It was pitch dark when our Foxtrot platoon rolled out of the compound. The road leading us into the target was narrow, a dusty single-lane track. That road was our only way in and our only way out from the target. Jack and I sat up front in the lead Humvee, while five other Humvees tailed us. Clark “Clarkie” Schwedler—one of our go-to guys, who excelled at everything from navigation to shooting—brought up the rear, in the vehicle manning the 50-caliber machine gun.
We rumbled through the farming district with few homes and no streetlights. A few miles from our target, a blast shook the ground and rattled our Humvees. Clarkie and his crew had been hit by an IED. I’m not sure if they rolled over it or if it had been remotely detonated. There was no time to stop and figure it out, too risky. We sped through the area to a safe location, rallied up, and took inventory of personnel and equipment. The blast had rocked Clarkie’s Humvee and rang a few bells, but there were no serious injuries. We called off the operation and returned to base to come up with an alternative plan.
IEDs were a constant hazard. I experienced a total of six IED blasts on this deployment alone. We had a convoy hit while transporting guys to the airport to catch their flight home. One of our guys—who had made it through the entire deployment without a scratch—earned a Purple Heart on his ride to the airport to fly out of Iraq that day. We were hit twice on this ride. One blast was in Fallujah just before crossing the bridge from which U.S. contractors were hanged and burned during an attack in March 2004. The event made headlines across the globe. One of the contractors, Scott Helvenston, was one of my BUD/S instructors. The second blast happened a couple miles down the road in a rural area. The IED ripped through the vehicle and a piece of fragmentation slipped in between the gunner’s body armor. He was medevaced to Baghdad and came back to work a couple weeks later.
This was to be one of our last missions before rotating home. We were already in the process of bringing guys in from SEAL Team 10 and shipping out our guys from SEAL Team 4.
In less than two weeks, our entire team would rotate back to the United States. I knew that this mission was imminent, as our target was a hardcore al-Qaida terrorist who led an effective cell of fighters. This particular terrorist group had shot down four of our medevac helicopters, killing everyone onboard; they had stripped our dead of their weapons, clothes, and gear. Our new plan was to hit the same target again but arrive by helicopter to avoid the IEDs, then snatch up our terrorist targets before they could get out of their beds.
A few nights after the IED incident, our intel trigger was pulled on the same target. While the choppers readied and our guys geared up in our team’s ready room, Gary Blackwell and I rolled across Camp Fallujah to alert our Iraqi scouts to get ready. We never disclosed our target locations to the scouts; we just gave them a heads-up that we were rolling and to get jocked up. I always had to assume that there was an intel leak, even if there wasn’t.
I would be the assault force commander on this mission. We were a mixed group, a combination of twenty-two operators made up of Navy SEALs and our Iraqi scouts. This was a turnover operation, which meant our newly arrived SEAL teammates from Team 10 would be on the mission with us. For some of our newly arrived SEALs, this would be their first ever mission, and for others it would be their first operation of this deployment.
Meanwhile, Iraq’s Sunni–Shia factional violence was out of control; American troops were pouring into Iraq to quell the fighting in a strategy referred to as “the Surge.” Iran and other state actors were provoking and supporting the violence, and there was a mix of low- and high-level criminal activity, plus a steady stream of terrorists from across the globe coming into Iraq to fight. The violence was constant, and it was tearing the country apart, killing countless Iraqis as well as American service members.
Our mission on this particular night was to capture or kill an al-Qaida terrorist cell leader in a safe house under the cover of darkness, and by complete surprise. This cell leader knew how to move, hide, shoot, fight, and kill. He came with a loyal crew of fanatical bodyguards. Our enemy target in Fallujah had been shooting down medevac helicopters with our own ground-to-air missiles. These missiles, and other equipment, had been acquired by the enemy during an ambush of a U.S. Army convoy in Ramadi just west of our location. The helicopters that they shot down may have also given them access to our radios, weapons, and night-vision equipment. Being experts at target takedowns, none of that bothered us. We were so silent on missions, we could come up on our targets—terrorists, rapists, and murderers—still sound asleep in their beds, their weapons parked beside them.
