A text from the Sheriff popped up on the phone of Alpha’s senior sniper, Dylan Dille: “Hey, call me on the red phone now.”
It was dawn on the day in early February 2017 when Alpha was taking off for Iraq. Most of the combat gear was already packed in pallets and waiting on the runway. Dille had come to the high bay before dawn to pack the last of it.
He watched the last pallet bound for Iraq as it was loaded onto a truck in the dawn light. Behind it, he could just make out the twin lines of exhausted students running through the surf on the beach—the latest class of potential SEALs struggling through BUD/S. He was almost ready to go to the airport. And here was a text from Miller, telling him to call. And to use the red phone.
The platoon had a green phone in the high bay for run-of-the-mill communications. The red phone was a secure line for classified communications only. To get to it, SEALs had to leave the high bay and go up to the third floor, where the Team 7 brass worked. It required putting on a uniform and scanning a badge to get into a secure area. Generally, the enlisted SEALs tried to avoid the third floor at all costs.
Dille walked back into the high bay looking for Dalton Tolbert. Tolbert was one of the wildest men in Alpha platoon. Craig Miller had been raised in a law-and-order household by a father who was a cop. Tolbert most definitely had not. His father drank and wasn’t in the picture. He grew up running free in the Ozarks, wearing black death-metal shirts and hanging with a rebellious crowd. He regularly grumbled that the Sheriff was wound way too tight. He was not the typical military man. Before joining the SEALs, he had won his rural Missouri high school talent show by performing a song-and-dance routine in a fuchsia chiffon dress. Years of SEAL training had not worn down a vicious sense of humor. In the platoon, he could be counted on to deliver a one-liner that summed up what everyone was thinking.
“I just got a text from Craig telling me to call him on the red phone,” Dille said when he found Tolbert.
Tolbert walked out of the depths of the high bay with his phone in his hand. “Yeah, me too. Weird,” Tolbert said, furrowing his brow. “But then again, it’s Craig.”
As lead petty officer, Miller was the boss. Dille and Tolbert both respected him. He was a standup guy, a good dude, and a phenomenal operator. But to Tolbert, what made him so good also sometimes made him a pain in the ass. If Eddie let things slide, Miller was the opposite. Guys in Alpha would roll their eyes when the Sheriff demanded that every detail be followed to the letter of regulations. No detail escaped him. Even camouflage face paint had to be applied a certain way.
Miller and Eddie had flown to Iraq early to spend a week scouting with the Iraqi partner force and getting briefed on the combat plan so that the platoon could hit the ground running. “You know Craig, he probably just wants to check again that everything’s been checked,” Tolbert said.
“Why talk about it on the red phone, though?” Dille asked.
Tolbert’s wife was waiting in the parking lot to take him home. They had just a few hours before he had to get on a plane for six months in Iraq. “Who the fuck knows? I’ll tell him we’ll talk to him later,” Tolbert said as he tapped out a text.
Almost immediately a reply came back. “Just make sure when you get here you get in my truck. We need to talk. Something’s up with Eddie.”
Dille’s and Tolbert’s eyes met. Miller could be a stress case, but he was also smart. Whatever was up, it was serious. And he didn’t want anyone else to hear.
A few hours later, Alpha platoon’s sixteen SEALs and a handful of explosives ordnance disposal specialists, or EODs—bomb gurus attached to the platoon—loaded onto an enormous gray C-5 cargo jet and lifted off over the Pacific for the flight to a military airstrip in the Kurdish-controlled region of northern Iraq. It was a long, dull flight, but the platoon buzzed with excitement. They expected a historic battle in Mosul against a foe of an almost comic-book level of evil. There was no question in their minds that ISIS deserved a lethal dose of karma. And not only did they manage to get selected for the mission, but they had the good fortune to be flying to Iraq just a few weeks after Donald J. Trump had become the forty-fifth president of the United States. In the SEAL Teams, Trump was a hero. The Teams were overwhelmingly white and entirely male, and were predisposed to Republicans. Fox News was their default news source. But Trump had a special appeal. For years Barack Obama had been pulling troops back and limiting combat operations. Trump, on the other hand, talked tough, vowing to “knock the hell” out of ISIS and “bomb the shit out of ’em.” Trump had promised to take the gloves off, and he had. He picked retired general James Mattis as secretary of defense, and Mattis was vowing to use “annihilation tactics” to destroy ISIS completely. After years of the Obama administration winding down military operations, the SEALs were going to get a chance to really fight, and they were pumped.
Almost twenty-four hours later, when the snipers filed off the jet into the bright Iraqi sun, a convoy of tan cargo trucks rolled onto the tarmac and parked. At one end the snipers saw the six-foot-two frame of the Sheriff get out of a white Ford F-150 pickup and fix them in his eagle’s gaze. Dille and Tolbert maneuvered to make sure they ended up in the pickup once everything was loaded. There was a ninety-minute drive east from the air base in the city of Erbil to the platoon’s new safe house on the outskirts of Mosul in Kurdistan. It might be one of the only chances to have a real conversation away from the rest of the platoon for a very long time.
“I’m worried about Eddie,” Miller said immediately as the convoy steered out of the city and headed out onto a highway. “He’s acting like he’s lost his mind.”
In the week Miller and Eddie had spent scouting for the deployment, Miller said, Eddie had changed dramatically. The chief, who had generally been an easygoing, if tough, leader, was brooding like a character in Heart of Darkness. He seemed lost in his inner thoughts much of the time. His tone had turned grim. He seemed consumed by the idea of death. Miller knew something was off but couldn’t figure out what. “You feeling okay, Eddie?” he had asked repeatedly. “Everything good with your family?” Miller knew sometimes home could weigh heavily on a SEAL. Miller’s wife was six months pregnant with their first child, and it had not been easy to leave. Maybe something was going on with Andrea or the kids. The lead petty officer was supposed to support his chief. He told Eddie if he could help in any way, to let him know.
