TWO

FALLUJAH: A WAREHOUSE OF DEATH

FALLUJAH REPRESENTED A SICKENING REALITY ABOUT the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular. It is an ancient city whose long and rich history should have made it a gem in the crown of human achievement. For centuries, the region was the home of one of the greatest seats of Jewish scholarship in history. That’s right. From the year 258 until about 1038 it was the home of the Pumbedita Academy. It was a prosperous trading hub, having arisen where the Euphrates River and the Saqlawiyah Canal meet. In fact, the provincial name “Anbar” means “warehouse” in the original Persian tongue. In short, the region started out as a cultural and mercantile apex and was dragged down from there by religious and tribal squabbles—wars and strife that have gone on, basically unabated, for more than a thousand years.

And we were going to go in there and straighten things out? A so-called Arab Spring was going to spread enlightenment through that land where people murder one another over nuances in the same basic faith?

The Bush administration had it right on paper: you choke the local wars by choking the funds. If you’re going to fight, you fight to crush the local conflicts, then keep the region down by seizing the oil and doling out the funds carefully and with responsible oversight for educational, infrastructure, and humanitarian needs. You don’t go in, liberate a people, and tell them, “Okay, now you figure out this millennium-old struggle.” Unfortunately, that is what the media compelled us to do. By distorting the ability of the locals to self-govern, by playing up their inherent right to do so, we doomed them to the current hell that is ISIS.

But that still lay in the future. A different hell was playing out a decade before those barbarians coalesced.

Sadr had between five thousand and seven thousand people under him, and when he found out we had snatched his accountant it seemed as though they all decided to conduct insurgency operations. It’s the “use it or lose it” philosophy: if we were going to start ripping into his finances and freezing his funds, the fighters might as well earn what was left of their pay.

Fallujah, which was a city of around fifty thousand people at the time, was a major center for Sunni operations. Before we started moving in with force, we dropped a lot of leaflets hinting in general terms about what we were going to do—crush the murderers, only in nicer terms—and advising residents to evacuate. By the time we were ready to move in, we considered anyone left in Fallujah an enemy, although as you’ll see in a bit, it wasn’t as if we were going through the streets shooting randomly.

I can tell you a story about Fallujah—it’s a sad story, and I knew one of the guys involved—and US contractors who were there but who shouldn’t have been and who didn’t have the equipment or preparation they needed.

Around Fallujah, there were a lot of private contractors who hung up a shingle offering training support to military and law enforcement organizations and quasi-military services like guard duty. There were a lot of different organizations in Iraq at the time. The most well-known of them was Blackwater Security Company.

I knew people at Blackwater. Heck, the company was established by a former SEAL officer—Erik Prince, who was with SEAL Team Eight before he left to found his company. Erik and his company have been verbally attacked, at times viciously, since the cessation of hostilities, mostly for political reasons. The one thing I do know about Erik is that he came from wealth and did not have to join the military. He chose to serve his country by being a SEAL and was respected by the men he served with. What I also know is that if there were not a legitimate need for Blackwater services, they would not have been there. The State Department asked them to do a mission that no one else could do, and it was that same State Department who cut bait and pointed fingers when the violence started to flare. Typical.

I knew some of the other guys at Blackwater too. One of them, Scotty Helvenston, was a former SEAL who had been one of my BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL) instructors in the late 1980s. Scott was a phenomenal athlete and had competed on the navy’s top triathlon teams. His specialty was physical fitness—training, diet, and exercise. His dream was to make an exercise video and set himself up as a fitness guru to the stars. Part of the reason he left the SEAL teams was he was ordered to go to Army Ranger School, and that conflicted with his cross-training program. He was seriously competitive when it came to training.

The basic idea of at least some SEALs going through that program is that Rangers tend to work in larger groups than SEALs and it is important for the different forces within Special Operations to understand each other. I’m all for the idea of having units understand the Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTP) of other units, but I was never an advocate of sending SEALs through Ranger School to get it. SEALs have been through the graduate school of suffering and don’t need to be reminded of it.

So Scotty was with Blackwater and had stopped by our headquarters in BIAP to say hello and get any intelligence updates. Even though the Blackwater staff were contractors, we were on the same team and would provide as much information as we could. There is no doubt they were informed about the perils of the Anbar Province, specifically about Fallujah: it wasn’t safe, and they were private citizens, not soldiers. To this day, I don’t know why they were there on March 31, 2004. Maybe they were conducting their own surveillance or, more likely, just thought they were invincible. So much of Iraq is open nothingness that you feel you can go out into it like Lawrence of freakin’ Arabia and just take in the scenery. Without a guy like me shouting in your ear every day, you can become complacent.

The Blackwater guys offered a sad example of what happens when underequipped civilians try to cowboy their way through a war zone. They didn’t have a local map reader, they didn’t have a shooter, and they didn’t have armored vehicles. What they did have was obviousness: they were driving through Fallujah, which is a small city where everyone knows who’s driving by the sight of the car. And the Fallujans know who’s military and who’s not.

