Every story has a beginning.

Mine starts in north-central Texas. I grew up in small towns where I learned the importance of family and traditional values, like patriotism, self-reliance, and watching out for your family and neighbors. I’m proud to say that I still try to live my life according to those values. I have a strong sense of justice. It’s pretty much black-and-white. I don’t see too much gray. I think it’s important to protect others. I don’t mind hard work. At the same time, I like to have fun. Life’s too short not to.

I was raised with, and still believe in, the Christian faith. If I had to order my priorities, they would be God, Country, Family. There might be some debate on where those last two fall—these days I’ve come around to believing that Family may, under some circumstances, outrank Country. But it’s a close race.

I’ve always loved guns, always loved hunting, and in a way I guess you could say I’ve always been a cowboy. I was riding horses from the time I could walk. I wouldn’t call myself a true cowboy today, because it’s been a long time since I’ve worked a ranch, and I’ve probably lost a lot of what I had in the saddle. Still, in my heart if I’m not a SEAL I’m a cowboy, or should be. Problem is, it’s a hard way to make a living when you have a family.

I don’t remember when I started hunting, but it would have been when I was very young. My family had a deer lease a few miles from our house, and we would hunt every winter. (For you Yankees: a deer lease is a property where the owner rents or leases hunting rights out for a certain amount of time; you pay your money and you get the right to go out and hunt. Y’all probably have different arrangements where you live, but this one is pretty common down here.) Besides deer, we’d hunt turkey, doves, quail—whatever was in season. “We” meant my mom, my dad, and my brother, who’s four years younger than me. We’d spend the weekends in an old RV trailer. It wasn’t very big, but we were a tight little family and we had a lot of fun.

My father worked for Southwestern Bell and AT&T—they split and then came back together over the length of his career. He was a manager, and as he’d get promoted we’d have to move every few years. So in a way I was raised all over Texas.

Even though he was successful, my father hated his job. Not the work, really, but what went along with it. The bureaucracy. The fact that he had to work in an office. He really hated having to wear a suit and tie every day.

“I don’t care how much money you get,” my dad used to tell me. “It’s not worth it if you’re not happy.” That’s the most valuable piece of advice he ever gave me: Do what you want in life. To this day I’ve tried to follow that philosophy.

In a lot of ways my father was my best friend growing up, but he was able at the same time to combine that with a good dose of fatherly discipline. There was a line and I never wanted to cross it. I got my share of whuppin’s (you Yankees will call ’em spankings) when I deserved it, but not to excess and never in anger. If my dad was mad, he’d give himself a few minutes to calm down before administering a controlled whuppin’—followed by a hug.

To hear my brother tell it, he and I were at each other’s throats most of the time. I don’t know if that’s true, but we did have our share of tussles. He was younger and smaller than me, but he could give as good he got, and he’d never give up. He’s a tough character and one of my closest friends to this day. We gave each other hell, but we also had a lot of fun and always knew we had each other’s back.

Our high school used to have a statue of a panther in the front lobby. We had a tradition each year where seniors would try and put incoming freshmen on the panther as a hazing ritual. Freshmen, naturally, resisted. I had graduated when my brother became a freshman, but I came back on his first day of school and offered a hundred dollars to anyone who could sit him on that statue.

I still have that hundred dollars.

You’re not a cowboy until you can break a horse. I started learning when I was in high school; at first, I didn’t know a whole heck of a lot. It was just: Hop on them and ride until they quit bucking. Do your best to stay on.

I learned much more as I got older, but most of my early education came on the job—or on the horse, so to speak. The horse would do something, and I would do something. Together, we came to an understanding. Probably the most important lesson was patience. I wasn’t a patient person by nature. I had to develop that talent working with horses; it would end up being extremely valuable when I became a sniper—and even when I was courting my wife.

Unlike cattle, I never found a reason to smack a horse. Ride them till I wore them out, sure. Stay on them till they realized who was boss, absolutely. But hit a horse? Never saw a reason good enough. Horses are smarter than cattle. You can work a horse into cooperating if you give it enough time and patience.

I don’t know if I exactly had a talent for breaking horses or not, but being around them fed my appetite for all things cowboy. So, looking back, it isn’t very surprising that I got involved in rodeo competitions while still in school. I played sports in high school—baseball and football—but nothing compared with the excitement of the rodeo.

Every high school has its different cliques: jocks, nerds, and so on. The crew I was hanging out with were the “ropers.” We had the boots and jeans, and in general looked and acted like cowboys. I wasn’t a real roper—I couldn’t have lassoed a calf worth a lick at that point—but that didn’t stop me from getting involved in rodeos around age sixteen.

I started out by riding bulls and horses at a small local place where you paid twenty bucks to ride as long as you could stay on. You would have to supply your own gear—spurs, chaps, your rigging. There was nothing fancy about it: you got on and fell off, and got on again. Gradually, I stayed on longer and longer, and finally got to the point where I felt confident enough to enter some small local rodeos.

Bustin’ a bull is a little different than taming a horse. They buck forward, but their skin is so loose that when they’re going forward, you not only go forward but you slip side to side. And bulls can really spin. Let me put it this way: staying on top of a bull is not an easy matter.

I rode bulls for about a year, without a ton of success. Wising up, I went to horses and ended up trying saddle bronc bustin’. This is the classic event where you not only have to stay on the horse for eight seconds, but also do so with style and finesse. For some reason, I did a lot better in this event than the others, and so I kept with it for quite a while, winning my share of belt buckles and more than one fancy saddle. Not that I was a champion, mind you, but I did well enough to spread some prize money around the bar.

I also got some attention from the buckle bunnies, rodeo’s version of female groupies. It was all good. I enjoyed going from city to city, traveling, partying, and riding.

Call it the cowboy lifestyle.

I went to work for David Landrum, in Hood County, Texas, and quickly found out I wasn’t near as much of a cowboy as I thought I was. David took care of that. He taught me everything about working a ranch, and then some. He was a rough man. He would cuss you up one side and down the other. If you were doing good, he wouldn’t say a word. But I ended up really liking the guy.

Working on a ranch is heaven.

It’s a hard life, featuring plenty of hard work, and yet at the same time it’s an easy life. You’re outside all the time. Most days it’s just you and the animals. You don’t have to deal with people or offices or any petty bullshit. You just do your job.

David’s spread ran ten thousand acres. It was a real ranch, very old-school—we even had a chuck wagon during the spring round-up season.

I want to tell you, this was a beautiful place, with gentle hills, a couple of creeks, and open land that made you feel alive every time you looked at it. The heart of the ranch was an old house that had probably been a way station—an “inn” in Yankee-speak—back in the nineteenth century. It was a majestic building, with screened porches front and back, nice-sized rooms inside, and a big fireplace that warmed the soul as well as the skin.

Of course, because I was a ranch hand, my quarters were a little more primitive. I had what we called a bunkhouse, which was barely big enough for an actual bunk. It might have measured six by twelve feet, and my bed took up most of that. There wasn’t space for drawers—I had to hang all my clothes, including my underwear, on a pole.

The walls weren’t insulated. Central Texas can be pretty cold in the winter, and even with the gas stove on high and an electric heater right next to the bed, I slept with my clothes on. But the worst thing about it was the fact that there wasn’t a proper foundation under the floorboards. I was continually doing battle with raccoons and armadillos, who’d burrow in right under my bed. Those raccoons were ornery and audacious; I must’ve shot twenty of them before they finally got the message that they weren’t welcome under my house.

I started out riding the tractors, planting wheat for the cattle in the wintertime. I moved on to sluffing feed to the cattle. Eventually, David determined I was likely to stick around and started giving me more responsibilities. He bumped my salary to $400 a month.

After my last class ended around one or two in the afternoon, I’d head over to the ranch. There I’d work until the sun went down, study a bit, then go to bed. First thing in the morning, I’d feed all the horses, then head to class. Summer was the best. I’d be on horseback at five o’clock in the morning until nine at night.

Eventually, I became the two-year man, training “cut horses” and getting them ready for auction. (Cutting horses—also called carving horses, sorting horses, whittlers—are trained to help cowboys “cut” cows from the herd. These working horses are important on a ranch, and a good one can be worth a good amount of money.)

This is really where I learned about dealing with horses, and became much more patient than I had been before. If you lose your temper with a horse, you can ruin it for life. I taught myself to take my time and be gentle with them.

Horses are extremely smart. They learn quickly—if you do it right. You show them something real small, then stop, and do it again. A horse will lick its lips when it’s learning. That’s what I looked for. You stop the lesson on a good note, and pick up the next day.

Of course, it took a while to learn all this. Anytime I messed up, my boss would let me know. Right away he’d cuss me out, tell me I was a worthless piece of shit. But I never got pissed at David. In my mind, I thought, I’m better than that and I’ll show you.

As it happens, that’s exactly the kind of attitude you need to become a SEAL.

Out there on the range, I had a lot of time and space to think about where I was headed. Studying and classes were not my thing. With my rodeo career ended, I decided that I would quit college, stop ranching, and go back to my original plan: join the military and become a soldier. Since that was what I really wanted to do, there was no sense waiting.

And so, one day in 1996, I made my way to the recruiters, determined to sign up.

This recruiting station was its own mini-mall. The Army, Navy, Marine, Air Force offices were all lined up in a little row. Each one watched as you came in. They were in competition with each other, and not necessarily a friendly competition, either.

I went to the Marine door first, but they were out to lunch. As I turned around to leave, the Army guy down the hall called over.

“Hey,” he said. “Why don’t you come on in here?”

No reason not to, I thought. So I did.

“What are you interested in doing in the military?” he asked.

I told him that I liked the idea of special operations, and that from what I’d heard of Army SF, I thought I’d like to serve in that branch—if I were to join the Army, that is. (Special Forces, or SF, is an elite unit in the Army charged with a number of special operations missions. The term “special forces” is sometimes used incorrectly to describe special operation troops in general, but when I use it, I mean the Army unit.)

At the time, you had to be an E5—a sergeant—before you could be considered for SF. I didn’t like the idea of waiting all that time before getting to the good stuff. “You could be a Ranger,” suggested the recruiter.

I didn’t know too much about Rangers, but what he told me sounded pretty enticing—jumping out of airplanes, assaulting targets, becoming a small-arms expert. He opened my eyes to the possibilities, though he didn’t quite close the sale.

“I’ll think about it,” I said, getting up to leave.

As I was on my way out, the Navy guy called to me from down the hall.

“Hey, you,” he said. “Come on over here.”

I walked over.

“What were you talking about in there?” he asked.

“I was thinking about going into SF,” I said. “But you have to be an E5. So we were talking about the Rangers.”

“Oh, yeah? Heard about the SEALs?”

At the time, the SEALs were still relatively unknown. I had heard a little about them, but I didn’t know all that much. I think I shrugged.

“Why don’t you come on in here,” said the sailor. “I’ll tell you all about ’em.”

He started by telling me about BUD/S, or Basic Underwater Demolition/Scuba training, which is the preliminary school all SEALs must pass through. Nowadays, there are hundreds of books and movies on SEALs and BUD/S; there’s even a pretty long entry on our training in Wikipedia. But back then, BUD/S was still a bit of a mystery, at least to me. When I heard how hard it was, how the instructors ran you and how less than 10 percent of the class would qualify to move on, I was impressed. Just to make it through the training, you had to be one tough motherfucker.

I liked that kind of challenge.

Then the recruiter started telling me about all the missions SEALs, and their predecessors, the UDTs, had completed. (UDTs were members of Underwater Demolition Teams, frogmen who scouted enemy beaches and undertook other special warfare assignments beginning in World War II.) There were stories about swimming between obstructions on Japanese-held beaches and gruesome fights behind the lines in Vietnam. It was all bad-ass stuff, and when I left there, I wanted to be a SEAL in the worst way.

With the military ruled out, I focused on making a career out of ranching and being a cowboy. Since I already had a good job on a ranch, I decided there was really no sense staying in school. I quit, even though I was less than sixty credits shy of graduating.

David doubled my pay and gave me more responsibilities. Larger offers eventually lured me to other ranches, though for different reasons I kept coming back to David’s ranch. Eventually, just before the winter of 1997–98, I found my way out to Colorado.

I took the job sight-unseen, which turned out to be a big mistake. My thinking was, I’d been spending all my time in the Texas flatlands, and a move to the mountains would be a welcome change of scenery.

But wouldn’t you know it: I got a job at a ranch in the only part of Colorado flatter than Texas. And a good deal colder. It wasn’t long before I called up David and asked if he needed some help.

“Come on back,” he told me.

I started to pack, but I didn’t get very far. Before I finished making arrangements to move, I got a phone call from a Navy recruiter.

“Are you still interested in being a SEAL?” he asked.

“Why?”

“We want you,” said the recruiter.

“Even with the pins in my arm?”

“Don’t worry about that.”

I didn’t. I started working on the arrangements right away.

“Drop! One hundred push-ups! NOW!”