We believed our terrorist target was holed up in a single-story, walled compound in northeast Fallujah. Iraqi compounds are a confusing jigsaw of small buildings with windowless rooms and multiple doors. The kit I wore on missions was always the same, except for this night. (A kit is what SEALs wear to work. It’s like a tool belt, and it’s customized to one’s role on the team and previous experience in gunfights.) I dressed and set up my kit the same way I had done for hundreds of other missions: my Kevlar helmet with Night Optic Devices (NODs) attached, cammies (my usual dark camouflage-colored cargo pants and shirt), Load Bearing Equipment (LBE) webbing over the body armor to carry extra pistol magazines, my radio, a tourniquet. A utility belt with pouches to carry a medical blowout kit, flash crashes, grenades and explosives for breaching doors. On this night I moved my pistol magazines from my left hip to the pocket located at the center of my vest. This was the first, last, and only time that I have moved my magazines. I’m not sure what prompted me to do it.
My kit was heavy, close to eighty pounds. My primary weapon, an M4 rifle, hung down from a sling in my front, and a radio system was strapped to my chest. My extra magazines full of 5.56- and 9-millimeter bullets were now tucked in the vest webbing wrapped around the front of my abdomen. My secondary weapon, a 9-millimeter pistol, I had strapped securely to my right leg. Underneath it all, like a rhinoceros’s armor, were my bulletproof plates, protecting me from both the front and the back, and I always wore black gloves.
It was after midnight when the helicopters dropped us off about three clicks from the target, making the hike longer than usual. It was a rural area, speckled with small farms and not many homes. It was chilly, in the low sixties, but I was dripping wet with sweat, humping nearly eighty pounds of gear through the darkness.
The route took us through a small vineyard with trellis vines reaching up to our shoulders. The vines had woken from their winter dormancy, and there was already a canopy of young leaves on the branches, their regrowth triggered by the warm April sun. It was strange to find a lone vineyard in the middle of the desert. We walked leaning forward, bending low and blending into the outstretched arms of the vines as we moved through the narrow rows.
My internal dialogue, the voice in my head, shuts off once the mission begins. There is only the here and now; nothing else matters. My body and mind unite, and I become like an antenna tuned into everything around me—smells, sounds, tastes, and the slightest change in my surroundings. I can feel everyone’s energy and am constantly assessing their condition by their pace, breathing tempo, and whispered grunts or lack thereof. It feels more like I’m floating rather than walking, constantly absorbing information from my environment and making automatic micro adjustments to improve our situation.
Suddenly there was a splash. We all paused, weapons ready—my heart rate spiking hard enough I could feel it thumping under my chest plate. A few seconds later, one of my SEAL teammates emerged from an irrigation ditch; his moonlight swim left him drenched but it managed to lighten our collective mood. It could have been any one of us who fell into the ditch, which should have made us sympathetic, but it didn’t, and his misstep was met with sarcastic comments. We had done hundreds of real-world missions and thousands more in training—as professional warfighters, we were hyper-focused but totally relaxed. This is all normal stuff, and the comments served as constant reminders of the hazards of war. The SEAL teams are different than other military units, there was no need for me or any of our leaders to reprimand our brother or tell him to be more careful; however, outside the SEAL teams, I have seen other commanders micromanage their warriors. We have come to understand that the relentless peer ribbings and dark humor were far more effective than lectures, and the ruthless ridicule served as friendly reminders of mistakes not to be made again. This is all a normal part of our continuous process of improvement.
We arrived on target undetected. Our breacher identified a possible location in the compound where we thought our guy might be held up. “Breacher” is an actual occupation on SEAL teams—there’s even a breacher school. A breacher’s sole mission is to reach the other side of any barrier, whether it’s a door or a wall or a fence. His methods include mechanical, ballistic, explosive, and thermal breaching. Sometimes I would just turn a doorknob and walk into the room, or go around a thick wall and enter through an open gate. We once had a target we’d visited three different times over a period of several months—and sure enough on all three missions, the key was in the lock. All I had to do was turn the key, unlock the door, and walk in. I found it totally bizarre that the occupants of the home left a key in their locked door. But as long as you get to the other side, it’s still considered a breach.
