insurgents saw us, they started letting us have it.
One of my guys shot off a Carl Gustav rocket at the top of the
building where they were shooting from.
The Gustav put a big
ol
��
hole there. Bodies flew everywhere.
The rocket helped take some of the fight out of them, and as
resistance
weakened, the Army punched in and took the building.
By the time they reached the grounds, there was almost no
resistance. The few people we hadn’t killed had run away.
I
t was always hard to tell how many insurgents were opposing us in
a battle like that. A small handful could put up a pretty good fight. A
dozen men fighting behind cover could hold up a unit advance for
quite a while, depending on the circumstances. Once the insurgents
were met with a lot of force, however, you
could count on about
half squirting out the back or wherever to get away.
W
e’d had the Carl Gustav with us earlier, but as far as I know, this
was the first time we’d actually killed anyone with it, and it may
have been the first time any SEAL unit did so. It was certainly the
first time we used it against a building.
Once word spread, of
course, everyone wanted to use them.
Technically, the Carl Gustav was developed to combat armor,
but as we found out, it was pretty potent against buildings. In fact, it
was perfect in Ramadi—it just blew right through reinforced
concrete and took out whoever was inside. The overpressure from
the explosion wiped out the interior.
We had different rounds for the gun. (Remember, it’s actually
considered a recoilless rifle rather than a rocket launcher.) A lot of
times, the insurgents would hide behind
embankments and other
barriers, well protected. In that case, you could set an air-burst
round to explode over them. The air
burst was a lot worse than
anything that detonated on the ground.
The Gustav is relatively easy to use. You have to wear double
ear-protection and be careful where you stood when it’s fired, but
the results are awesome. Everyone in the platoon wanted to use it
after a while—I swear there were fights over who was going to
launch it.
W
hen you’re in a profession where your job is to kill people, you
start getting creative about doing it.
You think about getting the most firepower you possibly can into
the battle. And you start trying to think of new and inventive ways
to eliminate your enemy.
We had so many targets out in Viet Ram we started asking
ourselves, what weapons have we
not
used to kill them?
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