Miller told the story as he drove. His Rolex Sub hugged his wrist. He had purposefully brought it on the deployment because he planned someday to give it to his son and, when he did, tell him the story of the epic battle of Mosul. The snipers listened, watching the squat houses and dusty winter fields of the Iraqi countryside fly by.
The weird behavior started around the time Eddie met with Chief Stephen Snead, Miller told them. Alpha platoon SEAL Team 7 was taking over a sector of Iraq from Charlie platoon in SEAL Team 5. Snead was chief of Charlie and an old buddy of Eddie’s. They had deployed together to Afghanistan in 2010, during the tour where Eddie said he shot through the little girl. When Eddie had been caught during workup sneaking off to Cabo San Lucas, it was to go to Snead’s wedding. Both had patches from that platoon that declared them “The Good Old Boys.”
In addition to being a buddy, Snead was a mentor. Both men came from the same town in Indiana. Snead was a few years younger, but he had advanced ahead of Eddie in his career. Since he was always a step or two in front, he was there to pass Eddie advice when he arrived at the same point. During Alpha’s workup, Snead fed Eddie tips on what tactics to study and how to make it through training as a new platoon chief. He had been on the ground in Iraq for six months and was now, once again, there to hand the baton to Eddie.
Snead met Eddie and Miller at the airport and took them to a spacious mansion in Kurdistan that the SEALs called the Sheikan House. It was their safe house far from the front lines, a place where they could rest and refit. It had running water and a working kitchen, a ping-pong table and a crude rooftop bar. Once Eddie was around Snead, Miller told the snipers, he turned suddenly morbid. It was as if a switch had flipped. Suddenly Eddie seemed to be consumed by the dark possibilities of the next six months in combat, as if the prospect of mayhem, killing, and death were some ghoulish type of opportunity.
The first afternoon at the house, Eddie, Snead, and Miller were sitting at the kitchen table, and Snead was talking about all the shit that had happened on his deployment. He brought up the day one of the EODs attached to his platoon had been killed. The bomb specialists were trained in many arts, but one of the most critical was spotting and diffusing improvised explosive devices. Snead said he was driving with three of his guys in an armored truck through a village they had just taken from ISIS. The EOD was in the back seat next to Snead. Someone in the truck spotted what looked like an IED ahead of them. The truck stopped. Snead told them to reverse. The EOD opened his door so he could watch the path of the rear tire for other possible IEDs. He had his head cocked out, scanning, when the truck triggered an unseen explosive. The force of the blast slammed the heavy armored door closed and crushed the EOD’s head. Eddie seemed fascinated, and probed with questions, asking for every visceral detail.
Miller sat at the table listening and was struck not so much by the details of Snead’s story but by the tone. There was no sorrow or remorse. It wasn’t that he was laughing about it, more that he seemed locked on it with the primordial focus of a coyote tracking a rabbit. To Miller, it sounded like Eddie and Snead were describing some elusive mystical beast that was their quarry—the raw presence of combat, the one real thing that forged true SEALs.
As Miller listened, a chill went over him. When the EOD sailor died, scores of SEALs showed up to the funeral in San Diego. Miller had been there. He had watched the parents weep by the coffin, holding a little boy still too young to fully grasp what had happened. All that seemed lost on the chiefs. Miller only knew Snead in passing, and he didn’t know if he had grown callous after years of deployment, but what Miller heard was two guys whose profession was war talking shop, fascinated with possibilities of chaos, hardened to loss and sorrow, as if death was nothing but a résumé-builder.
Snead went on with the story. He said when the blast hit, he caught a few blast fragments in the leg and he was being awarded a Purple Heart for being wounded. He said he was also put in for the Silver Star, the nation’s third-highest battlefield decoration for heroism. Miller noticed Eddie immediately perk up.
“It felt like all he heard was that Snead was getting a Purple Heart and a Silver Star, and those were two things Eddie didn’t have,” Miller told the guys in the truck. “I don’t know if he’s jealous or insecure, but you could just tell that it got to him.”
After that, Eddie was different. For the rest of the handover, Miller said, the chief kept talking about how SEALs were going to get shot on the deployment and that it wouldn’t be a real deployment unless someone got killed. He seemed resigned to it, but also energized. Eddie would be touring the region with Snead, looking at a bombed-out village, and turn to Miller and smile and nod and say things like, “There’s going to be a lot of Purple Hearts this go.”
Long before arriving in Iraq, Miller had accepted that the fight to clear Mosul was going to be big and ugly and dangerous and that some SEALs might not come home. It was a reality all SEALs accepted when they signed up. Miller had been shot at in Afghanistan. It didn’t worry him too much. Actually, he kind of enjoyed it. He was looking forward to the fight. What worried him was that his chief seemed not just resigned to losing dudes but almost eager.
As the pickup sped across the Iraqi desert, Dille didn’t immediately react. Of all the men in the platoon, he had a reputation as a reader and a thinker. Right before the SEALs he had been accepted to the Coast Guard Academy but pulled out at the last minute because he wasn’t sure it would be challenging enough. He wanted to do something real, to make a real difference. Growing up hunting, he learned that the most important tool a hunter can have was not a rifle, but patience. Being a good sniper was about more than just hitting targets. It was about watching until patterns emerged and not pulling the trigger until you were dead sure, because there wouldn’t be another chance. He used the same instinct when judging others.
“Maybe this is just talk,” Dille suggested after a few moments. “Maybe it’s just Eddie being Eddie.”
In two years of observing Eddie during workup, Dille had come to the conclusion that the chief was mostly show. He wasn’t that good a shooter. He wasn’t that good a strategist. He wasn’t even that good a brawler. A few SEALs from Alpha had sparred with Eddie and had beaten him pretty badly. Dille wasn’t even sure the chief was a good person. He had seen the chief make mistakes, then blame other SEALs. He’d heard him lie and make racist jokes.
