Eddie wove his way through a blown-up, burned-out elementary school, past tangles of broken desks covered by the dust of explosions. A heavy pack of sniper gear hung from his shoulders. In the dark hall, he stepped past an IED set to blow if anyone opened one of the classroom doors and moved toward a stairway to the roof. Right behind Eddie was Dalton Tolbert, lugging his own sniper pack, an assault rifle in his hands, silently sweeping his eyes over every desk and corner, looking for stay-behind ISIS fighters.
It was a few weeks after Alpha’s first combat mission, and the platoon had pushed deeper into Mosul than ever before. The noose around Mosul was tightening, and as it did, Eddie was establishing a pattern. Most mornings Eddie would have the platoon give false locations in official radio transmissions to the SOTF, then turn off their trackers and move up to the FLOT. Once they were close to the action, the chief would grab a few SEALs for security and walk off to find a rooftop or window with a view of the city that would be his sniper hide. There he would spend the day behind the scope of a high-powered rifle, cracking off shots.
That morning, Eddie walked up the school’s abandoned stairway and stepped out into the sunlight of the roof with Tolbert. As their eyes adjusted they saw the bright sprawl of Mosul stretching out in front of them.
Craig Miller was a few blocks away running the platoon’s main operations with ERD while Eddie was on the rifle. It was becoming clear to the Sheriff that his boss wasn’t the least bit concerned with the basic requirements of being a platoon leader. He rarely told the men the plan for the day, and he didn’t do much of a debrief when the day was done. Miller noticed that Eddie even neglected basic safety steps like memorizing the head count before going out on missions so he wouldn’t leave anyone behind.
Was someone in the leadership to smack Eddie and tell him to do his job? Miller thought maybe the young lieutenant in charge, Jake Portier, would eventually be forced to say something. But so far, no luck. Portier was a big, confident man with authority in his voice. The guys liked him. He was smart and funny and strong. He liked to blast music in the trucks on the drive to Mosul. But as the weeks went on, it became clear that while he was their commanding officer, he wasn’t much of a leader, and he definitely wasn’t in command. During missions Portier spent much of his time on the radio in a truck coordinating between the Iraqis and the SOTF, acting more like a dispatcher. Officially, his job was to make the orders that Eddie would carry out, but guys regularly heard Portier try to give commands over the platoon radio, only to have Eddie’s voice crackle back with something like “No, Jake, we’re not fucking doing that.” Eventually they noticed that Portier just started asking Eddie to tell him the plan. And Portier didn’t seem to mind. He was one of Eddie’s biggest cheerleaders. He appeared enamored of Eddie’s experience and swagger. It was as if the BUD/S instructor relationship from years before had never gone away.
Eddie was choosy about which team members he took to the sniper hides. He picked favorites, and Dalton Tolbert was one of them. Eddie saw potential in him. Tolbert had a hunch it was because he had a wild streak and the chief saw him as a fellow rebel who didn’t seem too caught up in rules and regulations. Eddie would tell him he had the makings of a real frogman. Dylan Dille, on the other hand, was more serious, almost too cerebral; he seemed to think about war too much to really enjoy it. Joe Arrington was the other choice, and he didn’t click with Eddie. Arrington had deployed as a new guy with Eddie in a different platoon years before, and it hadn’t gone well. Eddie had hazed him relentlessly. Arrington had appeared in a platoon skit in a dress as a character named Bubbles, and Eddie had never let him forget it. He considered Arrington a hippie and a goof. He was still calling him Bubbles years later. Of the snipers in Squad 1, that left Tolbert.
On the roof they set up their rifles and dialed in the range. A platoon of ERD had pushed ahead and a firefight was blowing up about 1,000 meters north into the city. Through their scopes, Eddie and Tolbert could see Iraqi Army trucks moving into position and squads of soldiers maneuvering around corners. Puffs of smoke rose over the neighborhood as grenades and mortars fired off. The two snipers hunted the rooftops, ready to pick off ISIS fighters, but buildings were blocking their view of the main fighting. They scanned for nearly an hour but took no shots.