At any rate, on that day in late March they were ambushed and Scotty, along with Wesley Batalona, Mike Teague, and Jerry Zovko—three more Blackwater guys—were pulled from their vehicle, beaten to death, and their bodies burned and dragged through the streets of Fallujah in front of cheering crowds. Then all four were hung from a bridge that crosses the Euphrates River.

Photos were taken and distributed to the locals and to the international media. Anytime those latter buzzards can preface a story with, “We warn you, these images are graphic,” you can be sure it’ll run on the front page or at the top of a broadcast.

It was a sickening development, hardly unpredictable, not without precedent, but a reminder that this is a sick and hateful region of the planet.

As more coalition forces moved into Fallujah and prepared to rustle the city away from the Sunni insurgents, the Marine Expeditionary Camp (MEK) became the headquarters of US military operations in the Anbar Province. That camp was located just outside of Fallujah. You’d cross a highway and then you’d be in this lawless Iraqi city.

In March 2004, Marine Lieutenant General James T. Conway was given control of the Anbar Province. His forces included the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force … and me. I had been there only a few days and figured out pretty quickly that there was a lot of miscommunication: a marine battalion commander would pass on reports from his company commanders that the perimeter around Fallujah was secure. Our team that operated a covert safe house and had a network of local informants would report just the opposite. They were reporting what they saw; we were reporting what we knew. The result was confusion.

Regardless of whether the borders were secure or not, inside the city it was utter chaos. Shortly after we took the accountant, I did a low-visibility operation in Fallujah to get “eyes on.” The small group included General James N. Mattis, who at the time was a two-star with the Marine First Division. Mattis was a warrior and one of the most impressive commanders I ever met. One day, after the general had proposed a bold strategy to force the insurgents into an industrial “killing zone,” I was explaining to him where the positions of our friendly forces were when a marine sergeant grabbed me pretty hard and pushed me.

There must have been a look of anger in my eyes after I recovered (after all, I was indeed thinking to myself, I’m a SEAL commander and you’re shoving me? That’s messed up!), because he immediately piped up with, “They’re shooting at you, sir.”

When I looked at where I had just been standing, I could see I had been exposed to rounds whizzing by. Everyone else carried on with little notice. I just looked at the sergeant and said, “Semper fi.” (To this day, every time I meet a marine I say “Semper fi” in reverence.) And by the way: in a combat situation, it’s often difficult to know incoming from ricochet. You may get hit by debris carved from the wall or furnishings by a shell—a high-velocity piece of wood, concrete, clay—and for a second or two you aren’t sure what has hit you, only that you have been hit. Strange as it may seem, it takes that long for the shock to your flesh to die and the reality to set in. I’d been so focused on giving my report to General Mattis that I had lost my battlefield perspective and had made myself a target. That was the time, the moment, when I first started thinking I was getting too old for this sort of action.

I’ll take a moment here and tell you about Mattis, because he’s an American hero. He made a point of being in the thick of things with his troops. Nicknamed “Mad-Dog Mattis” by his men, he was a command warrior in the old George Patton mode. He wasn’t an armchair general by any definition of that much-maligned term. If a marine re-upped at a location where he was present, he would personally go to that marine and thank him or her for rejoining. He put a premium on being connected with his men, and I deeply admire that quality. I could literally go on for pages upon pages about Mattis and how influential this man was to me and many others who fought alongside him, but I will limit myself to two quotes that I believe are particularly telling of this man’s character. The first is as follows: “The most important six inches on the battlefield is between your ears.” Enough said.

The second is a little more subtle and yet every bit as important in my view, particularly for those of us who have returned from war to the civilian world here at home: “For whatever trauma came with service in tough circumstances, we should take what we learned—take our post-traumatic growth—and, like past generations coming home, bring our sharpened strengths to bear, bring our attitude of gratitude to bear. And, most important, we should deny cynicism a role in our view of the world.”¹

For me, the truth behind this quote is crucial to our recovery, both individually and as a society, from the wounds that fifteen years of war have inflicted upon all of us. More on this later.

Mattis’s plan for tamping down insurgent activity in Fallujah was brilliant. By mid-2004, civilian noncombatants had for the most part fled Fallujah. The people remaining, we figured, were hostile. Mattis wanted to drop some artillery rounds into some of the insurgents’ fortified positions we’d identified and then bring in tanks, do a pivot, and force the insurgents into an industrial area through what he called a pincer move. Once the insurgent fighters were there, Mattis would just blow the hell out of that area, completely mowing down the enemy.

Mattis also knew that the only way to secure stability in the Anbar Province was to empower the Sunni tribes to control their own destiny. The long-standing rivalry between the Sunni and the Shia had been going on for centuries and was not going to end anytime soon. The fall of Saddam Hussein and the creation of a Shia-controlled government created a wedge. The cleansing of Sunni by the Shia from the neighborhoods of Baghdad further drove the wedge into violence. Mattis understood that disenfranchising the Sunni would have grave consequences. While ISIS had yet to be organized, the seeds were sown in Fallujah.

Mattis ran this plan up the line, and the higher brass shot it down.