Two hundred and twenty-some bodies hit the asphalt and started pumping. We were all in camis—camouflage BDUs, or battle-dress uniforms—with freshly painted green helmets. It was the start of BUD/S training. We were bold, excited, and nervous as hell.

We were about to get beat down, and we were loving it.

The instructor didn’t even bother to come out of his office inside the building a short distance away. His deep voice, slightly sadistic, carried easily out the hall into the courtyard where we were gathered.

“More push-ups! Give me forty! FOUR-TEEE!”

My arms hadn’t quite started to burn yet when I heard a strange hissing noise. I glanced up to see what was going on.

I was rewarded with a blast of water in my face. Some of the other instructors had appeared and were working us over with fire hoses. Anyone stupid enough to look up, got hosed.

Welcome to BUD/S.

“Flutter kicks! GO!”

It had taken me the better part of a year to reach that point. I’d joined the Navy and reported for basic training in February 1999. Boot camp was pretty lame. I remember calling my dad at one point and saying that basic was easy compared to ranch work. That wasn’t a good thing. I’d joined the Navy to be a SEAL and challenge myself. Instead I got fat and out of shape.

You see, boot camp is designed to prepare you to sit on a ship. They teach you a lot about the Navy, which is fine, but I wanted something more like the Marines’ basic training—a physical challenge. My brother went into the Marines and came out of boot camp tough and in top condition. I came out and probably would have flunked BUD/S if I’d gone straight in. They have since changed the procedure. There’s now a separate BUD/S boot camp, with more emphasis on getting and staying in shape.

Lasting over a half-year, BUD/S is extremely demanding physically and mentally; as I mentioned earlier, the dropout rate can top 90 percent. The most notorious part of BUD/S is Hell Week, 132 hours straight of exercise and physical activity. A few of the routines have changed and tested over the years, and I imagine they will continue to evolve. Hell Week has pretty much remained the most demanding physical test, and probably will continue to be one of the high points—or low points, depending on your perspective. When I was in, Hell Week came at the end of First Phase. But more about that later.

Fortunately, I didn’t go directly to BUD/S. I had other training to get through first, and a shortage of instructors in the BUD/S classes would keep me (and many others) from being abused for quite a while.

According to Navy regs, I had to choose a specialty (or Military Occupation Specialty, or MOS, as it is known in the service) in case I didn’t make it through BUD/S and qualify for the SEALs. I chose intelligence—I naively thought I’d end up like James Bond. Have your little laugh.

But it was during that training that I started working out more seriously. I spent three months learning the basics of the Navy’s intelligence specialties, and, more importantly, getting my body into better shape. It happened that I saw a bunch of real SEALs on the base, and they inspired me to work out. I would go to the gym and hit every vital part of my body: legs, chest, triceps, biceps, etc. I also started running three times a week, from four to eight miles a day, jumping up two miles every session.

I hated running, but I was beginning to develop the right mind-set: Do whatever it takes.

I unfolded myself from the backseat of the cab and straightened my dress uniform. Hoisting my bag out of the taxi, I took a deep breath and started up the path to the quarterdeck, the building where I was supposed to report. I was twenty-four years old, about to live my dream.

And get my ass kicked in the process.

It was dark, but not particularly late—somewhere past five or six in the evening. I half-expected I’d be jumped as soon as I walked in the door. You hear all these rumors about BUD/S and how tough it is, but you never get the full story. Anticipation makes things worse.

I spotted a guy sitting behind a desk. I walked over and introduced myself. He checked me in and got me squared away with a room and the other administrative BS that needed to be handled.

All the time, I was thinking: “This isn’t too hard.”

And: “I’m going to get attacked any second.”

Naturally, I had trouble getting to sleep. I kept thinking the instructors were going to burst in and start whipping my ass. I was excited, and a little worried at the same time.

Morning came without the slightest disturbance. It was only then that I found out I wasn’t really in BUD/S; not yet, not officially. I was in what is known as Indoc—or Indoctrination. Indoc is meant to prepare you for BUD/S. It’s kind of like BUD/S with training wheels. If SEALs did training wheels.

Indoc lasted a month. They did yell at us some, but it was nothing like BUD/S. We spent a bit of time learning the basics of what would be expected of us, like how to run the obstacle course. The idea was that by the time things got serious, we’d have our safety down. We also spent a lot of time helping out in small ways as other classes went through the actual training.

Indoc was fun. I loved the physical aspect, pushing my body and honing my physical skills. At the same time, I saw how the candidates were being treated in BUD/S, and I thought, Oh shit, I better get serious and work out more.

And then, before I knew it, First Phase started. Now the training was for real, and my butt was being kicked. Regularly and with a great deal of feeling.

Which brings us up to the point where we started this chapter, with me getting hosed in the face while working out. I had been doing PT for months, and yet this was far harder. The funny thing is, even though I knew more or less what was going to happen, I didn’t completely understand how difficult it was going to be. Until you actually experience something, you just don’t know.

At some point that morning, I thought, Holy shit, these guys are going to kill me. My arms are going to fall off and I’m going to disintegrate right into the pavement.

Somehow I kept going.

The first time the water hit me, I turned my face away. That earned me a lot of attention—bad attention.

“Don’t turn away!” shouted the instructor, adding a few choice words relating to my lack of character and ability. “Turn back and take it.”

So I did. I don’t know how many hundreds of push-ups or other exercises we did. I do know that I felt I was going to fail. That drove me—I did not want to fail.

I kept facing that fear, and coming to the same conclusion, every day, sometimes several times.

That first week I tried to be as far under the radar as possible. Being noticed was a bad thing. Whether it was during PT or an exercise, or even just standing in line, the least little thing could make you the focus of attention. If you were slouching while in line, they fixed on you right away. If an instructor said to do something, I tried to be the first one to do it. If I did it right—and I sure tried to—they ignored me and went on to someone else.

I couldn’t completely escape notice. Despite all my exercise, despite all the PT and everything else, I had a lot of trouble with pull-ups.

I’m sure you know the routine—you put your arms up on the bar and pull yourself up. Then you lower yourself. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

In BUD/S, we had to hang from the bar and wait there until the instructor told us to start. Well, the first time the class set up, he happened to be standing right close to me.

“Go!” he said.

“Ugghhhh,” I moaned, pulling myself northward.

Big mistake. Right away I got tagged as being weak.

I couldn’t do all that many pull-ups to begin with, maybe a half-dozen (which was actually the requirement). But now, with all the attention, I couldn’t just slip by. I had to do perfect pull-ups. And many of them. The instructors singled me out, and started making me do more, and giving me a lot of extra exercise.

It had an effect. Pull-ups became one of my better exercises. I could top thirty without trouble. I didn’t end up the best in the class, but I wasn’t an embarrassment, either.

And swimming? All the work I’d done before getting to BUD/S paid off. Swimming actually became my best exercise. I was one of, if not the fastest, swimmers in the class

Again, minimum distances don’t really tell the story. To qualify, you have to swim a thousand yards in the ocean. By the time you’re done with BUD/S, a thousand yards is nothing. You swim all the time. Two-mile swims were routine. And then there was the time where we were taken out in boats and dropped off seven nautical miles from the beach.

“There’s one way home, boys,” said the instructors. “Start swimming.”

Probably everyone who’s heard of SEALs has heard of Hell Week. It’s five and a half days of continuous beat-down designed to see if you have the endurance and the will to become the ultimate warrior.

Every SEAL has a different Hell Week story. Mine actually begins a day or two before Hell Week, out in the surf, on some rocks. A group of us were in an IBS—“inflatable boat, small,” your basic six-man rubber dinghy—and we had to bring it ashore past those rocks. I was point man, which meant it was my job to clamber out and hold the IBS tight while everyone else got off and picked it up.

Well, just as I was getting set, a huge wave came up in the surf and took the boat and put it down on my foot. It hurt like hell, and immediately got numb.

I ignored it as much as I could, and eventually wrapped it up. Later on, when we were finished for the day, I went with a buddy whose dad happened to be a doctor and had him check it out. He did an X-ray and found it was fractured.

Naturally, he wanted to put it in a cast, but I refused to let him. Showing up at BUD/S with a cast would mean I would have to put my training on hold. And if I did that before Hell Week, I’d have to go back to the very beginning—and no way I was going through everything I’d just been through again.

(Even during BUD/S, you’re allowed to leave base with permission during your off time. And, obviously, I didn’t go to a Navy doctor to get the foot checked out, because he would have sent me back—known as “roll back”—immediately.)

The night Hell Week was supposed to start, we were taken to a large room, fed pizza, and treated to a movie marathon—Black Hawk Down, We Were Soldiers, Braveheart. We were all relaxing in a non-relaxing kind of way, since we knew Hell Week was about to begin. It was like a party on the Titanic. The movies got us all psyched up, but we knew that iceberg was out there, looming in the dark.

Once more, my imagination got me nervous. I knew at some point an instructor was going to bust through that door with an M-60 machine gun shooting blanks, and I was going to have to run outside and form up on the grinder (asphalt workout area). But when?

Every minute that passed added to the churning in my stomach. I was sitting there saying to myself, “God.” Over and over. Very eloquent and deep.

I tried to take a nap but I couldn’t sleep. Finally, someone burst in and started shooting.

Thank God!

I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to be abused in my life. I ran outside. The instructors were throwing flash-crashes and had the hoses going full-blast. (Flash-crashes and flash-bang grenades give off an intense flash and make a very loud noise when they explode, but won’t injure you. Technically, the terms are applied to different grenades used by the Army and Navy, but we generally use the names interchangeably.

I was excited, ready for what some people think is the ultimate test for SEAL trainees. But at the same time, I was thinking, What the hell is going on? Because even though I knew all about Hell Week—or thought I did—never having experienced it, I really didn’t understand it in my bones.

We were split up. They sent us to different stations and we began doing push-ups, flutter kicks, star jumpers…

After that, everything ran together. My foot? That was the least of the pain. We swam, we did PT, we took the boats out. Mostly, we just kept moving. One of the guys was so exhausted at one point, he thought a kayak coming to check on us in the boats was a shark and started yelling a warning. (It was actually our commander. I’m not sure if he took that as a compliment or not.)

Before BUD/S began, someone told me the best way to deal with it is to go meal-to-meal. Go as hard as you can until you get fed. They feed you every six hours, like clockwork. So I focused on that. Salvation was always no further than five hours and fifty-nine minutes away.

Still, there were several times I thought I wouldn’t make it. I was tempted to get up and run over to the bell that would end my torture—if you ring this bell, you’re taken in for coffee and a doughnut. And good-byes, since ringing the bell (or even standing up and saying “I quit”) means the end of the program for you.

Believe it or not, my fractured foot gradually started to feel better as the week went on. Maybe I just became so used to the feeling that it became normal. What I couldn’t stand was being cold. Lying out on the beach in the surf, stripped down, freezing my ass off—that was the worst. I’d lock arms with the guys on either side of me and “jackhammer,” my body vibrating crazily with the chills. I prayed for someone to pee on me.

Everybody did, I’m sure. Urine was about the only warm thing available at that point. If you happen to look out on the surf during a BUD/S class and see a bunch of guys huddled together, it’s because somebody out there is pissing and everybody is taking advantage of it.

If that bell was a little closer, I might have stood up and gone and rung it, gotten my warm coffee and doughnut. But I didn’t.

Either I was too stubborn to quit, or just too lazy to get up. Take your pick.

The week after Hell Week is a brief recovery phase called walk week. By then they’ve beaten you so bad your body feels permanently bruised and swollen. You wear tennis shoes and don’t run—you just fast-walk everywhere. It’s a concession that doesn’t last for very long; after a few days, they start beating the hell out of you again.

“Okay, suck it up,” the instructors yell. “You’re over it.”

They tell you when you’re hurt and when you’re not.

Having survived Hell Week, I thought I was home free. I traded my white shirt for brown and began part two of BUD/S, the dive phase. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way I’d gotten an infection. Not long after second phase started, I was in a dive tower, a special training apparatus that simulates a dive. In this particular exercise, I had to practice with a dive bell, making what is called a buoyant ascent while keeping the pressure in my inner and outer ears equalized. There are a few methods for doing that; one common one is to close your mouth, pinch your nostrils closed, and gently blow through your nose. If you don’t or can’t clear properly, there will be trouble…

I’d been told this, but because of the infection I couldn’t seem to get it. Since I was in BUD/S and inexperienced, I decided to just suck it up and take a shot. That was the wrong thing to do: I went on down and ended up perforating my eardrum. I had blood coming out of my ears, nose, and eyes when I surfaced.

They gave me medical attention on the spot and then sent me to have my ears treated. Because of the medical problems, I was rolled back—assigned to join a later class once I healed.

When you’re rolled back, you’re in a sort of limbo. Since I had already made it through Hell Week, I didn’t have to go all the way back to the start—there’s no repeating Hell Week, thank God. I couldn’t just lie on my butt until the next class caught up, though. As soon as I was able, I helped the instructors, did daily PT, and ran with a class of white shirts (first phase) as they got their asses busted.

