No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.
—Field Marshal Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke
“Three minutes out!” As Rob Furlong’s Chinook got close to their drop point the front door gunner suddenly opened up, letting it rip on the big gun. Sitting just behind him, Rob had just enough time to think, What the hell is he shooting at? when he saw a stream of tracers arcing back up directly toward them and zipping past their chopper.
In machine gun ammunition, every fifth round is a special round that contains an illuminant that will burn with a bright light, either red or green, as it flies, illuminating the gunner’s line of fire to help him stay on aim. That’s what Rob was seeing right now.
This is contact, Rob thought. We’re under contact. It’s happening, right now. It was his first time being under live fire.
They hadn’t even landed yet and things had already started going wrong.
As the front door gunner’s M240 spat rounds into the darkness Rob felt a surge of adrenaline pumping through his body. He felt his grip tighten on the big .50—a futile but irrepressible gesture. It was a weird combination of thrill and frustration, like a super-heightened version of that maddening waiting game. They were under attack. They were being shot at. And there was nothing he could do but grip the nylon netting and wait. He wanted in the worst way to get off that aircraft and down there on the ground, where he could do something.
He felt their craft veer off sharply to the right. Of course: their chopper must be breaking off and heading for an alternate LZ. But it didn’t take more than a few minutes to realize that wasn’t what was happening. Their aircraft was not heading for an alternative LZ. It seemed like they were flying north, heading back the way they’d come.
Wait—they’d been called off?
Once they got on the ground back at Bagram they got the update on what had happened. The entire airborne convoy had taken heavier than anticipated enemy fire. Of the eight fully loaded choppers that had left in the predawn darkness, most had turned back. However, a few actually had landed. One of those had carried 63 Alpha, the other Canadian team.
Their guys were over there on the ground—and they weren’t.
The men of 63 Bravo freaked out. “This is bullshit,” Rob told the ground crew at Bagram.
“Get us on a fucking aircraft,” McMeekin added. “We’re going back there, now!” Leaving their teammates behind out there in the mountains of Afghanistan, while they sat here on the ground? Absofuckinglutely unthinkable. Not happening. Canadians may be a polite people, but Rob and his mates could curse as well as any American sailor when the occasion demanded it.
The occasion demanded it.
It took a few hours, but before long they were loading onto the chopper again, heading back south for their rendezvous with war.
As they boarded the Chinook the second time, a young Delta sniper climbed in with them. They’d met earlier out on the airstrip at Bagram, when they were all sitting around after a debriefing, and Rob had noticed he was carrying an SR-25. They’d struck up a conversation about the merits of different sniper rifles. Now here he was, with his SR, heading out to the Shahikot Valley on the same aircraft Rob was taking.
They started talking about what they were heading into. Some of the Delta guys had already been out there, come back, and were on their way back out again.
“Shit, man,” said the young Delta operator. “We’re going into a hornet’s nest.”
* * *
War is improvisation. You’d like to think it’s different, that everything goes according to plan. Sometimes that happens. But not very often. Here’s what normally happens: things start going to hell the moment the shit starts hitting the fan. That is exactly what was happening in Anaconda.
The plan was, go in, provide overwatch while the American forces round up the bad guys, and then get out. The op’s planners still had the expectation that enemy forces were small, ill-prepared for a set battle, and would either be killed or voluntarily surrender on short order. Thus, the snipers’ task would be a quick in and out: predawn insert one day to exfil the next. A one-day op. Easy.
The check is in the mail. Promises, promises.
Back at Bagram a few hours earlier when they’d been packing their kit, the Americans had told them, “Guys, don’t worry about bringing sleeping bags and stoves and Gucci kit—” the term Gucci kit referring to equipment you buy personally to add to your unit-supplied kit “—we’re only going for twenty-four hours.”
In their briefing, Rob and his teammates had not been told exactly how long they were expected to be out on this mission, nor precisely what the mission was. They knew there was quite a bit of secrecy around it, and that something big was happening out there. No one needed to tell them that; they could feel the hum and crackle of excitement. Now their American colleagues were telling them it was going to be an in-and-out run. Not a big deal. That they should pack light. But that went against their training. The minimum they should pack for, they’d been taught, was seventy-two hours, no matter what the mission was. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. They ignored the Americans’ advice and went on with their packing.
As it turned out, even packing for seventy-two hours would not be nearly enough.
* * *
When Jason Delgado stepped off the transport plane in the early months of 2004, he found himself in … well, he wasn’t sure just what the hell this place was. It had been nearly a year since he and Jesse Davenport had been part of the column driving up through the center of the country to topple Saddam’s regime. Mission accomplished. Now, here he was again, this time in the western part of the country with a different unit—Lima Company, Third Battalion, Seventh Marine Regiment—if not exactly to “keep the peace,” at least to help establish the peace. Help the country put itself back on its feet. Win some hearts and minds.
But this place? He could have been standing in the middle of some Dallas suburb. Had he taken a plane to Iraq, or Vegas? Strolling through the base he saw a nightclub, a Carl’s Jr., a Burger King, a Pizza Hut, and a KFC. A movie theater. Hell, they had a Cinnabon.
Standing roughly halfway between Baghdad and Iraq’s western border, the Al Asad Air Base was then the largest U.S. base in western Iraq, the Anbar Province equivalent of Baghdad’s Green Zone, a six-hundred-plus-square-mile oasis of imported Western amenities.
This isn’t Iraq, thought Delgado. This is America in a bubble in Iraq.
He wasn’t there long. The 3/7 Marines were told their main base of operations would be a place about ninety miles to the northwest called Al Qaim, just fifteen miles from Iraq’s border with Syria.