So Fallujah was this tinderbox of danger and endless challenge. One of those challenges was our schedule and the conditions of those operations. We were running a handful of missions every night. Not all of them were direct actions as dramatic as snatching the accountant, of course: some were surveillance operations, some were security assessments, and some were simply to keep the enemy guessing. We also infiltrated local insurgency organizations by looking at relationships and flipping targeted locals: we might give someone’s sister a job, and if that worked well, we could give other family members jobs, money, or a little more freedom than they might have had living in Fallujah. That was the carrot method, which has come to be known as “winning the hearts and minds.”

For the stick method, for those who did not already work for us, we might lean on them for information. Maybe you apply pressure by threatening to tell others that his sister got her new job because he was working for us. You don’t have to physically manhandle someone to be intimidating; you just have to haul them into a room and know what makes them tick and what they fear. It’s not a pretty or politically correct method. It just works and saves lives. A lot of the locals did not want to be presumed to be collaborators, so they tended to show a little cooperation. And once they were on the hook, they were not getting off. Even so, you only had a one-third chance of getting the truth; the rest was “I don’t know” or an outright lie. Keeping someone prisoner without cause was not only un-American; in the end it would likely be counterproductive.

Of course, this technique also had the overtones of something out of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance. In that operetta, orphans were granted a kind of amnesty—so, suddenly, every pirate claimed to be one. In Fallujah, it seemed that everyone we attempted to coerce had a family member who was working for us, which would not have stood well with those family members. And with the size of some of those extended families, it may not have been a lie.

Often we’d start by trying to get one piece of verifiable rudimentary information out of them. If they gave us that, we had them: we’d leverage that one piece of innocuous information into higher-level intel, at least as much as they could give us.

We could even get useful information out of those who tried to game us. Once we determined that they were feeding us misinformation or unreliable information, we would give their intel a lower level of usefulness … but we’d still monitor them, because if they got careless with their cell phones and we could track whom they were in contact with, they might inadvertently give us something useful.

My job was not to micromanage the experts on the specific technique or tactic, but rather to identify who would be responsible for each operation and what resources they needed to succeed. When the marines or other units needed information on what was happening on the ground, my job was to deliver the results to save American lives. We were the eyes and ears of what was happening in Fallujah.

On occasions, a strange event occurred that broke the ordinary grind of the battle rhythm in the life at the Forward Operating Base within the walls of the MEK in Fallujah.

It was well after midnight and we had just been through another rocket attack a few hours before, a routine occurrence of late. The insurgents knew that the marines had the capability to determine the coordinates of the source of an incoming rocket attack and would respond within minutes with helicopter gunships or directed fire. Their counter to this would be that they would conduct a few patrols to make sure there were no sniper teams in the area and then conduct a hasty rocket attack. Often, they would simply drive to a site, place a rocket-firing assembly on the ground, aim, fire, and leave. This method was an improvement from attempting to fire the rockets from the back of a pickup, which for them resulted in either a vehicle fire or leaving a telltale ignition mark, which could be easily identified and targeted later. The problem with either technique was that aiming was difficult and where the rockets landed was anyone’s guess. The insurgents could shoot pretty well in a general direction but had trouble adjusting for distance. The result was the rounds often went long or short. The MEK was large enough that the rockets usually would make it inside the perimeter but with no real damage or effect. Nonetheless, I had knocked off for the night and was awakened with a quick knock. It was a SEAL lieutenant in battle fatigues carrying his weapon and a small backpack. I recognized him as being part of the Camp Posey team at BIAP. “Commander,” he said to me, “I am stranded and looking for a place to stay until I can catch a flight out of here.” My first thought was, How does a SEAL lieutenant get stranded in the middle of a battle zone? Too tired to ask for details, I said, “Sure, grab an open rack and welcome to Fallujah Hilton Garden Inn.” The next morning I got the full story. As it turns out, he had a longtime Marine officer girlfriend who was assigned to a forward Marine base outside of Al Qa’im, near the Syrian border. He was about to return home in a few days and decided to hitch a ride by taking a series of rotary wing supply helicopters to go see her one more time before leaving Iraq. He had completed his romantic rendezvous and was on his way back to Posey when the mortar attack caused a disruption to his plan. I admired his creativity and mission focus and arranged a Navy Black Hawk flight to return him to the camp. I did not want to be the one to stand in the way of his successfully completing his mission of love.

I also found great personal satisfaction in fighting the bureaucratic supply system to get what was needed. The battle to get the supply system to produce offered its own set of rules of engagement and challenges. The Humvees brought forward from the States had been specially modified for fast patrols and open desert warfare. They were brilliant in design but did not have the armor kits installed that offered protection in urban environments. Since the Special Operations Forces were now operating in hostile towns and neighborhoods across Iraq, it was time to quickly upgrade our vehicle protection with armor. Fallujah was, compared with the open-air desert, pretty tight quarters: as I said, it was a city built long before the advent of the automobile, so the streets were narrow, and there were a lot of walls and obstacles.

The idea of a battle line—which is sort of like a scrimmage line in football—was almost laughable. A commander couldn’t just say, “We need to move the line up by five yards,” because you’d be leaping through the obstacle-filled streets and then there’d be an open courtyard forty yards ahead of your position. And the insurgents had a lot of snipers too. They might not have been as well trained as ours, but anyone who has spent time around mosquitos knows that enough of them will really mess up your day.

