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O
ur head shed had helped plan the COP Falcon operation,
working directly with the Army commanders. Once they were
done, they came to the platoon leadership and asked for our input. I
got involved in the tactical planning process more deeply than I ever
had before.
I had mixed feelings. On the one hand, I had experience and
knowledge to add something useful. On the other hand, it got me
doing the kind of work I don’t like to do. It seemed a little “admin”
or bureaucratic—coat-and-tie stuff, to use a civilian workplace
metaphor.
A
s an E6, I was one of the more senior guys in the platoon. Usually
you have a chief petty officer (E7), who’s the senior enlisted guy,
and an LPO, the lead petty officer. Generally the LPO is an E6, and
the only one in the platoon. In our platoon, we had two. I was the
junior E6, which was great—Jay, the other E6, was LPO, and so I
missed a lot of the admin duties that go with that post. On the other
hand, I had the benefits of the rank. For me, it was kind of like the
story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears—I was too senior to do
the bullshit jobs and too junior to do the political jobs. I was just
right.
I hated sitting down at a computer and mapping everything out,
let alone making a slideshow presentation out of it. I would have
much rather just said, “Hey, follow me; I’ll show what we’re going
to do on the fly.” But writing it all down was important: if I went
down, someone else would have to be able to step in and know
what was going on.
I did get stuck with one admin job that had nothing to do with
mission planning: evaluating the E5s. I truly hated it. (Jay arranged
some sort of trip and left me with that—I’m sure because he didn’t
want to do it, either.) The bright side was that I realized how good
our people were. There were absolutely no turds in that platoon—it
was a real outstanding group.
A
side from my rank and experience, the head shed wanted me
involved in planning, because snipers were taking a more aggressive
role in battle. We had become, in military terms, a force multiplier,
able to do a lot more than you might think based on our sheer
numbers alone.
Most planning decisions involved details like the best houses to
take for overwatch, the route to take in, how we’d be dropped off,
what we would do after the initial houses were taken, etc. Some of
the decisions could be very subtle. How you get to a sniper hide,
for example. The preference would be to get there as stealthily as
possible. That might suggest walking in, as we had in some of the
villages. But you don’t want to walk through narrow alleys where
there’s a lot of trash—too much noise, too many chances for an
IED or an ambush.
There’s a misperception among the general public that SpecOp
troops always parachute or fast-rope into a trouble zone. While we
certainly do both where appropriate, we didn’t fly into any of the
areas in Ramadi. Helicopters do have certain advantages, speed
and the ability to travel relatively long distances being one of them.
But they’re also loud and attract attention in an urban environment.
And they’re relatively easy targets to shoot down.
In this case, coming in by water made a great deal of sense,
because of the way Ramadi is laid out and where the target was
located. It allowed us to get to a spot near the target area stealthily,
comparatively quickly, and with less chance of contact than the
overland routes. But that decision led to an unexpected problem—
we had no boats.
O
rdinarily, SEALs work with Special Boat Teams, known at the
time and in the past as Special Boat Units, or SBUs. Same mission,
different name. They drive the fast boats that insert SEALs and then
retrieve them; we were rescued by one when we were “lost” on the
California coast during training.
There was a bit of friction between SEALs and SBUs back
home in the bars, where you’d occasionally hear some SBU
members claiming to be SEALs. Team guys would think, and
sometimes say, that’s like a taxi driver claiming to be a movie star
because he drove someone to the studio.
Whatever. There are some damn good guys out there. The last
thing we need is to be picking fights with the people who are
supporting us.
But that’s a point that works both ways. Our problem in Ramadi
came from the fact the unit that was supposed to be working with
us refused to help.
They told us they were too important to be working with us. In
fact, they claimed to be standing by for a unit with a higher priority,
just in case they were needed. Which they weren’t.
Hey, sorry. I’m pretty sure their job was to help whoever
needed it, but whatever. We hunted around and found a Marine unit
that was equipped with SURC boats—small, shallow-draft vessels
that could get right up to the shore. They were armored and
equipped with machine guns fore and aft.
The guys driving them were bad-ass. They did everything an
SBU was supposed to do. Except that they did it for us.
They knew their mission. They didn’t pretend to be someone
else. They just wanted to get us there, the safest way possible. And
when our mission was done, they came for us—even if it was a hot
extract. These Marines would come in a heartbeat.
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