Then Eddie hissed, “I got something.”
Tolbert lifted his eye from his scope and tried to line up with Eddie, then peered back through the glass as Eddie talked him onto a courtyard in the middle distance. It took a moment for Tolbert to take in what was happening. The fighting was only a few blocks away, but there was no hint of it in the courtyard. In the morning light, a middle-aged man leaned one shoulder against a broad doorway and cocked his head to one side, watching a young boy chase after a soccer ball as it bumped across the dirt.
“What, the kid?” Tolbert said.
No, Eddie said, the man. Go ahead, Eddie said, shoot him. It was as if Eddie was doing Tolbert a favor by offering him the first shot.
Tolbert scanned for a gun or some military gear, a radio—anything that might make the man a target. There was nothing.
Come on, shoot him, Eddie said. The chief was looking down his own rifle, finger on the trigger, but he wanted Tolbert to make the kill, like it was some sort of an initiation and he was daring the young sniper to do it, maybe even grooming him. Tolbert centered his scope on the man. But if Eddie thought Tolbert’s trailer-park roots made him an outlaw, it was just the opposite.
It was true that Tolbert had grown up with nothing and clawed his way up like a character from a Victorian novel. His mother had multiple sclerosis and couldn’t work. His father was almost never around, and when he was, it was usually trouble. He spent much of his boyhood in the Ozarks in a single-wide so decrepit that when the family finally moved out, the local authorities had it condemned. They were poor enough that at times Tolbert shot squirrels and speared frogs to put meat on the table. “This is where you don’t want to be,” his mother once told him, gesturing around the trailer. “So go out there and find something better.”
Tolbert had every excuse to amount to nothing, but he just didn’t have it in him. He wanted to be the best at something. There was no money for college, and his tiny rural high school was too small to have sports teams that might get him noticed, so the military seemed like the best way out. Both his parents had been in the Navy. He decided to go the same route. And when he heard in middle school that the elite of the elite in the Navy was the SEALs, that’s what he announced he planned to do. His own mother just laughed at his announcement and told him he couldn’t even pick up his own socks, so she didn’t see how he was going to be a SEAL. That made him want it more. During high school, he trained relentlessly. He would pack the heaviest pots and pans in a backpack and go rucking through the woods or sit in a bathtub of icy water for as long as he could to try to toughen up for BUD/S.
Because Tolbert grew up with nothing, the SEALs to him meant everything. He pushed hard and refused to quit. Early in training he fell off the back of a moving cargo truck and ended up in a medically induced coma for several days with serious internal bleeding. The Navy offered him an early medical discharge, but he wouldn’t take it. He wanted to be someone that mattered. He wasn’t going to let a near-death experience get in the way.
Growing up, Tolbert had gotten a close-up view of every deadbeat vice and destructive lifestyle imaginable. He met scammers and liars, many of them supposed authority figures. He didn’t consider it a bad upbringing because it forced him to decide early who he was and what he wanted. It made him disciplined and hardened to outside influence. He didn’t have to worry about fitting in, because he never had. And so even if the chief he had admired was saying to do it, there was no fucking way Tolbert was going to shoot a guy who was just watching a kid play.
At the same time, Tolbert also wasn’t ready to tell his chief and former BUD/S instructor to fuck off. Eddie had given him an order. Defying it would have consequences. He had to make it look like he was obeying. If he did it just right, he could scare the man and the boy inside, away from the gunfire. He shifted his crosshairs off the man’s torso, put them on a wall just over his head. He pulled the trigger. The high-velocity bullet smacked against the building, spraying concrete. Through his scope Tolbert saw the man wince. Eddie, seeing that Tolbert had missed, immediately fired. His shot went wide. The man waved frantically to the boy and they scrambled inside. Tolbert breathed a sigh of relief. He had just seen Eddie try to shoot a civilian for no reason. But at least the chief wasn’t a very good shot.