You get close to the people in BUD/S, but you try not to get too close until after Hell Week. That’s where the heaviest attrition is. We graduated two dozen guys out of our class; less than ten percent the number that started.

I was one of them. I’d started in class 231, but the rollback meant I graduated with 233.

After BUD/S, SEALs go to advance training—officially known as SQT or SEAL Qualifying Training. While I was there, I was reunited with a friend of mine I’d met while at BUD/S—Marcus Luttrell.

Marcus and I got along right away. It was only natural: we were a couple of Texas boys.

I don’t suppose you’ll understand that if you’re not from Texas. There seems to be a special bond between people from the state. I don’t know if it’s shared experiences, or maybe it’s something in the water—or maybe the beer. Texans tend to get on pretty well with each other, and in this case we formed an instant friendship. Maybe it’s not that much of a mystery; after all, we had a lot of experiences in common, from growing up with a love of hunting to joining the Navy to toughing out BUD/S.

Marcus had graduated from BUD/S prior to me, then went off to do special advanced training before returning to SQT. Trained as a corpsman, he happened to check me over when I got my first O₂ hit while diving. (In layman’s terms, an “O₂ hit” occurs when too much oxygen enters your bloodstream during a dive. It can be caused by a number of different factors and can be extremely serious. My case was very minor.)

Diving again. I always say I’m an “… L,” not a SEAL. I’m a land guy; you can keep air and sea for someone else.

The day my incident occurred, I was swimming with a lieutenant, and we were determined to get the day’s golden fin—an award for the best shit-hot dive of the day. The exercise involved swimming under a ship and planting limpet mines. (A limpet mine is a special charge that is placed against the hull of a ship. Generally, it will have a timed charge.)

We were doing extremely well when suddenly, while I was underneath the hull of the ship, I experienced vertigo and my brain turned into a vegetable. I managed to grab hold of a pylon and hug it. The lieutenant tried handing me a mine, then tried signaling to me when I wouldn’t take it. I stared blankly into the ocean. Finally, my head cleared, and I was able to get out and continue.

No golden fin for us that day. By the time I got back to the surface, I was all right, and both Marcus and the instructors cleared me.

Though we ended up in different Teams, Marcus and I kept in touch as the years went by. It seemed like every time I was coming back from a combat deployment, he was coming in to relieve me. We’d have lunch together and trade informal intel back and forth.

Something else happened to me that spring that had an enormous impact not just on my military career, but on my life.

I fell in love.

I don’t know if you believe in love at first sight; I don’t think I did before the night in April of 2001 when I saw Taya standing at a bar in a San Diego club, talking with one of my friends. She had a way of making black leather pants look smokin’ hot and classy. The combination suited me fine.

I’d just joined Team 3. We hadn’t started training yet, and I was enjoying what amounted to a week of vacation before getting down to the serious business of becoming a SEAL and earning my place on a Team.

Taya was working for a pharmaceutical company as a drug rep when we met. Originally from Oregon, she’d gone to college in Wisconsin and moved out to the coast a couple years before we met. My first impression was that she was beautiful, even if she looked pissed off about something. When we started talking, I also found out she was smart, and had a good sense of humor. I sensed right away she was someone who could keep up with me.

But maybe she should tell the story; her version sounds better than mine:

As our relationship got closer and closer, Taya and I started spending more time with each other. Finally, we’d spend nights at each other’s apartment, either in Long Beach or San Diego.

I woke up one morning to her yelling. “Chris! Chris! Wake up! You’ve got to see this!”

I stumbled into the living room. Taya had turned on the television and jacked the volume. I saw smoke pouring out of the World Trade Center in New York.

I didn’t understand what-all was happening. Part of me was still sleeping.

Then as we watched, an airplane flew right into the side of the second tower.

“Motherfuckers!” I muttered.

I stared at the screen, angry and confused, not entirely sure it was real.

Suddenly I remembered that I left my cell phone off. I grabbed it, and saw I’d missed a bunch of messages. The sum total of them was this:

Kyle, get your ass back to base. Now!

I grabbed Taya’s SUV—it had plenty of gas and my truck didn’t—and hauled down to base. I don’t know exactly how fast I was going—it might have been three digits—but it was certainly a high rate of speed.

Down around San Juan Capistrano, I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw a set of red lights flashing.

I pulled over. The cop who came up to the truck was pissed.

“Is there any reason you’re going so fast?” he demanded.

“Yes, sir,” I told him. “I apologize. I’m in the military and I just got recalled. I understand you got to write me a ticket. I know I was in the wrong but with all due respect can you just hurry and give me the ticket so I can get back to base?”

“What branch are you in?”

Motherfucker, I thought. I just told you I have to report. Can’t you just give me the damn ticket? But I kept my cool.

“I’m in the Navy,” I told him.

“What do you do in the Navy?” he asked.

By now I was pretty annoyed. “I’m a SEAL.”

He closed his ticket book.

“I’ll take you to the city line,” he told me. “Go get some fuckin’ payback.”

He put his lights on and pulled in front of me. We went a bit slower than I’d been going when he nabbed me, but it was still well past the limit. He took me as far as his jurisdiction went, maybe a little farther, then waved me on.

We were put on immediate standby, but it would turn out that we weren’t needed in Afghanistan or anywhere else at that moment. My platoon would have to wait roughly a year before we got into action, and when we did, it would be against Saddam Hussein, not Osama bin Laden.

There’s a lot of confusion in the civilian world about SEALs and our mission. Most people think we’re strictly sea-based commandos, meaning that we always operate off ships, and hit targets on the water or the immediate coastline.

Admittedly, a fair amount of our work involves things at sea��we are in the Navy, after all. And from a historical perspective, as briefly mentioned earlier, SEALs trace their origins to the Navy’s Underwater Demolition Teams, or UDTs. Established during World War II, UDT frogmen were responsible for reconning beaches before they were hit, and they trained for a variety of other waterborne tasks, such as infiltrating harbors and planting limpet mines on enemy ships. They were the mean, bad-ass combat divers of World War II and the postwar era, and SEALs are proud to carry on in their wake.

But as the UDT mission expanded, the Navy recognized that the need for special operations didn’t end at the beach line. As new units called SEALs were formed and trained for this expanded mission, they came to replace the older UDT units.

While “land” may be the final word in the SEAL acronym, it’s hardly the last thing we do. Every special operations unit in the U.S. military has its own specialty. There’s a lot of overlap in our training, and the range of our missions is similar in many respects. But each branch has its own expertise. Army Special Forces—also known as SF—does an excellent job training foreign forces, both in conventional and unconventional warfare. Army Rangers are a big assault force—if you want a large target, say an airfield, taken down, that’s their thing. Air Force special operators—parajumpers—excel at pulling people out of the shit.

Among our specialties are DAs.

DA stands for “direct action.” A direct-action mission is a very short, quick strike against a small but high-value target. You might think of it as a surgical strike against the enemy. In a practical sense, it could range from anything like an attack on a key bridge behind enemy lines to a raid on a terrorist hideout to arrest a bomb maker—a “snatch and grab,” as some call it. While those are very different missions, the idea is the same: strike hard and fast before the enemy knows what’s going on.

After 9/11, SEALs began training to deal with the places Islamic terrorists were most likely to be located—Afghanistan number one, and then the Middle East and Africa. We still did all the things a SEAL is supposed to do—diving, jumping out of planes, taking down ships, etc. But there was more emphasis on land warfare during our workup than there traditionally had been in the past.

There was debate about this shift far above my pay grade. Some people wanted to limit SEALs to ten miles inland. Nobody asked my opinion, but as far as I’m concerned, there shouldn’t be any limits. Personally, I’m just as happy to stay out of the water, but that’s beside the point. Let me do what I’m trained to do wherever it needs to be done.

The training, most of it anyway, was fun, even when it was a kick in the balls. We dove, we went into the desert, we worked in the mountains. We even got water-boarded and gassed.

Everybody gets water-boarded during training. The idea is to prepare you in case you’re captured. The instructors tortured us as hard as they could, tying us up and pounding on us, just short of permanently damaging us. They say each of us has a breaking point, and that prisoners eventually give in. But I would have done my best to make them kill me before I gave up secrets.

Gas training was another kick. Basically, you get hit with CS gas and have to fight through it. CS gas is “captor spray” or tear gas—the active ingredient is 2-chlorobenzalmalononitrile, for all of you chemistry majors. We thought of it as “cough and spit,” because that’s the best way to deal with it. You learn during training to let your eyes run; the worst thing to do is rub them. You’re going to get snotty and you’re going to be coughing and crying, but you can still shoot your weapon and fight through it. That’s the point of the exercise.

We went up to Kodiak, Alaska, where we did a land navigation course. It wasn’t the height of winter, but there was still so much snow on the ground that we had to put on snowshoes. We started with basic instruction on keeping warm—layering up, etc.—and learned about things like snow shelters. One of the important points of this training, which applied everywhere, was learning how to conserve weight in the field. You have to figure out whether it’s more important to be lighter and more mobile, or to have more ammunition and body armor.

I prefer lightness and speed. I count ounces when we go out, not pounds. The lighter you are, the more mobile you become. The little bastards out there are faster than hell; you need every advantage you can get on them.

The training was pretty competitive. We found out at one point that the best platoon in the Team would be shipped out to Afghanistan. Training picked up from that point on. It was a fierce competition, and not just out on the training range. The officers were backstabbing each other. They’d go to the CO and dime each other out:

Did you see what those guys did on the range? They’re no good…

The competition came down to us and one other platoon. We came in second. They went to war; we stayed home.

That’s about the worst fate a SEAL can imagine.

For months, the United Nations Security Council pressured Iraq to comply fully with U.N. resolutions, especially those requiring inspections of suspected weapons of mass destruction and related sites. War wasn’t a foregone conclusion—Saddam Hussein could have complied and shown inspectors everything they wanted to see. But most of us knew he wouldn’t. So when we got the word that we were shipping out to Kuwait, we were excited. We figured we were going to war.

One way or the other, there was plenty to do out there. Besides watching Iraq’s borders and protecting the Kurdish minority, who Saddam had gassed and massacred in the past, U.S. troops were enforcing no-fly zones in the north and south. Saddam was smuggling oil and other items both into and out of his country, in violation of the U.N. sanctions. The U.S. and other allies were stepping up operations to stop that.

Before we deployed, Taya and I chose to get married. The decision surprised both of us. One day we started talking in the car, and we both came to the conclusion that we should get married.

The decision stunned me, even as I made it. I agreed with it. It was completely logical. We were definitely in love. I knew she was the woman I wanted to spend my life with. And yet, for some reason, I didn’t think the marriage would last.

We both knew that there is an extremely high divorce rate in the SEALs. As a matter of fact, I’ve heard marriage counselors claim that it is close to 95 percent, and I believe it. So maybe that was what worried me. Perhaps part of me wasn’t really ready to think about a lifetime commitment. And of course I understood how demanding my job was going to be once we went to war. I can’t explain the contradictions.

But I do know that I was absolutely in love, and that she loved me. And so, for better or worse, make that peace or war, marriage was our next step together. Happily, we’ve survived it all.

“Wake up. We got a tanker.”

I roused myself from the side of the boat where I’d been catching some rest despite the cold wind and choppy waters. I was soaked from the spray. Despite the fact that I was a new guy on my first deployment, I’d already mastered the art of sleeping in all sorts of conditions—an unheralded but critical SEAL skill.

An oil tanker loomed ahead. A helicopter had spotted it trying to sneak down the Gulf after loading up illegally in Iraq. Our job was to get aboard her, inspect her papers, and if, as suspected, she was violating the U.N. sanctions, turn her over to the Marines or other authorities for processing.

I scrambled to get ready. Our RHIB (rigid hulled inflatable boat, used for a variety of SEAL tasks) looked like a cross between a rubber life raft and an open speedboat with two monster motors in the back. Thirty-six feet long, it held eight SEALs and hit upward of forty-five knots on a calm sea.

The exhaust from the twin motors wafted over the boat, mixing with the spray as we gathered speed. We were hauling at a good pace, riding the wake of the tanker where radar couldn’t pick us up. I went to work, taking a long pole from the deck of the boat. Our speed dropped as our RHIB cut alongside the tanker, until we were just about matching its pace. The Iranian ship’s engines pulsed in the water, so loud our own motors were drowned out.

As we pushed alongside the tanker, I extended the pole upward, trying to angle the grappling hook at the top onto the ship’s rail. Once the hook caught, I jerked the pole down.

Gotcha.

A bungee cord connected the hook to the pole. A steel cable ladder was connected to the hook. Someone grabbed hold of the bottom and held it while the lead man began climbing up the side of the ship.

A loaded oil tanker can sit fairly low in the water, so low, in fact, that you sometimes can just grab the rail and hop over. That wasn’t the case here—the railing was quite a bit higher than our little boat. I’m not a fan of heights, but as long as I didn’t think too much about what I was doing, I was fine.

The ladder rocked with the ship and the wind; I pulled myself upward as quickly as I could go, my muscles remembering all those pull-ups in BUD/S. By the time I reached the deck, the lead guys were already headed toward the wheelhouse and bridge of the ship. I ran to catch up.