When he got to Al Qaim he found a pretty cozy setup. The Americans had commandeered a major railway station for use as a military base, and Jason’s accommodations had bunk beds with mattresses, air-conditioning, running water, all the amenities. In the chaos of the invasion the previous spring there’d been times when they would go thirty days without taking a bath. But that was an invasion. Now they were in the occupation/rebuild phase, and by all accounts it was supposed to be a much calmer, more peaceful deployment.
He was looking forward to a little comfort. The check is in the mail.
The moment he got to Al Qaim he was tapped to take a few of his PIGs and go head up the sniper platoon at the western forward operating base (FOB) in the nearby border city of Husaybah. He pulled his gear together and got ready for the quick drive out there. He hoped it would be as peaceful and as nice as Al Qaim.
It wasn’t.
Husaybah was a funky square mile of urban crawl, population roughly 100,000—think Erie, Pennsylvania, or Flint, Michigan, only in post-invasion Iraq. Situated right at an angular spot where Syria juts into Iraq’s western territory, the place was a hotbed of criminal activity, with a long history of serving as the region’s capital for trafficking in illegal goods, including the shuffling of arms (and the people to shoot them) back and forth across the border.
When the 3/7 Marines arrived in Husaybah they were taking over from the army’s Third Infantry Division. The Third ID was not big on putting their soldiers out on the streets in harm’s way. They would drive through the city in small tanks and armored Humvees and then hurry back to their bases. This was something the commanding officer of the 3/7 Marines, Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Lopez, wanted to change. He wanted grunts out on the streets, covering the city with patrols. The departing army unit thought the marines were crazy to walk through the streets. To Colonel Lopez, that was the only way to do this thing right: make sure the good people of Husaybah knew who was in charge here. Driving around in armored vehicles was not the marine way. Show of force: that was the marine way.
So the marines hit the streets. By and large, things seemed tolerably quiet. Yes, there were small outbreaks of violence here and there, the occasional roadside bomb or fitful armed skirmish. Yes, every so often someone fired mortar rounds at the marine camp. But it all seemed fairly random, nothing organized. And that was why they were there, right? Show of force.
Camp Husaybah, where the U.S. forces were stationed, was set up in a group of abandoned buildings on a little trapezoidal patch of land at the city’s northwest corner, butted right up against the desolate fifty-yard-wide strip of no-man’s-land that formed the Iraq-Syria border. It had no running water, no working plumbing, no city services, no amenities, nothing. Definitely no Carl’s Jr.
Jason and the others walked into the place, noticing the oppressive heat inside, and were just about to ask where they should stash their gear, when they were called up.
“Delgado! Get your section ready. You’re out in thirty.”
So much for getting settled into their new home. Not only had they not stashed their gear, they hadn’t even been told yet where to stash it. They dropped all their stuff where they stood, grabbed up their weapons and assorted equipment, and got ready to head back east out of the camp and into downtown Husaybah on their first mission here.
It was supposed to be a routine LPOP (listening post and observation post), watching over the Husaybah police station and reporting on anything that looked suspicious. Something just to give them the feel of the place. A quiet night of nothing but monotony and hourly radio check-in.
Promises, promises.
* * *
When Nick Irving boarded his C-17 in early 2009, bound for southern Afghanistan and what would be his last deployment, there were two things on his mind. There was what he hoped to see happen. After more than three years and multiple deployments as a ranger, he’d just spent the last seven or eight months in advanced sniper training. He’d busted down doors and shot machine guns and been part of plenty of fast and furious firefights. He wanted to get down slow and quiet in the dark, and stalk. He wanted to go out on a mission that lasted for hours unseen, silently zeroing in on his prey. He wanted to take the long shots.
He wanted to see some Carlos Hathcock action.
And then there was what he expected—which was to spend the next few months being bored out of his mind.
Back home at Fort Benning, rangers who’d just rotated back to the States from Afghanistan told Nick and the others in his platoon that they needed to be prepared for a whole lot of nothing. Reports from Kandahar were that things were very quiet over there. “Better take your Xbox and PlayStation with you, dude,” was a comment he’d heard more than once. Some of his teammates loaded up on DVDs of their favorite films before leaving. They figured they’d have a lot of cinema time to catch up on.
He had already deployed once to Afghanistan, up in Bagram and Jalalabad. They’d spent a lot of time in the mountains up there, working as support to other Spec Ops forces already in theater; it had been a lot of walking up and down the mountains in the bone-freezing cold. Not many people lived out there; they’d see a single house and then nothing else for miles. To Nick it seemed like Afghanistan’s Appalachia. They’d go hit or capture their HVT, then go back home. They got into a few firefights, but getting fired on was more the exception than the rule in that deployment.
When he arrived at FOB Wilson, just west of Kandahar and about an hour’s drive from Helmand Province, he could see things were different. For one thing, it was a hell of a lot hotter. And there were no mountainside villages here; this was a land of mixed desert scrub, flat sprawling towns and cities. And poppy fields. A lot of poppy fields.
The other guys started unpacking their Xboxes and PlayStations, DVD players, music and movies. Not Nick. He liked his room simple and sparse. Maybe he’d do some reading. Maybe he’d do a hell of a lot of dry-firing.
Welcome to boredom kingdom.
Except that the boredom didn’t last more than five hours before Nick and his spotter, Mike Pemberton, were summoned for their first mission and plunged into a breakneck op tempo more insane than anything Nick had ever seen.
* * *
When people asked Alex, “Why did you want to become a SEAL?” he had plenty of answers. “For the thrill of adventure,” he’d tell them. A passion for the outdoors. A love of travel. If he knew the person better he might say, out of a desire to be thrust into the chaos and fury of combat, where he would be tested to his core. A desire to find out how he would hold up, whether he did in fact have what it took to stand side by side with his brothers in the face of mortal threat and not waver or buckle.
And all these things were true—but they weren’t the truth.
The truth was, Alex joined the SEAL teams out of a morbid fascination with the idea of hunting other men. Hunting them honorably, legally, and in pursuit of a just cause … but still: hunting them. That was why he joined the SEALs.