We were split into two groups, one covered the outside area, and the other moved inside to cover doors and clear rooms. Our breacher surveyed the entry door, then mechanically opened it. The door popped open, and a group of my SEAL teammates poured into the room. We had practiced this technique of room clearing for years. We moved without thinking. The room was empty—it was a prayer room, with only one way in and one way out. My radio broadcasted the information into my earpiece: “short room.” This was the signal that the target was not there. Because there were no other doors inside this room that led to other parts of the home, the breach team needed to get out fast and breach another door. As one group exited the short room, I stood by the door to a foyer. I donkey-kicked the door to the foyer to open it, and my room-clearing train followed me in.
To get to the entrance of the foyer, we had to pass through an outdoor carport covered by a sheet metal roof. Clark Schwedler, who a few days before had been rocked by an IED blast driving to this same target, had been the first man into the prayer room. He ran out of that room, through the carport, and into the foyer, where he saw that I was holding security on two different doors. Clarkie quickly set up on the second door, located diagonally across from me. He was loaded down with extra weight, as he was hauling around all our intel-gathering gear. These were the types of compounds where we would often find gruesome video evidence of what the people who we hunted had done to women, to little boys and girls—while they made family members watch.
Our Iraqi scouts and SEALs followed Clarkie’s lead and split off my room-clearing train to fill in behind him to create a second room-clearing train. Less than thirty seconds after entering the first room, Clarkie was at the front of another train ready to clear another room. Clark’s door was located directly across from my door and the angle was such that a straight line could be drawn connecting the entryways of both doors. Through the open doors, you could see the far corner of one room from the far corner of the other room. It was pitch dark; however, the yellow glow of a gas lamp pilot in the corner of the foyer provided more than enough light to fuel my night-vision goggles. I could see everything clearly.
I was the number-one man on the door in my train, which meant I would be the first man into the room. Missions often included “debates” as to who would get to go first. All these guys were fearless and liked to “train hop” to the front of the stack—the most dangerous place—to be first into a room. SEALs love to fight. We all want to be the first into the fight, and every SEAL is willing to accept the greater risk, especially for his buddy’s sake.
I had no apprehension about the possibility of my own death. My concern was for my platoonmates. While I can’t speak for everyone, their actions this night proved they all felt the same way.
Clarkie and I looked at each other; he smiled back at me. We had practiced this maneuver a thousand times and had successfully done it on hundreds of missions just like this one. There was no rush of adrenaline or anxiety—we were composed, relaxed, and professional. We would simultaneously breach our respective doors and go to work clearing the rooms of enemy fighters and other potential threats. We launched on the signal: a mutual wave of our rifle barrels. I breached the door to my room; it swung open to the right. I followed the door in as it opened, looked down the right wall, and saw that it was clear.
As I pivoted off my right foot to move down the left wall, I had the sensation that my body was being slammed with a dozen sledgehammers. My entire body was now in the room, and the men behind me in my room-clearing train were attempting to follow me in. The room was small, twelve feet by twelve feet; my night-vision goggles illuminated the darkness, and I saw in clear view four of our targets aiming at me. All of them armed with automatic weapons and all of them firing at me.
It was surreal, like something out of a movie: time slowed almost to a stop and everything happened in super slow motion, almost as if I were watching the scene unfold frame by frame. Seconds seemed like minutes. A slow-motion torrent of bullets flew at me. I could clearly see all the bullets coming at me. I had total auditory exclusion; there were no sounds. I had never been shot before, so I had no idea how it felt. In this strange slow-motion scene, I had a mental conversation with myself: Hey, am I actually getting shot right now? It occurred to me that those sledgehammers smashing all over my body were bullets hitting me, one after another after another.
