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P
RAYERS AND
B
ANDOLIERS
B
efore every op, a bunch of the platoon would gather and say a
prayer. Marc Lee would lead it, usually speaking from the heart
rather than reciting a memorized prayer.
I didn’t pray every time going out, but I did thank God every
night when I got back.
There was one other ritual when we returned: cigars.
A few of us would get together and smoke them at the end of an
op. In Iraq, you can get Cubans; we smoked Romeo y Julieta No.
3s. We’d light up to top off the day.
I
n a way, we all thought we were invincible. In another way, we
also accepted the fact that we could die.
I didn’t focus on death, or spend much time thinking about it. It
was more like an idea, lurking in the distance.
I
t was during this deployment that I invented a little wrist bandolier,
a small bullet-holder that allowed me to easily reload without
disturbing my gun setup.
I took a holder that had been designed to be strapped on a gun
stock and cut it up. Then I arranged some cord through it and tied it
to my left wrist.
Generally, when I fired, I would have my fist balled up under the
gun to help me aim. That brought the bandolier close. I could fire,
take my right hand, and grab more bullets, and keep my eye sighted
through the scope at all times.
A
s lead sniper, I tried to help the new guys, telling them what
details to look for. You could tell someone was an insurgent not just
by the fact that he was armed but by the way he moved. I started
giving advice I’d been given back at the beginning of Fallujah, a
battle that by now seemed like a million years ago.
“Dauber, don’t be afraid to pull the trigger,” I’d tell the younger
sniper. “If it’s within the ROEs, you take him.”
A little bit of hesitation was common for the new guys. Maybe all
Americans are a little hesitant to be the first to shoot, even when it’s
clear that we’re under attack, or will be shortly.
Our enemy seemed to have no such problem. With a little
experience, our guys didn’t, either.
But you could never tell how a guy was going to perform under
the stress of combat. Dauber did real well—real well. But I noticed
that, for some snipers, the extra strain made them miss shots that
they would have no trouble with in training. One guy in particular—
an excellent guy and a good SEAL—went through a spell where he
was missing quite a lot.
You just couldn’t tell how someone was going to react.
R
amadi was infested with insurgents, but there was a large civilian
population. Sometimes they’d wander into firefights. You’d wonder
what the hell they were thinking.
One day, we were in a house in another part of the city. We’d
engaged a bunch of insurgents, killing quite a few, and were waiting
through a lull in the action. The bad guys were probably nearby,
waiting for another chance to attack.
Insurgents normally put small rocks in the middle of the road to
warn others where we were. Civilians usually saw the rocks and
quickly realized what was going on. They always stayed far away.
Hours might pass before we saw any people again—and, of course,
by that point, the people we would be seeing would have guns and
be trying to kill us.
For some reason, this car came flying over the rocks and floored
it, speeding toward us and passing all sorts of dead men on the
way.
I threw a flash-crash but the grenade didn’t get the driver to
stop. So, I fired into the front of the car. The bullet went through the
engine compartment. He stopped and bailed out of the car, yelling
as he hopped around.
Two women were with him in the car. They must have been the
stupidest people in the city, because even with all that had
happened, they were oblivious to us or the danger around them.
They started coming toward our house. I threw another flash
grenade and finally they started moving back in the direction they’d
come. Finally, they seemed to notice some of the bodies that were
littered around and started screaming.
They seem to have gotten away okay, except for the foot
wound. But it was a miracle they hadn’t been killed.
T
he pace was hot and heavy. It made us want more. We ached for
it. When the bad guys were hiding, we tried to dare them into
showing themselves so we could take them down.
One of the guys had a bandanna, which we took and fashioned
into a kind of mummy head. Equipped with goggles and a helmet, it
looked almost like a soldier—certainly at a few hundred yards. So
we attached it to a pole and held it up over the roof, trying to draw
fire one day when the action slowed. It brought a couple of
insurgents out and we bagged them.
W
e were just slaughtering them.
There were times when we were so successful on overwatch
that I thought our guys on the street were starting to get a little
careless. I once spotted them going down the middle of the street,
rather than using the side and ducking into the little cover area
provided by the walls and openings.
I called down on the radio.
“Hey, y’all need to be going cover to cover,” I told them,
scolding them gently.
“Why?” answered one of my platoon mates. “You’ve got us
covered.”
He may have been joking, but I took it seriously.
“I can’t protect you from something I don’t see,” I said. “If I
don’t see a glint or movement, the first time I know he’s there is
when he shoots. I can get him after he’s shot you, but that’s not
going to help you.”
H
eading back to Shark Base one night, we got involved in another
firefight, a quick hit-and-run affair. At some point, a frag came over
and exploded near some of the guys.
The insurgents ran off, and we picked ourselves back up and got
going.
“Brad, what’s with your leg?” someone in the platoon asked.
He looked down. It was covered with blood.
“Nothin’,” he said.
It turned out he’d caught a piece of metal in his knee. It may not
have hurt then—I don’t know how true that is, since no SEAL has
ever actually admitted feeling pain since the beginning of Creation—
but when he got back to Shark Base, it was clear the wound wasn’t
something he could just blow off. Shrapnel had wedged itself behind
his patella. He needed to be operated on.
He was airlifted out, our first casualty in Ramadi.
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