So far, though, it hadn’t worked out that way. The world was not at war when he signed his induction forms in 1987, fresh out of high school. Three years later he was in the middle of a fairly boring peacetime deployment when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Within months Alex found himself in the Persian Gulf, participating in Desert Storm—but from his vantage point, not much really happened. That action consisted mostly of Americans dropping bombs and Iraqi forces running. For warriors like Alex, sitting on the sidelines even as they were in the midst of it, Desert Storm was like watching a gigantic videogame.
After returning from Kuwait Alex had gone through sniper school, failed the stalk portion, then spent a few uneventful years doing what SEALs do (train, train, and then train some more) before going back through it again in 1994. The second time through he crushed it. Alex was now officially a SEAL sniper, and champing at the bit more than ever.
That October Saddam once again started rattling his sabers, moving his forces toward Kuwait to reach within fifteen miles of its border. An amphibious readiness group (ARG) of the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), led by the USS Tripoli, was dispatched in a mission officially named Operation Vigilant Warrior, but which Alex and his mates thought of as Operation Back the Fuck Down.
Saddam backed the fuck down.
As the Tripoli ARG made its way back home, it crossed paths with another ARG heading right back out to the Persian Gulf. This second ARG, led by the USS Essex, and including elements of the 13th MEU, was preparing for an entirely different mission. For the complex, delicate, and potentially volatile task ahead of them, the operation’s joint marine/naval command had assigned a platoon of SEALs to join the marines, knowing that the SEAL snipers had a unique ability, with their .50 cal sniper rifles, to reach out and touch someone in a highly surgical manner, should the need arise.
One of the platoon’s two snipers was Alex.
* * *
On their Chinook’s second approach Rob Furlong’s sniper team made it to their LZ without any further contact. The moment the chopper settled itself onto the ground they were out of there, hoofing their way southward and up the slope of the valley’s western side. The other team, 63 Alpha, had gone in under the cover of darkness, just as planned. No such luck for Rob’s team; the lengthy delay meant it was already bright daylight by the time they were making their way toward high ground.
The Shahikot Valley runs on a diagonal, from southwest to northeast, about five miles long and two and a half miles wide, its eastern ridge defined by a range of soaring mountains and its western ridge by a single long mile-high ridge dubbed the Whale. Rob’s chopper entered from the north, passing the Whale on their right, and dropped them at the foot of one of the eastern mountains about three quarters of the way down the valley. The plan was to head immediately for the southernmost mountain, Takur Ghar, which at nearly two miles in height was also the range’s tallest mountain, and make their way up toward the presumed crash site of a Chinook that had been shot down up there.
Their mission: secure the crash site so a rescue operation could proceed.
As soon as they were clear of the chopper they tried to raise comms with 63 Alpha, but they couldn’t get through to them. They had no idea where their compatriots were or what they were doing. They were on their own.
Rob and his two teammates started moving into the valley, making their way southward and upward. The valley floor of the Shahikot Valley was already about a mile and a half above sea level, but the summit of Takur Ghar loomed above them another half mile, and they had easily a mile to go horizontally.
Partway there, though, they got a call on their radio. The plan had changed. Instead of heading farther south to scale Takur Ghar, the Canadians were to remain at their current latitude and move to high ground, where they would help support a brigade of troops from the U.S. Tenth Mountain Division who were pouring into the valley from the southern end.
They were not told exactly why they were called off, but the abrupt change in plans made Rob suspect that one of two things had happened: either another team had already secured the LZ they’d been heading for, or it was too late for anyone to do any rescue at all. But that was all speculation. Orders were orders, and they had a job to do.
As they moved up the slope, McMeekin got a call from Lieutenant Justin Overbaugh, the commander of the American scout platoon they were attached to. Overbaugh said there was a Toyota pickup sitting in their area, and asked if they could get the vehicle in their sights.
They scoped out the area. Sure enough, they found a Toyota pickup truck, about eight hundred meters away. They radioed back, “Yeah, we have eyes on.”
“Can you neutralize the vehicle?”
The truck wasn’t moving. In fact, there was nobody in the truck. It was just sitting there. The lieutenant didn’t say why he wanted Rob’s team to hit the thing. They just got the order to hit it. They figured, either they believed this truck posed some kind of threat, or they just wanted to do something to drum up some chatter on the radio channels, maybe help get a better sense of who was there in the valley.
Rob’s team was the logical choice for this task, mainly because of the thunderstick he was hauling around with him.
It takes a particular skill set to handle the .50 cal, maybe even a particular temperament. There are plenty of good snipers who are not great .50 shooters, either because they just aren’t uncomfortable with it or because they haven’t learned how to mitigate and absorb its massive recoil. It’s a very unforgiving weapon if you don’t know how to shoot it correctly. It tends to be a black-and-white thing: either you like shooting .50s, or you don’t—and there are more in the don’t category than in the do.
When Rob returned from sniper school in late 2001, the Canadian Armed Forces had just received a shipment of McMillan TAC-50s as a trial purchase. He went out on the range with it. It was love at first shot.
One day they were shooting their standard rifles at a steel target at two hundred yards, and just for fun he grabbed the TAC .50 and took a shot. It didn’t just hit the target, it took the entire thing and flipped it over. This is a steel plate weighing hundreds of pounds.
Now he would have his first opportunity to put it to the test in the field of battle.
He unfolded and extended the big gun’s two bipod legs and settled them firmly into the dusty, granular hardscrabble, then lay down behind it, placed his left cheek against the stock and the butt on his shoulder, and sighted in. Squeezed the trigger.
BOOM!
He took out the entire engine block with one well-placed shot.
It was the first shot they took as part of Anaconda, Rob’s first shot ever fired in the commission of war. You could say it was his first kill shot, if you want to look at it that way: they left one dead Toyota on the Afghan mountainside.
