The essence of war is violence, and moderation in war is imbecility.
—Admiral John “Jacky” Fisher
Training is one thing; the reality of landing in an alien world, of being in the presence of dead bodies, of having people shooting at you with the intention of killing you and shooting back at them with the intention of killing them first, is quite another. It’s only once you’re in the field that you go through the final phase of the Killing School, the graduate and postgraduate phase.
My first experience of the reality of war hit about a year before the 9/11 attacks, when the destroyer USS Cole was struck off the coast of Yemen by a pair of suicide bombers in a speedboat.
A corpsman friend of mine in our platoon, Clint Emerson, was flown out there a little ahead of the rest of us to help deal with the dead and wounded as quickly as possible. Clint describes the scene as one of the worst things he ever saw, and as a combat medic, he’s seen some ugly things. He got to the ship, made his way down to the keel area where the bomb had hit and where more than a dozen bodies had been sitting now for hours, bloating in the hot pools of water. He reached down and took an arm to haul the body up, and the arm gave way and came off in his hands. Clint says it felt like the body was made of Jell-O.
Seventeen crew had died in the attack. There were seventeen of us SEALs there to cover it, so whenever we had a chance to grab any rack time, we slept in those dead guys’ racks. It was eerie.
As sobering as the Cole was, it was an experience shared by only a few. The world at large was still mostly asleep to what was brewing. Nobody was really paying much attention to a bombing off the coast of some Middle Eastern country that few could locate on a map, or say for sure whether it rhymed with lemon or semen. Ten months later that all changed, when two commercial jetliners crashed into the tallest buildings in New York City and the reality of war came knocking on our door.
My platoon was one of the first units of SEALs on the ground in the new war, which so far was being waged in a cautious, surgical way, with selected Spec Ops forces supporting Afghan military and American ground troops being used only in small units for very concise operations. We were more than eager to get into the fight; everyone was. Along with our Echo Platoon patches, which I’d designed and featured a white devil with the slogan “Embrace the Hate,” we also had NYFD patches sewn onto our uniforms. We spent October and November running interdiction ops in the Gulf and staging in Kuwait and Oman. Finally, in mid-December, we boarded a dark C-130 and a few hours later were walking down its ramp in Kandahar.
It was surreal. Storming Kandahar International Airport was one of the first things the Soviets did when they invaded in December 1979. Now it was exactly twenty-two years later, and whaddya know, here we were doing exactly the same thing. A decade of duking it out with the Soviets had ruined the place; when the Taliban took it over as one of their key strongholds, upkeep and repair was not at the top of their to-do list. And when a company of U.S. Marines landed and wrested it away from the Talis just a few days before we arrived, the place had taken one hell of a beating. There was broken glass everywhere, bloodstains on the floor, wreckage strewn here and there. We slept in the main terminal that night. It looked like the movie set for a postapocalyptic film.
The Cole had been an incident. This was war.
A few weeks later we would go up to northeastern Afghanistan and spend time in the mountains, near the Pakistan border. The area up there had a completely different feel, with its beautiful and terrifying countryside, its small farm communities surrounded by immense, jagged, snow-capped mountains. You knew there was some bad stuff going on up there, but it was still in a setting of some sort of normalcy, a fabric of culture and heritage.
Not Kandahar. Kandahar was a hellhole, just flat, hard desert and ugly urban sprawl, and you could tell bad shit was going down everywhere. It was like one gigantic seedy arms bazaar, and there was a sense that any minute someone was going to pull out an AK-47 and start shooting.
Kandahar has a distinct odor, a smell those who’ve never traveled outside the corridors of developed Western nations have never encountered—untreated sewage combined with the constant stink of open fires, of stoves burning wood and whatever else people could find to use for fuel to keep their bellies full. You could blindfold me, stick me on a plane, drop me there without telling me where we were, and I’d sniff it out in a heartbeat.
The most striking thing about Kandahar was its strangeness, its weird otherness. There was nothing in the U.S., or Canada, or Europe, or anywhere else I’d traveled to (at least in the West) that compared to it.
Years later I spent time in Iraq working as a private contractor. One day I was driving down the road in an Iraqi city when I noticed a kid in a cage sitting by the side of the street, right out in front of a busy market. A boy, maybe five or six years old, crammed into the kind of little wire box you’d set up for hamsters or guinea pigs. A kid. In a cage. What was that about? But I knew what it was about. The kid had been put there as some form of punishment, a public shaming. He looked miserable, but completely acquiescent, accepting of his fate. His posture said, This sucks, but I deserve it. Made me shudder.
I saw a lot of terrible things on the battlefield—people living in the worst of conditions and under crushing oppression, fields strewn with body parts, people reduced to a smear. But happening upon that little boy sitting in his cage ranks as the weirdest, strangest thing I saw, and in many ways the most disturbing.
That was what Kandahar felt like. An alien world. That was the world Rob Furlong landed in a few weeks later.
* * *
On February 2, 2002, Rob and his teammates bused out onto the tarmac at Edmonton International Airport to board a massive Lockheed Galaxy C-5. Rob had never seen anything like it. The C-5 is massive, one of the largest military transport planes ever built. (It also has a nickname among Galaxy flight crew: FRED, short for Fucking Ridiculous Economic Disaster.)