Over the next weeks Tolbert was one of the few SEALs consistently given a front-row view to Eddie in action. He quickly realized that Miller had been wrong about Eddie. Things weren’t just bad. They were, in fact, much worse. The after-action reports Tolbert quietly passed to the other snipers at the end of the day recounted a mix of sloppy practices, screwups, and bizarre behavior he could only call madness. At times, Eddie would say he saw a target and fire, but Tolbert would swing his scope to see it and find nothing. Other times, he saw Eddie shoot at targets and miss, but still claim a kill.
Eddie liked to regale the platoon with stories about kills at the end of each day. A few days after Eddie tried to shoot the man from the schoolhouse, he and Tolbert set up on a nearby rooftop, once again leaving the rest of the squad waiting down below in the trucks. The guys below heard the chief’s sniper rifle echoing repeatedly over Mosul. Must be a lot of action, Dille thought. Eddie came down at the end of the day, pulled off his sweaty body armor back at their house, and announced he had shot fourteen that day. The snipers gathered around to hear more. Eddie said he had seen squads of ISIS fighters in camo moving tactically to the northeast, block to block. He dialed in and picked them off one by one.
Shit, fourteen, thought Dylan Dille. No one else had even seen ISIS yet. One kill would be headline news. Fourteen was epic.
Eddie left to go change out of his gear. Tolbert remained behind, shaking his head and smiling. “Total bullshit,” he said. Eddie had fired a ton of shots, but he’d been firing almost directly to the east. The front line was several blocks north. “He might have shot at fourteen guys, but if he did, I’m pretty sure they were all ERD,” Tolbert said. “And he didn’t hit any of them.”
Every day Eddie kept shooting and boasting about more kills. Two here, five there. He sounded like a fisherman whose catches got bigger with every telling. Tolbert and Dille were quickly starting to wonder if part of the reason Eddie had such a reputation as a badass when he joined Alpha was that he relentlessly built up his own lore. After a month in Mosul, almost everyone who had spent any time in a sniper hide with Eddie had a story. Eddie would fire like he was in the Alamo. He shot ten or sometimes twenty times as much as other snipers. The crack of his rifle was almost always followed by him announcing, “Got ’em!” But when other snipers swung their scopes to check out the hit, they almost never saw anyone. Even so, Eddie kept casually mentioning a mounting tally back at the house.
I shot a guy today, he told Dille. The guy slumped against a wall but didn’t fall down, so I kept shooting and watched the body dance as each bullet hit. Joe Arrington overheard the story. After Eddie left the room, Arrington told Dille that Eddie had told him the same story years ago about another deployment in Afghanistan.
Eddie also appeared to be making up stories about close calls that never happened. He would tell the platoon a mortar landed ten meters from him. Guys who had witnessed it would quietly correct the story once he was gone—it was more like a hundred meters. One afternoon Eddie rushed in from a rooftop sniper position, breathlessly claiming that he had been shot in the helmet. He texted his buddy Snead to make sure he knew, adding, “They flanked us pretty good. Shit is crazy.” That night, while Eddie was meeting with the colonel at the SOTF, Tolbert, Dille, and a few others quietly inspected Eddie’s helmet. There were no bullet holes. No marks at all.
The real firepower in Mosul was in the hands of the JTACs, who could call in air strikes and obliterate a whole building of ISIS fighters, but Eddie argued he probably had more kills than any of the JTACs. He told the platoon he averaged at least three kills a day, then told them, “Do the math.” He suggested he probably had more kills than any sniper ever in the SEALs, even more than Chris Kyle, “the American Sniper.” He appeared to be trying to build the mystique that would make him a legend when he returned home. It became so ridiculous that Tolbert started to respond with mock excitement at each shot the chief took. “What you got, Eddie, what you got?! Talk me onto the target!” he’d yell, adding just enough melodrama to his voice to go undetected by the boss but still make Dille giggle under his breath.