They didn’t know this until much later, but that shot did in fact generate a ton of chatter. American technicians working the signals intercept detail reported that that they started picking up a burst of back-and-forth immediately after Rob neutralized the Toyota with his big gun. The boom of the .50 also telegraphed their own position to the enemy. It wouldn’t be long before they would be under fire themselves.
They continued moving in, climbing as they went. After a while Tim stopped, pointed upward and to the south, and said, “Hey, I can see some guys up there on that ridgeline.”
Rob pulled out one of their spotting scopes and started scanning the distant ridgeline near the top of the mountain while McMeekin got on the radio to Lieutenant Overbaugh.
“Sir,” Tim said, “we have eyes on possible friendlies.” They knew some SEAL scouts had gone somewhere up into that area a few days earlier to provide a crucial reconnaissance element; perhaps a few were still up there.
As they continued scanning the area through his spotting scope, Rob saw a guy crouched up on a distant ridgeline. The man was visible only from about chest-level up, and Rob couldn’t tell for sure what division he was from, but he was obviously an American: he could see him just well enough to clearly make out the unmistakable American BDU (battle dress uniform) top, American helmet with its “rhino horn,” the top-mounted night vision bracket, and the M4 he was carrying.
Rob told Tim, “Yeah, we’ve definitely got a friendly at this location,” and he gave him the coordinates.
McMeekin relayed the information over comms, then relayed Overbaugh’s response back to Rob: “Negative. We do not have friendly forces in that area.”
Rob said, “Um, yeah we do—I’m looking right at them. Radio back.”
They went back and forth like that for a few moments. Then, as Rob continued watching the guy with the M4, the man stood all the way up—and Rob saw that underneath the American BDU top he was wearing a long cloak of Afghan drab.
In an instant Rob understood for the first time what he was seeing.
That wasn’t his BDU top. That wasn’t his rifle. That wasn’t his helmet. These guys had already killed one of ours—a SEAL, a ranger, Rob didn’t know exactly who—and then taken his clothes and weapon.
An electric current of ice-cold fury shot through Rob’s body. That was the moment it all became as real as blood.
That piece of shit is up there walking that ridgeline, he thought, wearing one of OUR boy’s things like a fucking trophy.
Now he knew exactly why they were called off their original approach to the crash site on Takur Ghar. It was because it was too late for a rescue. Our boys were already dead.
In fact, a rescue had been attempted: a Chinook full of rangers had been flown up to the top of Takur Ghar (the same chopper that my SEAL teammates and I were sitting in when those rangers were sent in to replace us) and had been shot down as well. By this time Neil Roberts was gone, and now others had died, too. The chain of command would spend the entire day trying to figure out how to mount another rescue operation to rescue the first rescue operation.
But Rob didn’t know any of this at the time. All he knew was that the rescue effort must have gone wrong, and this guy standing on that distant ridgeline had killed one of our guys and was now walking around in his clothes.
Something in Rob ignited. It was this simple: he was going to kill those guys. He didn’t care what it took or what he might have to sacrifice. If it took his life to do that, then that’s what it would take. Up to that point they’d been following their training, following orders, doing what they’d been schooled to do. It had been, for lack of a better word, a job. Not anymore. In that instant it had become deeply personal.
He stared at the figure in his spotting scope and thought, You’re mine.
* * *
As Jason and his team rode out into Husaybah they got their first tour of the place that would be their home for the next few months.
Husaybah is laid out in a fairly regular grid, about one square mile, bordered by large avenues. The streets running north to south on the eastern and western edges had been dubbed West End Road and East End Road. The southern edge was bounded by a road they called Route Train, for the Iraqi Republic Railroad tracks that ran along a few dozen yards south of the city. Right now they were driving out along the main street that ran along the northern side of town, which the Americans called Market Street.
This was where the police station was located. Their mission: put eyes on the police station and report any suspicious activity there.
After getting a quick orientation of the town, they decided to set up their observation post in the big Baath Party headquarters building, abandoned since Saddam’s ouster. This not only was one of the biggest structures in the town but it also happened to sit on the south side of Market Street directly across from the police station. Perfect.
They inserted via combined antiarmor team (CAAT), a sort of rolling artillery unit that groups a half dozen to a dozen guys in a few vehicles with machine guns and heavy artillery, such as grenade launchers and TOW missiles. Jason and his team rode the CAAT across Market Street to within about two blocks of the building, near the northeast corner of the city, then dismounted so they could make a quiet approach. There were five of them: Jason, the two PIGs in his team, Josh Mavica and Brandon DelFiorentino, and two infantry guys along to serve as security.
They crept through the alleyways until they reached the Baath building, then quietly broke in and slipped up to the third floor, where they set up their urban hide by some north-facing windows that gave them a clear view of the police station across the street.
Once they were in, the first thing they did was a radio check.
Nothing.
The way their radio comms worked was by using freq hop, a technique of rapidly skipping through different frequencies as they broadcast. If anyone listened in, all they’d hear on any given frequency was a blip. The only way to hear the full transmission was if they had the algorithm that generated the pattern of freq hopping, which they called the radio’s fill.
Somehow, in the relatively calm fifteen-minute ride from Camp Husaybah through the city, both MBITR (multi-band inter/intra team) radios they’d brought had lost their fill.
Classic, thought Jason. He set DelFiorentino to screw around with the radio while he and Mavica started observing the police station and annotating their observations. An enormous amount of a sniper’s time is doing exactly what they were doing now: watching, sketching, and writing.
The minutes ticked by.
They watched.
They sketched.
They wrote.
Until suddenly all hell broke loose.
They’d been there just under an hour when they heard machine guns going off, from what direction they could not immediately discern. Bullets started smacking into the lips of the windows where they’d been sitting, looking out. Some were pinging directly into the room. They all threw themselves down on the floor, “belly and dick to the ground,” as Jason puts it.