At any rate, our Humvees weren’t really suited for this environment. Not only didn’t they have armor, most of them didn’t have doors. I spent a lot of time fighting with the supply chain to get my guys to the front of the line for armor kits. I ran around 360 or so missions, and for these efforts I received two Bronze Stars, which were given to me for meritorious service in a combat zone. I didn’t say anything at the time—I did and do appreciate it, even if it wasn’t why I was in the service—but I was tempted to ask that the medals be hammered out and added to the armor on the Humvees.

I also did a lot of what might be called community relations. It was kind of like what I was doing in the Philippines, except with a much more hostile native population. In Fallujah, that meant we had to interact as closely as possible with the local mullahs or imams—religious leaders whose interpretations of Sharia often stood for the whole of the law. Generally, they were not too keen on spending any time with us. They had no interest in adapting to any part of our ways. And they made it very clear they couldn’t wait until we were gone and they could solidify their authority.

I had a few opportunities to sit down with imams, but it usually wasn’t under the best of circumstances. We certainly weren’t chatting over a beer, not in a Muslim area. More often it would be negotiating settlements for collateral damage, such as when we conducted an operation like a compound raid and inadvertently killed a civilian. The accidents generally were the result of being caught in the cross fire or even from children being used as a human shield. The marines used to have to do that in Beijing—then Peking—during the Boxer Rebellion a century before. It was heartbreaking, and it’s discouraging to realize how little progress civilization has made since then.

We had to resolve those situations quickly: if we didn’t, there would have been eye-for-an-eye retaliation forever. The sit-downs with the imams usually followed a basic protocol. The first step was our acknowledging that the tragedy had happened and that we were genuinely sorry for the family’s loss. The next step was having the imam and family—because what the imam said usually flew with the family—acknowledge that what happened wasn’t murder but an accident, which it was: we had no interest in killing civilians and certainly not children.

The third step was compensation. We acknowledged that the village and the family had suffered an economic loss. In the case of a male, there would be lost future wages, and in the case of a female, a family lost out on getting a dowry for her.

We usually settled male casualties for a few hundred dollars and females for about half that. And I would like my liberal colleagues to take note: right there is the real “war on women,” not the false one crafted against the GOP. The Obama administration not just tacitly but openly supported and even praised governments that consider women to be second-class citizens at best or who throw gay men off the tops of buildings. Instead of reading the New York Times, the administration should talk to soldiers who have been there, who have seen systemic, entrenched, dehumanizing bias at work.

Thankfully, these occasions of having to negotiate for human losses were rare. Even though Americans often weren’t at fault—the indigenous troops were trigger-happy and in some cases vindictive, settling old scores—these were some of the most emotionally draining negotiations I’ve ever been involved with. You can’t be a compassionate person and not mourn when someone loses a child … even if that someone is on the other side of a battle line.

At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if some readers are shaking their heads, wondering if day-to-day life in Iraq was really as wrenching as I’ve described it. Surely nobody could deal with those sorts of circumstances on a daily basis, you must be thinking. There had to be letups in the stress and action, right?

There’s only one response to this: we were in the middle of a war zone. There were mounting US casualties every day. There is no such thing as rest—not in the traditional sense. Even when things appeared calm, the world around and above us was dangerous and I had to remain alert. Even the world below us was a potential hazard, when one considers the tunnels that terrorists dug into Israeli territory.

And if I can just address that point for a moment: no, they were not Palestinian “freedom fighters.” They were terrorists who bored their way into a nation that is our strongest ally in the Middle East. Only history will tell us how much damage eight years of Barack Hussein Obama’s coddling these killers has done to our planet. Far more than “climate change,” I’m sure.

A typical day at the FOB would start with my waking up at 0500 hours. I’d have spent the night on a cot, so I’d stretch and then get a cup of coffee. Strong as that morning joe was, neither it nor the assembly line bacon and eggs and pancakes could ever overpower the smell of Iraq. Iraqis usually take their garbage into nearby fields to burn it, so more often than not you’re smelling that. And when you’re not smelling burning garbage, there’s a greasy petroleum smell that hangs over the entire Middle East. Countries there don’t have emissions standards, and aside from that smell, on military bases you have the constant odor of petroleum from helicopters, rolling stock, and machinery. There’s also the smell of the temporary shelters we were in, which the Seabees had constructed from plywood and sandbags.

It was always hot in Iraq: even at 0500 hours the temperature would often be close to a hundred degrees. We had Porta-Potties around the compound, and on some days you could actually push and twist your pistol through the plastic sides.

Hey, it was extra ventilation. Never a bad thing in a Porta-Potty.

The first official business I’d do every morning would be to check out the intel updates and the After Action Reports from the operations of the last twenty-four hours. That was always a “brace yourself” moment, since the news tended to be worrisome at best, grim at worst. There would be lots of intelligence—human intelligence, signal intelligence, observational and recon intelligence—going on, and someone would have to have a high-level view of how it all fit together. Who was calling which imams? Are any high-value targets involved? Are there any tips that require immediate responses?