Guys in both Alpha and Golf platoons started making fun of Eddie’s bravado and suspicious body counts behind his back. On the walls of some of his regular sniper hides they started writing one-liners about what a badass he was. One read, “Eddie G puts the laughter in manslaughter.”
The senior chief in charge of the troop, Brian Alazzawi, came for an inspection halfway through the deployment. Eddie respected Alazzawi because he was an old-school, door-kicking dude who still took every chance to get out in the field with the boys. Alazzawi respected Eddie because he carried himself like he was the toughest guy ever to wear a SEAL Trident. “Everyone’s a pussy to Eddie. Everyone. If you’re not Eddie Gallagher, you’re a pussy. That’s one of the things I love about him,” Alazzawi later said.
Eddie took Alazzawi up in a sniper hide to give him a taste of what Alpha was doing in Mosul. The senior chief noticed something was screwy with Eddie, too. They were in an abandoned concrete room, three stories up. Eddie was on the rifle, shooting through a narrow window. The senior chief stood directly behind Eddie, spotting with binoculars. After scanning over the dense urban blocks for a few minutes, Eddie said he spied a group of dudes in ski masks carrying AK-47s. Boom. The bang of his high-powered rifle echoed through the concrete room.
“Got ’em!” Eddie said.
He fired again. Boom!
“Got ’em!”
He fired again. Boom!
“Got ’em!”
Alazzawi scanned with the binoculars, eager to see ISIS dirtbags getting smoked. After a moment he lifted his eyes to make sure he was lined up with Eddie, then scanned again. There was nothing there. Either I’m going crazy, he thought to himself, or Eddie is.
Eddie shot again. A deafening crack echoed through the room, sharper and louder than the others, followed by a shower of concrete shards and dust.
“What the fuck?” Alazzawi shouted as he ducked. He looked around and realized Eddie had panned too far to one side, missed the window entirely, and shot the wall of his own sniper hide.
Eddie didn’t seem to notice. Or at least he didn’t react. He just kept shooting.
It should have been a red flag, but Alazzawi had bigger things to worry about. He was overseeing three platoons in Iraq, and the other two teams of so-called elite commandos were barely functioning. One had a fresh, inexperienced chief because the original chief had been shot. Another had a command team so dysfunctional that he had to fire them halfway through deployment, and he now had to babysit the new team. At least Alpha’s chief was competent enough to be left on his own.
The platoon wasn’t so sure. The actual mechanics of clearing the city seemed far less important to the chief than the appearance of being a warrior in an epic battle. Guys in Alpha noticed Eddie seemed determined to use as many rockets and shoulder-fired missiles as he could, even when the SEALs saw no apparent targets. He was firing on the dense neighborhoods like they were a training range. He had guys launch toward random buildings in the city, arguing that he was doing recon by fire—stirring up the hornet’s nest to see what came out. Sometimes he would gather the guys together and shoot a video posing with an American flag while a SEAL in the background shot a rocket into the city. He texted one of those videos to his buddy Snead. It was almost as if he was shooting rockets just to get his stats up so he could gloat back in Coronado that he was getting more combat than his friends.
Golf platoon, the other SEAL outfit trying to operate in Mosul, was not happy. They often went to the same sniper hides as Alpha on different days, and the way Eddie operated was pissing them off. Every time a sniper took a shot from a hidden nest for no reason it let ISIS know where they were. When Eddie took ten, twenty, or thirty shots a day, that meant enemy fighters would stay hidden and snipers couldn’t work. Or worse, it meant ISIS would zero in on the spot and send mortars raining down. There was a very real possibility Eddie’s shooting at nothing was going to get guys killed.