“No fucking way!” yelled Jason. “How the hell did they see us?” Bullets were flying everywhere, chewing up the room’s sparse interior decoration.
Then they heard another sound chip in—similar, but slightly different. Louder. It was another machine gun going off, but this one was much closer. From the sounds of it, they were under attack from an assortment of machine guns, perhaps a few blocks away, and now one of their own guys right outside their building was giving them cover fire.
Yes! thought Jason. The cavalry to the rescue.
They started finding cracks where they could peep out. Once they got eyes on the scene, they realized the picture was completely different. The close-by gunfire wasn’t covering them at all. It was coming from a machine gunner perched atop the police station—only he was oriented to the north, away from them.
They looked way out past the gunner to the north and saw a string of muzzle flashes in a field some distance off. That gunfire wasn’t directed at them. Whoever those gunners were—Saddam loyalists? Zarqawi’s boys? some organized criminal element with a local beef?—they were firing on the police station itself, and the room they were sitting in was just getting incidental fire and ricochet.
Okay, so the good news was, nobody was shooting at them and they hadn’t been discovered. The bad news was, plenty of stray rounds from the barrage of machine gun fire were still spraying into their room.
They had no radio anyway, which meant they had no way of finding out what the hell was going on out there. Jason give the signal to initiate extract.
Their extract plan was to ride back out with the CAAT team, which had a react time of three to four minutes. Which meant that if they got into deep shit, they knew that they’d need to hang on for at least four minutes before they could get safe escort out of there. It was also a no-comms plan: instead of calling for help on their radio (which was still not working) they were supposed to signal the call to exfil with a red star cluster, a small aluminum tube with a tiny rocket-propelled package that fires up to a few hundred feet and then bursts into an illuminated five-pointed star.
He grabbed the aluminum tube and ran to the rear window, away from the gunfight, then slammed the device on the windowsill to initiate it. As it went off it smacked the lip of the windowsill. In his haste, Jason had neglected to hold it properly (hand upside down, so you can immediately flip it upright to point into the air), and he nearly launched the damn thing right into the room. Fortunately, he managed to flip it around enough to get it aimed out and up. A few seconds later the CAAT team was seeing Jason’s bat signal lighting up this funky Gotham’s skyline.
Or at least they hoped so. There was so much gunfire happening, they couldn’t assume that anyone would notice their get-us-outta-here fireworks display. Figuring they might need to manage their own E and E (escape and evasion) back through town to the FOB, they started quickly packing up their gear.
Then it got worse. Now they heard yet another gun, a big one, joining in the mix—GA-GA-GA-GA-GA-GA-GA-GA—and it was coming in closer and closer to where they were sitting. Jason ran around to different windows to steal more peeks wherever he could. When he got around to the east-facing side of the building he realized there was now a convoy coming up from the east to join the party. Not from the west, where Camp Husaybah was. These guys, whoever they were, were ripping down the street like something out of a Hollywood movie, coming in from Route Jade, the eastern continuation of Market Street. They must have come from the FOB at Al Qaim. They were coming to rescue Jason and his guys.
Jason ran over to one of the front windows and saw one of the convoy vehicles parked directly in front of the Baath building. A few others drove past and parked in front of the building next door, to the west, which was a large mosque. Marines started piling out of the vehicles, deploying security teams, and quickly aligning themselves in a stack. Jason recognized them: it was a Marine Force Recon element—basically the Corps’ version of SEALs or Delta.
“Yo, guys,” Jason called back into the room, “it’s not CAAT, it’s fucking Recon to come get us out!”
Jason knew you don’t just go popping out of doorways on these guys. Too easy to get shot that way. He initiated the pre-coordinated signal to ensure friendly fire was not directed their way and started yelling out the window, “Friendly! Friendly!”
The Recon marine standing security in front of their building looked straight up, saw Jason, and shouted up, “Friendly? You American?”
“Yeah,” Jason yelled back. “American! We’re coming down. We lost comm.”
The guy shouted back, “Come on down. It’s cool.”
They grabbed their gear and ran down the few flights of stairs. When they got outside to where the marine was standing, Jason said, “What’s up, bro? Why are you guys rolling up here?”
The guard said, “We came to pick up a sniper team.”
Jason said, “Yeah, that’s us.”
He said, “Wait—that’s you guys?”
Jason said, “Yeah, dude, it’s us. You got us.”
“Oh, shit!” said the marine. “We thought you were in that building,” and he pointed over at the mosque.
“Nah,” said Jason, “we were in this building right here.” He jerked his thumb back to point behind him.
“Then what’s that building?”
Jason said, “Man, that’s a mosque.”
“Oh, shit,” the guard said again. “Come on, we might want to tell the lieutenant before they—”
Boom! Boom! Boom!
A string of charges went off. An instant later a truck barreled in from the street, knocking down a big chunk of the mosque’s front wall before jerking to a stop. Marines piled out with door-busters and flashbangs and started clearing room to room, blowing all the locks off the doors. Another stack lined up to go in right behind them.
The young guard went up to the lieutenant and said, “Hey, sir, these are the snipers.”
The lieutenant was so hyped up that he didn’t fully grasp what the kid said. “Snipers? All right, get in the stack.”
The young marine said, “No, sir—they’re the snipers! The snipers we came to get!”
The lieutenant turned to look at him, and the penny dropped. He looked at Jason and the other snipers. “You guys are not in there?”
Jason said, “No, sir, we’re right here.”
“Well, then who the hell’s in there?”
“Nobody, sir.”
The young marine added, “That’s a mosque, sir.”
“Oh, shit!” said the lieutenant. He surveyed the wreckage for a moment and then said, more to himself than anyone else, “They’re going to be plenty pissed in the morning.”