Suddenly the tanker began gaining speed. The captain, belatedly realizing he was being boarded, was trying to head for Iranian waters. If he reached them, we’d have to jump off—our orders strictly forbade taking any ship outside of international waters.

I caught up to the head of the team just as they reached the door to the bridge. One of the crew got there at roughly the same time, and tried to lock it. He wasn’t fast enough, or strong enough—one of the boarding party threw himself against the door and bashed it open.

I ran through, gun ready.

We’d done dozens of these operations over the past few days, and rarely had anyone even hinted of resistance. But the captain of this ship had some fight in him, and even though he was unarmed, he wasn’t ready to surrender.

He made a run at me.

Pretty stupid. First of all, I’m not only bigger than him, but I was wearing full body armor. Not to mention the fact that I had a submachine gun in my hand.

I took the muzzle of my gun and struck the idiot in his chest. He went right down.

Somehow, I managed to slip as well. My elbow flew out and landed straight on his face.

A couple of times.

That pretty much took the fight out of him. I rolled him over and cuffed him.

In late fall, a SEAL platoon in the Philippines snuck alongside a freighter. From that point on, the North Korean ship was literally a marked vessel.

The 3,500-ton freighter had an interesting history of transporting items to and from North Korea. According to one rumor, she had transported chemicals that could be used to create nerve weapons. In this case, though, the ship’s papers declared that she was carrying cement.

What she was really carrying were Scud missiles.

The ship was tracked around the Horn of Africa while the Bush administration decided what to do about it. Finally, the President ordered that the ship be boarded and searched: just the sort of job SEALs excel at.

We had a platoon in Djibouti, which was a hell of a lot closer to the craft than we were. But because of the way the chain of command and assignments worked—the unit happened to be working for the Marines while we were directly under a Navy command—we were tasked to take down the freighter.

You can imagine how happy our sister platoon was to see us when we landed in Djibouti. Not only had we “stolen” a mission they considered theirs, they had to suffer the indignity of helping us offload and get ready for action.

As soon as I got off the plane, I spotted a buddy.

“Hey!” I shouted.

“Fuck off,” he answered.

“What’s up?”

“Fuck you.”

That was the extent of his welcome. I couldn’t blame him; in his place, I’d have been pissed myself. He and the others eventually came around—they weren’t mad at us; they were mad at the situation. Grudgingly, they helped us prepare for the mission, then got us aboard a mail-and-resupply helicopter from the USS Nassau, an amphibious assault ship out in the Indian Ocean.

Amphibs, as they’re called, are large assault ships that carry troops and helicopters, and occasionally Marine Harrier attack aircraft. They look like old-fashioned aircraft carriers with a straight-through flight deck. They’re fairly large, and have command and control facilities that can be used as forward planning and command posts during assault operations.

There are several ways to take down a ship, depending on the conditions and the target. While we could have used helicopters to get to the North Korean freighter, looking at photos of the ship we noticed that there were a number of wires running above the deck. Those wires would have to be removed before we could land, which would add time to the operation.

Knowing we’d lose the element of surprise if we went in with helos, we opted to use RHIBs instead. We started doing practice runs off the side of the Nassau with boats that had been brought out there by a Special Boat Unit. (Special Boat Units are the SEALs’ dedicated taxi service. They run the RHIBs, Mk-Vs, and other SEAL-related vessels. Among other things, the units are equipped and trained to make combat insertions, braving fire to get SEALs in and out of trouble.)

The freighter, meanwhile, continued sailing toward us. We geared up as it came within range, preparing to hit it. But before we could board the boats, we got a call telling us to stand by—the Spaniards had moved in.

What?

The Spanish frigate Navarra had confronted the North Korean ship, which had been fooling exactly nobody by sailing without a flag and with her name covered up. According to later reports, Spanish spec-op troops went in after the freighter failed to comply with the frigate’s orders to stop. Of course, they used helicopters, and just as we had thought, were delayed by having to shoot out the wires. From what I’ve heard, that delay would have given the captain aboard the vessel time to get rid of incriminating paperwork and other evidence, that’s what I think happened.

That December was the first Christmas I’d ever been away from my family, and it felt a little depressing. The day kind of came and went without a memorable celebration.

I do remember the presents Taya’s folks sent that year, though: remote-control Hummers.

They were small, radio-controlled toys that were just a blast to drive around. Some of the Iraqis working on base had apparently never seen anything like them before. I’d drive a vehicle toward them and they would scream and bolt away. I don’t know if they thought it was some sort of guided missile or what. Their high-pitched screams, coupled with sprints in the opposite direction, had me doubled over. Cheap thrills in Iraq were priceless.

Some of the people we had working for us were not exactly the best of the best, nor were all of them particularly fond of Americans.

They caught one jerking off into our food.

He was quickly escorted from the base. The head shed—our commanding officers—knew that as soon as everyone found out what he’d done, someone would probably try and kill him.

Being a new guy, I was the 60 gunner.

As I’m sure many of you know, “60” refers to the M-60 general-purpose machine gun, a belt-fed weapon that has served the U.S. military in a number of versions for several decades.

The M-60 was developed in the 1950s. It fires 7.62-mm bullets; the design is so flexible that it can be used as the basis for a coaxial machine gun in armored vehicles and helicopters, and a light, man-carried squad-level weapon. It was a workhorse in the Vietnam War, where grunts called it “the Pig” and occasionally cursed over the hot barrel, which required an asbestos glove to change after firing a few hundred rounds—not particularly convenient in combat.

The Navy made substantial improvements to the weapon over the years, and it remains a potent gun. The newest version is so improved, in fact, that it rates a different designation: the Navy calls it an Mk-43 Mod 0. (Some contend it should be considered a completely separate weapon; I’m not going to wade into that debate.) It’s comparatively light—in the area of twenty-three pounds—and has a relatively short barrel. It also has a rail system, which allows scopes and the like to be attached.

Also currently in service are M-240s, M-249s, and the Mk-46, a variant of the M-249.

As a general rule, the machine guns carried by shooters in my platoons were always called 60s, even when they were actually something else, like the Mk-48. We used more Mk-48s as time went on during my days in Iraq, but unless it’s significant for some reason, I refer to any squad-level machine gun as a 60 and leave others to sort out the fine print.

The old “Pig” nickname for the 60 survives, which leads a lot of 60 gunners to be called Pigs, or a creative variation; in our platoon, a friend of mine named Bob got tagged with it.

It never applied to me. My nickname was “Tex,” which was one of the more socially acceptable things people called me.

Geared up and strapped in, I sat vibrating in the gunner’s chair of the DPV shortly after nightfall March 20, 2003, as an Air Force MH-53 lifted off the runway in Kuwait. The vehicle had been loaded into the rear of the PAVE-Low aircraft, and we were en route toward the mission we’d spent the past several weeks rehearsing. The waiting was about to come to an end; Operation Iraqi Freedom was underway.

My war was finally here.

I was sweating, and not just with excitement. Not knowing exactly what Saddam might have in store, we’d been ordered to wear full MOPP gear (“Mission Oriented Protective Posture,” or spacesuits to some). The suits protect against chemical attacks, but they’re about as comfortable as rubber pajamas, and the gas mask that comes with them is twice as bad.

“Feet wet!” said someone over the radio.

I checked my guns. They were ready, including the 50. All I had to do was pull back the charging handle and load.

We were pointed straight toward the back of the helicopter. The rear ramp was not all the way up, so I could see out into the night. Suddenly, the black strip I was watching above the ramp speckled with red—the Iraqis had kicked on anti-aircraft radars and weapons that intel had claimed didn’t exist, and the chopper pilots began shooting off decoy flares and chaff to confuse them.

Then came the tracers, streams of bullets arcing across the narrow rectangle of black.

Damn, I thought. We’re going to get shot down before I even get a chance to smoke someone.

Somehow, the Iraqis managed to miss us. The helicopter kept moving, swooping toward land.

“Feet dry!” said someone over the radio. We were now over land.

All hell was breaking loose. We were part of a team tasked to hit Iraqi oil resources before the Iraqis could blow them up or set them on fire as they had during Desert Storm in 1991. SEALs and GROM were hitting gas and oil platforms (GOPLATs) in the Gulf, as well as on-shore oil refinery and port areas.

Twelve of us were tasked to hit farther inland, at the al-Faw oil refinery area. The few extra minutes it took translated into a hell of a lot of gunfire, and by the time the helicopter touched down, we were in the shit.

The ramp dropped and our driver hit the gas. I locked and loaded, ready to fire as we sped down the ramp. The DPV careened onto the soft dirt… and promptly got stuck.

Son of a bitch!

The driver started revving the engine and slapping the transmission back and forth, trying to budge us free. At least we were out of the helicopter—one of the other DPVs got stuck half on and half off the ramp. His 53 jerked up and down, trying desperately to free him—pilots hate like hell to get fired at, and they wanted out.

By this time I could hear the different DPV units checking in over the radio. Just about everybody was stuck in the oil-soaked mud. The intel specialist advising us had claimed that the ground would be hard-packed where we were going to land. Of course, she and her colleagues had also claimed that the Iraqis didn’t have anti-aircraft weapons. Like they say, military intelligence is an oxymoron.

“We’re stuck!” said our chief.

“Yeah, we’re stuck too,” said the lieutenant.

“We’re stuck,” said somebody else.

“Fuck, we got to get out of here.”

“All right, everybody get out of your vehicles and go to your positions,” said the chief.

I undid the five-point harness, grabbed the 60 off the back, and humped in the direction of the fence that blocked off the oil facility. Our job was to secure the gate, and just because we didn’t have wheels to do it with didn’t mean it wasn’t getting done.

I found a pile of rubble in sight of the gate and set up the 60. A guy came up next to me with a Carl Gustav. Technically a recoilless rifle, the weapon fires a bad-ass rocket that can take out a tank or poke a hole in a building. Nothing was getting through that gate without our say-so.

The Iraqis had set up a defensive perimeter outside the refinery. Their only problem was that we had landed inside. We were now between them and the refinery—in other words, behind their positions.

They didn’t like that all that much. They turned around and started firing at us.

As soon as I realized that we weren’t getting gassed, I threw off my gas mask. Returning fire with the 60, I had plenty of targets—too many, in fact. We were heavily outnumbered. But that was not a real problem. We began calling in air support. Within minutes, all sorts of aircraft were overhead: F/A-18s, F-16s, A-10As, even an AC-130 gunship.

The Air Force A-10s, better known as Warthogs, were awesome. They’re slow-moving jets, but that’s intentional—they’re designed to fly low and slow so they can put a maximum amount of gunfire on ground targets. Besides bombs and missiles, they’re equipped with a 30-mm Gatling cannon. Those Gatlings chewed the hell out of the enemy that night. The Iraqis rolled armor out of the city to get us, but they never got close. It got to the point where the Iraqis realized they were fucked and tried to flee.

Big mistake. That just made them easier to see. The planes kept coming, nailing them. They had them zeroed in, and zeroed them out. You’d hear the rounds coming past you in the air—errrrrrrrrr—then you’d hear the echo—erhrhrrhrh, followed closely by secondary explosions and whatever other havoc the bullets caused.

Fuck, I thought to myself, this is great. I fucking love this. It’s nerve-wracking and exciting and I fucking love it. 

A British unit flew in in the morning. By then, the battle was over. Of course, we couldn’t resist needling them about it.

“Come on in. The fight’s over,” we said. “It’s safe for you.”

I don’t think they thought it was funny, but it was hard to tell. They speak English funny. Exhausted, we moved back inside the gate to a house that had been almost completely destroyed during the firefight. We went into the ruins, dropped down between the rubble, and fell asleep.

A few hours later, I got up. Most of the other guys in my company were stirring as well. We went outside and started checking the perimeter of the oil fields. While we were out, we spotted some of the air defenses the Iraqis didn’t have. But the intel reports didn’t have to be updated—those defenses were now in no shape to bother anyone.

There were dead bodies everywhere. We saw one guy who’d literally had his ass blown off. He’d bled to death, but not before he tried to drag himself away from the planes. You could see the blood trail in the dirt.

While we were sorting things out, I spotted a Toyota pickup in the distance. It drove up on the road and stopped a little more than a mile away.

White civilian pickup trucks were used by the Iraqis as military vehicles throughout the war. Usually they were some version of the Toyota Hilux, the compact pickup built in a variety of styles. (In the States, the Hilux was often called the SR5; the model was eventually discontinued here, though it continued to be sold overseas.) Not sure what was going on, we stared at the truck for a few moments until we heard a whup.

Something went splat a few yards from us. The Iraqis had fired a mortar round from the rear bed. It sank harmlessly into the oily mud.

“Thank God that thing didn’t blow up,” somebody said. “We’d be dead.”

White smoke started pouring out of the hole where the projectile had landed.

“Gas!” yelled someone.

We started running as fast as we could back to the gate. But just before we reached it, the British guards slammed it shut and refused to open up.

“You can’t come in!” one of them yelled. “You’ve just been gassed.”