The U.S. was clearly serious about going to war.
The six Canadians got out of their bus and headed for the giant craft. The flight crew were all Americans and all smiles, obviously quite happy that the Canadians were joining them.
When the warning order came from the Canadian government that the PPCLI were being deployed to Afghanistan, they decided they would take their own snipers with them, deployed in two teams of three each: one on the big McMillan TAC-50, one serving as spotter (the team leader), one as security. At that point there were five men in the PPCLI’s sniper cell; they needed a sixth. Tim McMeekin, the instructor Rob had gotten along with so well through sniper school, came onboard as leader of 63 Bravo and would be pairing up with Rob as shooter. The other team, 63 Alpha, was led by Graham “Rags” Ragsdale, who had also been an instructor at the course. The phrase “cream of the crop” was never more aptly applied as it was to these six men. They were Canada’s best.
The group flew from Edmonton to Germany, then Germany to UAE, where they boarded a C-17 bound for Afghanistan. Landing on the tarmac at Kandahar, they walked down that big ramp and witnessed much the same thing I’d seen when our SEAL platoon landed there about seven weeks earlier, except that by then we’d cleaned it up somewhat and there was a hell of a lot of activity going on, personnel in dozens of different uniforms buzzing around the place.
Rob describes the scene with exactly the same word that came to me when I first walked down our C-130’s ramp: surreal. A blown-out old concrete airport, with hulks of ancient Russian planes and fighter jets lying around. They started settling in and unpacking their equipment. Before long they had to take cover in shelters because of incoming rocket attacks. That got their adrenaline going.
Still, they didn’t feel they were in much danger. They were in that weird purgatorial place: in an environment of war, on the edge of war, but not yet really within the gritty reality of war.
They were tasked into two-man sniper teams and sent off to deploy along with a team of U.S. scouts and some local Afghani fighters to man some old Russian-built guard towers about two kilometers outside the camp, to serve as an OP (observation post) and early warning system.
For the next two weeks they lived out there with these locals. Rob spent most of that time up in his little perch on top of the guard tower with his .50 cal and a spotting scope. They interacted quite a bit with some of the local warlords, and did actually catch a few bad guys as they tried to slip through their perimeter and get closer to the Coalition base at the airport. To Rob, this was not exactly what you’d call “action,” it was like making an arrest on any urban street back home. These guys would roll up in their vehicles or dirt bikes, the locals would start chatting with them, and suddenly there’d be raised voices and signs of a commotion. The locals would haul a guy out of his vehicle, identify him to the Americans and Canadians as Taliban, Rob and his colleagues would bag ’em and tag ’em, call over an MP, and that was that. The dude was on his way to Guantánamo, and Rob was back up on his tower.
One day, after about two weeks of this glorified guard duty, Rob saw an American Humvee come bumping out in their direction. They were scheduled for resupply every Tuesday. This wasn’t a Tuesday. The Humvee rolled to a stop and the front passenger window rolled down.
“You two,” said the guy inside, referring to Rob and one of his fellow snipers, “pack up your shit. You’re coming into camp. The CO wants to see you.”
Back at the camp Rob and his buddy joined up with the other Canadian snipers of 63 Alpha and 63 Bravo, and the six of them were ushered into a command tent, where they found themselves face-to-face with Lieutenant Colonel Pat Stogran, commanding officer of the PPCLI battle group. Next to Colonel Stogran sat an American commander, accompanied by a few attachés.
The colonel looked at the six men and said, “I’ve been asked by the American commander here,” and he nodded in the direction of the man to his right, “that you guys support an operation.”
“Sure, whatever you need, sir,” replied Ragsdale.
Colonel Stogran leaned in slightly. “Okay, guys, here’s the deal. It’s a Special Operations thing that’s going to be happening. I don’t have a lot of information, nor would I probably be allowed to tell you anyway.”
Rob knew full well that was about as much information as they were going to get, whether now or later. He also knew what it meant: they were going to be sent into the middle of a war zone to seek people out and kill them.
“But you’re going to be quarantined for a while first,” the CO continued. “You’ll probably fly out tomorrow. Take some time; get your kit ready. If you need anything, just let us know.”
A few American MPs appeared at their sides to escort them out. They turned to leave the room, and just as they reached the door Colonel Stogran spoke up once more.
“By the way,” he said, “I haven’t been able to get hold of the Canadian government yet, to run this by them. I’ll be pacing like a waiting father.”
In other words, he was acting without permission.
“Don’t worry, sir,” replied Ragsdale, “we won’t disappoint.”
Colonel Stogran would remember those words.
The MPs took the six of them out to a fenced-in compound set apart from the rest of the base and left them in there. They were not allowed to have any contact with anyone—not their parents, not their spouses, not other Canadian teammates, not a soul. To the rest of the world, they simply vanished.
For the following two weeks they lived in that small compound, training and waiting. It was a weird existence. They prepped their gear, kept up their PTs, went through the motions of maintaining their Spartan surroundings … but underneath the veneer of keeping busy they were really doing absolutely nothing but spinning their wheels. Okay, we’re here; now what?