He called in to his base in Al Qaim to let them know they’d picked up the sniper team, then gave the call sign to load up and pull out. The rest of the unit came streaming out of that building like a waterfall and loaded up on the vehicles in what seemed to Jason like less than a second. Jason and the others jumped on, too, and the marine convoy took off westward to bring the snipers back to Camp Husaybah.
At which point they saw, way down the street ahead of them, a convoy of trucks with guns mounted on their backs rolling toward them. It looked like the ICDC, Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, an armed indigenous security force created by the Coalition’s provisional government to help keep order. But wait—they weren’t coming to attack the marine column, were they? They were on our side, or were supposed to be. But it was hard to tell for sure. The armed elements in Iraq were forming factions and splitting into variously aligned groups faster than the Americans could keep track. It was hard to know who was who and whom you could trust, if anyone.
As the two convoys got closer Jason noticed another pickup truck swing in from a side street and join in ahead of the ICDC column.
“Got some headlights coming our way,” called out a marine. “What is that?”
Jason and his guys got on their scopes and peered up the street. There was a DShK (pronounced dooshka) mounted on the goddamn truck. The DShK is a heavy, Soviet-made antiaircraft gun. You see a DShK coming toward you, it’s a decent bet the guy behind it is not a fan of yours. And this truck was coming in fast.
They conveyed the information. The marines fired at the DShK-laden pickup until it hit an embankment and flipped over. Seconds later they were driving past it and on their way back to the camp.
Welcome to Husaybah, Delgado, thought Jason. It was the most bizarre extract he had ever witnessed.
As they drove west on Market Street, Jason thought about Al Asad, where he’d been just days earlier. Like Baghdad’s Green Zone, Al Asad was probably something like what Americans hoped would become the new reality in Iraq: a Western-style democracy with Starbucks and Cinnabons on every street corner. Dream on. Al Asad was someone’s fantasy of Iraq.
Husaybah was the reality of Iraq.
* * *
On Nick Irving’s first night in Helmand Province he and his spotter, Pemberton, were sent out to provide overwatch as their unit, Charlie Company, First Platoon, went on a fairly routine mission to capture a maker of suicide vests. A simple snatch-and-grab, just like the missions they’d run in northern Afghanistan.
Within minutes after arriving on site, the assault team had their HVT—but while they all sat awaiting an early exfil, Nick and Pemberton saw three figures with AK-47s, about four hundred yards from their hasty hide site, doing their best to sneak up on the American squad. The two men silently sighted in, let out their breath, and squeezed. Nick dropped one; Pemberton took out a second. The third began to run, but as the classic sniper saying goes, “Don’t bother running: you’ll only die tired.” Nick tracked his motion for a second or two, then nailed him with a single shot. Thirty seconds and three kills between them.
An exciting first night, Nick thought with a trace of regret that it was already over. And that, he figured, was the only action they would be seeing for weeks, maybe for the whole deployment. Boredom kingdom, right?
But the next night they were called out again. Again, the assault team quickly bagged their target, and again, Irving and Pemberton spotted an immediate threat, this time in the form of a lone figure they glimpsed through a canopy of trees running toward a weapons squad with a Russian grenade. Nick’s first shot missed; Pemberton’s shot nicked a tree branch and was deflected; Nick’s second shot burst in through the man’s back and pushed his heart clean out of his chest, still pumping blood.
Two nights, two missions. So … was that all the action they’d be seeing for a while?
Apparently not, because just days later they were called out yet again, and this time things got a little more complicated.
On the way to their objective they were ambushed and pinned down in the middle of a small village by four guys on a rooftop about 150 yards away. Using the lip of the roof as cover, the shooters were peeking over the ledge just enough to survey the scene and take a few more shots. As Nick sighted in, he discovered something interesting: when he shone IR (infrared) light on their eyes, they glowed bright white. He thought, Hey, that’s pretty neat. Then he shot them. Bam, Bam, Bam, like targets in a shooting gallery, the first three went down one after the other. The fourth tried to crawl away. He did not get far.
As they made their way closer to their objective (still a few klicks away) they encountered more firefights. Intel came from an overhead AC-130 gunship that a small group from their main objective had left the building and run into a forested area, maybe four hundred yards from their current position. Evidently they’d heard the ruckus and decided to squirt. The snipers took a squad with them, plus their dog, Bruno, and the dog’s handler, to slip out to that area and capture or kill these guys.
Nick and Pemberton stopped to set up overwatch at an irrigation mound about a hundred yards away from the wood line, while the rest of the guys continued to advance. They lay down against the mound, propped their rifles up on top of the berm, and watched the squad’s progress through their night vision.
Nick turned on his IR light and started shining his laser into the woods. At first, he couldn’t see a thing. Then he noticed something weird: he saw little white dots appear, then disappear, and reappear. Was he seeing things? Were there fireflies in Afghanistan? Nick wasn’t sure.
Then he realized what he was seeing: it was the eyes of the squirters lurking in the woods, facing the Americans. They were blinking.
At this point the line squad was maybe twenty-five feet away from the wood line and closing in on these guys fast.
Nick got on his radio. “Hey, are you guys seeing them?”
“Where?” they said back.
“You’re walking right up to one, man! There’s a dude at your twelve o’clock, twenty feet in front of you!”
“I don’t see shit.”
Nobody in the squad could see a thing, and they were about to walk right into them. Nick couldn’t shoot at them because his guys would be caught right in the middle. He radioed again and told them to stop. As they froze in place and carefully went down on one knee, Nick got one set of blinking eyes in his crosshairs. He slipped off his safety.
“Hey,” Nick said to one of them. “Listen, I’m going to drop one of these guys. But I have to shoot right over your shoulder—so you have to stay really, really still.”
“Roger that,” came the reply. The kneeling ranger stayed really, really still.