Dille had decided Eddie was all talk. He was one of the few who didn’t believe any of Eddie’s war stories. Many of the guys in the platoon had heard Eddie tell the story in BUD/S about shooting through the little girl in Afghanistan to kill the Taliban target. When Eddie took over as chief, he told the story again in the high bay. The high bay version was less like a parable and more like a joke. Eddie said he had been with a group of Army Special Forces in Afghanistan in 2010, trying to hit a high-value target who was carrying a child. The Green Berets didn’t know what to do, so Eddie just fired straight through the girl. The Green Berets’ jaws dropped. They looked at him like, What the fuck did you just do? Eddie told the SEALs. Then came the punch line. Eddie grinned as he looked at the guys. “Hey,” he said he told the Green Berets, “you gotta break a couple eggs to make an omelet.” Guys chuckled. Dille didn’t think it was funny. Dille remembered hearing Eddie tell a third version of the story years before to his BUD/S class about making tough moral decisions. In that one, Eddie got the girl in his sights and decided not to pull the trigger. Maybe one version of that story actually happened. Maybe none did. Dille increasingly believed his chief would say just about anything to make himself look good. And his idea of what looked good was pretty warped.
“It’s just Eddie talking,” Dille told Miller. “He always has to be the biggest badass in the room, and half of his stories aren’t even true.”
Yeah, but there’s more, Miller said. In Mosul, U.S. military leaders had created rules of engagement that required the SEALs to stay 1,000 meters behind the Forward Line of Own Troops, or FLOT, and let the Iraqi soldiers do the door-to-door fighting. The SEALs were there to be advisors, not door kickers. Miller had tried to talk to Eddie about the strategies the platoon could use to get in the fight anyway. Being that far back, maybe they’d still be able to use mortars and hand-launched drones to hit the enemy, he said. Eddie shook his head. Fuck that, Miller said the chief told him. Alpha wasn’t going to stay 1,000 meters back. They were just going to get right up in it, kick in doors, clear houses, and get close enough to shoot ISIS in the face.
Dille shrugged. “That’s what we want though, right?” The brass always had too many rules, and one of the skills of a frogman was figuring out how to get around them.
Yeah, but maybe not, Miller said. The Sheriff was okay with sidestepping some regs as long as the platoon had a purpose and a plan, but he told the snipers he had tried to ask Eddie about their strategy and got no answers. They’d be driving through recently cleared villages on the outskirts of Mosul, looking at the pulverized buildings left from coalition air strikes and artillery. How were we going to move up while all this was going on? Eddie would just tell Miller to quit worrying.
“Zero interest in how he was going to make his plan work,” Miller said. “Just ‘let’s go in and get ’em.’ ”
In the Teams, guys valued hard-charging gunfighters. But that aggression had to be combined with a foxlike cleverness that stayed a step ahead of the bad guys. Eddie didn’t seem to want to figure that part out. During the turnover, Miller never saw his chief talk to Snead about how things worked on the battlefield. The day before Snead left, Miller suggested to Eddie that they sit down and pick Snead’s brain about the previous six months. “Nah, we’re good,” Miller said Eddie had told him.
There was silence in the truck as Miller’s words sank in.
“Great,” Tolbert said. “We finally get a good chief and he turns out to be a psycho.”
The rest of the drive was devoted to how to manage this new intel. No one was going to whine about getting in an up-close fight with ISIS. Hell, most of the guys would be thrilled. And no one was going to tell a chief no. That would be seen as insubordination or, worse, cowardice. Miller liked what Eddie had done for the platoon and was determined to make things work. Best thing to do, he decided, was support the chief with whatever he was going through. If Eddie wasn’t going to sweat the tactical details of operating on the front line, then Miller would take on that part of the job. After all, if Eddie didn’t succeed, none of them would.
“Okay, if we’re doing this, which it looks like we are, we need to be on our A game,” Miller told the snipers. “We need to focus on medevac, maybe take blood out with us and have it in every vehicle.” They’d have to make sure all their procedures were checked and double-checked. Guys couldn’t get lazy, and no cowboy shit. They would need to stay in the armored trucks whenever possible, stay away from windows, always wear helmets. Miller wasn’t going to shy away from a fight, but he also didn’t want to get careless and end up bringing someone home in a bag.
“Welp, if Eddie’s going Rambo we should probably let medics know,” Tolbert said.
Dille nodded. He was still in observation mode, waiting to pull the trigger. Eddie was Eddie, but maybe this whole conversation in the truck was just Miller being Miller. He didn’t want to say anything that might needlessly freak anyone out.
“We can handle this,” Dille assured the others as they neared the safe house. “Maybe it won’t be that bad.”
Alpha got its first view of Mosul through the bulletproof glass of its armored trucks a few days later. The platoon had four M-ATVs—blast-proof five-seat trucks that looked like oversized Jeeps, each topped with a remote-controlled .50-caliber heavy machine gun. The platoon pulled up onto a hill on a hazy afternoon in late February 2017 and saw the city spread out in a lattice of dust-colored urban blocks on a table-flat plain. The beige expanse was punctuated by eruptions of black smoke, as if dozens of urban volcanoes had pushed through the cracks in the city streets and were venting from hell below. ISIS was lighting mounds of car tires to form an inky smokescreen in an attempt to hide their movements on the street from the coalition drones, fighter jets, and attack helicopters that churned above the city at all hours. In the checkerboard of haze and tire fires swirled larger columns of smoke—the gray plumes from coalition missile strikes.
The only clear landmark was the dark thread of the Tigris River weaving south toward the sea. The river was the reason for the city of Mosul. On the ancient Silk Road between East and West, it was one of the easiest places to cross the Tigris, and a settlement took root on the bank. The natural crossing had traded hands many times over the millennia, and each wave of traders and invaders had left its mark on the city. Its ancient, meandering streets hosted markets that dated back to the Babylonians, stately Ottoman houses, and ancient stone mosques standing near Assyrian churches that in some cases had been holding daily worship for more than a thousand years.