Golf’s chief would get into shouting matches with Eddie, accusing Eddie of sneaking up to the FLOT or burning sniper positions. Eddie would say he was just jealous because Eddie was getting more action. Then Eddie would bash the chief behind his back with Alazzawi. “Bro he is the dumbest motherfucker I have met,” he wrote in one text. “I don’t know how this guy fakes that he was any good at his job.”
Every day, Portier went to briefings with Eddie and the SOTF. Miller and the snipers knew the lieutenant had witnessed the infighting, the lying, and the weird behavior of the chief, but day after day, he did nothing. The officer was closer with Eddie than with anyone else in the platoon. They slept in the same room. Often the snipers next door could hear them yelling at each other through the walls. Eddie insulted and browbeat the officer so often that the platoon started joking darkly that Portier had some kind of codependent abusive relationship with Eddie and could never leave him. The chief’s constant disapproval only made the officer try to please him more.
Many of the guys tried to put Eddie’s antics out of their minds. After all, they had a job to do. Their platoon drama was just a play within a play—a petty nothing in the epic saga of Mosul. Block by block they were helping ERD, pinpointing ISIS with drones, hitting them with mortars, and calling in air strikes. They could focus on how their boss sucked, or they could focus on destroying a brutal criminal theocracy that had vowed to spread violence all over the globe. Every day they had a chance to be the bad karma that ISIS had coming. The stuff with Eddie? They might grumble about it, but most of them figured they’d probably laugh about it eventually.
In the worst moments, though, it didn’t seem funny at all. There was a war going on—the biggest armed conflict on the planet. Thousands of Iraqi troops were slowly tightening the noose on an increasingly desperate and mean group of ISIS fighters. Almost every day Alpha took fire, often from heavy machine guns, sometimes from rockets. Two SEALs had close calls from rocket-propelled grenades. An interpreter was nearly cut in half by one of the explosions. ISIS dropped a grenade from a drone and nearly killed Craig Miller, knocking him backward and sending a hot shard of shrapnel into the body armor on his chest.
One afternoon Dylan Dille was walking from his truck to a sniper hide when a mortar hit just a few meters away, showering the street with stone blocks. It was the closest he had ever come to death, and he was surprised and a little pleased to find he felt almost no fear. His instinct was not to panic but to focus. ISIS had spotted the squad. He needed to warn the others that it was time to bail. He ducked into a house being used by Portier as a command center and told him, then hurried back past where the mortar had hit to a building where Eddie and the snipers were set up on the roof. As he passed the crater he smelled the unmistakable scent of garlic. It was strong, so strong it burned. He began to cough. He realized ISIS had hit the platoon with homemade mustard gas. The word passed fast and guys took cover in their trucks, wiped down with decontamination sponges, and got out of the area as fast as possible. The mustard was poorly made and didn’t cause anyone serious harm. But it showed how vicious the fighting was getting.
Josh Vriens watched the sun rise from behind the barrel of a .50-caliber sniper rifle on the top floor of an abandoned police station above the Tigris River. The growing light slowly stitched detail into the silhouettes of the ancient city’s domes and minarets as he scanned the rooftops. The city was quiet. A half dozen other SEALs from Alpha were set up with him in the police station. Eddie had set up with other SEALs a block south in an abandoned university building. All of them had their rifles fixed on the old city, but there was no action. It was too early. No one was out on the street.
Suddenly a high-pitched whoosh cut the air—the telltale scream of a Javelin. Vriens caught the flash of the $100,000 missile streaking across the river. It arced up, then slammed down into the ancient, hand-built stone dome of a four-hundred-year-old mosque on the other side of the water. The boom echoed through the silence as showers of stone plinked onto the street and smoke rose above the city.
The missile had come from Eddie’s position at the university. Vriens knew Eddie loved firing Javs and often shot missiles and rockets to try to stir things up. Eddie explained it like it was an established tactic, but in a crowded city, it struck Vriens as a pretty bad idea. In workup SEALs practiced over and over to make sure they didn’t endanger civilians. It was a point of professional pride. Vriens started to worry that it seemed to matter little to Eddie.