Nick’s finger tightened on the trigger—and just as he was about to squeeze off a round the squirter moved. Nick saw a long glint and a spark and had just time to think, Shit, that’s a machine gun, when a burst of gunfire shot out from the tree line.
Everyone in the squad hit the ground, but as they did one of the rangers took a round in the helmet. Another got hit in his night-vision goggles, shattering the device.
Nick immediately started putting down suppressive fire.
Bruno, the ranger dog, took off toward the shooters, took a bullet in the ribs, but kept going, caught up to the guys in the woods and started biting them viciously.
Nick found one target and shot the man directly in the head, then took out a second.
The squad leader got to his feet to drag out one of the men who’d been shot. At the same time he was dragging he was also doing his best to stay low; as he dug in with his back leg he had his front leg extended out at a pretty good distance, halfway to a full split. As Nick watched him he glimpsed one of those sets of blinking white dots appear right through the space between the team leader’s legs, maybe twenty feet beyond him.
The man was about one football field away.
Nick took careful aim.
At a hundred yards, that bullet was going to reach its position directly between the squad leader’s legs in one tenth of a second or less. Too fast for his friend’s legs to change position much.
This should work, Nick thought. I really hope I don’t shoot this guy’s balls off.
He took the shot.
The bullet traveled more or less in a straight line—no arc to speak of in a mere one hundred yards—and screamed between the squad leader’s legs without touching him and onward twenty more yards, where it found its target.
The guy’s head exploded—came completely off the neck.
Their saving grace was that the enemy did not have night vision, and in the dark they didn’t have good visibility, even at twenty-five feet. The rangers managed to keep dragging both shot men back from the tree line.
Nick was so glad he hadn’t shot that poor guy’s nuts off.
As Nick continued doing his best to acquire targets in the thick of the forest, one of the rangers called in an air strike. They were far too close for five-hundred-pounders, so they opted to call in some 105mm howitzer rounds. Even with the 105s, they were at the absolute minimum possible distance.
The first howitzer strike was way off.
Nick called a better set of coordinates back to their RTO (radio telephone operator), who relayed them to the howitzer. For a few moments, the ground around them turned to jelly as the big explosive shells did their work.
Once it got still again, they got up and advanced toward the tree line. There were fingers on the ground, butt cheeks, thighs, faces. They walked around picking up the pieces to try to patch together who was who. It was such a mess they never were able to determine exactly how many bodies there were out there.
The rangers had lost nobody on the team. The two men who’d been shot in the helmet both suffered only bruises, and Bruno was fine once the canine handler got his ribs wrapped up and gave him some medical care. They all carried on with the rest of the mission, which lasted another four hours. The primary objective was secured, that is, bagged and tagged.
Nothing in Nick’s previous deployments had quite prepared him for this. In Iraq he’d seen a fairly heavy op tempo. Still, the firefights there were mostly more one-sided. Typically they would catch their targets off guard and have the advantage of surprise and overwhelming force. It was generally more like being on a SWAT team raid than engaging in an entrenched gun battle.
But this? This was insane. It seemed like everywhere they went there were Taliban taking arms against them. They were receiving contact constantly, and sometimes the other guys would actually own the firefight for a while before the rangers managed to regain fire superiority.
And it kept going like that. They’d be out night after night, sometimes multiple missions per night, then get a break for a day or two, maybe even three—and then be back at it. They traveled all over the province, north, south, east, west, everywhere, rolling up HVTs. On one op Nick and Pemberton killed five or six Taliban commanders in a single night.
If it wasn’t exactly the Carlos Hathcock kind of work he’d always dreamed of doing, it certainly was more action, and crazier action, than Nick had ever seen before.
* * *
For three months, from December 1994 through February 1995, Alex Morrison’s platoon ambled around the Persian Gulf on their amphibious warship (otherwise known as a “gator freighter”) as part of the Essex ARG. There wasn’t much to do; there never is. Being part of an ARG is typically as boring as an all-week C-SPAN marathon.
Still, every chance they got, every time they put in to port and could get off the ship for any length of time, Alex and the platoon’s other sniper would head ashore to go off and find somewhere they could practice. They wanted to keep their shooting skills honed to a razor’s edge, since as near as they could tell they’d soon be needed, or so they assumed. They hadn’t actually been told anything about why they were there or exactly what was the point of treading water in the Gulf for weeks on end. But they didn’t have to be told; they could connect the dots.
Somalia had been a shit storm. In October ’93, less than a year after Operation Hopeless began, everything had gone to hell in a battle that left eighteen American Spec Ops warriors dead and the United States deeply traumatized. Within weeks of the Battle of Mogadishu, the U.S. had washed its hands of the whole operation and turned it over to the U.N., who gave up on it after another year of trying. The decision to pull the plug had already been announced. Everyone knew the Americans would have to lead the final evacuation. That was why Alex and his teammates were there.
And now here they were, anchored four miles off the southern Somalia coast, all briefed up and ready to go.
They knew that Operation United Shield (or Operation Abandon Hope, as one wag had dubbed it) was supposed to be a peaceful withdrawal. They also knew this was one seriously funky neighborhood. The odds that the locals would let it go without making some kind of play were ridiculously low.
For the past few days, Alex and his fellow SEALs had been busy doing hydrographic surveys, a throwback to the World War II days when underwater demolition teams (UDT, the precursors of SEALs) would swim in close to shore, gather as much data as they could, and then put it into a hand-drawn map for the landing crews to use in navigating a landing. Or to blow the crap out of whatever they needed to blow up. Hydrographic surveys are an exacting, time-consuming, tedious process. They used to make us do them during BUD/S as a way to wear us down. Alex could do them in his sleep. (That’s often exactly how it felt back in BUD/S.)
But the surveys were over now; the months of floating round the Gulf were over; the years of training were over.
It was time to go on the hunt.
* * *
You’re mine, Rob had thought as he gazed through his spotting scope at the Taliban fighter with the dead American’s BDU and helmet.