At one point a warrant officer came in and briefed them on the nature of high-altitude operations. He put them on acetazolamide, a med to help offset the effects of extreme altitude, and asked them if there was any special equipment they needed or wanted. They could ask for pretty much anything, he said. “That’s okay,” they replied. They had everything they needed. He left.
And they waited.
A big part of war is waiting. In some ways—in many ways—the waiting is worse than the combat. You’ve prepared for this for years. You want to be in action. You don’t want to be sitting around in some shithole, watching while the war machine slowly grinds into motion. But that is generally the way it works. The skill of war depends upon the warfighter’s capacity for boredom and inactivity, laced with tension and nervous apprehension.
Finally one evening an officer came in and said, “All right, guys, thirty-minute warning. Get your shit ready. We’re heading out.”
They got their gear ready—which took no effort at all, since they’d been ready for days—and a half hour later some men came in and walked them out to a waiting C-17. They walked up the ramp to find the big beast’s cavernous interior completely empty. They were the only passengers.
As the ramp began to close a Canadian officer ran out onto the tarmac, his arms full of equipment. “Hey!” he shouted. “You guys, you gotta wear helmets!” He held up a mass of gear: six sets of flak vests and helmets.
Rob and the other snipers looked at each other, then back at the officer. “Yeah,” said one, “we don’t wear that shit.”
The ramp closed, leaving officer and gear standing on the tarmac.
For Rob the war was about to get real in the Shahikot Valley.
* * *
For Jason Delgado it all got real a year later, in the spring of 2003, when his unit, the Third Battalion, Fourth Marines, went driving up through the belly of Iraq, heading for the capital city to pull down Saddam’s statue. It was about 350 miles from the southeastern tip of Iraq northwest to Baghdad, and for most of that push Jason and his sniper partner Jesse missed out on what little resistance the battalion met.
Until they reached the Diyala River.
On April 6 the marines arrived at the small urban town of Jisr Diyala, just across the Diyala River (a tributary of the Euphrates) from the southeastern tip of Baghdad. They were meched up—that is, traveling on military motorized vehicles, convoy style—and in motion. Nobody had any intention of stopping at that town. The plan was to drive through, cross the bridge, hold up on the other side, and wait for permission from regiment to push on past the Al Rasheed Air Base and into Baghdad.
But the sequence didn’t go that way.
Jason and Jesse pulled into the town in their amphibious assault vehicle (AAV), also called an Amtrac, short for amphibious tractor. Following their standard sequence, they stopped the vehicle and got out so they could find a good location from which to serve as sniper overwatch for the moving column of India Company, the unit they were supporting. Quickly locating a small bell tower, they judged it to be adequate for their purposes and climbed up with a few other members of the platoon. On an upper floor they gained access to an empty room with four panel windows, one looking out in each direction of the compass. Perfect.
Jason had his M16 out, Jesse was on the M40; another sniper, Alex Cordova, was on the .50 cal SASR (special applications scoped rifle, pronounced sasser). India Company starting moving through the area and toward the bridge.
At that moment Jason noticed a figure huddled on a nearby rooftop with a long tube resting horizontally on his shoulder. The tube was pointed directly at one of India’s AAVs. Jason just had time to register the thought—That cocksucker is firing on our guys with an RPG!—when he heard the explosion and simultaneously saw the plume of gray smoke billow out the back of the tube. A fraction of a second later the grenade slammed into the side of the AAV.
Incredibly, it did not explode. The AAV wore a layer of false armor, a hollow layer on the outside with the actual steel armor underneath protecting the troops inside the vehicle. The grenade had pierced the hollow outer shell and lodged there. No one was hurt—but the company reacted immediately, and reacted hard. A few days earlier they had taken their first casualty, when a young PIG named Mark Evnin had died from a gunshot wound sustained in a skirmish at Al Kut, some one hundred miles southeast of Diyala. The day before that, a hastily assembled Iraqi truck bomb had crashed into an Abrams tank—an Abrams!—and blown it to hell. The marines were now on a hair trigger and in no mood to be casual.
In seconds Cordova had his SASR up on the ledge pointed toward that other rooftop, and let a round go. The sound of that SASR round going off was so loud that for a moment, Jason thought they had been hit with an RPG. Everyone in the room grabbed their heads, hands over the ears.
“Oh my freaking God,” yelled Jason, “what are you doing, man?”
Meanwhile everyone on the ground was scrambling. None of them knew where the RPG had come from. Jason and Jesse, who had clearly seen the shooter and the smoke plume, were frantically trying to get through on their comms to tell the guys on the ground. But no one was listening. They were immersed in the fog of war. The radio channels were full of voices shouting, “We got hit!” “Contact left! Contact left!” “No, it’s contact right!” and everyone was opening up fire.
Unable to get through on comms, they bounded down the stairs and outside, where they saw a platoon running by across the street. It happened to be the India Company platoon Jason had belonged to before becoming a sniper. They recognized him, and he called out, “Follow me!” He and Jesse started running for a nearby alley, headed toward the building where the guy had launched the RPG, the other platoon now following their lead. They tore through the alley, and the moment Jason reached the end and poked his head around the corner, sure enough, there was the guy slipping out of the building in a black tracksuit.
