as he walked.
After a while more buildings appeared; they passed a dam and found themselves moving through what looked like the industrial outskirts of a small city. From this point on they had to be extremely quiet and careful. Once again, they were sneaking around the corners of houses and slinking through shadows, heading farther west and deeper into Helmand Province.
Finally, after about three hours of walking, the group reached the point, about a half mile from their objective, where the snipers and recce operators had planned to split off from the main element and set up a blocking position.
Had they been going in just themselves, without the platoon, they would most likely have opted to go straight to the building where their target was holed up, where they would then lay up for a while, just as they’d done the past several days, wait for their HVT to walk outside to make a phone call or something, and then make the hit. If he came out. They knew exactly what building he was in, all the way down to which corner of that building.
But it made no sense to wait for hours for this guy to emerge—possibly, maybe—when they were there with a whole platoon and assault team who specialized in exactly this kind of op. They had excellent intelligence: they knew exactly how many other people were with him in that building, exactly where he was, and exactly how to take him down. So the plan was for the door-kickers to blow the gates, barge in, and pull a classic snatch and grab. Nick’s little group’s job was to provide overwatch and perimeter security. To make sure no one came in or out.
Which was all good, except for one thing. This was supposed to be an in-and-out hit, all done under the cover of night. The fact that Americans had night vision, while the enemy presumably did not, coupled with the element of surprise, made this a slam dunk, or as close to one as any insanely dangerous foray deep into enemy-held territory can be. By the time daybreak came, they would be long gone.
Except that it hadn’t gone that way. Once those Amtracs got stuck in the sand and they had to get out and hoof, their timing was shot to hell. Instead of sneaking in under the cover of night, they were arriving right at sunup.
This is not good, thought Nick.
Welcome to the jungle.
While the main element forked left and headed south toward the main objective, Nick’s group split off to the right and headed five or six hundred feet to the north-northwest, into a wide open field where they had a clear view in multiple directions.
By this point they had broken out into the open and the sun was poking well up over the horizon, so they were completely visible. They moved very slowly and even more cautiously.
As they walked into their blocking position, standing out in a wide-open field, Nick on point, he noticed there were a number of small craters around, like perhaps mortars had been fired at this location in the past. One of these holes was especially large, maybe two meters wide and about two feet deep. He looked over at Pemberton and quietly said, “Anything happens, let’s go back to that hole right there.”
Pemberton gave him the thumbs-up.
They moved on another ten or twenty yards, then got down in the grass and set up their position, Pemberton on Nick’s left, the recce team spread out to his right, and lay there ready to provide overwatch for as long as it took.
They tried their radios. Nick’s had crapped out. So had Pemberton’s. So had Derek’s. Three for three. Army equipment: when you need it most, it isn’t there for you.
So much for planning.
From where he lay, Nick had a view of a village ahead, about three hundred yards to the west, on the other side of a main road that ran roughly north to south; a small city skyline of relatively taller buildings directly to the north; and to their south, the residential area where Second Platoon was right at this moment slowly creeping up on their objective.
“Allahu akbar, allahu akbar … ash-hadu an-la ilaha illa allah…”
Nick heard the sound of early morning prayers floating in across the field. The little village to the west was waking up.
The sun was now fully above the horizon. Whatever meager advantage of semidarkness they had on their approach was completely gone.
Shit, thought Nick. This is SO not good.
Mogadishu Airport, 1995
At about 1300 hours Alex saw a small company of men gathering down at the camp on the southern end of the airport. He counted three carrying RPG tubes and one with a PKM, a big belt-fed machine gun. The others all had AKs. They started patrolling, moving around between the different buildings there. Clearly they were working up some kind of maneuver.
Sitting out on the runway and facing the Americans, another group of men had formed up into a classic C-shaped fighting position, with two lines spread out along forty yards of sandbags, some sort of abandoned checkpoint that airport personnel had been using before the evacuation.
Now these heavily armed guys walked out into the middle of the C formation and started talking with the men there, gesturing and pointing over toward Alex and the other Americans to their north. This was a troubling development. These dudes were not crouching up on a hillside more than a thousand yards off, they were standing on the runway, directly level with Alex’s bunker, maybe six hundred yards away. Still at the outer limits of the RPG’s effective range, but close enough to be a credible threat, should they start aiming in the SEALs’ direction.
Peering through his scope, Alex focused on the man in charge, the one who was doing most of the talking and pointing. He was wearing a gray U.S. Army shirt.