It was March 22, 2017. Alpha had been in Mosul for a month, and both squads were out together. For their first big operation with the entire platoon, they were trying something different. The Tigris cut the city into two halves. ISIS was holed up in the west. On all their previous missions the SEALs had attacked western Mosul from the desert edges, pushing the enemy back toward the river. The eastern half was an abandoned expanse of rubble and skeletal buildings. The plan was to sneak into those buildings, surprise the enemy pushed up against the river, and shoot them in the back. It was a classic stealth SEAL mission.
Vriens and his squad inserted well before dawn, climbing the dark, abandoned stairwells of the police station using night vision while Eddie and his crew went up into the university. The police station looked like someone had kicked in its teeth. All the glass was smashed out of the windows. The concrete and stucco walls were a plague of dull gray pocks caused by showers of machine gun fire and exploding shells. Inside, the walls were spray-painted with ISIS flags and propaganda. ISIS had lugged barrels of oil to the top floor and dumped them down the stairwell, perhaps planning to set the place on fire as they retreated, but the oil was still there, dark and slick as the SEALs crept up the stairs.
Miller and Dille set up a mortar pit in a courtyard between the two buildings. The armored trucks with their heavy machine guns were positioned to the north to provide flanking cover fire. Just across the water stood Mosul’s old city, where for centuries merchants and traders had built up a warren of stone houses. Many of the streets were no wider than a man’s reach. They branched into dead ends and hidden courtyards. Jumbles of flat roofs provided hiding spots at every level. It was the perfect place for ISIS to make a last stand.
As the rumble of the Javelin explosion ripped up the river, Vriens scanned the streets for fighters who had been flushed out. He wasn’t exactly cool with firing missiles randomly, but if it actually worked, he didn’t want to miss the chance to smoke an ISIS fighter with a .50-caliber rifle. No luck. ISIS had bashed networks of rat holes through the shared walls in the houses of Mosul’s old city. They could go for blocks without venturing out. Vriens scanned the open streets where he thought fighters might be forced to expose themselves, but all was quiet. The Javelin had blown a hole in the side of the mosque, but it hadn’t stirred up anything. All it had done was announce to all of old Mosul the location of the SEALs.
Vriens shook his head in frustration but stayed in position. If he bailed on every mission where Eddie did something stupid, he’d never leave the Sardine Can. He sat patiently for hours, listening to the echo of gunfire from a battle several blocks south where the Iraqis were pushing toward the old city. Then finally, he spotted a man stepping out onto a top-floor balcony across the river. Vriens had taken a break from the sniper rifle, and he studied the man with his binoculars. The man was of military age, looking south toward the front line of fighting, talking into a boxy handheld radio.
“Whoa, whoa, I got something,” Vriens said to the other SEALs in the room. But he wasn’t sure the man was a legit target. The man didn’t have a gun. If he was just a civilian ham radio enthusiast, he was off-limits, but if he was coordinating fighting positions for ISIS, he was cleared hot. Vriens turned to one of the platoon’s Iraqi interpreters, “Hey, do people in Mosul usually talk on walkie-talkies?”
“What? No, man, this is Mosul,” the terp said. “They talk on cellphones like everyone else.”
Vriens studied the man. He was looking toward the front lines. He appeared to be relaying information on the battle. Vriens could make out five or six other men in the room off the balcony. No women. No children. It was the first real target of the day. Two other SEALs had their crosshairs on him.
“Okay,” Vriens said. “When you’re ready, take the shot.”
One of the snipers squeezed off a shot but missed. The bullet exploded against a wall and the man flung himself down and crawled inside.