The man hadn’t seen him. He turned, glanced briefly in Jason’s general direction—just long enough that Jason could see his face—then turned away again and started walking casually down the street in the other direction.
No way was Jason letting this guy get away. He took two steps out from the alleyway, brought his weapon up, took careful aim, and let a shot go.
Nothing happened.
The guy heard the shot and started running without even turning to look.
Shit! thought Delgado. Maybe I was a little jittery and not steady enough on the rifle.
It should not have been that difficult a shot. The guy was running away from him in more or less a straight line, which meant that he still presented a dead-on target. Jason embraced his M16, sighted in once more, steadied his breathing, and squeezed the trigger, as calmly as he could.
And once more: nothing. The guy kept running.
What the fuck is going on? thought Jason. He’d now missed his target twice. The guy knew he was being shot at and was running away. There was no point just shooting a third time; he’d already done his best to aim correctly and missed, twice.
What the hell was he supposed to do now?
* * *
Delgado had been through U.S. Marine Corps training, some of the best on the planet, and a brutally thorough six-month-long “indoc” that was for all practical purposes a six-month full-bore sniper school, plus the Corps’ sniper school itself. He was as trained as it gets.
But no matter how thoroughly you train, it’s still not the same as the real thing.
You take someone who has gone to Tae Kwon Do classes faithfully for ten years, gotten his zillionth-degree black belt, and throw him into a bar fight in a bad section of town where he suddenly finds himself grappling on the floor with some mean drunk motherfucker who’s doing his best to tear this guy’s eyes out, and what’s going to happen? The mean drunk motherfucker is going to tear his eyes out.
Classes are classes. Real is real.
When it’s real, there’s so much going on internally. Your heart is racing, you’re anxious, adrenaline’s flowing, random thoughts are zipping unbidden through your mind, and you’re trying to ignore the absolutely unignorable voice in your mind going Shit, this is actually happening!
The military did its best to train for that. Coming out of the Vietnam experience, especially, and then from other more minor combat experiences since then, they had developed a science-based sort of approach, looking at what went on in a person’s physiology when they were engaging in combat and attempting to replicate that in training. They knew that in the thick of war, when you’re downrange and entering a firefight, your heart rate goes up. So they got their people’s heart rates up in training. They would have their trainees do extensive PT and then jump straight onto the range to shoot.
But the reality is nowhere near that simple. There’s a lot more going on than an accelerated heart rate. You can do a few push-ups and run a few hundred yards, then grab your gun, and, yeah, it gets you breathing hard while you’re trying to shoot. But you still know you’re in training. You know what you’re being tested on. You’ve been on this range before. You know what’s coming. No matter how hard they bust your balls, no matter how hard the hell is, it’s ultimately not that big a deal. It’s not combat.
In combat there are so many unknown factors, and no one can really train you for that feeling.
By the time Jason went through his training, the military had become more sophisticated in their efforts. Now when marine instructors trained their snipers they had flashbangs going off, sporadic automatic weapons fire, or maybe rock music blaring at ear-splitting volume and lights flashing on and off at random intervals, anything to overload and overwhelm the senses. Because if a sniper can operate when his circuits are being overloaded, that’s your guy for the battlefield.
But still. It’s not combat.
Jason took a breath and tried to clear his head. He had missed twice and the seconds were ticking. He knew he’d get only one more chance. He was about to experience the art of self-correction.
You’d think that when you miss a shot, your tendency would be to overcompensate on your second try. That jibes with our normal experience. Imagine you’re driving along, not paying attention, and you suddenly realize you’re drifting left into the oncoming traffic’s lane. What do you do? Most people will jerk the wheel to the right—usually a little too far to the right, perhaps even hitting the guy in the next lane over. That’s how a lot of highway accidents happen: not from the original drift but from the overcorrection.
Curiously, though, that’s not what tends to happen on the range. When a student marksman misses, his tendency will be to undercorrect. When I went through the SEAL course in 2000 I remember the instructors saying, “Make bold corrections.”
Which is not bad advice, to some extent. Better to act boldly than timidly. But it’s really not that helpful. Eric Davis says that whenever he heard an instructor say that, he would think, What the hell is “bold” supposed to mean?
A few years later, when we were teaching the course ourselves, I had to laugh every time I heard what Eric would say to our students: “Don’t make bold corrections—make correct corrections.”
Because it isn’t about being bold. It isn’t about having a different attitude. It’s about precision. It’s about a number. This speaks to that point about accuracy and the demands of being laser focused, the whole reason sniper school is so murderously difficult. Telling you to make “bold corrections” is like telling you to try harder, or to be more inspired. But you can’t try, or bluff, or attitude-adjust that round onto your target. You have to surgically place it there.
* * *
And that’s what needed to happen now. Delgado had to make a correct correction. And he had to do it right now, immediately.
Delgado felt his weapon, its butt stock pressed against his shoulder, his 203 grenade launcher attached underneath the barrel, making the M16 feel heavy and cumbersome. He looked down at his sighting mechanism—and it dawned on him. He had his rear sight aperture set to six hundred yards. The guy was at probably two hundred yards or so.