The latest invader was the Islamic State—a hardcore group of militant Sunni Muslims in Iraq and Syria, long kept in check by sectarian governments in both countries and suddenly freed as both governments crumbled. Now they were determined to create a fundamentalist Sunni caliphate of their own. Sunni fanatics from all over the globe had gathered to form a state based on a strict interpretation of Islamic law. ISIS arrived at Mosul from the west in hundreds of stolen Humvees and pickups in the first half of June 2014 to sack the city just as the Mongols had centuries before. They shot their way through checkpoints, stringing up Iraqi police and setting government buildings on fire. Tens of thousands of residents fled. So did nearly all of the Iraqi soldiers in Mosul.
Over the course of four days, a ragtag force of about two thousand ISIS fighters took control of Iraq’s second-largest city, home to more than two million people. ISIS crushed anyone who didn’t follow its interpretation of Sunni Islam. Young men were pressed into the ranks; women were forced to marry ISIS fighters. Assyrian Christians who had lived in the city for centuries were executed. Students and intellectuals were killed. Though hundreds of thousands of Mosul residents fled at the coming of ISIS, two and a half years later hundreds of thousands still remained captive in the city. Anyone who tried to flee was shot.
The offensive to free Mosul had started in October 2016 on the rural outskirts to the east of the city. A vast force of Iraqi Army troops backed by American and European forces moved in. Heavy artillery pounded enemy strongpoints. Circling drones vaporized ISIS vehicles and heavy weapons. Iraqi tanks swept across the scatterings of villages, moving fast on open ground. ISIS fell back into the urban heart of Mosul, where the dense population and warren of narrow streets erased the Iraqi Army advantage. The army stopped on the perimeter of the city to prepare for the final battle. That was when Alpha arrived.
Somewhere between two thousand and eight thousand ISIS fighters were barricaded in the city. There was no escape. Iraqi tanks and army battalions outnumbered the ISIS force by at least ten to one. They were better equipped and better trained. Coalition jets owned the skies and could hunt over the city day and night. But the fight was not going to be fast or easy. ISIS had spent years preparing for the assault. Mosul was infested with trenches, tunnels, and hidden bombs. ISIS had makeshift factories to churn out suicide car bombs and chemical weapons. And because they had no retreat, it would be a fight to the death.
The coalition had enough air-to-surface firepower to flatten Mosul in an afternoon, but couldn’t use it. Mosul was a jigsaw puzzle of urban blocks that held the largest concentration of terrorists on the planet, but also had about a half million civilians. An all-out assault would leave tens of thousands of innocents dead. The only option was to clear Mosul on foot, house by house. That’s where the SEALs came in.
The idea was to put a noose around the city with conventional Iraqi forces and slowly tighten from all sides. Teams of Iraqi commandos would be at the front, taking the city back block by block. The SEALs would be right there with them. As they won ground, conventional army forces would follow, tightening the noose until ISIS was strangled. It would be bloody urban combat. Every block was a stronghold where ISIS had pecked sniper loopholes and rigged doors and hallways to blow if someone made the wrong step, but the coalition had the advantage of the skies. Drones and gunships hovered over the city waiting to send precision air strikes in on ISIS positions. One of the main jobs of the SEALs was to call in those strikes. Chiefs on the ground would coordinate with their Iraqi counterparts, pinpoint enemy positions, and target precision American firepower.
Alpha teamed up with the Iraqi Ministry of Interior’s elite Emergency Response Division, or ERD, which was the Iraqi version of the SEALs. ERD had a grueling selection course modeled on BUD/S, complete with the SEALs’ signature brass bell students could ring if they wanted to quit. The force also had plenty of experience. By the start of the offensive against Mosul, it had already led a bloody street fight to take back the city of Fallujah. The soldiers were battle-hardened and well armed. And because they were mostly Shia, they instinctively hated the Sunni-dominated ISIS. ERD’s mission was to find and kill ISIS fighters as it took back the city street by street. Alpha was supposed to hang one kilometer back and help by calling in air strikes from the rear. It was not a direct combat mission. It was what’s known as Triple A: Accompany, Advise, and Assist.
Even though Alpha had to hang back, it still had an arsenal of ways to rain fury down on ISIS. It had mortars and truck-mounted heavy machine guns that could easily kill at a kilometer. It had MK-13 sniper rifles and MK-47 automatic grenade launchers, both lethally accurate up to 1,500 meters. It had Carl Gustaf recoilless rifles—shoulder-fired rocket launchers that could shoot both armor-piercing anti-tank rounds or anti-personnel rounds designed to shred an area with deadly shrapnel. The platoon had hand-launched drones that could hunt the city for targets and shoulder-fired Javelin missiles that could lock on a target from miles away. Perhaps most important to the Iraqis, the platoon had Joint Terminal Attack Controllers, or JTACs—SEALs trained to call in strikes from the gyre of bombers and attack helicopters circling Mosul at all times.
In such a massive operation, guys on the ground had to worry about their own allies as much as ISIS. Several different kinds of Iraqi ground troops were converging on the same city from different directions. So were European commando teams, U.S. Marines, U.S. Army Special Forces, and SEALs, all with different commands, often speaking different languages, all completely capable of accidentally mistaking a friend for an enemy and cutting them down with a .50-cal or vaporizing them with a missile. To cut the risk, every coalition troop and every SEAL in Alpha platoon carried an electronic tracker called an Android Team Awareness Kit, or ATAK. Each SEAL with an ATAK showed up as a blue dot on all coalition maps, letting commanders in headquarters, pilots overhead, and Iraqis battling in the rubbled blocks know exactly who was where. The trackers would let the SEALs get close without getting killed.
Alpha’s armored trucks idled on the hilltop, watching the city below. ERD troops were blasting away at the airport. The SEALs could hear the spray of machine gun fire and see people running. American helicopters circled overhead, sending in Hellfire missiles. The black tire smoke grew thick as ISIS lit its defensives. The SEALs could see Iraqi soldiers on foot moving in squads through a collection of industrial buildings north of the runway.