Irony on the battlefield.
At that moment the gesturing stopped. Evidently the time for talking was done, because Mr. Army Shirt now shouldered his RPG, aimed it directly at the Americans, and started tweaking his sight.
He was dialing in their position.
Shahikot Valley, 2002
On their eighth day in the Shahikot Valley, Rob Furlong and Tim McMeekin were once again perched on the crest of the valley, shooting at targets in all directions. Rob, who was on the gun that day, was scanning the area with the TAC-50’s 16x scope; Tim was on the 40x Leupold. (They brought a second spotting scope with them, a 60x Leupold, but it was hardly necessary; the 40x offered magnification as powerful as they would possibly need.)
They saw movement on the far side of the valley to the west-northwest, up toward the Whale. It was a little compound of mud huts, almost like a ranch area, where the people kept their donkeys and such.
A few days earlier, when they’d been out of ammo, glassing and feeding coordinates to their fast air assets for air strikes, they had noticed quite a bit of movement over in that area, and they’d wanted to shut it down. But even if they’d had ammo they knew they wouldn’t be able to reach it, even with their .50. They had called in some fast air in that area, but hadn’t quite been able to nail it.
Now they spotted a three-man team heading out from that little compound, walking not exactly toward them but on an oblique angle to them. They were way out there, about three kilometers, or nearly two miles.
Stop for a second just to contemplate that.
Forget about shooting: just seeing someone at that range is an extreme accomplishment. If you’ve ever gone hunting or bird-watching with a decent set of binos, you know what it’s like trying to zero in on an object at hundreds of feet, maybe even hundreds of yards. We’re talking here about something at two miles.
The three suddenly shifted direction, altering their path so that they were now walking directly toward the Canadians.
“Hey,” said Tim, “one of those guys has an RPK.” Sure enough, one of the three walked with an RPK, a light machine gun, slung back over his shoulder. They kept watching, figuring that if the trio continued walking in their direction they might eventually come within range, and they could then possibly take them out.
But the walkers soon shifted course once again, now walking on a more oblique path, almost directly perpendicular to the snipers. If they continued on that path, they wouldn’t be getting any closer.
They continued on that path.
Tim ranged them with his laser range finder. They were at about 2,430 meters.
At that point the two had been occasionally shooting at targets moving up toward that range, in the high 2,300s, even right up to 2,400. At these extreme ranges, though, a lot of what they were doing boiled down to what you’d call harassing fire: shots whose main purpose was to rattle the bad guys and get them moving out of there. But to actually hit the guys they were aiming at, at distances like those? Crazy. Insane. Nuts.
Saying it out loud wasn’t even necessary. They both had the same thought.
Let’s take him.
Husaybah, 2004
Every react asset the marines had was already out in the city, so the group headed out on foot, Lieutenant Awtry up in front with Lima 2, Kilo 1 following at a short distance, and Jason, Mavica, and DelFiorentino hanging back toward the rear where they could maintain the broadest perspective and be most effective as overwatch.
The column started out down West End and hoofed the mile down past the 440 to Route Train, where they took a left and began heading eastward along the bottom edge of the city. Jason assumed they were going out to help out some marines with cover fire. In fact, though he didn’t know this yet, they were actually heading out to raid another stronghold that had been identified as a major trouble spot on the southwestern edge of the city.
After they’d gone a few hundred yards, Awtry called out to Jason.
“Delgado!” he said. “C’mere.”
Jason ran over to where he was standing. “What’s up, sir?”
Awtry pointed over to the north, up at a rooftop of an apartment building one or two streets in. “What is that, up there? That someone on the roof waving a goddamn flag?”
Jason peered through his scope and saw a young kid standing on top of a rooftop water tank, waving a stick around with a white plastic bag tied to it.
He told the lieutenant what he saw.
Lieutenant Awtry looked at him and said, “It’s your call, Sergeant. You can drop him, if you want, if you think there’s something funny going on there.”
Jason thought there was something funny going on, all right, and he didn’t like the feeling of it. He knew better than anyone how common it was for the enemy here to use kids as intel assets. At the same time, he’d also seen local children doing something vaguely similar to what this kid was doing as a way of training pigeons.
For all his trigger-happy reputation, the truth was, Jason was fairly conservative with his shots. He was ready to kill without hesitation—but only the people he was sure needed a good dose of killing. This kid looked like he was about ten years old. And what if he really was just messing around with a bird?