Jason was shooting for a six-hundred-yard shot, which meant he was way over-shooting his target.
There was no time to reset the elevation on his gun. He had to run a seat-of-the-pants calculation and compensate on the fly. He brought his M16 back up level, put his front sight close on the running guy’s butt cheek, and squeezed the trigger—
This all happened in the space of a few seconds, but in Jason’s mind it stretched out over minutes, like a long, slow sequence, each step happening with great deliberateness, as if he were crossing a river, stepping carefully from rock to rock and placing each foot so he wouldn’t slip and fall in …
First shot—
Observe—
Missed! What happened?—
Contemplating—
Don’t know—
Steady up, aim—
Second shot—
Observe—
Missed again!—
Now the guy was moving faster—
Shit, he knows I’m on to him—
Contemplating—
What’s going on? Why am I missing?—
Looks down at his gun—
Light dawns: it’s set on six hundred yards—
No time to reset sight—
Nod: I know what to do—
Aim back in, lower the M16 just a hair to place the center of the sight square on the guy’s buttocks as he runs—
Jesse is now swinging his rifle up into position, too, to take a shot—
But by this time Jason is already squeezing the trigger—
He lets go with a third round—
Observe—
Boom!… ssssssmack!
—and the third round hit the man square in the back.
That’s the surreality of combat. In situations like this your brain operates so fast, there’s so much adrenaline flooding your system, that everything around you goes into extreme slow motion. To Jason, it might as well have taken an hour for the whole sequence to elapse. It was timeless.
And then the surreality of it all became even more so. As Jason watched what happened when the round hit the man, it seemed to him the weirdest thing he’d ever seen. He was waiting for that Hollywood scene—the one where the guy takes a shot, flips over like a bowling pin, and lies there dead. Ominous chords in low brass fade on the soundtrack. But that wasn’t what happened. This guy grabbed his stomach.
What? Jason had shot him in the back. So that was already confusing. Jason had the half thought, Wait, did I shoot him, or did someone else shoot him from the front? But no, he’d shot him all right. But the guy grabbed his stomach.
Then he took a few steps forward, like he was walking over to do something. And then he sat down on the ground, very calm.
Then lay down and died.
As the war ground on Jason saw this again and again: he would shoot someone, and know he’d hit him, but would see some reaction that seemed so completely out of character for what he was expecting that he would doubt for a moment whether he’d made the shot at all. Or, no visible reaction at all: the guy would just take a few more steps, then sit down, perhaps light a cigarette, and then, after lighting his cigarette, lie down, cross his legs, and die.
Just like this man. There was something about it that was so unexpected, so peculiar, that it seemed way worse to Jason than if the man had just done the movie stuntman thing and flipped over onto his back.
But Jason didn’t have time to think about it, or even to react to it. Because on the heels of his first combat kill, he was about to have another first-time battlefield experience.
The unexpected RPG shot, and the response that it elicited, seemed to have touched off a fair amount of chaos there at the river’s edge. A firefight was erupting. Jason and Jesse scrambled back up to a second-story vantage point and were soon running from rooftop to rooftop, looking to secure the best positions from which to see the action and provide their compatriots protective fire. As they stood for a moment on one rooftop, Jason suddenly heard the damnedest thing: a swarm of angry bees started buzzing right past their heads.
What the hell? he thought. Bees? On a rooftop in Iraq, in the middle of a firefight?
It took them both a moment to realize what it was they were actually hearing. It wasn’t a swarm of angry bees at all. It was a swarm of angry bullets.
They were being shot at.
We’re a long way from Van Cortlandt Park, Delgado.
They had both fired tens of thousands of rounds themselves, and been around other guys firing tens of thousands of rounds. But actually being shot at, having live rounds fired directly toward you, is one thing that never happens in training. This was the first time either of them had ever been targeted by focused enemy fire like that.
And it was targeted fire, all right. Jason didn’t want to think it was sniper fire per se, but it sure as hell seemed like that’s what it was. Those shots were being aimed right at them, and they were high-speed rounds. Jason had thought “angry bees” because that was exactly what the rounds sounded like as they flew past: Eeeeethup! Eeeeeethup! Eeeeeethup!
They both reacted simultaneously, melting into the base of the roof and slipping down behind the slight rampart. For the next few minutes they were pinned down.
Damn! thought Jason. They had an enemy sniper homed in on them and they couldn’t even pick up their heads to try to see exactly where he was. It was frustrating.
Jason looked at his M16 again, with its damned clunky 203 attachment. That thing pissed him off. It was so cumbersome, and whenever he broke into a run it would continually smack against the back of his knee. It really was a pain in the ass.
Then it occurred to him: he had a load of twelve 203 grenades with him.
He smiled.
Kaboom! Kaboom! Kaboom! Jason turned into a one-man mortar team, letting off those 203s in the direction he guessed the gunfire was coming from, slightly changing his angle of fire with each one. Kaboom! Kaboom! Kaboom! Kaboom! he wondered exactly where they were landing, and hoped wherever it was, it was helpful.
They waited a moment.
Apparently it was helpful, because when they poked their heads up over the lip of the roof to look around, they didn’t see anything happening. And no more angry bees.