How can we help those guys from all the way up here? Miller asked himself. He wondered if Eddie was right. Maybe it was pointless to follow regulations and stay so far behind the FLOT.
Before he could discuss it with Eddie, a mortar exploded at the base of the hill, sending up a column of dust and a deafening crump! that Miller could feel even through the thick armor of the M-ATV. Then a second mortar hit higher on the hill. Then a third. ISIS had spotted the trucks and was steadily walking in rounds, adjusting after each hit until they were on target. Eddie radioed the other trucks: Time to get the fuck out. It was a fitting introduction to Mosul. If Alpha was capable of hitting from behind the front lines, so was the enemy.
Dylan Dille walked into a squat, dirty abandoned house that Alpha had commandeered as its operating base and stopped cold. The family that had once lived there had fled in such a hurry when ISIS first arrived that a little girl’s drawings were still taped to the wall of the room he planned to use as a bedroom. Schoolwork and clothes were scattered in a closet with a pink door. The furniture was still somewhat arranged in the family room; photos of parents and grandparents, birthdays and weddings, were scattered here and there. For Dille, walking through the rooms made the war more real than the mortar strikes on the hill. For the first time the sniper could see the human toll. During workup he’d always pictured the fight against ISIS as a gunfight against a bunch of armed fanatics in beards. He realized that mixed into the fighting were thousands and thousands of lives torn apart, little girls who couldn’t go to school, old women forced to flee when they could barely walk. The fighting was much more complex and the cost more real. He could feel his anger at ISIS sharpen. As he set up his cot in a corner of the room, the drawings on the wall made him more eager than ever to lay down fire.
Alpha’s combat house was in a smashed-out village called Hammam al-Alil a dozen miles downriver from Mosul that had recently been retaken from ISIS. The platoon walked in loaded down with combat gear and divided up rooms. Eddie, Jake Portier, and Portier’s assistant officer in charge, Tom MacNeil, took one room. Miller, Tolbert, and the other senior enlisted guys moved into the room Dille had picked. The rest of the platoon crammed their cots into a separate one-room building that had been a family prayer room. There were no showers, no running water, very little electricity. Because of the prayer room’s tight quarters and the smell it took on after nearly a dozen unwashed men started sleeping there, it became known as the Sardine Can.
The house right next to Alpha was used by Iraqi ERD. The house on the other side held another SEAL Team 7 platoon, Golf. In a house just behind Golf was a platoon of Marine Raiders—the Marine Corps’ version of the SEALs. British special forces were also a few houses away. Each commando platoon was paired up with a different Iraqi force. All of them fell under the command of one United States Marine Corps colonel known as the Special Operations Task Force commander, or SOTF. The colonel directed the missions and set the rules. From a small command center across from the SEALs’ house, the SOTF team could see the feeds from drones, track the location of aircraft, chart the slow tightening of the noose, and see the hundreds of dots of different platoons moving through the battlespace as their ATAK trackers pinged on the map. Like a conductor, the SOTF made sure all the players performed their parts and no one got fried by an air strike.
Every day, Eddie and Portier had to debrief the SOTF on their missions and coordinate plans for the next day. The Marine colonel had to give the green light for all missions. He set the guidelines, he enforced the rules of engagement, he approved the air strikes, and he made sure no one in the commando teams was going rogue in a way that was going to blow up in Uncle Sam’s face. The platoon knew they had to keep the SOTF happy. Step out of line and Alpha could be put on time-out at the safe house in Kurdistan. Get too wild and the Marine colonel could easily send the whole platoon back to California.
Eddie’s voice came over the radio: “Turn off your ATAKs.”
Alpha’s big armored trucks were rolling toward Mosul in a dusty line behind a convoy of ERD Humvees when the order crackled over comms. Dille looked at Tolbert and wondered if he had heard the chief right. In the truck behind them, Miller looked at Tom MacNeil, Alpha’s junior officer, a Naval Academy grad. Amid the roar of the big diesel engines they said nothing. The men knew it was crazy to turn off their trackers, because it would drastically increase the risk of getting vaporized by friendly fire. But they trusted Eddie. He had been in way more combat. If the leader wanted to do something covert, he probably had a good reason. And maybe it would mean they would finally get into the fight.
Eddie had only half of the platoon with him that day. He’d divided the platoon into two squads so they could rotate on missions. Splitting the platoon made it more nimble and would give each squad a chance to rest, he told them. That day Squad 1 was with him. It included Miller, Dille, and Tolbert, and it was by far the more experienced of the two squads. They were driving north along the Tigris through a green patchwork of farm fields that ran up to Mosul. That morning ERD had taken over a house at the southern edge of the city, at most 200 meters from the FLOT. Eddie told the others over the radio that ERD needed sniper support. Even if they had to bend the rules, they were going to help.
They were about a week into a six-month deployment, and Eddie had been bitching constantly about staying a kilometer behind the fighting. The biggest battle of his career was kicking off, and SOTF’s rules threatened to reduce Alpha to little more than a bunch of well-armed tourists on combat safari. Frustration was growing in the platoon, too. All the guys in Alpha had chosen combat as a profession. They had studied and practiced the art of lethal force to near perfection. They wanted action. It didn’t sit well that they might watch tire fires and air strikes from a distance for six months, then go back to a lifetime of doughy civilians saying, “Thank you for your service.”
The SEALs were unconventional forces, and they did things unconventionally. If a platoon could get a mission done by getting a little creative, that wasn’t just accepted, it was encouraged. It had been drilled into them again and again. But even to guys who had misgivings, expressing them wasn’t how a SEAL platoon worked. It was a strict military hierarchy. The chief told you what to do, and you did it. Working around the rules was expected, but second-guessing the boss was not.
So when Eddie gave the order, they all pulled out the smartphones that ran their ATAK trackers and switched them off. Their little blue dots disappeared from the screen in the SOTF command center, where there were so many other blue dots churning around Mosul that it was unlikely anyone noticed.