The team decided to try a Javelin missile that could take out the whole room, but they needed clearance to fire. Vriens had another SEAL radio Portier and relay what he was seeing. Portier then radioed the SOTF. While Vriens was waiting, he told Corey Scott to get the missile ready.
Scott was a platoon medic but also one of the more experienced fighters in the platoon. He had been with Alpha as long as Miller, Dille, and Tolbert and had deployed with them to Afghanistan. Nothing in his demeanor immediately screamed that he was trained as a saver of lives. He had a low, prominent brow, a shaved head, and the broad, powerful shoulders of a brawler. He looked more like a longshoreman from an old movie. The team’s other medic, T. C. Byrne, was always geeking out about medical procedures and anatomy. After missions he volunteered to help the surgeons working on Iraqi soldiers in order to build his skills. Not Scott. He was there to do a job, but first aid did not seem like his passion. In Coronado he had a reputation for arriving at the Alpha high bay a bit late and leaving a bit early. Because he was rarely around, the guys called him “the Ghost.” If he had a reputation for anything else, it was for being a serial entrepreneur with a shaky record. Scott seemed to always be looking for an easy way to get ahead and he was vulnerable to get-rich-quick schemes. He once bought a small avocado farm in the hills above San Diego, sure that he would soon be rolling in dough and guacamole. It didn’t pan out. He tried to start a moving company and got a few other guys in the platoon to invest. They lost money. None of that, though, meant he wasn’t a solid SEAL. He was even-keeled, fearless, and loyal. And like everyone in the platoon, he wore many hats. He could shoot a rifle, launch a missile, and then stop a bleed.
Scott pulled out the Javelin and balanced the launch tube on his shoulder. Attached to the tube was a laptop-sized computer with a small screen used to lock in on the target. Scott used his thumbs to zoom in on the door of the balcony. Portier gave the green light to fire. Scott positioned himself in a window, got a lock on the door, and launched. There was a modest click, a second of silence, then a fierce hiss as the missile popped out of the tube. It floated for a fraction of a second as ten steering fins popped out like a chandelier of switchblades. Then the main thrusters kicked in and it roared away.
The missile went right through the door. Smoke and debris punched out of every window. As the dust cleared, the team could see a survivor dragging out the wounded. The snipers started firing on anyone still moving. Then the battle started heating up. The SEALs could hear the shooting to the south, where Iraqi soldiers were pushing north along the river. The fighting was growing more intense. Vriens spotted files of ISIS fighters in combat gear darting between buildings and moving toward the front line. The SEALs began firing. Soon everyone was shooting almost as much as Eddie usually did. The ISIS forces battling the Iraqis to the south realized that they were being hit from the east, and turned their guns across the river.
Rocket-propelled grenades shot toward the SEALs, leaving white smoke trails across the green water. Tracer fire from an ISIS heavy machine gun streaked over the police station. The Puma drone was up, circling above the neighborhood. With its black-and-white camera, it zeroed in on enemy rocket teams and relayed the locations to the mortar team. Miller and Dille dropped mortars as fast as they could. ISIS responded with its own mortars. The SEAL gun trucks dumped rounds back, using a mix of armor-piercing rounds and exploding anti-personnel rounds that the SEALs called “party mix.” Soon the SEALs were throwing everything they had across the river: mortars, snipers, machine guns, and shoulder-launched rockets from the Carl Gustafs.
For maybe the first time since landing in Iraq, Alpha was working as it was supposed to, a whole platoon focused on a surprise mission, sucker-punching ISIS in the gut to take pressure off the Iraqis taking back the city. That Eddie was acting more like a shooter than a chief didn’t seem to matter. The guys all knew their roles; no one needed direction. Snipers spotted for gun trucks. Gun trucks provided suppressive fire for snipers. The camera in the sky relayed enemy positions, and the mortar team pounded them. Carl Gs flew into buildings where ISIS scurried for cover. It was, as noted in a write-up for a Bronze Star awarded months later to Jake Portier, a “lethal symphony of focused combat power.” The crescendo was a five-hundred-pound bomb called in by one of the JTACs that screamed in on an ISIS command post and swallowed the entire building in a whip of smoke and dust caused by its own ruin. Vriens watched it all from a blown-out window. Karma was raining down. All the mayhem was…beautiful.