They got off that rooftop fast and moved on to an adjacent rooftop to set up in a spot where they hadn’t already been targeted.
Jason believes the enemy had not intended to mount an offensive, not right then and there. He believes they had planned to wait and let some of the marines cross the bridge, then blow up the bridge and attack them on both sides with their forces divided. But the scuffle that resulted from that RPG attack went on long enough that the enemy finally said “fuck it” and brought the fight to the marines on the south side of the bridge.
It’s impossible to say what would have happened if that one Iraqi hadn’t lost his cool and shot off that one RPG, but he did, and it affected the course of the whole mission, with terrible results for all parties involved—as we shall see later on.
* * *
In the reality of combat, things don’t always go the way they went back in the training exercises. In 2005, Alex Morrison and a few other snipers were working with a conventional army unit in Tamin, right across the river from Ramadi, doing a lot of sniper overwatch to try to force the insurgents to think twice before placing their IEDs (improvised explosive devices). It was exactly the kind of work Chris Kyle had done in Fallujah in ’04 and would do again in Ramadi in ’06, and it was having an impact. Alex’s teammates had already killed a number of insurgents trying to place bombs on the major routes through Ramadi, and the frequency of IED events here was starting to drop off.
There was an intersection by a cab stand that was getting hit with IEDs about once a week, and the army unit asked the SEALs if they could set up an overwatch there. They chose a nearby building on the main thoroughfare there that had one second-story wall facing the intersection.
They went out at night in a few Bradley fighting vehicles and drove around the area, stopping in a few places to do false inserts, then got dropped off within eight hundred meters of the building they’d selected. They slipped into the building, explained to the building’s occupants why they were there and secured them for the night, then headed up to the second floor, where they popped a few loopholes in the wall and set up to wait.
And waited.
Nothing happened that night. Alex was on watch first thing in the morning, and saw a series of shifty-looking characters pass through, but no actionable behavior. About two in the afternoon, now off his shift, Alex was sitting up against a wall, trying to catch a quick catnap. Another sniper who’d been stationed at one of their loopholes for a while stood up to stretch, and happened to glance out the window.
“Holy shit!” he exclaimed. “There’s a guy right there!”
Alex lurched to his feet and took a look. Sure enough, there was a guy barely forty yards away, digging into the street.
“It was like sitting for hours in a deer stand,” says Alex, “then getting up to take a piss, and suddenly realizing there’s a giant buck standing right behind you.”
The thing was, they were set up to shoot toward the intersection, but not out in this direction at the street. They couldn’t just shoot through glass, and the window was a thick, solid piece with bars over it. And they didn’t want to spook the guy and lose him before they could get a clean shot.
“Listen,” Alex told his sniper friend. “I’ll sledge out the window, then you can pop out the glass and shoot him.” They would have to pull off the move in perfect sync, and quickly.
Alex grabbed their sledge, swung it behind him, and—CRASH!—smashed out the window.
At which point the sledge was caught fast in the bars. Alex tried to yank it out. It didn’t budge.
The insurgent stopped dead in his tracks and looked up at the building. Out of the corner of his eye, Alex could see him staring right toward them. He looked very much like he was thinking, Wait a minute—why did that window just break? but he didn’t move a muscle. Which was fortunate for Alex, because he was still trying to wrestle the damn sledge out of the wreckage.
Meanwhile the other sniper got his SR-25 up there and managed to poke it out through the shattered window just as Alex hauled the sledge free.
BOOM!
The man was still staring at the window when the SR-25’s slug caught him in the chest and threw him to the ground.
* * *
Nick Irving plunged into the reality of war when his ranger unit hit the ground in Tikrit in the middle of 2006. For the next three years, his life would careen from one firefight to the next. At one point his unit conducted 120 missions in ninety days. The op tempo was unreal. Still, the first handful of firefights he was in were all essentially one-sided, with no real organized return fire.
One night they were on a mission going after a very well-known high-value target (HVT), one of the top figures in the shadowy Al Qaeda network at the time. They had walked for what seemed like forever. Nick then weighed about 150 pounds, and with all the ammo he brought he was carrying probably another 150. Nick’s legs never did get used to the business of endless marching while carrying a massive load. Neither did the rest of him.
Finally they reached their objective. As a machine gunner, Nick pulled security duty and was stationed standing up on a big brick wall at the back of the site, responsible for making sure no one slipped out the back.
He stood and waited for the mission to go down. And waited. Suddenly he heard a weird noise:
Sssssnap! Sssssnap! Sssssssnap!
Oh shoot, he thought. His earpiece was going out. He started tapping on the thing. It seemed okay. So what the hell was that snapping sound—
He was still in the middle of the thought when his team leader grabbed him, shoved him on the ground, and put his knee in Nick’s back. “Get the fuck down!” he said. “We’re getting shot at!”
The enemy snipers on the roof of the next building over were shooting at them with suppressed rifles, so there was no loud bang coming from the shot itself. The only noise they made was the sound of tiny sonic booms as the supersonic rounds zipped past his head and impacted on the wall behind him.
That was what he’d been hearing.