The trucks rolled north. On the left was the Mosul International Airport, still smoldering from the fighting a few days before. Ahead was Mosul itself.
Dylan Dille was driving. He pulled his armored gun truck up at an abandoned farm compound on the bank of the Tigris. A high wall surrounded a few buildings, providing cover. As soon as they arrived they could feel how close they were to the fighting. The FLOT was just ahead. The rattle of machine gun fire and the zip of stray bullets from ISIS filled the air overhead like summer insects.
ERD soldiers were pushing up through an industrial neighborhood a few blocks away. ISIS was springing its defenses. They had built hundreds of armored suicide vehicles, welding Mad Max plates of iron onto civilian cars, trucks, and even bulldozers, leaving only small slits for windshields, then packing them with explosives made from fertilizer and other looted chemical stockpiles. They were crude but powerful enough to take out an M-ATV and were one of the few heavy weapons ISIS still had in good supply.
As Dille parked his truck, the whole street shook as a fiery mushroom cloud rose above the FLOT. A car bomb had just blown. The boom felt powerful enough to bend the thick blast glass of his windshield.
Miller felt the blast and instinctively glanced back at the other trucks to make sure everyone was okay. He remembered his conversation with Dille and Tolbert in the pickup a few days before about taking every precaution. He remembered the story of the EOD technician who had his head smashed in by an open door. He got on the radio. Everyone stay in the trucks unless you have a reason to be out, he said. The area hasn’t been swept for IEDs yet, so there’s no reason for anyone to be walking around, even behind cover. Before Miller could fully take in what was going on, Eddie was out of his truck, walking past Miller’s window wearing just a ball cap.
ERD had set up a hasty command post in the farmhouse. The Iraqi general in charge was poring over the maps and directing squads over the radio. Eddie had a brief conversation with the ERD officer, then came back to one of the trucks and announced over comms that ERD needed a sniper, so Eddie was going to the roof.
Dille wasn’t sure he had heard right. Eddie had been a sniper years before but was not one anymore. He hadn’t trained on the rifle in workup. He didn’t even have his own sniper gear. Why was he going to the roof? Dille watched through the thick glass as Eddie grabbed another SEAL named Joe Arrington—who actually was a sniper—took his gear, and told him to come help as his assistant and spotter. Eddie had Arrington’s rifle in his hand. The two climbed to the roof of the farmhouse.
Dille waited for Eddie to give the signal to the other snipers to get in the action. It never came. Dille and Tolbert were left sitting in the trucks, wondering what was going on. Something was off. Why had the chief gone to the roof without them? Eddie was supposed to be the tactical lead—the coach of the team. He should have been down at the trucks directing strategy. If he wanted a sniper rifle on the roof, he could send one. The chief getting behind the narrow scope of a rifle alone on a rooftop during their first real combat operation was a bit like a basketball coach tossing aside his playbook at the first whistle of the game and going in for a dunk.
Miller was in his own truck thinking the same thing. Eddie had walked off without making a tactical plan for defense or even telling Miller where he was going. The Sheriff sighed, Not good. He was annoyed that the chief had left without first doing his job. Then Miller stopped himself and remembered that part of SEAL training is learning how to react when things don’t go according to plan. You had to deal with it. If Eddie wasn’t going to do his job that day, fine. Miller knew he could do the job just as well, maybe better.
A road ran straight down to the farmhouse compound from the FLOT, where a row of abandoned houses was getting rocked by the staccato of machine guns and the boom of mortars. It was a straight shot for another Mad Max suicide car. Miller ordered one of the gun trucks to park at a corner looking down the road toward the front lines. Any car bombs speeding toward them would be stopped by the armor-piercing rounds of the heavy machine gun on the truck’s roof. He parked another truck at the rear to guard their flank and told a third truck to back into an area where the gunner had a view of the fighting and could watch for ISIS fighters on rooftops. Now if something went wrong, at least they’d be ready.
Miller told medic T. C. Byrne, who was also the platoon’s drone pilot, to launch the Puma. The Puma looked like an overgrown child’s toy, a garage-built radio-controlled plane. It had big white wings and a simple propeller, but it also had cameras and targeting software that could circle over Mosul to pinpoint enemy positions.
As the drone circled, Eddie lay on the roof scanning for targets. He was up there for a long time, but he didn’t take any shots. By that spring, many of the ISIS fighters had been battling the Iraqis for months and knew better than to stick their heads up. Instead they shot through small “murder holes” pecked in the walls. Eddie had also set up in a bad place, the snipers knew. The farmhouse was right next to the river on ground too low to look down on the city. There were simply no targets. As they waited, a few SEALs got out of the trucks to help ERD. Late in the afternoon Eddie climbed down and told the platoon to break down their gear. He passed by Byrne, who was still flying the Puma. Pack it up, Eddie said with what sounded like frustration, we’re going home.
Byrne brought the drone around in a wide swing over the Tigris and angled toward the small courtyard where the trucks were parked to bring it in for a landing. He was aiming to glide just over the courtyard wall and skid the drone to a stop in the gravel lot. But landing the Puma wasn’t easy. The Puma came in too low and crashed into the wall outside the compound, bounced back like a dodgeball, and tumbled down onto the riverbank.
The impact didn’t damage the drone, but it presented the SEALs with a serious problem. They needed to get the Puma back so they could use it on the next day’s operations. But when the Puma landed on the riverbank it became in effect a big white X that could be easily spotted from thousands of windows and murder holes in Mosul. Any enemy sniper just had to dial in the wings and wait for someone to come grab it.