While Marine Cobras flew in overhead to take care of the mortar trucks, we tried to figure out if we were going to die.

When we were still breathing a few minutes later, we realized the smoke had been just that—smoke. Maybe it was steam from the mud. Whatever. It was all sizzle, no boom, no gas.

Which was a relief.

With al-Faw secured, we rigged up two of our DPVs and hit the road, driving north to Shatt al-Arab, the river that separates Iran and Iraq as it flows out to the Gulf. Our job was to look for suicide boats and mine layers that might be coming down the river to the Gulf. We found an old border station abandoned by the Iraqis and set up an observation post.

Our ROEs when the war kicked off were pretty simple: If you see anyone from about sixteen to sixty-five and they’re male, shoot ’em. Kill every male you see.

That wasn’t the official language, but that was the idea. Now that we were watching Iran, however, we were under strict orders not to fire, at least not at Iran.

Every night someone on the other side of the river would stand up and take a shot at us. We would dutifully call it in and ask for permission to return fire. The answer was always a very distinct, “NO!” Very loud and clear.

Looking back, this made a lot of sense. Our heaviest weapons were a Carl Gustav and two 60s. The Iranians had plenty of artillery, and they had the position dialed in. It wouldn’t have taken anything for them to hit us. And, in fact, what they were probably trying to do was suck us into a fight so they could kill us.

It did piss us off, though. Somebody shoots at you, you want to shoot back.

After the high of the start of the war, our spirits sagged. We were just sitting around doing nothing. One of the guys had a video camera and we made a video poking fun at it. There wasn’t much else to do. We found a few Iraqi weapons and gathered them in a pile to be blown up. But that was it. The Iraqis weren’t sending boats our way, and the Iranians would only fire a single shot then duck and wait for us to react. About the most entertaining thing we could do was wade into the water and piss in their direction.

For a week we took turns on watch—two guys on, four guys off—monitored the radio and watched the water. Finally, we were relieved by another set of SEALs and headed back to Kuwait.

By now, the so-called Race to Baghdad had begun. American and allied units were streaming across the border, making large advances every day.

We spent a few days hanging around our camp back in Kuwait, waiting for an assignment. As frustrating as our stay at the border station was, this was worse. We wanted to be in action. There were any number of missions we could have accomplished—eliminating some of those “nonexistent” air defenses farther into Iraq, for example—but the command didn’t seem to want to use us.

Our deployment had been extended so that we could take part in the beginning of the war. But now the rumor was that we would be rotated back to the States and replaced by Team 5. No one wanted to leave Iraq now that the action was getting hot. Morale hit rock bottom. We were all pissed off.

Nasiriya is a city on the Euphrates River in southern Iraq, about 125 miles northwest of Kuwait. The city itself was taken by the Marines on March 31, but action in the area continued for quite some time, as small groups of Iraqi soldiers and Fedayeen continued to resist and attack Americans. It was near Nasiriya that Jessica Lynch was captured and held during the first few days of the war.

Some historians believe that the fighting in the area was the fiercest the Marines encountered during the war, comparing it with the most ferocious firefights in Vietnam and later in Fallujah. Besides the city itself, the Marines took Jalibah Airfield, several bridges over the Euphrates, and highways and towns that secured the passage to Baghdad during the early stages of the war. Along the way, they began encountering the sort of fanatical insurgency that would characterize the war after Baghdad fell.

We had an extremely small part in the conflict there. We got into some very intense battles, but the bulk of the action was by Marines. Obviously, I can’t write about most of that; what I saw of the overall battle was like looking at an enormous landscape painting through a tiny straw.

I had never known that much about Islam. Raised as a Christian, obviously I knew there had been religious conflicts for centuries. I knew about the Crusades, and I knew that there had been fighting and atrocities forever.

But I also knew that Christianity had evolved from the Middle Ages. We don’t kill people because they’re a different religion.

The people we were fighting in Iraq, after Saddam’s army fled or was defeated, were fanatics. They hated us because we weren’t Muslim. They wanted to kill us, even though we’d just booted out their dictator, because we practiced a different religion than they did.

Isn’t religion supposed to teach tolerance?

They may have been cowards, but they could certainly kill people. The insurgents didn’t worry about ROEs or court-martials. If they had the advantage, they would kill any Westerner they could find, whether they were soldiers or not.

One day we were sent to a house where we had heard there might be U.S. prisoners. We didn’t find anyone in the building. But in the basement, there were obvious signs that the dirt had been disturbed. So we set up lights and started digging.

It wasn’t long before I saw a pants leg, then a body, freshly buried.

An American soldier. Army.

Next to him was another. Then another man, this one wearing Marine camis.

My brother had joined the Marines a little before 9/11. I hadn’t heard from him, and I thought that he had deployed to Iraq.

For some reason, as I helped pull the dead body up, I was sure it was my brother.

It wasn’t. I said a silent prayer and we kept digging.

Another body, another Marine. I bent over and forced myself to look.

Not him.

But now, with each man we pulled out of that grave—and there were a bunch—I was more and more convinced I was going to see my brother. My stomach tightened. I kept digging. I wanted to puke.

Finally, we were done. He wasn’t there.

I felt a moment of relief, even elation—none of them were my brother. Then I felt tremendous sadness for the murdered young men whose bodies we had pulled out.

We continued working with the Marines as they marched north. Our missions would typically take us out ahead of their advance, scouting for knots of defenders. Although we had intel that there were some enemy soldiers in the area, there weren’t supposed to be any large units.

By this time, we were working with the entire platoon; all sixteen of us. We came up to a small building compound at the edge of a town. Once we were there, we began taking fire.

The firefight quickly ratcheted up, and within a few minutes we realized we were surrounded, our escape cut off by a force of several hundred Iraqis.

I started killing a lot of Iraqis—we all were—but for everyone we shot, four or five seemed to materialize to take their place. This went on for hours, with the fighting stoking up, then dying down.

Most firefights in Iraq were sporadic. They might be very intense for a few minutes, perhaps even an hour or more, but eventually the Iraqis would withdraw. Or we would.

That didn’t happen here. The fight continued in waves all through the night. The Iraqis knew they had us outnumbered and surrounded and they weren’t quitting. Little by little, they started getting closer and closer, until it became obvious that they were going to overrun us.

We were done. We were going to die. Or worse, we’d be captured and made prisoners. I thought about my family and how horrible that would all be. I determined I was dying first.

I fired off more of my rounds, but now the fight was getting closer. I was starting to think about what I would do if they charged us. I’d use my pistol, my knife, my hands—anything.

And then I would die. I thought of Taya, and how much I loved her. I tried not to get distracted by anything, tried concentrating on the fight.

The Iraqis kept coming. We estimated we had five minutes to live. I started counting it off in my head.

I hadn’t gotten very far when our company radio squeaked with a transmission: “We’re coming up on your six.”

Friendlies were approaching our position.

The cavalry.

The Marines, actually. We weren’t going to die. Not in five minutes, anyway.

Thank God!

That action turned out to be our last significant encounter during that deployment. The CO pulled us back to base.

It was a waste. The Marines were going into Nasiriya every night, trying to clear the place out as the insurgency stoked up. They could have given us our own section that we could patrol. We could have rolled in and taken out the bad guys—but the CO vetoed it.

We heard it at the forward bases and camps where we were sitting around waiting for something real to do. The GROM—the Polish special forces—were going out and doing jobs. They told us we were lions led by dogs.

The Marines were blunter. They’d come back every night and bust on us:

“How many did y’all get tonight? Oh, that’s right—y’all didn’t go out.”

Ballbusters. But I couldn’t blame them. I thought our head shed was a bunch of pussies.

We had started training to take down Mukarayin Dam northeast of Baghdad. The dam was important not only because it provided hydroelectric power, but because if it were allowed to flood it could have slowed military forces attacking Iraqis in the area. But the mission was continually postponed, and finally given to SEAL Team 5 when they rotated into the Gulf toward the end of our stay. (The mission, which followed our basic plan, was a success.)

There were many things we could have done. How much of an impact on the war they would have had, I have no idea. We certainly could have saved a few lives here and there, maybe shortened some conflicts by a day or more. Instead, we were told to get ready to go home. Our deployment was over.

I sat back at base for a couple of weeks with nothing to do. I felt like a little fucking coward, playing video games and waiting to ship out.

I was pretty pissed. In fact, I was so mad I wanted to leave the Navy, and give up being a SEAL.

Taya:

I didn’t quit the SEALs.

I might have, if my contract hadn’t still had a lot of time to run. Maybe I would have gone to the Marines. But it wasn’t an option.

I had some reason for hope. When you come home and the Team returns from a deployment, there’s a reshuffling at the top and you get new leadership. There was always a chance our new head shed would be better.

I talked to Taya and told her how pissed off I was. Of course, she had a different perspective: she was just happy that I was alive and home in one piece. Meanwhile, the brass got huge promotions and congratulations for their part in the war. They got the glory.

Bullshit glory.

Bullshit glory for a war they didn’t fight and the cowardly stance they took. Their cowardice ended lives we could have saved if they would have let us do our jobs. But that’s politics for you: a bunch of game-players sitting around congratulating each other in safety while real lives are getting screwed up.

I gave up part of my vacation and came back from leave a week early to go to sniper school. I would have given up much more than that for the chance.

Marine snipers have justifiably gotten a lot of attention over the years, and their training program is still regarded as one of the world’s best. In fact, SEAL snipers used to be trained there. But we’ve gone ahead and started our own school, adapting a lot of what the Marines do but adding a number of things to prepare SEAL snipers for our mission. The SEAL school takes a little more than twice as long to complete because of that.

Next to BUD/S, sniper training was the hardest school I ever went through. They were constantly messing with our heads. We had late nights and early mornings. We were always running or being stressed in some way.

That was a key part of the instruction. Since they can’t shoot at you, they put as much pressure on you as they can manage in every other way. From what I’ve heard, only 50 percent of the SEALs who take the school make it through. I can believe it.

The first classes teach SEALs how to use the computers and cameras that are part of our job. SEAL snipers aren’t just shooters. In fact, shooting is only a small part of the job. It’s an important, vital part, but it’s far from everything.

A SEAL sniper is trained to observe. It’s a foundation skill. He may find himself out ahead of a main force, tasked to discover everything he can about the enemy. Even if he’s assigned to get into position to take out a high-value target, the first thing he has to be able to do is observe the area. He needs to be able to use modern navigational skills and tools like GPS, and at the same time present the information he’s gathered. So that’s where we start.

The next part of the course, and in a lot of ways the hardest, is stalking. That’s the part where most guys fall out. Stalking means sneaking into a position without being seen: easier said than done. It’s moving slowly and carefully to the exact right spot for the mission. It’s not patience, or at least that’s not all it is. It’s professional discipline.

I’m not a patient person, but I learned that to succeed as a stalker I need to take my time. If I know I’m going to kill someone, I will wait a day, a week, two weeks.

Make that, I have waited.

I will do whatever it takes. And let’s just say there are no bathroom breaks, either.

For one of the exercises, we had to sneak through a hay field. I took hours arranging the grass and hay in my ghillie suit. The ghillie suit is made of burlap and is a kind of camouflage base for a sniper on a stalking mission. The suit allows you to add hay or grass or whatever, so you can blend in with your surroundings. The burlap adds depth, so it doesn’t look like a guy with hay sticking out of your butt as you cross a field. You look like a bush.

But the suits are hot and sweaty. And they don’t make you invisible. When you come to another piece of terrain, you have to stop and rearrange your camouflage. You have to look like whatever it is you’re crossing.

I remember one time I was making my way s-l-o-w-l-y across a field when I heard the distinct rattle of a snake nearby. A rattler had taken a particular liking to the piece of real estate I had to cross. Willing it away didn’t work. Not wanting to give away my position to the instructor grading me, I crept slowly to the side, altering my course. Some enemies aren’t worth fighting.

I was not the best sniper in my class. In fact, I failed the practice test. That meant potentially washing out of the class.

Unlike the Marines, in the field we don’t work with spotters. The SEAL philosophy is, basically, if you have a fellow warrior with you, he ought to be shooting, not watching. That said, we did use spotters in training.

After I failed the test, the instructor went through everything with me and my spotter, trying to figure out where I’d gone wrong. My scope was perfect, my dope was set, there was nothing mechanically wrong with the rifle…

Suddenly, he looked up at me.

“Dip?” he said, more a statement than a question.

“Oh…”

I hadn’t put any chewing tobacco in my mouth during the test. It was the only thing I’d done differently… and it turned out to be the key. I passed the exam with flying colors—and a wad of tobacco in my cheek

Snipers as a breed tend to be superstitious. We’re like baseball players with our little rituals and must-dos. Watch a baseball game, and you’ll see a batter always does the same thing as he steps to the plate—he’ll make the sign of the cross, kick the dirt, wave the bat. Snipers are the same way.

During training and even afterward, I kept my guns a certain way, wore the same clothes, had everything arranged precisely the same. It’s all a matter of controlling everything on my end. I know the gun is going to do its job. I need to make sure I do mine.