Training had taught Nick how to clear rooms, how to bait explosive breaches and blow open doors, how to conduct hand-to-hand combat. It had prepared him for the suck and stress of endless marches, no sleep, and impossible circumstances. It had even taught him how to shoot and kill people. But being shot at himself? And still do all those things he’d trained for while being shot at? That was graduate-course work.
The thought flashed through Nick’s mind: I’m still a young guy! He could really, no shit, die, right here, right now.
But he didn’t die. Ranger snipers started returning fire, and then the assault team made their way up onto that other rooftop. One intense firefight later it was the enemy snipers who were dead.
The night wasn’t over.
While the immediate danger of the enemy sniper team was neutralized, activity all around them was exploding, and they were in danger of becoming surrounded by hostiles. Nick and the rest of his machine gun team began moving out to secure the perimeter and make sure no one came in. As he moved, he glanced over his right shoulder—and spotted an MH-6 Little Bird helo in the distance flying dangerously low. At that moment Nick heard a loud BOOM. Smoke started pouring out of the top of the chopper and it started spinning. For a moment Nick thought it had been hit by an RPG; then he realized the pilot had hit a power line.
The bird went down about a mile from where Irving stood, watching it all happen. Shit, he thought, this is looking just like Black Hawk Down.
A platoon sergeant strode over to where Nick and a few other guys were standing and barked at Nick, “Hey, we’ve got a Little Bird down, we need you and your guys over there to go secure this pilot.”
They took off running, a mile-long dead sprint with hundreds of pounds of gear, Nick’s internal commentary running the whole time. I’m eighteen years old, and I’m going with a couple of teenagers to secure a freaking downed helicopter surrounded by hostiles. When they reached the Little Bird they climbed up on a berm and found the pilot cradled behind a bush, holding a little MP5 Heckler & Koch machine pistol. The poor guy was freaking out.
One of Nick’s squad members picked up a Mark 48, the same weapon Nick was packing (and a more substantial machine gun than the MP5) and started laying down lead. Some guy had been coming toward them with an AK-47. It seemed to Nick that the entire village was rolling in behind this guy, all of them with AK-47s. It was indeed starting to look like a scene from Somalia.
And then it got worse.
Nick glanced over to his right and was stunned to see a tank grinding its way in their general direction. Holy shit! he thought. These guys have tanks?
He swung to his right and aimed, centering his weapon’s infrared laser directly on the small sensor that sits on a little turret toward the front, where he figured the driver would be. If he made the shot, he knew he would at the very least halt the tank’s progress. If he was lucky, he’d kill the driver and maybe additional personnel in there to boot.
He flipped his Mark 48 off SAFE and slipped his finger inside the trigger guard, then felt the metal of the trigger press against his index finger as he began to squeeze.
A fraction of a second before the trigger engaged and the Mark 48 burst into life, the tank came to an abrupt halt, swiveled its big cannon, and pointed it right at Nick. Time seemed to come to a complete halt, too, as he gazed down that long, black hole. Well this sure was going to be an education. Less than an hour ago he’d been shot at by snipers, and now he was going to find out what it was like to be shot at with a 120mm tank round. That’s a “bullet” with a diameter bigger than his arm.
Oh shit, he thought. This is going to be very bad.
“Hey,” said a voice by his shoulder. It was their team leader. “Hey,” he repeated, “that’s our guys.”
It was an Abrams M1. Nick had been about to shoot a U.S. tank.
He slowly lowered his weapon, backed away from the tank, and went over to help secure the pilot.
His unit killed close to thirty insurgents that night, but their HVT had already moved on to another location. Didn’t matter. The pilot was safe, and their work was done for that night.
Nick never forgot the feeling of looking down the black tunnel of that tank’s gun.
* * *
Being in combat doesn’t always mean being shot at. Sometimes the threat of lethal violence simmers just beneath the surface of unfolding events and never quite erupts. Sometimes the tension of an uncertain standoff (are they bluffing or are they going to shoot?) or civilian interrogation (are they really just innocent civilians?) is so thick you could cut it into blocks and use it as high explosive. The reality of war encompasses a huge range of situations. But whether you’re facing off with armed insurgents in an urban ambush, or conducting sniper overwatch on a raid, or doing a room-to-room sweep in the dead of night and taking prisoners, missions are missions, war is war: you’re thrust into a situation where there are armed hostiles whose mission is to kill you, and no matter how well it was been planned it’s essentially a powder keg with a match tossed into the middle.
This is the central reality of war that’s impossible to convey in training: every op is semi-organized and highly lethal insanity. There’s no such thing as a safe mission. And even when that reality makes itself stark and clear, you have to jump in and perform anyway.
Every mission feels something like skydiving. There is an edge of anticipation, a fractional nervousness, but as soon as you jump off the ramp and you’re in the air, the nerves and anxiety and misgivings all disappear, blown off by the wind velocity of the reality you’ve plunged into. It all goes away, and you’re in the zone. You don’t think about anything or care about anything but the deadly game in which you’re engaged and doing whatever it takes to make sure your teammates come out of it alive, and if possible, that you do, too.
Which is an interesting distinction.