Nearly all of the SEALs were still in the trucks, oblivious to the situation. Eddie and Arrington were crouched behind some rubble closest to the downed drone, but neither wanted to risk running out to the white X. Eddie said he had an idea—they would send an Iraqi soldier instead. The chief relayed a message to the Iraqi officer in charge and a minute later an Iraqi in camouflage sprinted out to grab the plane. As soon as he reached it, he suddenly jerked and fell to the ground. A sniper had shot him right through one of his butt cheeks. The soldier writhed on the ground and called for help. Eddie and Arrington ducked out from behind the rubble where they were hiding and sprayed a quick burst of cover fire as the Iraqi stumbled to his feet and lurched back to safety. Eventually, the Iraqis drove a battered armored Humvee down to the riverbank to block fire while a soldier opened the door and grabbed the drone.
Eddie came back to the trucks clearly pumped. It was the platoon’s first taste of combat in Mosul, and he wanted to tell the guys about it.
I actually saw the sniper who shot the Iraqi, Eddie told Dille.
“No shit?” Dille said.
Yeah, he was running up a hill across the river, Eddie said. He told Dille he took a few shots, but the sniper got away.
Eddie left to go to his truck, and Dille went to find out more about the firefight from Joe Arrington, the SEAL who had spotted for Eddie. The two had known each other for years. Dille asked about the sniper Eddie had fired at. Arrington just shook his head and smiled. Eddie may have shot his rifle, he said, but he was just spraying at nothing—we didn’t see anyone.
Dille nodded. Part of him had hoped the story was true. But given what he knew of Eddie, finding out it was bullshit didn’t surprise him.
That was it: the first day in combat. All in all, the guys saw it as pretty stupid. A squad of elite commandos had snuck into the biggest firefight on the planet. Then most of them sat in their trucks all day while the chief played American Sniper on a roof and an Iraqi got shot in the ass. Not the type of stuff that would ever make it into a Hollywood screenplay about SEALs. But if nothing else, it suggested to the snipers that Miller was right. Eddie really did intend to get right up on the FLOT, and when he got there, he might be more concerned with getting some action than he would be about devising tactics. In fact, he might not even do his job as chief at all.
As Alpha’s M-ATVs bumped down the dusty road back to their house in Hammam al-Alil, Eddie came over the radio to speak to all four trucks. “Hey, no one says anything about this,” he announced. One of the other trucks radioed back. They didn’t understand what he meant. “Don’t fucking talk about it to the other guys,” Eddie clarified. The radio clicked off with no further explanation.
The “other guys” were Alpha’s Squad 2. When Eddie had divided Alpha in half at the start of deployment, he had presented the idea as a way to alternate combat missions to give everyone a rest. But soon it became clear that for Eddie, the squads were not equal. Eddie was building a varsity and a JV. Squad 1 was packed with guys Eddie considered the hardest and most experienced: Craig Miller; the senior snipers Dylan Dille and Dalton Tolbert; Joe Arrington, a strong sniper who was also the platoon’s most experienced JTAC; and the best medic, T. C. Byrne, whom Eddie had handpicked from another platoon because of his skill. Eddie filled out the crew with Alpha’s newest new guy, Ivan Villanueva, whom the chief saw as a reliable gopher.
Squad 2 was stocked with SEALs with less experience and fewer accolades, guys Eddie often badmouthed in front of Squad 1. There was Josh Graffam, the new guy who had won the pistol contest back in training. Eddie never particularly liked him. There was David Shaw, a JTAC who was an outlier because he had become a SEAL after spending years as a Navy diver and getting a master’s degree at George Washington University. He was so much older than the others that the platoon called him Shaw-daddy. Eddie seemed wary of Shaw, and talked openly about how he thought Shaw was bad at his job, though no one else seemed to agree. There was Corey Scott, the other medic, who was senior to Byrne, but not quite the go-getter, and there was Josh Vriens, the most junior sniper.
Vriens was a tall, powerfully built sniper from Southern California whose resting expression was a bemused smile. He had been a water polo coach before joining the SEALs and had the loud, friendly confidence of a jock who liked to win. He prided himself on being the most aggressive SEAL in Alpha and all through training yelled at everyone to be faster, harder, meaner. He believed SEALs should always be like pit bulls straining at their leashes and should let the chief worry about when to set them loose. Vriens was also a devout Christian. He saw no contradiction between the two, so long as the fight was righteous. And he saw Mosul as a very righteous fight.
Bullies had always infuriated Vriens, especially men who victimized women. The SEAL ethos that all new SEALs were required to memorize read in part, “I humbly serve as a guardian to my fellow Americans, always ready to defend those who are unable to defend themselves.” That was right up his alley. After college he had wanted to become a cop, then a detective, then eventually an FBI agent specializing in sex traffickers. What better way to express his faith than through good works? But before he could apply to any local police forces, a Navy veteran who had gotten to know him as a mentor pulled him aside. Since Vriens had grown up playing water polo, he was a powerful swimmer. With your skills and motivation, the mentor said, you’d make a great SEAL. Vriens never looked back. He breezed through BUD/S and excelled at everything he did. He planned to stay in the military until he retired and hoped he could find a way to do the whole twenty years behind a gun.
Vriens loved Eddie. He admired that the chief went to church regularly yet was a savage badass. He was pumped to be serving with such an aggressive frogman who didn’t keep the leash too tight. But when Alpha got to Iraq and Eddie put Vriens in Squad 2, away from the best SEALs in the platoon, the sniper began to worry. He started seeing signs that Eddie was planning to push his squad aside. Eddie told Vriens to give Squad 1 his best weapons—the rocket launchers, the grenade launchers, the Puma, the Javelins. There was little left for Vriens to work with. Vriens started getting a sinking feeling that Eddie planned to do all the real fighting with Squad 1 and leave him on the bench.
That same creeping feeling spread through Squad 1 when Eddie gave the order over the radio not to tell Squad 2 anything. No one radioed back to ask why the chief didn’t want to talk about their first enemy contact. He was the chief. But the order caused them to glance around at one another. Debriefing was a daily part of life on deployment. What one squad saw on one day could provide life-saving intel for the squad going out the next. Guys understood the logic behind turning off trackers to get in the fight. But why hide details of the first contact from the other squad? That wasn’t just weird, it was dangerous.