After reviewing the daily intelligence reports from our operations, I would walk over to the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force (MEF) battle brief with General Conway and his staff. Conway represented exactly what a marine general should be—mission-focused, smart, and loyal to the corps. He would later become the commandant of the US Marine Corps. To the marines, that is about as close as you can get to becoming God. The brief typically lasted more than an hour, and every battalion, group, and unit would update everyone else on what had happened during the previous twenty-four hours and what the operations over the next twenty-four hours would be. My small part of the brief would last only a few minutes and was intentionally limited to our overall objectives, number of operations conducted, number of insurgents killed or captured, and where we would be operating during the next cycle of darkness. We were also running a number of Special Access Programs (SAP) that would have to be briefed separately in a more secure environment. Even in the middle of the well-defended MEK, any indiscriminate disclosure of Special Access Program information put lives at risk. Mishandling SAP intelligence was taken seriously. The military prison at Leavenworth, Kansas, has more than one cell full of former military personnel who violated the law and put sources at risk by the gross mishandling of classified information. The battle briefs ensured asset allocation supported the overall strategy and minimized the risk of blue-on-blue damage; we didn’t want one of our forces inadvertently stumbling into the crosshairs of another because of poor communication—or, for that matter, any other reason. We also made sure everyone was clear on what the rules of engagement would be in any given situation.

Being in a state of warfare in Iraq was, at times, surreal. We had magnificent meals while we were there: we’d have steak and lobster a couple of times a week, and there was always ice cream available. And on the same day when we’d gorged ourselves on steak and lobster and had our double ice cream cones, we’d get into our convoy vehicles with our machine gun and go on patrol, hoping we wouldn’t get hit with sniper fire or drive over an IED we hadn’t spotted.

When it came to avoiding IEDs, we usually depended on two qualities: observation and luck. There’s no skill or reliable pattern to an enemy scattering a few explosives along a road and then melting into the background.

For that reason, plus due to the increasing threat of snipers, we tried to mix our patrol routes up. We didn’t want enemies to expect and be able to target us. Yes, we were looking for live-body insurgent activity along the roads, but we also wanted a sense of which roads were clear. And we wanted to know this for both main and back roads, because when we sent men out for special operations, we weren’t going to send them along main routes every time.

So we’d be riding around, hoping to see potential explosives. If we happened not to spot them before coming upon them, we hoped our vehicles were armored enough to withstand the blasts.

After patrols, we’d have an intelligence briefing and prepare for special operations activities. We had a handful of those going on every day, which meant there were always briefings and reviews.

If nothing was demanding my immediate attention, I’d go for a five-mile run around the compound. I found a daily morning run to be quite therapeutic. I was once on a run around the Special Operations compound within BIAP where Saddam’s palace residence and vineyards were. The palace compound near Al-Furat was a small thumb-shaped peninsula that jutted out from the main airfield complex. It was defended by two high exterior walls with a road in the middle and a company of 10th Mountain Division troops. I had scoped it out and thought it was more or less safe for a run. The shade trees along the first part of the 10K route had been cut down for security purposes, and the clay walls made the first couple of miles similar to running in an oven. The second half of the route opened up and consisted of a few former senior officer villas, occupied now by OGA and overlooking a series of fishing ponds.

I was running alongside one of those ponds—a nice little waterside run—when rockets started coming in. You see, insurgents would aim their rockets in the general direction of the airfield, let ’em fly, and then reinsert themselves in the civilian population. They weren’t really concerned with doing damage; they just wanted to be a nuisance and remind us that they were there. With Iran providing the ordnance, they had an endless supply.

So on this particular day when I was running, one of those insurgents decided to let loose a few rockets. I heard a whistling noise, and the next thing I knew there were rockets hitting the ponds and kicking up mud and reeds close enough that I dropped and began to think about my predicament. I knew that if one of those rockets hit the road instead of the pond, there would be shrapnel, and I was armed with a pair of Nike shoes and a T-shirt.

There were about a dozen or so rockets from the time I first heard them until I dropped. I was miles from anything like base activity, and all I could think of was, Are you kidding me? This is the way I’m going to get killed? On a run? I’m going to get hit by a rocket in a swamp in Nikes!

I was reminded of a favorite saying from Admiral Tom Richards when he was commanding officer of SEAL Team One. He would always demand that all team physical training (PT) was done in jungle boots and not tennis shoes. “Son, you ain’t going to put your Nikes on in combat.” I guess I proved him wrong. Once the rockets let up—it wasn’t more than a minute or so—I got back on my feet and finished my run. I had a few miles to go. I picked up the pace, made it back to headquarters, and said, “I just got rocketed.”

Just another day in the field.

Which brings me to something that the news media rarely reports, that most civilians are unaware of: how every American man or woman fighting in that region can’t fight to win by restrictive and unworkable rules of engagement.

I commented earlier on how field commanders and their on-the-ground staff are often better informed and are better positioned to make tactical decisions. That’s the SEALs way: we position commanders close to the fight to have full situational awareness of the battle, and close enough to react at a moment’s notice to send additional forces if needed. It’s a smart method of conducting warfare, as it lets our forces react to and take advantage of changing situations. Having too many layers of approval in a dynamic battlefield environment delays our ability to fight and win, especially when troops are engaged in combat.