After spending the entire summer at sniper school, I returned to my platoon and got busy with the rest of our workup, going through the different training sessions as we prepared to deploy in a year. As usual, I had some of my hardest times in the water.

We did finally make shore without getting eaten. But meanwhile, the entire Navy was looking for us. The news media started carrying the story: FOUR SEALS LOST AT SEA.

Not exactly what we wanted to be famous for.

It took a while, but a patrol plane finally spotted us and an Mk-V was dispatched to pick us up. The commander of the assault boat took care of us and got us home.

Besides being a SEAL, I was also a husband. And after I came home, Taya and I decided to try and start a family.

Things went pretty well. She got pregnant about the first time we kissed without protection. And her pregnancy was near-perfect. It was the childbirth that got complicated.

For some reason, my wife had a problem with a low platelet count. Unfortunately, the problem wasn’t discovered until too late, and because of that she couldn’t get an epidural or other painkiller when it came time to give birth. So, she had to give birth naturally, without any training or preparation.

Our son was eight pounds, not a particularly small kid.

You learn a lot about a woman when she’s under duress. I got bitched to high heaven. (She claims she didn’t, but I know better. And who are you going to believe, a SEAL? Or a SEAL’s wife?)

Taya was in labor for sixteen hours. Toward the end, they decided they could give her laughing gas to ease the pain. But before they did, they warned me of everything that could happen to my son, no matter how distant the possibility.

I didn’t feel I had much of a choice. She was in tremendous pain. She needed relief. I told them to go ahead, though in the back of my mind I was worried that my boy would come out messed up.

Then the doctor told me my son was so big, he couldn’t quite squeeze through the birth canal. They wanted to put a suction thing on his head to help him get out. Meanwhile, Taya was passing out cold between contractions.

“Okay,” I said, not really understanding.

The doctor looked at me. “He may come out like a Conehead.”

Oh great, I thought. My child is not only going to be fucked up from the gas but he’s going to be a Conehead.

“Goddamnit, just get him out of there,” I told him. “You’re killing my wife. Do it!”

My boy came out just fine. But I have to say, I was a case the whole time. It was the most hopeless feeling in the world, seeing my wife in excruciating pain, without anything I could do.

I was a hell of a lot more nervous watching her give birth than I ever was in combat.

Besides sniper school, I had been “volunteered” for nav school by my chief. I went reluctantly.

Navigating is an important skill in combat—without a navigator, you don’t know how to get to the battle, let alone how to get away when you’re done. In a DA (direct action) scenario, the navigator figures out the best way to the target, comes up with alternatives, and guides the fire team to safety when you’re done.

The problem is, SEAL navigators often don’t get a chance to actually fight in the DA they navigate to. The way we set things up, the navigator is usually assigned to stay in the vehicle while the rest of the unit breaks into the house or whatever. That’s so he can be ready in case we need to get out fast.

Sitting in the passenger seat plugging numbers into a computer was not exactly where I wanted to be. But my chief wanted someone he could count on planning the routes, and when your chief asks you to do something, you do it.

I spent the whole first week of nav school frowning at a desk in front of a Toughbook laptop computer, learning the computer’s functions, how to hook up to a GPS and manipulate the satellite imagery and maps. I also learned how to take the images and paste them onto PowerPoint for briefings and the like.

Yes, even SEALs use PowerPoint.

The second week was a little more interesting. We drove around the city—we were in San Diego—plotting and following different routes. I’m not pretending it was cool, though—important, yes, but not very exciting.

As it happened, though, it was my skills as a navigator that got me to Iraq ahead of everyone else.

Toward the end of our workup, we found out that they were standing up a new unit in Baghdad to do direct action raids on suspected terrorists and resistance leaders. The unit was being run by the GROM, the Polish special operations unit. While the Poles would handle most of the heavy lifting, they needed some supplements—namely, snipers and navigators. And so, in September 2004, I was pulled from my platoon and sent to Iraq to help the GROM as a navigator. The rest of the platoon was due to come overseas the following month; I’d meet them there.

I felt bad about leaving Taya. She was still healing from the birth. But at the same time, I felt my duty as a SEAL was more important. I wanted to get back into action. I wanted to go to war.

A lot had happened in Iraq since I left in the spring of 2003. The country had been liberated from Saddam Hussein and his army with the fall of Baghdad on April 9 of that year. But a variety of terrorist forces either continued or began fighting after Saddam was deposed. They fought both other Iraqis and the U.S. forces who were trying to help the country regain stability. Some were former members of Saddam’s army and members of the Ba’athist Party that Saddam had headed. There were Fedayeen, members of a paramilitary resistance group the dictator had organized before the war. There were small, poorly organized groups of Iraqi guerrillas, who were also called Fedayeen, though, technically, they weren’t connected with Saddam’s organization. Though nearly all were Muslim, nationalism rather than religion tended to be their primary motive and organizing principle.

Then there were the groups organized primarily around religious beliefs. These identified themselves as mujahedeen, which basically means “people on jihad”—or murderers in the name of God. They were dedicated to killing Americans and Muslims who didn’t believe in the brand of Islam that they believed in.

There was also al-Qaeda in Iraq, a mostly foreign group that saw the war as an opportunity to kill Americans. They were radical Sunni Muslims with an allegiance to Osama bin Laden, the terrorist leader who needs no introduction—and whom SEALs hunted down and gave a fitting sendoff in 2011.

There were also Iranians and their Republican Guard, who fought—sometimes directly, though usually through proxies—to both kill Americans and to gain power in Iraqi politics.

I’m sure there were a hell of a lot of others in what came to be known to the media as “the insurgency.” They were all the enemy.

I never worried too much about who exactly it was who was pointing a gun at me or planting an IED. The fact that they wanted to kill me was all I needed to know.

“Kyle, you will come.”

The Polish NCO doing the briefing stroked his bushy beard as he pointed at me. I didn’t understand much Polish, and he didn’t speak very good English, but what he was saying seemed pretty clear—they wanted me to go in the house with them during the operation.

“Fuck yeah,” I said.

He smiled. Some expressions are universal.

After a week on the job, I had been promoted from navigator to a member of the assault team. I couldn’t be happier.

I still had to navigate. My job was to figure out a safe route to and from the target house. While the insurgents were active in the Baghdad area, the fighting had slowed down and there wasn’t yet the huge threat of IEDs and ambushes that you saw elsewhere. Still, that could change in an instant, and I was careful plotting my routes.

We got into our Hummers and set out. I had the front seat, next to the driver. I’d learned enough Polish to give directions—Prawo kolei: “right turn”—and guide him through the streets. The computer was on my lap; to my right was a swing arm for a machine gun. We’d taken the Hummer’s doors off to make it easier to get in and out and fire. Besides the mounts on my side and in the back, we had a .50 in a turret at the back.

We reached the target and hauled ass out of the truck. I was psyched to finally get back into battle.

The Poles put me about sixth or seventh in the line to go in. That was a bit disappointing—that far back in the train you’re unlikely to get any action. But I wasn’t about to bitch.

The GROM hit houses essentially the way SEALs do. There are little variations here and there: the way they come around corners, for example, and the way they cover buddies during an operation. But for the most part, it’s all violence of action. Surprise the target, hit them hard and fast, take control.

One difference I particularly like is their version of flash-crash grenades. American stun grenades explode with flash of light and an enormous bang. The Polish grenades, on the other hand, give a series of explosions. We called them seven-bangers. They sound like very loud gunfire. I tried to take as many of those from them as I could when it was time to move on.

We moved the instant the grenade started going off. I came in through the door, and caught sight of the NCO directing the team. He motioned me forward silently, and I ran to clear and secure my room.

The room was empty.

All clear.

I went back downstairs. Some of the others had found the guy we’d come for and were already loading him into one of the Hummers. The rest of the Iraqis who’d been in the house stood around, looking scared to death.

Back outside, I hopped into the Hummer and started directing the team back to base. The mission was uneventful, but as far as the GROM were concerned, my cherry had been burst—from that point on, I was a full-fledged member of the team.

We went on DAs for another two and a half weeks, but there was only one where we had anything like real trouble. A guy wanted to fight as we were going in. Unfortunately for him, all he had were his bare fists. Here he’s facing a squad of soldiers, each heavily armed and protected by body armor. He was either stupid or courageous, or maybe both.

The GROM took care of him quickly. One less asshole on the wanted list.

We picked up a pretty wide variety of suspects—financiers for al-Qaeda, bomb-makers, insurgents, foreign insurgents—one time we picked up a truckload of them.

The GROM were a lot like SEALs: extremely professional at work, and very hard-core partiers after hours. They all had Polish vodka, and they especially loved this one brand named Zubrówka.

Zubrówka has been around for hundreds of years, though I’ve never seen it in America. There’s a blade of buffalo grass in each bottle; each blade comes from the same field in Poland. Buffalo grass is supposed to have medicinal properties, but the story related to me from my GROM friends was a lot more colorful—or maybe off-color. According to them, European bison known as wisent roam on this field and piss on the grass. The distillers put the blades in for an extra kick. (Actually, during the process, certain ingredients of the buffalo grass are safely neutralized, so just the flavor remains. But my friends didn’t tell me that—maybe it was too hard to translate.)

I was a little dubious, but the vodka proved to be as smooth as it was potent. It definitely supported their argument that the Russians don’t know anything about vodka and that Poles make it better.

About a month into my tour with the GROM, I was woken by a shake on my shoulder.

I jumped upright in bed, ready to deck whoever had snuck into my quarters.

“Hey, hey, it’s cool,” said the lieutenant commander who’d woken me. He was a SEAL, and my boss. “I need you to get dressed and come to my office.”

“Yes, sir,” I mumbled. I pulled on a pair of shorts and my flip-flops and went down the hall.

I thought I was in trouble, though I wasn’t sure what for. I’d been on good behavior working with the Poles, no fights to speak of. I searched my mind as I walked toward his office, trying to prepare a defense. My mind was still fairly blank when I got there.

“Kyle, I’m going to need you to get your sniper rifle and pack up all your gear,” the lieutenant commander told me. “You’re going to Fallujah.”

He started telling me about some of the arrangements and threw in some operational details. The Marines were planning a big push, and they needed snipers to help out.

Man, this is going to be good, I thought. We are going to kill massive amounts of bad guys. And I’m going to be in the middle of it.

From a historical point of view, there were two battles for Fallujah. The first took place in the spring, as I’ve mentioned before. Political considerations, mostly driven by wildly distorted media reports and a lot of Arab propaganda, caused the Marines to back off their offensive soon after it was begun, and well before it achieved its aim of kicking the insurgents out of the city. In place of the Marines, Iraqis loyal to the interim government were supposed to take control and run the city.

That didn’t work. Pretty much the moment the Marines pulled back, the insurgents completely took over Fallujah. Civilians who were not connected with the insurgency were killed, or fled the city. Anyone who wanted peace—anyone with any sense—left as soon as they could, or ended up dead.

Al-Anabar Province, the area that contained the city, was studded with insurgents of various forms. A lot were Iraqi mujahedeen, but there were also plenty of foreign nationals who were members of “al-Qaeda in Iraq” or other radical groups. The head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi—had his headquarters in the city. A Jordanian who had fought with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, he was committed to killing Americans. (Despite numerous reports to the contrary, as far as is known, Sheikh Abdullah al-Janabi escaped from Fallujah and is still at large.)

The insurgents were one-part terrorists, another-part criminal gangs. They would plant IEDs, kidnap officials and their families, attack American convoys, kill Iraqis who didn’t share their faith or politics—anything and everything they could think of. Fallujah had become their safe haven, an anti-capital of Iraq dedicated to overthrowing the interim government and preventing free elections.

Al-Anabar Province and, more specifically, the general area around Fallujah became known through the media as the Sunni Triangle. That’s a very, very rough approximation both of the area—contained between Baghdad, Ramadi, and Baqubah—and the ethnic composition.

(Some background on Islam in Iraq: There were two main groups of Muslims in Iraq, Sunnis and Shiites. Before the war, Shiites lived mostly in the south and east, say from Baghdad to the borders, and Sunnis dominated around Baghdad and to the northwest. The two groups coexisted but generally hated each other. While Shiites were the majority, during Saddam’s time they were discriminated against and not allowed to hold important offices. Farther north, the areas are dominated by Kurds, who, though mostly Sunni, have separate traditions and often don’t think of themselves as being part of Iraq. Saddam considered them to be an inferior people; during one political suppression, he ordered chemical weapons used and waged a despicable ethnic-cleansing campaign.)

Dismissed by the lieutenant commander, I immediately gathered my gear, then headed outside to a pickup truck that was waiting to take me out to the helo. A 60—a Blackhawk H-60—was waiting for me and another guy who’d been working with the GROM, a coms specialist named Adam. We looked at each other and smiled. We were thrilled to be getting into a real battle.