Everyone in Alpha wore a platoon patch bearing the Bad Karma Chick. Everyone except Eddie. He wore a black-and-red “Good Old Boys” patch from his crew that deployed to Afghanistan years before. It was a small detail that at first just struck guys in the platoon as a little odd. Why wouldn’t the platoon leader wear the platoon patch? But after that day, the guys couldn’t put it out of their minds. Some began to wonder if Eddie’s loyalty was really with Alpha.
Vriens was waiting in the doorway of the Sardine Can when Squad 1 came home. “Yo, how’d it go today?” he said, smiling as he walked up and met the trucks. He’d spent all day wishing he was up at the FLOT killing ISIS and now wanted to hear about the action. It was getting dark, but even in the low light the eagerness showed on his face. Dylan Dille looked up at him as he shouldered his sniper bag and shook his head, then looked down. “It was…kind of slow,” he said.
“What do you mean, ‘kind of slow’? Like what happened?” Vriens pressed.
Dille kept walking to the house, weighed down by gear. “I’ll tell you later.”
Vriens and Dille had been friends for years, and Dille was dying to tell him all about the bullshit Eddie had pulled. But he wanted to do it quietly, covertly. Not while the chief was right there.
Vriens turned to Craig Miller, who had just stepped down from his truck, and asked where the squad had gone. Eddie stood near the door to the house, just a few steps away.
“Can’t talk about it right now,” Miller said. He pushed past, followed by the rest of Squad 1. Maybe Eddie had reasons for keeping things quiet, Miller kept thinking. As LPO, Miller had to make sure the guys respected the chief’s orders.
“Are you fucking kidding me? What, are you, like, too busy?” Vriens said sarcastically. He looked around as if to see if anyone else had noticed what was going on.
Then one of the interpreters, whom the SEALs referred to as “terps,” spotted Vriens. He was a rotund, jovial Kurdish man the platoon called Phil. “Oh, Josh, it was crazy,” he said with a grin. “The Puma crashed, and when they went to get it, bullets were flying. This one Iraqi got shot.”
Bullets flying? A guy got shot? Vriens looked around. The cold shoulder he was getting from the squad confirmed his worries about the future of Squad 2. The chief would probably have Vriens doing laundry at the safe house before long.
“Fuck this!” he said. He marched back to the Sardine Can with a clenched jaw, pushed open the door, and started swearing. ISIS had shot a guy, and Dille and Miller were trying to say that nothing had happened? It wasn’t just the silent treatment that pissed him off. It was the implication. Vriens was probably going to miss the most epic battle that his generation of SEALs would experience. And friends like Miller, Tolbert, and Dille, the men he had eaten with, slept with, and jumped out of planes with for years, the guys he was ready to die with, were cutting him out of it. It was the betrayal of everything he believed about the brotherhood of the SEALs.
Vriens began to boil with rage. He pushed open the door and went out into the yard to confront his friends. He found Miller and Tolbert still pulling gear out of the truck. “What the fuck!” Vriens said. He had his arms cocked open and his chest out so that his whole body demanded an answer. “Why aren’t you telling us anything?”
Miller glanced across the yard. Eddie was still on the steps, talking to the lieutenant. “You need to calm down,” Miller said.
“What do you mean, calm down?” Vriens shouted. “You’re not even going to give your boys a debrief?”
Then Tolbert, several inches shorter than Vriens, got right up in his face and pushed him back. “Calm the fuck down!” he hissed.
Tolbert was as pissed about Eddie’s bullshit as anyone. Ever since the ride from the airport, he had been angry that he was going to have to figure out how to deal with stupidity rather than focus on fighting ISIS. He had worked hard to get to the SEALs and even harder to get to Mosul, only to be confronted with the same backwoods bullcrap he’d left behind when he joined the Navy. He was one of the best snipers in the platoon, but he had spent all day stuck in a truck like a dog at a Walmart parking lot. And this shit about one squad not talking to another made no sense. It confirmed to him, just like Miller said, that Eddie had gone way upriver.
“This is not your fucking problem right now,” Tolbert hissed at Vriens, trying to lower his voice, but still speaking through gritted teeth. “You’ll find out when you need to know.”
Vriens pushed back. His eyes were wide open; he was clearly ready to fight. “Oh, it’s like that? When I need to know?” he said.
The Sheriff stepped in the middle. Just chill out, both of you, Miller said. He looked over and saw that Eddie had gone inside the main house. Other SEALs from Alpha, drawn in by the standoff, had gathered around. Miller realized that Eddie had pushed him into a corner. He now needed either to support his chief or to support his men. He couldn’t do both. Eddie’s order was about to spark a brawl and quite possibly cause a split in the platoon for the rest of the deployment.
“All right, everyone,” he said in his most authoritative voice. “Meeting in the Sardine Can.”
The platoon piled into the prayer room and crowded onto the scattering of cots. A lot of them still had their sweaty body armor and helmets on. Miller made his way to the front and explained everything that had happened that day: the trackers, sneaking to the FLOT, Eddie’s one-man sniper mission, the crashed Puma, Eddie spraying bullets, and the Iraqi who got shot in the ass. Miller ended by describing how Eddie had told everyone on the way home not to talk about it to anybody.
There was silence as Alpha took it all in.
“Well, that’s…stupid,” volunteered one of the EOD technicians.
“None of this makes any sense,” Vriens said. His anger had dissolved into bewilderment. “Why wouldn’t you want to share that stuff? Like, what’s the point?”
Miller shook his head. “I don’t know, I really don’t,” he said.
There were other questions. Guys wanted to know tactical details about the gunfire and the suicide cars. But most of the questions focused on Eddie. What was his reason for hiding things? What was he trying to do? Was he trying to divide Alpha in two?
Miller crossed his arms. He kept shaking his head.
“Look, this is coming from Eddie, not me,” he finally said. “But we’re not going to let it happen, okay? I promise I will never keep anything from you. Never. No one is ever, ever going to divide Alpha.”