For some, access to that zone is denied. There are guys whose immediate and total response, when plunged into the boiling water of armed conflict, is to do everything they can to scramble back out again. There’s no room in their brain for concern over their teammates’ safety. It’s not that they don’t care about their teammates, it’s just that the scream of survival instinct is at such a deafening pitch, it drowns out everything else. I’ve seen it happen. So has everyone who’s ever gone into combat.
Nick saw it happen in Mosul in 2007, on his second deployment. His unit was already deep into an especially long and bitter firefight, when an RPG skipped off the front end of his Stryker and landed on the ground right in front of them.
One of the guys in Nick’s unit saw that unexploded grenade sitting there—and he just folded. Lay down and curled into the fetal position. And that was the end of that. He wasn’t moving.
Nick jumped up on the Stryker hatch and started laying down suppressive fire, dumping all seven mags into his M4, killing every enemy fighter within the immediate perimeter. The grenade never went off. And the whole time, this guy just lay there curled up on the round. After the mission wrapped, he was shipped directly home.
Rob Furlong saw it happen in Anaconda, when one of his team simply shut down, much like the guy in Nick’s unit.
In one particularly hairy mission my unit engaged in, we had just landed at our drop point in Afghanistan’s mountain country, when one of our guys suddenly said his ankle hurt. He turned around and climbed back on the chopper.
Okay, I and everyone else in our platoon thought, I know I don’t want to be next to him in a firefight.
I don’t judge these folks as lesser human beings or in some way morally flawed. It’s no indictment on their character. It’s simply this: they don’t belong in combat. The rigors and hell of military training do everything possible to weed these folks out beforehand, but no system is foolproof. Cowards leak through.
And the truth is, you don’t really know for sure about yourself, you can’t know for sure about yourself, until you are standing there in the smoke and clamor and adrenaline of war. Everyone thinks they’re going to be able to perform the job. But you just don’t know, until you know. When you go into combat for the first time there are the inevitable questions hovering in the back of your mind. Will I get shot? Killed?—those are back there, yes, but they’re not first and foremost. The bigger question is, Will I measure up? This is the question that most strongly stalks you as you approach your LZ: Do I have what it takes to go to war and perform, and not be a wuss?
That’s perhaps the most critical piece of information you gain in the first days of the Killing School’s graduate program, that you cannot get any earlier or anywhere else: this gut sense, once you’ve been out on a couple of missions, that you know who’s got it and who doesn’t. It’s a good feeling, to know: I have what it takes; I will not wimp out. I’ve got my brother’s back.
* * *
A few weeks before Rob Furlong arrived in Afghanistan, my platoon went on its first major mission, a search-and-destroy drop into the training compound in the caves of Zhawar Kili, planned for twelve hours, that would turn out to be an extended one-week operation. That first night, we staged in an abandoned village we found on top of the mountain there.
Just before dawn the next morning, a small team of us went out to conduct a BDA (battle damage assessment) on an area that had been bombed the night before, looking for the body of one particular KIA. We humped out for a while, maybe twelve to fifteen klicks, or kilometers (seven and a half to nine miles), reached the spot, and set up a perimeter. The sun was just starting to come up. Two guys went off searching for the body we were supposed to find; the rest of us sat tight.
A few minutes later we heard a group of men emerge from a nearby cave. While not close enough for them to notice us, they were close enough that we could see they were armed: RPGs, machine guns, AK-47s. This presented a problem. They significantly outnumbered us. Our lieutenant, who was part of the group, told me we had a nearby B-52 on comms that would drop a guided thousand-pound bomb called JDAM (joint direct attack munition). He needed me to give the range.
The problem: we had no range finder. Worse, I didn’t have my sniper scope, either, and no sniper rifle (this was supposed to be a twelve-hour op, remember), nothing but an M4, basically a lighter, smaller version of an M16 with a little ACOG mini scope. Nothing that would do us any good here. I was going to have to guesstimate the distance.
The reality of war.
Okay, guesstimate it would have to be. Not much margin of error here; if I was off the wrong way by a little, the bomb would kill us just as easily as the other guys. Hey, no pressure, I thought. I worked out the range—about five hundred yards, danger close—and gave coordinates to the LT, who relayed them to our guy on comms, who fed them to the B-52. By this time the enemy fighters had either seen us or heard us and were firing in our direction. The LT gave us permission and we started firing back, knowing a bomb was on its way. Toward them, hopefully.
The first bomb dropped wide. I’d hedged our bets and given coordinates about a hundred yards long. Better too far than too close. I gave adjusted coordinates to the LT. The second bomb was a direct hit—on them.
As the smoke cleared we walked over to do our BDA, not on the bomb drop from the night before but on the bomb drop we’d just called in. The graphite smell of the blast, mixed with the stench of burnt flesh, hovered over everything. There were no body parts, or at least not anything you’d recognize as such. Nothing that large. More like a vague foul-smelling smear. A thousand pounds of explosive dropped directly on top of you will do that.
It was a strange thing, to realize that there had been more than a dozen people standing here moments earlier, and now they were gone. Evaporated.
Later we all got an award for the action. It looks heroic on an award. This kind of thing looks heroic in a movie. When it’s happening, it doesn’t feel like heroism. It’s just the truth of the moment. You’re about to be killed. Or, you’re about to kill.
That’s the reality of war.