SEALs from all over Iraq were making a similar trip, heading toward the large Marine base south of the city at Camp Fallujah. They’d already established their own small base inside the camp by the time I arrived. I treaded my way through the narrow halls of the building, which had been dubbed the Alamo, trying not to knock into anything. The walls were lined with equipment and gear, gun boxes and metal suitcases, cartons and the odd box of soda. We could have been a traveling rock band, staging a stadium road show.

Except that our road show had very serious pyrotechnics.

Besides snipers from Team 3, men had been pulled from Team 5 and Team 8 to join the assault. I already knew most of the West Coast guys; the others I’d come to respect over the next few weeks.

The energy level was intense. Everyone was eager to get into the fight and help the Marines.

As the battle drew near, my thoughts wandered to my wife and son. My little baby boy was growing. Taya had started sending me photos and even videos showing his progress. She’d also sent images through e-mail for me to look at.

I can see some of those videos now in my mind—he’d be lying on his back, and shake his hands and feet, going as if he was running, a big ol’ smile on his face.

He was a super-active kid. Just like his daddy.

Thanksgiving, Christmas—in Iraq, those dates didn’t mean all that much to me. But missing my son’s experience of them was a little different. The more I was gone, and the more I saw him grow, the more I wanted to help him grow—do the things a father does with and for a son.

I called Taya while I was waiting for the assault to begin.

It was a brief conversation.

“Look, babe, I can’t tell you where I’m going, but I’m going to be gone for a while,” I said. “Watch the news and you’ll figure it out. I don’t know when I’m going to be able to talk to you again.”

That was going to have to do for a while.

On the evening of November 7, I squeezed into a Marine amtrac with a dozen Marines and a few SEALs, all keyed up for battle. The big armored vehicle rumbled to life, and slowly moved toward the head of a massive procession of armor heading out of camp and north of the city, into the open desert.

We sat knee to knee on benches facing each other in the bare-bones interior. A third row had been squeezed into the middle of the compartment. The AAV-7A1 wasn’t exactly a stretch limo; you might try not to crowd out the guys on either side of you, but there was only so much you could do. Tight wasn’t the word. Thankfully, just about everyone inside with me had showered recently.

At first, it was cold—this was November, and to a Texas boy it felt like deep winter—but within a few minutes the heater was choking us and we had to ask them to crank it down. I put my ruck down on the floor. With my Mk-11 propped between my legs and my helmet on the butt, I had a makeshift pillow. I tried to nap as we moved. Close your eyes, and time moves faster.

I didn’t get all that much sleep. Every so often I glanced toward the slit windows in the rear door, but I couldn’t see past the guys sitting there. That wasn’t much of a loss—all they could see was the rest of the procession, a haze of dust, and a few patches of empty desert. We’d been practicing with the Marines for about a week, going over everything from getting in and out of their vehicles to figuring out exactly what sort of charges we would use to blow sniper holes through buildings. In between we’d worked on radio coms and general strategy, exchanged ideas about how to provide the best cover for the squads we’d be accompanying, and made a dozen tentative tactical decisions, such as deciding whether it would be generally better to shoot from the top floor or the one right below.

Now we were ready, but as often happens in the military, we were in hurry-up-and-wait mode. The tracked vehicles drove us up north of Fallujah, then stopped.

We sat there for what seemed like hours. Every muscle in my body cramped. Finally someone decided we could drop the ramp and stretch a bit. I unfolded myself from the bench and went out to shoot the shit with some of the other SEALs nearby.

Finally, just before daybreak, we loaded back up and began trundling toward the edge of the city. There was maximum adrenaline inside that tin can on treads. We were ready to get it on.

Our destination was an apartment complex overlooking the northwestern corner of the city. Roughly eight hundred yards from the start of the city proper, the buildings had a perfect view of the area where our Marines were going to launch their assault—an excellent location for snipers. All we had to do was take it.

“Five minutes!” yelled one of the NCOs.

I hooked one arm through my ruck and got a good grip on my gun.

The amtrac jerked to a halt. The rear ramp slammed down and I leapt out with the others, running toward a small grove with some trees and rocks for cover. I moved quickly—I wasn’t afraid of getting shot as much as I was of being run over by one of the armada that had ferried us here. The mammoth amtracs didn’t look like they’d stop for anybody.

I hit the dirt, got the ruck next to me, and began scanning the building, watching for anything suspicious. I worked my eyes around the windows and the surrounding area, expecting all the while to be shot at. The Marines, meanwhile, poured out their vehicles. Besides the tracked personnel carriers there were Hummers and tanks and dozens of support vehicles. The Marines just kept coming, swarming over the complex.

They started kicking in doors. I couldn’t hear much, just the loud echoes of the shotguns they used to blow out the locks. The Marines detained a few women who had been outside, but otherwise the yard around the building was vacant.

My eyes never stopped moving. I scanned constantly, trying to find something.

Our radio guy came over and set up nearby. He was monitoring the Marine progress as they worked up through the apartment building, securing it. The few inhabitants they found inside had to be taken out and moved to safety. There was no resistance inside—if there were insurgents, they’d either gotten out when they saw us coming, or they pretended now that they were loyal Iraqis and friends of the U.S.

“All right,” said our radio guy finally. “They want us inside.”

I ran from the trees to the apartment complex, where a SEAL lieutenant was organizing the overwatches. He had a map of the city and showed us where the assault was going to take place the next day.

“We need to cover this area here, here, and here,” he said. “Y’all go find a room to do it.”

He gave us a building and off we went. I’d been paired with a sniper I’d met during BUD/S, Ray. (I’ve used the name to protect his identity.)

Ray is a big-time gun nut. Loves guns, and knows ’em real well. I’m not sure how good a shot he is, but he’s probably forgotten more than I know about rifles.

We hadn’t seen each other for years, but from what I remembered from BUD/S I figured we’d get along all right. You want to feel confident the guy you’re working with is someone you can rely on—after all, you are literally trusting him with your life.

A Ranger we called Ranger Molloy had been shepherding our rifles and some gear with us in a Hummer. He came up and gave me my .300 Win Mag. The rifle’s extra distance over the Mk-11 would be handy once I found a good hide to shoot from.

Running up the stairs, I sorted the situation out in my head. I knew what side of the building I wanted to be on, and roughly where I wanted to be. When I reached the top—I’d decided I wanted to shoot from a room rather than the roof—I started walking through the hall, scanning for an apartment that had the right view. Going inside, I looked for one with furniture I could use to set up.

To me, the home I was in was just another part of the battlefield. The apartments and everything in them were just things to be used to accomplish our goal—clearing the city.

Snipers need to either lie down or sit for a long period of time, so I needed to find furniture that would let me do that as comfortably as possible. You also need something to rest your rifle on. In this case, I was going to be shooting out of the windows, so I needed to be elevated. As I searched through the apartment, I found a room that had a baby crib in it. It was a rare find, and one I could put to good use.

Ray and I took it and flipped it over. That gave us a base. Then we pulled the door of the room off its hinges and put it on top. We now had a stable platform to work on.

Most Iraqis don’t sleep on beds; they use bedrolls, thick mats, or blankets that are put directly on the floor. We found a few of them and laid them out on the door. That made a semi-comfortable, elevated bed to lie on while working the gun. A rolled mat gave us a place to rest the end of our guns on.

We opened the window and were ready to shoot.

We decided we’d work three hours on, three hours off, rotating back and forth. Ray took the first watch.

I started rummaging through the complex to see if I could find any cool shit—money, guns, explosives. The only thing I found worth acquisitioning was a handheld Tiger Woods golf game.

Not that I was authorized to take it, or even did take it, officially. If I had taken it, I would have played it the rest of the deployment. If I’d done that, it might explain why I am actually pretty good at the game now.

If I had taken it.

As the Marines moved into the city, they soon reached a position where we could no longer cover them from the apartment towers. We came down, ready for the next phase—working in the city itself.

I was assigned to Kilo Company, helping the Marine units on the western side of the city. They were the first wave of the assault, sweeping down block by block. Another company would come in behind them, securing the area and making sure that none of the insurgents snuck back in behind them. The idea was to clear Fallujah out, block by block.

The properties in this part of the city, as in many Iraqi cities, were walled off from their neighbors by thick brick and stucco walls. There were always nooks and crannies for insurgents to hide in. The backyards, usually flat with hard dirt or even cement, were rectangular mazes. It was a dry, dusty place, even with the river nearby. Most of the houses didn’t have running water; the water supply would be on the roof.

I worked with Marine snipers for several days during the first week or so of that phase of the assault. For much of the time I was paired with two Marine snipers and a JTAC, a SEAL who could call in air strikes. There would also be a few support guys, Marines who would provide security and occasionally help out with different tasks. These were Marines who wanted to be snipers; after their deployment, they were hoping to ship out to the Marine sniper school.

Every morning would start with about twenty minutes of what we called “fires”—mortars, artillery, bombs, missiles, rockets—it amounted to a hell of a lot of ordnance being dumped on key enemy positions. The fire would take out ammo caches or dumps, or soften up spots where we thought we’d have a lot of resistance. Black funnels of smoke would rise in the distance, caches hit by the bombings; the ground and air would rumble with secondary explosions.

At first, we were behind the Marine advance. But it didn’t take long before I realized we could do a better job by getting ahead of the squad on the ground. It gave us a better position, allowing us to surprise any insurgents who tried rallying to the ground unit.

It also gave us a hell of a lot more action. So we started taking houses to use as hides.

Once the bottom of the house was cleared, I’d run up the stairs from the top floor to the roof, emerging in the small shack that typically sheltered the entrance to the roof. Sure the roof was clear, I’d move over to the wall at the edge, get my bearings, and set up a position. Usually there would be something on the roof I could use—a chair or rugs—to make things more comfortable; if not, there was always something downstairs. I’d switched back to the Mk-11, realizing that most of my shots would be relatively close, because of the way the city was laid out. The weapon was more convenient than the Win Mag, and at these ranges just as deadly.

Meanwhile, the Marines on the ground would work down the street, usually side to side, clearing the houses. Once they reached a point where we could no longer cover them well, we’d move up and take a new spot, and the process would start over again.

The enemies we were fighting were savage and well-armed. In just one house, the Marines found roughly two dozen guns, including machine guns and sniper rifles, along with homemade rocket stands and a mortar base.

That was just one house on a long block. It was a nice house, in fact—it had air conditioning, elaborate chandeliers, and fancy Western furniture. It made a good place to rest while we took a break one afternoon.

The houses were all searched carefully, but the weapons were usually pretty easy to find. The Marines would go inside and see a grenade launcher propped against a china cabinet—with rockets stacked next to the teacups below. At one house, Marines found dive tanks—apparently the insurgent who had been staying at the house used them to sneak across the river and make an attack.

Russian equipment was also common. Most of it was very old—in one house there were rifle grenades that could have been made during World War II. We found binoculars with old Communist hammer-and-sickle emblems. And IEDs, including some cemented into walls, were everywhere.

One day I came down from a roof to take a break and headed out into the backyard of the house with another SEAL sniper. I pulled open the bipod on my rifle and set it down.

All of a sudden there was an explosion right across from us, maybe ten feet away. I ducked, then turned and saw the cement block wall crumbling. Just beyond it were two insurgents, AKs slung over their shoulders. They looked as stunned as we must have; they, too, had been taking a break when a stray rocket hit or maybe some sort of IED went off.

It felt like an old western duel—whoever got to their pistol the quickest was going to live.

I grabbed mine and started shooting. My buddy did the same.

We hit them, but the slugs didn’t drop them. They turned the corner and ran through the house where they’d been, then cut out into the street.

As soon as they cleared the house, the Marines pulling security on the road shot them down.

You cannot be afraid to take your shot. When you see someone with an IED or a rifle maneuvering toward your men, you have clear reason to fire. (The fact that an Iraqi had a gun would not necessarily mean he could be shot.) The ROEs were specific, and in most cases the danger was obvious.

But there were times when it wasn’t exactly clear, when a person almost surely was an insurgent, probably was doing evil, but there was still some doubt because of the circumstances or the surroundings—the way he moved, for example, wasn’t toward an area where troops were. A lot of times a guy seemed to be acting macho for friends, completely unaware that I was watching him, or that there were American troops nearby.

Those shots I didn’t take.

You couldn’t—you had to worry about your own ass. Make an unjustified shot and you could be charged with murder.

I often would sit there and think, “I know this motherfucker is bad; I saw him doing such and such down the street the other day, but here he’s not doing anything, and if I shoot him, I won’t be able to justify it for the lawyers. I’ll fry.” Like I said, there is paperwork for everything. Every confirmed kill had documentation, supporting evidence, and a witness.

So I wouldn’t shoot.

There weren’t a lot of those, especially in Fallujah, but I was always extremely aware of the fact that every killing might have to be justified to the lawyers.

My attitude was: if my justification is I thought my target would do something bad, then I wasn’t justified. He had to be doing something bad.

Even with that standard, there were plenty of targets. I was averaging two and three a day, occasionally less, sometimes much more, with no end in sight.

Not long afterward, a guy I’ll call Runaway and I were on the street when we had contact with Iraqi insurgents. We ducked into a shallow setback in the wall next to the street, waiting for the hail of bullets to die down.