By the time it was all over, darkness was falling. Eddie sent the call over the radio to break down the operation and regroup at the university. They were headed home. The mission had been going on for twenty-four hours and they were wiped. Vriens lugged his gear down to the gun trucks, exhausted. The adrenaline was wearing off, and the cold of the spring evening made him shiver in his sweat-soaked uniform. But he was also pumped. Alpha had pulled off a coordinated, complex attack with nearly every weapon at their disposal and sent ISIS fighters cartwheeling through the air. It was what he had joined the Navy to do. Even with the Eddie situation, Vriens saw that Alpha was going to work. It felt fantastic.
Everyone piled into the idling trucks, ready to go. But orders came down from the SOTF to wait. The colonel in charge was sending Golf platoon to replace them. Alpha had to hold until the other SEALs arrived. A few minutes went by, then a few more. Everyone wanted to go home and get some rest. As they waited, Eddie came over the radio. He wanted to know if anyone had any ammo left.
“Not really,” Vriens replied. “Just a couple cans of forty mike-mike.”
Sweet, Eddie replied. He told Vriens to grab the cans and meet him on the roof. Also, he added, bring the new guys, Graffam and Villanueva. He wanted to get them some experience.
“Forty mike-mike” was the nickname for the MK-47—a squat, laser-guided grenade launcher that spat out forty-millimeter grenades at a rate of 250 rounds per minute. It was impressively lethal, but in the dense urban landscape the SEALs hadn’t had much chance to use it. Vriens lugged the MK-47 up the stairs with more than a little excitement. It was a badass gun, why waste the opportunity? He and the new guys set up the launcher on the roof facing the city. By that time the sun had set. All power to occupied Mosul had been cut, so the city looked darker than it probably had for a thousand years. The new guys needed to learn the gun, Eddie said. Some practice would be good for them. Fire into the neighborhood across the river, Eddie told the new guys. There wasn’t much more instruction than that.
Why do it? Eddie didn’t say. Vriens didn’t ask, and neither did the new guys. To question an order was to create a problem. When guys were a problem, Eddie sent them back to sit at the safe house. Graffam and a few other guys had already been benched for a few weeks for hesitating at some of Eddie’s tactics. Whatever guys thought of the chief, they knew they had to be very careful not to piss him off.
The guys took turns spraying the city with grenades. In the dark the burst of hundreds of bomblets put on an impressive fireworks show. They drained one ammo can, then another. It looked cool, Vriens thought as he watched. But as they continued to launch grenades over the river it dawned on him that it was also incredibly stupid. They were exposed on a rooftop. At any moment an ISIS sniper could tag one of them in the head. It was dark, but the enemy had a few night-vision scopes. Vriens was the last person to shy away from risk, but what was the reward? Eddie was putting his own guys out there for no reason.
Vriens was hunched over in front of the gun, holding down the tripod as the new guys shot. He started to think more and more about who might be hiding in the ghostly, blacked-out buildings on the receiving end of the fireworks show. It occurred to him that some of them might hold ISIS fighters who had been shooting at them all day, but others might hold families trapped in the crossfire, cowering as grenades smashed into their rooftops. In the dark there was no way to know.
Vriens had joined the Navy to help the helpless. He was convinced Mosul was a righteous fight. For years he had craved unfettered combat and now here he was, in the thick of it, launching hundreds of grenades blindly into a city. He wondered how it had gotten to that point and felt himself recoil. He looked over at Eddie. In the flashes from the grenades he could see the chief’s face. His eyes were locked on old Mosul. His mouth wore a broad grin. He seemed to be enjoying himself.