I’ll give you an example. I mentioned that Fallujah’s borders were porous. And I don’t mean leaky like our border with Mexico but open like driving from state to state in the United States. Officially, the marines were saying that everything was sealed, while our guys knew this wasn’t the case. I was once out on a ride-along with a few Special Operative snipers, checking locations where we could station snipers, and we pulled up alongside some marines who were on observation duty. They were in a Light Armored Vehicle (LAV) on the very bridge where Scott Helvenston and the others were hung. They were, by the way, openly pleased to see friendly faces: there’s not a lot of love on the streets, and that lack can have a subtle, deteriorative effect.

The marines were observing activity across the river and pointed to a few Iraqi males they had been watching off-load ammunition and weapons from a car into a house. The insurgents clearly were not innocent civilians nor fortifying their position to defend their home but instead were preparing for battle against us. A sidebar for those of you who have defended the current refugee policy, with its unreliable and nearly absent vetting process, here’s a suggestion that will never be adopted: Take those guys who have been observers and stand them by a queue of people seeking safe haven here. They will tell you with certainty who should be sent packing. That won’t fit the ideology of “innocent until proven guilty,” but then that law applies to American citizens, not likely terrorists, and I would rather risk being wrong about a few refugees than jeopardize dozens or hundreds or even one American life by admitting someone who is devoted to killing us to the home of the free and brave.

Like, for example, these boys in Fallujah whose very posture screamed a kind of animal defiance as they were in the process of moving ammunition, weapons, and rockets to a position that commanded the streets below the bridge.

It was now nighttime, and the marines we encountered didn’t have night-vision goggles, so they couldn’t clearly see what we could. Furthermore, the LAV and the area around the marines had lights on it that would have caused anything they could have seen with night-vision goggles to be obscured by glare.

We had better equipment and could see a lot more clearly what the Iraqis were doing, so we were able to determine that they constituted a clear threat. They were setting up sniper positions on the rooftop aimed at the marines. I asked the marines whether they were going to engage the Iraqis, and they told me they had radioed headquarters for permission and were waiting to hear back. That was hours before, and they were still waiting. Well, that’s what they were supposed to do, but until they got the go code they were just sitting, watching ammunition being taken into a house where it would soon be used against them.

Think about that: imagine your local police, sitting in a patrol car, having to watch known radicals or prison escapees popping the back of a van and off-loading AK-47s, Molotov cocktails, land mines, you name it … and doing nothing while they waited for a court order to search the van. Or being unable to act while they watched a mugging or a rape. That is exactly how insane the rules of engagement were and are over there.

For these marines, not being able to do anything was maddening. And in the meantime, Fallujah was crumbling around them.

The Iraqis setting up for battle with us were about three hundred yards away—an easy shot for any sniper. So I turned to the Special Forces snipers I had been riding with, pointed, and said simply, “Make sure those guys don’t kill any of our marines.” The next morning, I noticed that our teams had reported four anti-coalition forces had been engaged and confirmed KIA. Bravo Zulu.

You may be wondering why the rules of engagement seem so complex in determining what constitutes a “threat.” To me, it is absurd to have to wait until an armed combatant shoots at you first before you are allowed to engage. Absurd. Part of that is personal responsibility: I was willing to take action to protect our people and interests. But there’s something larger than that. Let me paint a picture of the insurgent situation in Fallujah. We had our main Forward Operating Base in Camp Fallujah, the Marine Expeditionary Camp—on one side of Fallujah, just across a highway. That camp was rocketed almost every day—nuisance rockets, for the most part, but even nuisances can be fatal sometimes. We had our safe houses on the outskirts of the city, which we used as bases to help us infiltrate the insurgency, identify its networks, and disrupt its supply lines, or as staging areas for raids.

Having these bases in Fallujah meant, of course, that we had to move ourselves in and out. We tried to be inconspicuous—when traveling to the houses on the outer perimeter, we would put people in the back of vans, and hopefully the house we were moving into had a garage so our guys could go straight from the van to the house without being seen. We made sure the driver had a beard and blended in as much as possible. Fallujah was home to hundreds of recently arrived foreign fighters whose movements and defense strategy was not well coordinated. This was an advantage to movement in our indigenous vehicles. Even then, we moved people in and out as infrequently as we could get away with.

The deeper we got into Fallujah—and some of our safe houses were pretty deep in—the more exposed we were. On the city’s perimeters, we could clear blocks and have lines of sight into our front line fairly easily. But within the city, when we have buildings to the right, left, front, and rear, we faced constant threats.

According to our rules of engagement, we could not generally shoot “civilians.” Well, of course not. You didn’t want to make a mistake. But how could you tell who was a threat and who was not? If nothing else, remember what I said earlier about pissing off the populace and having to sit down with the imams and pay—even when you killed insurgents. Remember, this is the same city that had butchered and hung up Americans on a bridge, and not one of the people who did it had a “uniform” on.