But that wasn’t going to happen, at least not right then, not in those circumstances. While Rob could clearly see these Taliban fighters on his scope, they were well out of any conceivable range. What’s more, they were standing at above ten thousand feet, while Rob and his buddies were not much above eight thousand feet, so in addition to being an impractical range it was also quite a height difference. There was no possibility of engaging them, and he couldn’t exactly start running toward them, as much as he felt the urge to do exactly that.
Sixty-three Bravo still had a mission to run. They had to get in place so they could provide cover for our guys moving into the valley.
Discipline.
They relayed the information to Lieutenant Overbaugh at command, annotated it, and moved on. But Rob would never forget what he saw.
Soon dusk started cutting in. They had reached about halfway up the ridgeline, high enough to qualify as high ground. This was where they would set up their observation point. As the American scout platoon started digging foxholes, getting some chow into them, changing their socks, and setting up for nightfall, the Canadians covered them.
They began their routine.
First they searched out a patch of ground that would provide them the biggest field of view while also giving maximum natural cover. They found a slight depression in the ground wide enough for their purposes.
Extending the big gun’s bipods and getting it settled onto a level spot, McMeekin climbed in behind it (he and Rob would trade off shooter and spotter roles throughout their time in Anaconda) and started laying out his ammo. Rob, meanwhile, pulled out his range finder and began building his range card, that is, a detailed mapping of the area of fire. He did a quick sketch of the valley itself, then began methodically identifying every significant visual element in the valley below them, so that if they suddenly started acquiring targets they would already have ready reference points with all their ranges worked out.
Large mud compound at twelve o’clock, that’s at 1,800 meters.
Large cliff base, 2,200 meters.
He worked quickly; there wasn’t much light left, and what there was wouldn’t last long.
AK-AK-AK-AK-AK-AK-AK-AK!
Suddenly they were being hammered by machine gun fire.
Everyone scrambled.
Rob realized that these guys had probably had eyes on them from the moment of that first shot they fired at the Toyota pickup, and they had probably been followed all the way to this position. Although the Americans and Canadians were fairly far up the mountain at this point, the other guys still had high ground, and they had held off opening up on them until dusk fell. Typical military move: wait until last light.
It sounded like a DShK antiaircraft gun. These guys were not supposed to have DShKs up here. This was most definitely not going according to plan. They were supposed to be there to prevent the bad guys from escaping. But it looked like escaping was the last thing the bad guys had in mind. Now the Americans and Canadians were being heavily engaged by machine gun fire. Guys were scattering everywhere, scrambling for cover.
Tim and Rob started shouting back and forth, “You see where the fire’s coming from?” as they both scanned the valley looking for a source, Rob on spotting scope and Tim on the gun’s optics.
Suddenly Tim shouted out, “I’ve got a guy! I’ve got a guy!”
There was a shooter positioned behind a piece of corrugated steel. They ranged him: just short of 1,500 meters. Tim sighted in and put a round downrange.
BOOM!
The big Hornady BMG .50 round caught the guy and threw him backward like a rag doll. One shot, one kill—from 1,500 meters. Not bad. But that wasn’t the guy who was putting out the heavy machine gun fire. The Canadians and Americans were still taking direct fire.
Then the mortar rockets started.
Wait—What? Mortar fire was definitely not something the Anaconda planners had been expecting. But there they were.
The first few rockets came whistling in and struck the ground just meters in front the snipers’ position. They could both hear the fins rotating as they flew.
Rob and Tim both dove for cover behind some small rocks, scarcely big enough to provide cover for a muskrat, but it was all they had. You know what? thought Rob. Maybe we should have brought those helmets and flak vests—and just then another mortar shell hit the ground, this time directly behind them.
Here’s a piece of field wisdom they had all learned about mortars: if one hits in front of you, and the next one hits behind you, that means the other guys have got your position bracketed—and the next one will land on you.
No one had to say a thing: they all knew their position had been bracketed. They jumped up, grabbed their kit, and ran out of there. Seconds later, the position they’d just vacated was blasted to rubble by another mortar round.
They pushed back to where the American platoon had dug in, Tim carrying the .50 and Rob the spotting scope. The scouts had dropped their rucks there, grabbed just their day packs, M4s, and ammo, and boogied. As the two snipers followed back into the mountain, Rob came face-to-face with an eager young American sniper he’d met before they all left Bagram. Great kid, brand-new sniper, pumped to be going on this mission. He was carrying an M40—nice gun, but not much help at the distances he’d be shooting. He took one look at Rob and thrust the rifle in his hands, then handed him a small pile of ammo.
“Here,” he said, “you can use this better than I can.”
Rob looked at him, and thought, Why not? The kid would still have his M4. “Sure,” said Rob. “Thanks.” He stuck the rounds in his pocket, grabbed the sniper rifle, and got down behind some cover.
They stayed back in that position, under heavy direct fire, until it got dark enough to start moving around again. Once it finally quieted down, they set up their .50 in an overwatch position again and talked about what to do next.
They couldn’t move back to the spot where they’d been hit. The enemy knew that position; it was tainted. They’d all left a lot of kit back there, though, and they were reluctant to simply abandon it. And some of the Americans, the ones who’d been in the middle of changing their socks, had left weapons back there, too. They needed to slip back out there and secure their stuff.
The Canadians had one advantage: they had night vision. The Taliban—and Uzbeks, and Arabs, and whoever the hell else was out there—presumably did not.
Tim and Rob started taking turns leading teams back to their mortar-blasted former position to start retrieving equipment under cover of night, using their night vision scopes to help them, one taking a team back out while the other caught a little rack time. They did that throughout the night, staying in that position until the break of daylight.
One thing was clear: this was not going to be a twenty-four-hour operation.
The truth was, they would not emerge from the wilds of the Shahikot for well more than a week.