“Sir,” he said, “I don’t feel comfortable dropping him. For right now let’s just keep pushing. If something happens, then I’ll take him out.”
“All right,” said Awtry. He looked back at the two platoons, then back at the city to the north, then back at Delgado. “I don’t like this,” he murmured. He turned around and looked behind them. Off to the south, a long trash ditch ran parallel to and a few yards south of the Iraqi Republic Railroad train tracks. It looked nasty in there.
Lieutenant Awtry nodded in the direction of the tracks and called out, “I want everybody inside that trash ditch for cover. We’ll follow the ditch out into the city.”
“Roger that,” said Delgado.
It was, as he would later say, the single best battlefield decision he ever witnessed.
The men left the road and walked down to the train tracks, crossed over them, then dropped down into that funky trash ditch.
The air hung foul and heavy in the blistering Iraqi heat, the relative silence broken only by the swish swish swish of guys slogging their way through the trash and sewage and the sporadic muttered crack. “Hope like hell this is worth it.” “Jesus Mary mother of God, this shit is rank.”
And then the sky opened and poured down bullets.
Helmand Province, 2009
Just then Nick heard the putt-putt-putt of a small engine, and to his horror saw a guy riding down that north–south dirt road on a little moped, heading in the direction of Second Platoon and the target building.
Fuck! Nick was now staring at one of those classic dilemmas, like Marcus Luttrell and his team in the Lone Survivor mission. What could he do with this guy? If he just let him go on he would run right into the platoon as they made their way toward the main objective. That could blow the whole op. Worse, for all Nick knew he could have a suicide vest on and be heading there intentionally to blow them all up. While that admittedly sounded unlikely, it wasn’t out of the question. These people had an extremely efficient grassroots intel network and could very well have foreknowledge of the rangers’ approach. But if Nick made any move to stop the moped guy or ward him off course, he would be giving away his own group’s position.
Risk the mission; possibly risk lives in the main element; or risk themselves.
No contest. He needed to stop the guy.
Nick raised his rifle and put his AN/PEQ-15’s visible red laser dot on the guy’s face.
The moped rider noticed the dot right away and came to a halt. A look of fear flitted across his face, which a moment later gave way to something like disgust, like he was thinking, “Oh, shit—you guys are here?”
He stood there on his moped for a few moments, peering around. It was clear that he couldn’t see Nick or Pemberton; both of them had pretty well tucked themselves down into the dirt, hidden by tufts of grass.
Now Nick moved the laser dot down to his chest.
The guy looked at the dot, then slowly backed his moped up a little, turned around, and started off in the other direction, westward, toward the village Nick had seen waking up.
Fuck! Nick knew he was going back there to tell everyone the Americans were here. But he couldn’t just shoot a guy putt-putting along on his moped. Even his ROEs didn’t have room for that.
There was nothing to do but lie there and wait.
They lay there and waited.
After another ten minutes, Pemberton got Nick’s attention. “Dude,” he whispered, and nodded in the direction of the little village. “Big meeting going on.”
Nick crawled over closer to Pemberton and looked over in the direction he was looking. They saw eight or nine guys in a huddle, what looked to be a gathering of elders or some similar sort of strategic powwow. The men peered over in their direction, much as the moped guy had done, as if they were trying to see exactly where they were. It didn’t seem like they had located the snipers yet, but the direction they were looking in was pretty much spot on. They went back to their little huddle, then broke apart and headed out in different directions, each going out to his respective area of the village. No doubt to go grab up their arms and get ready to fight, thought Nick.
“Dude,” he whispered to Pemberton, “we’re about to get attacked.”
He looked back toward Derek, the recce team leader, with a Can I shoot now? look. Derek looked back and shook his head.
“Hey, man,” Nick called over quietly. “These guys don’t have weapons, but I know what they’re doing, and we’re about to get attacked. Permission to engage?”
“Fuck!” said Derek, clearly torn. “No, man, you can’t,” leaving unspoken the self-evident corollary, But I sure as shit wish you could.
Nick said, “All right, roger that. But we’re gonna get hit.”
Derek thought for a moment and then said, “Hey, everyone, I’ve got a really bad feeling about this. Let’s start getting really, really low.”
Nick and Pemberton were already sprawled about as low against the ground as they could be; they couldn’t get any lower. The recce operators start getting down on their stomachs, very slowly.
Less than thirty seconds later Nick heard a single shot go sssnap!—and then they were surrounded by a cacophony of gunfire.