The guidance given to the Special Forces and the SEALs was that if there was a clear threat, our guys should engage. After the civilians were notified to leave the city, those remaining were considered either foreign fighters or insurgents. If they were carrying a weapon, they were a clear threat. And if they were supplying a clear threat with ammunition, specialized equipment, or supplies to positions or logistic operations, engage. Don’t call me and ask for permission.

These may seem like pretty liberal rules of engagement, but you have to consider to whom they were being issued. My forces weren’t twenty-year-old kids; they were snipers and skilled operatives, many of whom had a large amount of experience under their belts. Among this group, I had some amazingly talented sniper teams that included snipers like Chris Kyle and others from the SEALs and the marines. Professionals to a man, they saved hundreds, if not thousands of American troops’ (and Iraqi civilians’) lives, due to their precise elimination of enemy combatants. Remember, between the time someone raises his hand and announces he’s going to try out for the SEALs to the time that SEAL—if he makes it—first sees combat, you’re talking about a three-year intensive training period. That’s a lot of time to beat the jerky kid instincts out of someone. Further, between the time you become a SEAL, or a marine, and when you complete sniper training, you have again been evaluated and garnered a multitude of skill sets, beyond being able to shoot the enemy with precise accuracy at a great distance. Snipers often act alone or in pairs, away from oversight. Trust is something that a commander must give to those at the front lines.

Even so, where there were gray areas, we tended to be cautious. Let’s say there was an individual who was possibly supplying information, who was likely part of a network, and a sniper observes that individual with a cell phone. Would that constitute a supply mechanism that would aid the insurgents?

I would say no, and that was my guidance. Cell phones are everywhere, and even if we suspected someone was up to no good, we needed stronger evidence than that. There had to be a pattern of activity that indicated this person was doing intelligence work for the insurgents and was making regular reports or reports timed after specific activities we took. In short, there had to be a pattern of actions against us. A simple cell phone wasn’t justification enough.

Admittedly, sometimes I had to step in and pull back on the reins a bit. We once had two sniper teams operating in the same field, and word got back that they were competing on the number of hits. That time, I gave commander’s guidance telling them to knock it off and reminded them of the rules we’d set regarding disrupting clear threats.

This type of behavior, although rare, wasn’t limited to the American forces. It was widely reported that one of our Special Forces allies was going into villages and breaking the trigger finger of every male they suspected as hostile. After I got the report from a concerned commander, I had to talk to them and tell them that, unless they had determined the people they were assaulting were insurgents, that wouldn’t fly any longer. In the end, they knew I was looking out for them, and I think, out of respect, they paid attention.

Here’s the thing: in the early stages of the war, commanders were given a lot of flexibility. It wasn’t until after the Iraqi army had been dismantled and the bureaucracy of the American military machine kicked into high gear that operations began grinding to a halt.

Sometimes, when I bucked the system’s rules, it was because following the rules set by people who weren’t in the field would have put our guys in danger. For instance, an edict once came down that we had to have interpreters who were locals, who understood the nuances of the Farsi language. Or guards who were local. In theory, this was understandable—we were trying to have Iraqi faces on our operations.

But in practice, it put our people in harm’s way. Often these interpreters weren’t well vetted, and they weren’t trustworthy. And they had access to a lot of information about where we were, what sort of resources we could draw on, and how these resources were lined up for various operations. Did I balk against using unvetted Iraqis in sensitive security positions? What do you think?

Which brings us to the Mighty 36. Part of the reason civil order was so tenuous was because of the wholesale dismantling of the Iraqi military and related Ba’athist elements, which left a void for a dedicated force tasked with shutting down the insurgency. When the rise in civil disorder exploded, the United States and its coalition wanted to put an Iraqi face on bringing back order—thinking that it would have been better to have Iraqi security forces take the lead rather than the “occupiers.” The problem is that the Iraqi security forces—the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps (ICDC)—wasn’t especially well trained or well equipped. There were thirty-six battalions of what was on paper around five hundred soldiers each, and only one of them, a Special Forces battalion made up of the best Sunni, Shiite, Kurd, and Christian operators called the Mighty 36, was anywhere close to battle ready. I think there were maybe 240 real live individuals in the Mighty 36. And honestly, while there were a few brave and goal-oriented souls in that group (as there are in virtually any battalion), most of them were more interested in turning a blind eye to members of their own particular religious persuasion—which was frequently at odds with the desires and practices of some other guys they bunked with—than they were in keeping the peace and maintaining the stressed, artificial construct that was “Iraq.”

I am mighty proud of the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Forces’ effort in training the Mighty 36, given the lack of local will and funding. They were an example of how the different divisions within Iraq could be united for a common purpose. I saw a glimmer of hope and fought hard to get them the right equipment and training to be combat ready. The rest of the Iraqi forces didn’t have adequate resources and in many cases even the right ammunition to operate their weapons effectively. Calling on them to do anything more than limited patrols in which we paired them with coalition soldiers was out of the question.

Our goal was always to train and turn over to the Iraqis the responsibility for their own internal security operations. The problem was that when we allowed—or, more specifically, forced—the Iraqi army to disband, we lost a lot of the structure and unit cohesion that would have allowed them to maintain order. Disbanding the Iraqi army was our first major mistake.

