I had arrived in Iraq in late 2005 on what was to be my first of two deployments to the country. I was a little nervous flying into Baghdad International Airport (BIAP) the first time. My expectation was of the worst environment imaginable. On final approach into BIAP, we were instructed to put on our Kevlar helmets and body armor in case we were to take fire. The huge C-17 cargo aircraft went into an aggressive, very steep dive to avoid small-arms fire and possible ground-to-air missiles. On the ground, it was like the other military airports I had been through, but the difference was that this was Iraq and there was a war. We were picked up in buses and trucks to move our gear. We drove through the base to our compound, and the roads were lined with barriers. Navigation used graffiti on the walls—for example, “turn right at the Kilroy Was Here tag.” Iraq didn’t remind me of any other place that I had visited. I didn’t love or hate anything about Iraq; I just wanted to work. We all did. I had just completed a training workup at SEAL Team 4 and was ready to apply violence of action to the enemy.
We were traveling into the Iraqi badlands in a convoy made up of a mixture of forces, including a few Navy SEALs and Army Special Forces operators. We were heavily armed and moving fast, at times near sixty miles per hour, which is blazingly fast for a fully loaded and armored vehicle with a big gun sticking out the top.
We were speeding down the road and slid into a left turn. As soon as we made the corner, we nearly smashed into a makeshift roadblock. We must have been moving too fast, as we caught the roadblock construction crew off guard, who still had their AKs strapped to their backs. Their friends had all taken up positions on the right side of the road and had their weapons trained on us, ready to shoot as we sprinted around the corner. In a split second, the construction crew found themselves in a very awkward position, pinned between us and their friends, who wanted to shoot us.
In the confusion, we managed to get the jump on them. The lead Humvee was equipped with a minigun, and the gunner had the reflexes of a mongoose. Forty feet away from the targets and their rifle-wielding friends, I had a front-row seat to the action when the gunner opened up on all of them. I had not seen a minigun in live combat before, so I was a little surprised by what happened next. (By the way, there is nothing mini about a minigun; it’s a pedestal-mounted six-barrel rotary machine gun that shoots as many as six thousand 7.62 × 51 mm rounds per minute, and the bullet is about the size of a AAA battery.) Bullets spit so fast out of the six Gatling-style rotating barrels that it looked like a red laser beam and sounded like the mating call of some bizarre prehistoric bird—burrrr, burrrr.
The first volley of bullets hit one guy in the chest, and he practically vaporized in a burst of red mist. As this was going on, about fifty yards up the road, another enemy fighter popped up and fired an RPG directly into the lead Humvee, the one that was firing the minigun. I couldn’t see the RPG, but I saw the Humvee ten feet in front of me lift up, drop back down with a crash, and catch on fire. The gunner didn’t even flinch—he just kept on shooting. In thirty seconds, the twenty-five or so ambushers—including the RPG triggerman—had all been killed and were all red piles of flesh spread all over the street. When it was over, we secured the area, salvaged what we could from the still-burning Humvee, and then destroyed it with a thermite grenade.
The minigun turned twenty-five human beings into shredded flesh in less than a minute. That was quick, I thought, and then I felt weird, because the next thought I had was, That was awesome. Awesome because we did not get killed, and because of the power of the minigun. This was the first time I had seen people in the process of dying, but it was not the first time seeing dead people. My life and training had prepared me for these situations. My constant inoculation to violence and stress made what would have been grotesque and unbearable to many an acceptable situation to me. My trauma had conditioned me to accept the unacceptable.
That’s what war does—it changes the way you view the world.
I found no pleasure whatsoever in killing the enemy. However, this was an outcome of war. Everyone at some point was someone’s child, but that thought is lost in war. The most profane aspect of war is that it deletes the humanity from humans.
I saw myself as part of a professional clandestine military community. My missions were all based on extensive intelligence gathering, constant vetting of sources, and the use of leading-edge technology to identify our targets. My team’s direct-action missions were capture or kill. Most of the time we snatched our well-armed targets without firing a shot. These were great missions; we would gain useful intel from our captured targets.
While the other members of SEAL Team 4 were doing direct action mission and/or personal security details for diplomats and politicians, I was working with a combined group of intelligence specialists from several other branches of the military. Our efforts were mostly done behind the scenes, developing trusted relationships with a network of well-placed individuals. We were working to identify people who were supporting bomb builders and sniper trainers, and in many cases we did.
What I came to learn is that war is a combination of ideology and economics. War zones create employment opportunities for civilian populations unfortunate enough to be living in these areas. We employed people in lots of different occupations: cooks, cleaners, translators, drivers, security personnel, construction workers, office workers, and many other jobs. These were people with very few options, and they needed to feed their families. But the enemy employed people too: they paid kids to plant IEDs, transport weapons, and gather intelligence on our routines and troop movements. Many of these people did the work for the same reasons their neighbors worked for us: they needed to feed their families. They didn’t adhere to a rigid ideology; they needed the same basic things we all do, like food, shelter, and security. I could just as easily have been born in Iraq, a desperate kid looking for work. We tried to offer people an alternative, one that gave them a sense of dignity and hope and options. The enemy had no interest in any of these things; if people refused to do their work, they would kidnap, torture, rape, and kill men, women, and children alike. I saw their methods firsthand in the videos we recovered and the bodies of the victims themselves. Frankly, it was hard for me not to hate the enemy.