It was in that moment I said my first real prayer: “God, please get me home to my girls.” My wife and two young daughters were halfway around the world; in that instant, I felt them and they felt me.
It felt like I was a bullet-dodging character in The Matrix, only I wasn’t dodging any of the bullets; they were hitting me. My rifle was shot out of my hands. Bullets whizzing past my head hammered into the men entering the room behind me even as I continued to penetrate down the left wall. Nobody else in my train would be able to make entry, as all four of the enemy continued to fire directly into what is known as the fatal funnel, the dimly lit doorway in which I was standing.
War shifts from a national interest to an extremely personal one. This shift happens at the precise moment enemy bullets are directed at you and not at a theology or a country. It’s also at this precise moment when self-preservation becomes the overriding objective. When bullets start flying and men are dying, nobody is thinking about “God and country”; our thoughts are about our loved ones at home, the guys beside us, and ending the fight. I suspect that during these violent episodes, the enemy thinks and reacts much the same way. In the violence we become more human, more ruthless, and more alike than we are different. Survival is all that matters. In the savagery, our involuntary responses are powered by our respective autonomic nervous systems. This internal fight-or-flight ecosystem has been installed in the most ancient part of every brain over the course of human evolution and our reactions are governed by primal survival instincts.
The enemy bullets triggered my rage and drove me to act; it was then that my body became my mind and took over. I suppose that’s what a habit is, when the body overrides the mind and acts without specific instructions from the brain. My right hand instinctively reached down for my secondary weapon, a pistol. My hand was on autopilot as it unhooked the rubber strap I had fashioned to keep my pistol secure, and with a fluid forward push and pull—the very same motion that I had done a hundred thousand times in training—my weapon released from my holster.
I aimed my pistol and engaged the enemy fighter directly opposite me down the left wall. He was glaring at me, with his weapon throwing rounds directly at me. I returned fire; four or five rounds from my weapon caught him in the face and chest as he stared at me. His head jilted back; I saw the life leave his eyes like a light going off. I knew he was dead as he melted into a pile in front of me. I landed next to the dead man on my left side. Years of training and muscle memory without any direct orders from my brain lifted my arm, arched it, and aimed my pistol at a young male figure—maybe in his early twenties—as he stood up and moved toward the doorway. I was still on the floor when I watched him pull a hand grenade from the front of his vest and pull the pin. My right hand pointed at him, and my index finger squeezed the trigger. I saw the bullets exit my pistol and spin clockwise as they flew toward him, leaving a green vapor trail in their wake. I watched my bullets punch into one side of his head, an exhaust of blood and brain matter instantly exiting out the other side. I shot him dead as he attempted a suicide mission to run out into the foyer with a live grenade where my fellow SEALs and Iraqi scouts had stacked up, attempting to enter the room. My rounds dropped him in his tracks; as he fell forward, I saw the grenade release from his hand and roll toward me. Then it detonated.
One of our newly arrived SEALs from Team 10 was outside under the carport looking into the room’s only window when he saw my bullets hit the enemy in the head. He watched as the enemy fell. The ensuing grenade blast shattered the window, spraying shards of glass into my teammate’s face. This was his first mission in Iraq—what a way to start a new job.
The grenade blast knocked me unconscious. When I awoke a few minutes later, I was fully lucid and lying on my left side, looking across the room at two men; both were firing their weapons over my head out the window directly above me. The grenade blast had twisted my helmet, rendering my night-vision goggles unusable. The light from their muzzle flashes and the dim glow of the gas lamp in the foyer were enough to clearly illuminate the men standing no more than ten feet away from me.
I heard no sounds; it was totally silent. I was in a very bad place in the middle of a gunfight—if the enemy caught a glimpse of me glaring up at them, all it would take to finish me off would be for both of them to point down, pull their triggers, and unload high-velocity bullets into me. If I could clearly see them, then they could see me too. For an instant, I thought about playing dead, but in that same millisecond, before the thought could be fully evaluated, my anger rejected it outright. I had never been so angry—a feeling of determined, ruthless rage. It seemed to be stored somewhere deep inside me, and something just snapped. In that moment, my rage consumed me; my world closed in and nothing else mattered to me but destroying the two men still standing in front of me. I would fight back and kill them before they killed me.