Our second mistake was believing that a Shia-controlled central government would act in the best interest of the Sunni population. Instead, they ignored the Sunni ethnic cleansing going on in Baghdad and other affluent neighborhoods. Of course they did; one has only to look at the Iranian mullahs and their wholesale ethnic cleansing of all non-Shia populations immediately after coming into power in 1979. Seeing a future of always being in the minority, the Sunni population felt isolated and disenfranchised. During the first part of the surge, we focused on reestablishing relationships with Sunni tribesmen. The Sunnis were the second-most populous tribe in Iraq, which meant that in terms of resources we could draw from, we were already starting at a disadvantage.

With the goal of reestablishing Iraqi control for their internal security, the plan was for the ICDC battalions to lead the effort. When the first battle of Fallujah was on the horizon, the brass wanted to put “an Iraqi face” to the campaign and the ICDC were called up for action.

Of the thirty-six ICDC battalions, the Mighty 36 was the only battalion to deploy and fight in Fallujah.

We trained them just outside of Baghdad, and when it was time to deploy them into Fallujah, we had to make sure everything they needed to move from trainee status to combat status, such as uniforms and weapons, went with them. We had a marine base located just across a highway from Fallujah, and that’s where we stationed them. Unfortunately, only about half of the listed five hundred members got on the bus to Fallujah. The rest “missed” the bus. And to make matters worse, when they got off the bus, they had virtually no equipment. Had it been stolen or sold? Who knew? But it was not with them.

A look at the Mighty 36 might give some insight into why Iraq was such a mess. A battalion, at full strength, is around 500 people. At 240, we were at about half strength. In the Mighty 36 were around a dozen or so Kurds—fighters from northern Iraq who had long-standing tribal strife with Sunnis. So of course, the Kurds were more than happy to stay in the Mighty 36 and kill Sunnis. After a couple weeks of waiting for equipment, we started basic patrols on the outskirts of Fallujah. They would patrol for a few hundred yards, stop, and retreat. Any retreat was hastened by occasional insurgent activity. After a short period, only a handful were willing to continue. To no one’s surprise, this group included all the Kurds, and to everyone’s surprise, the group also included a Shia woman.

She had a compulsion to kill men. She said she’d been raped as part of the various conflicts, and while we couldn’t verify her story and prosecute her rapists, we had no reason to doubt her. When someone is that angry, that committed, there’s usually a good reason. Her narrative certainly filled the criteria. At any rate, she wanted to be a combatant, she had sniper skills, and she was more than willing to be told whom to kill.

Iraqi women soldiers were at a premium, just as I mentioned previously how women in general are pivotal in many covert and special operations work similar to our Operational Support Teams and other specialty units. Even when our guys grew their beards and took on local garb, if you stuck two or three of them in a car together, they looked exactly like what they were: a couple of knuckleheads in a car. But put a woman and a man in a car, assuming they can pass as a family, and they’ll be able to go places and arouse less suspicion than a couple of guys. Also, in a segregated society, males did not have access to a lot of sites that were the domain of women and important intelligence-gathering operations. The Shia woman became critical to many forward recon activities.

I can’t really tell you much about her beyond what she told us. She kept to herself, even when we put her in the Mighty 36. We did a background check on her, of course, as far as we were able: her story about coming from north of Baghdad checked out. Her parents were dead, she wasn’t married, and she didn’t have any children who were alive. She basically volunteered for this job. We had advertised positions open, and she knocked on the door and presented herself as a sniper.

When we interviewed her, we found out there was only one restraint on her: she wouldn’t kill during sex. She would kill before sex. She would kill after sex. But during the actual act, she wouldn’t kill.

She was hired.

I’ve mentioned the rules of engagement, how female operatives can reduce special ops’ signature and make them less visible and the need for the forward commander to make the decision on the ground. I’ve got a story that ties all of that together, but to tell it we need to jump back to Bosnia.

We were monitoring a PIFWC and had been tracking him for a while, doing the basic recon work.

A team of a couple of SEALs and a female colonel were driving around conducting surveillance, and they spot the PIFWC walking with a cup of coffee in one hand and a croissant in the other. He was alone, and his hands were full.

So the team drove past him, turned around, drove by him again, verified that it was him, stopped the car, grabbed him, threw him in the backseat, and put a hood over his head. They moved the colonel to the front seat and put a SEAL next to him for the drive back to headquarters. Just like that, they were able to cross someone of value off their list.

Except it wasn’t over. The Air Force colonel called into headquarters to tell them the SEALs had grabbed this guy, and headquarters went ballistic. How could they just do this sort of operation without telling anyone or getting a green light? The brass at headquarters were practically melting the radio. How could anyone but them make a decision?

The two SEALs were almost court-martialed over that—for taking initiative, for making a decision in the field based on information immediately at hand.

I’ve seen this elsewhere but nowhere more obviously than in American government. Government is too larded up, and too many decisions are being made by unelected bureaucrats who have no expertise or don’t know what’s happening in the field. And they’re causing harm or at least gross inefficiencies.