I didn’t know it at the time, but while I was lying unconscious on the floor, two of my SEAL teammates were still outside the door of the room trying to get a shot at the enemy. Two of our Iraqi counterparts were the only eyes that saw me enter that room; in the chaos that ensued, they were unable to communicate my location to anyone. The volume of fire coming from the room through the door and out of the window was so excessive that there was no way anyone else was getting into the room. The team decided to pull everyone back and call in an air strike to “neutralize” the target—and me with it.
As the team pulled back from the house, Connor, my other SEAL teammate, was shot and wounded by one of the two remaining enemy fighters firing over my head out the window. While I lay on the floor, my teammates worked their radios, calling for the status of each other and what was going on in the house. I heard nothing.
As the remaining elements of my assault team departed the house and moved to a safe dropping distance from the target, I was lying on my left side with my pistol still in my right hand. Just like before, my arm reached up and aimed at one of the men standing in front of me and my finger pulled the trigger. I couldn’t hear the gun fire, but I felt my hand jump—rounds exited my weapon and I watched the projectiles fly in slow motion as they punched into his body. Small holes burst open in the fabric of his shirt where my bullets entered. His face contorted into a bizarre combination of surprise and pain—more surprise than pain. In less than five seconds, I ran a magazine dry and completed a magazine change before the two enemy fighters figured out that I was still alive and shooting back at them. My bullets drew their gunfire away from my departing teammates. Their full attention and bullets were then directed back at me.
I still don’t have an explanation as to why I moved my magazines from my left hip to the webbing in the front of my vest, but it saved my life, and possibly the lives of many others that night. I was lying on my left side, which is where I normally carried my extra magazines—on my left hip. They would have been trapped under me if they had been in their usual location.
The enemy fighters were now both so close to me. I remember the stunned look on their faces as they pointed their weapons at me and I fired back. A round from one of their AK-47s struck the bottom of my pistol and dislodged my gun’s magazine. My pistol jammed, and I felt the gun’s grips crumble in my hand. Another enemy bullet sailed clear through the foot of my magazine. I opened my hand slightly to release the shards of broken plastic that were once my pistol grips—the grips seemed to absorb the shock, shattering like an armor plate. I was fortunate to have this type of weapon; another model may have been smashed to bits or been shot out of my hands.
My palm was now pressed against the gun’s internal springs. The bullets that struck my pistol caused my weapon to malfunction; I squeezed the trigger, but nothing happened. I quickly cleared the malfunction with a tap of the bottom of the magazine to firmly reinsert it into the pistol, a rack of the slide, then I squeezed the trigger. I had done this “tap, rack, bang” malfunction drill so many times that it happened automatically. All the while, I was still being shot at from no more than ten feet away. An instant later, well before the human brain could process what and how it had happened, my hand aimed my pistol at the other man standing across from me, and my finger squeezed the trigger. I saw rounds twisting as they exited my pistol, flying toward him and entering his body, and then a round tunneled into his face. Science has termed this slow-motion phenomenon as time’s subjective expansion.
I emptied that magazine into both men as they crumpled to the floor in front of me. I loaded my last magazine into my damaged pistol. I was lying on my left side, leaning against the man who I first shot when I entered the room. I pushed myself up with one hand and reached behind with the other, placing my pistol against my dead enemy’s motionless body and fired several more rounds.
Seconds later, all four enemy fighters were silent; their dead bodies lay in pools of their own blood and piles of spent bullet casings. A metallic odor flooded the room. Blood and urine leaked from their bodies onto the floor.
I knew that I had been shot. I felt heavy, like there was a few hundred pounds sitting on my back; it was difficult to breathe. The fight was not over, and the worst battles were yet to come.