“We’ll work our way back,” I told Runaway. “You go first. I’ll cover you.”

“Good.”

I leaned out and laid down cover fire, forcing the Iraqis back. I waited a few seconds, giving Runaway time to get into position so he could cover me. When I thought enough time had passed, I jumped out and started running.

Bullets began flying all around, but not from Runaway. They were all coming from the Iraqis, who were trying to write their names in my back with bullets.

I threw myself against the wall, sliding next to the gate. For a moment I was disoriented: where was Runaway?

He should have been nearby, waiting under cover for me so we could leapfrog back. But he was nowhere to be seen. Had I passed him on the street?

No. Motherfucker was busy earning his nickname.

I was trapped, hung up by the insurgents and without my mysteriously disappearing friend.

The Iraqi gunfire got so intense that I ended up having to call for backup. The Marines sent a pair of Hummers, and with their firepower backing up everything I could lay down, I was finally able to get out.

By then I’d figured out what had happened. When I met with Runaway a short time later, I practically strangled him—I probably would have, if it hadn’t been for the officer there.

“Why the hell did you run away?” I demanded. “You ran all the way down the block without covering me.”

“I thought you were following me.”

“Bullshit.”

It was the second time that week Runaway had taken off on me under fire. The first time I’d cut him slack, giving him the benefit of the doubt. But it was now clear he was a coward. Once he was under fire, he just pussied out.

Command separated us. It was a wise thing to do.

A little after Runaway’s Exciting Adventure, I came down from my position on one of the roofs when I heard a shit-ton of rounds go off nearby. I ran outside but couldn’t see the firefight. Then I heard a radio call that there were men down.

A fellow I’ll call Eagle and I ran up the block until we came across a group of Marines who’d retreated after taking fire about a block away. They told us that a group of insurgents had pinned down some other Marines not too far away, and we decided we’d try and help them.

We tried getting an angle from a nearby house, but it wasn’t tall enough. Eagle and I moved closer, trying another house. Here we found four Marines on the roof, two of whom had been wounded. Their stories were confusing, and we couldn’t get shots from there, either. We decided to take them out so the wounded could be helped; the kid I carried down had been gut-shot.

Down on the street, we got better directions from the two Marines who hadn’t been shot, finally realizing that we had been targeting the wrong house. We started down an alley in the direction of the insurgents, but after a short distance we came to obstructions we couldn’t get around, and we reversed course. Just as I came around the corner back out onto the main street, there was an explosion behind me—an insurgent had seen us coming and tossed a grenade.

One of the Marines following me went down. Eagle was a corpsman as well as a sniper, and after we pulled the injured kid away from the alley he went to work on him. Meanwhile, I took the rest of the Marines and continued down the road in the direction of the insurgents’ stronghold.

We found a second group of Marines huddled at a nearby corner, pinned down by fire from the house. They’d set out to rescue the first group but stalled. I got everyone together and I told them that a small group of us would rush up the street while the others laid down fire. The trapped Marines were about fifty yards away, about one full block.

“It doesn’t matter if you can see them or not,” I told them. “We’re all just gonna shoot.”

I got up to start. A terrorist jumped out into the middle of the road and began unleashing hell on us, spitting bullets from a belt-fed weapon. Returning fire as best we could, we ducked back for cover. Everybody checked themselves for holes; miraculously, no one had been shot.

By now, somewhere between fifteen and twenty Marines were there with me.

“All right,” I told them. “We’re going to try this again. Let’s do it this time.”

I jumped out from around the corner, firing my weapon as I ran. The Iraqi machine gunner had been hit and killed by our earlier barrage, but there were still plenty of bad guys farther up the street.

I’d taken only a few steps when I realized that none of the Marines had followed me.

Shit. I kept running.

The insurgents began focusing their fire on me. I tucked my Mk-11 under my arm and fired back as I ran. The semiautomatic is a great, versatile weapon, but in this particular situation its twenty-round magazine seemed awful small. I blew through one mag, popped the release, slammed in a second, and kept firing.

I found four men huddled near a wall not far from the house. It turned out that two of them were reporters who’d been embedded with the Marines; they were getting a hell of a better view of the battle than they had bargained for.

“I’ll cover you,” I shouted. “Get the hell out of here.”

I jumped up and laid down fire as they ran. The final Marine tapped me on the shoulder as he passed, signaling that he was the last man out. Ready to follow, I glanced to my right, checking my flank.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a body sprawled on the ground. He had Marine camis.

Where he came from, whether he’d been there when I arrived or crawled there from somewhere else, I have no idea. I ran over to him, saw that he’d been shot in both legs. I slapped a new mag into my gun, then grabbed the back of his body armor and pulled him with me as I retreated.

At some point as I ran, one of the insurgents threw a frag. The grenade exploded somewhere nearby. Pieces of wall peppered my side, from my butt cheek down to my knee. By some lucky chance, my pistol took the biggest fragment. It was pure luck—it might have put a nice hole in my leg.

My butt was sore for a while, but it still seems to work well enough.

The kid looked at me with a mixture of excitement and disbelief. He was a young Marine, eager but tempered by the fight we’d been waging the past week.

“Do you want to be a sniper?” I asked him. “Right now?”

“Hell yeah!” he said finally.

“Good,” I told him, handing over my Mk-11. “Give me your M-16. You take my sniper rifle. I’m going in the front door.”

And with that, I headed over to the squad we’d been working with and told them I was helping them hit the houses.

I took the lead.

Waiting outside the first house, I thought about the guys I saw being pulled out.

I did not want to be one of them.

I could be, though.

It was hard to get that idea out of my mind. I also knew that I would be in a shitload of trouble if I did get hurt—going down on the streets was not what I was supposed to be doing, at least from an official point of view. It was definitely right—what I felt I had to do—but it would severely piss the top brass off.

But that would be the least of my problems if I got shot, wouldn’t it?

“Let’s do it,” I said.

We blew the door open. I led the way, training and instincts taking over. I cleared the front room, stepped to the side, and started directing traffic. The pace was quick, automatic. Once things got started and I began to move into the house, something took over inside me. I didn’t worry about casualties anymore. I didn’t think about anything except the door, the house, the room—all of which was plenty enough.

I have no idea how many blocks, let alone how many houses, we took down. The Marines were following a carefully laid out plan—we had to be at a certain spot each lunchtime, then reach another objective by nightfall. The entire invasion force moved across the city in choreographed order, making sure there were no holes or weak spots the insurgents could use to get behind us and attack.

Every once in a while, we’d come across a building still occupied by families, but for the most part, the only people we were seeing were insurgents.

We would do a full search of each house. In this one house, we heard faint moans as we went down into the basement. There were two men hanging from chains on the wall. One was dead; the other barely there. Both had been severely tortured with electric shock and God knows what else. They were both Iraqi, apparently mentally retarded—the insurgents had wanted to make sure they wouldn’t talk to us, but decided to have a little fun with them first.

The second man died while our corpsman worked on him.

There was a black banner on the floor, the kind the fanatics liked to show on their videos when beheading Westerners. There were amputated limbs, and more blood than you can imagine.

It was a nasty-smelling place.

As the Marine drive neared the southern edge of the city, the ground action in our section started to peter out. I went back up on the roofs and started doing overwatches again, thinking I would catch more targets from there. The tide of the battle had turned. The U.S. had mostly wrested control of the city from the bad guys, and it was now just a matter of time before resistance collapsed. But being in the middle of the action, I couldn’t tell for sure.

Knowing that we considered cemeteries sacred, the insurgents typically used them to hide caches of weapons and explosives. At one point, we were in a hide overlooking the walled-in boundaries of a large cemetery that sat in the middle of the city. Roughly three football fields long by two football fields wide, it was a cement city of the dead, filled with tombstones and mausoleums. We set up on a roof near a prayer tower and mosque overlooking the cemetery.

The roof we were on was fairly elaborate. It was ringed with a brick wall punctuated with iron grates, giving us excellent firing positions; I sat down on my haunches and spotted in my rifle through a gap in the grid work, studying the paths between the stones a few hundred yards out. There was so much dust and grit in the air, I kept my goggles on. I’d also learned in Fallujah to keep my helmet cinched tight, wary of the chips and cement frags that flew from the battered masonry during a firefight.

I picked out some figures moving through the cemetery yard. I zeroed in on one and fired.

Within seconds, we were fully engaged in a firefight. Insurgents kept popping up from behind the stones—I don’t know if there was a tunnel or where they came from. Brass flew from the 60 nearby.

I studied my shots as the Marines around me poured out fire. Everything they did faded into the background as I carefully put my scope on a target, steadied the aim on center mass, then squeezed ever so smoothly. When the bullet leapt from the barrel, it was almost a surprise.

My target fell. I looked for another. And another. And on it went.

Until, finally, there were no more. I got up and moved a few feet to a spot where the wall completely shielded me from the cemetery. There I took my helmet off and leaned back against the wall. The roof was littered with spent shells—hundreds if not thousands.

Someone shared a large plastic bottle of water. One of the Marines pulled his ruck over and used it as a pillow, catching some sleep. Another went downstairs, to the store on the first story of the building. It was a smoke shop; he returned with cartons of flavored cigarettes. He lit a few, and a cherry scent mingled with the heavy stench that always hung over Iraq, a smell of sewage and sweat and death.

Just another day in Fallujah.

The Air Force, Marines, and Navy were flying air support missions above us. We had enough confidence in them that we could call in strikes just down the block.

One of our com guys working a street over from us was with a unit that came under heavy fire from a building packed with insurgents. He got on the radio and called over to the Marines, asking permission to call in a strike. As soon as it was approved, he got on the line with a pilot and gave him the location and details.

“Danger close!” he warned over the radio. “Take cover.”

We ducked inside the building. I have no idea how big the bomb he dropped was, but the explosion rattled the walls. My buddy later reported it had taken out over thirty insurgents—as much an indication of how many people were trying to kill us as how important the air support was.

I have to say that all of the pilots we had overhead were pretty accurate. In a lot of situations, we were asking for bombs and missiles to hit within a few hundred yards. That’s pretty damn close when you’re talking about a thousand or more pounds of destruction. But we didn’t have any incidents, and I was also pretty confident that they could handle the job.

After I’d been working with Kilo Company for about two weeks, the commanders called all the SEAL snipers back so they could redistribute us where we were needed.

“What the hell are you doing out there?” asked one of the first SEALs I met. “We’re hearing shit that you’re down there on the ground.”

“Yeah, I am. No one’s coming out on the street.”

“What the hell are you doing?” he said, pulling me aside. “You know if our CO finds out you’re doing this, you’re out of here.”

He was right, but I shrugged him off. I knew in my heart what I had to do. I also felt pretty confident in the officer who was my immediate commander. He was a straight shooter and all about doing the job that needed to get done.

Not to mention the fact that I was so far out of touch with my top command that it would have taken a long time for them to find out, let alone issue the orders to get me pulled out.

A bunch of other guys came over and started agreeing with me: down on the street was where we needed to be. I have no idea what they ended up doing; certainly, for the record, they all remained on the roofs, sniping.

“Well hell, instead of using that Marine M-16,” said one of the East Coast boys, “I brought my M-4 with me. You can borrow it if you want.”

“Really?”

I took it and wound up getting a bunch of kills on it. The M-16 and the M-4 are both good weapons; the Marines prefer the latest model of the M-16 for various reasons that have to do with the way they usually fight. Of course, my preference in close quarters combat was for the short-barreled M-4, and I was glad to borrow my friend’s gun for the rest of my time in Fallujah.

I was assigned to work with Lima Company, which was operating a few blocks away from Kilo. Lima was helping fill in holes—taking down pockets of insurgents who had crept in or been bypassed. They were seeing a lot of action.

That night, I went over and talked to the company leadership in a house they’d taken over earlier in the day. The Marine commander had already heard what I’d been doing with Kilo, and after we talked a bit, he asked what I wanted to do.

“I’d like to be down on the street with y’all.”

“Good enough.”

Lima Company proved to be another great group of guys.

A few days later, we were clearing a block when I heard shooting on a nearby street. I told the Marines I was with to stay where they were, then ran over to see if I could help.

I found another group of Marines, who had started up an alley and run into heavy fire. They’d already pulled back and gotten under cover by the time I got there.

One kid hadn’t quite made it. He was lying on his back some yards away, crying in pain.

I started laying down fire and ran up to grab him and pull him back. When I got to him, I saw he was in pretty bad shape, gut-shot. I dropped and got an arm under each of his, then started hauling him backward.

Somehow I managed to slip as I went. I fell backward, with him on top of me. By that point, I was so tired and winded I just lay there for a few minutes, still in the line of fire as bullets shot by.

The kid was about eighteen years old. He was really badly hurt. I could tell he was going to die.

“Please don’t tell my momma I died in pain,” he muttered.

Shit, kid, I don’t even know who you are, I thought. I’m not telling your momma anything.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “Don’t worry. Don’t worry. Everybody will make it sound great. Real great.”

He died right then. He didn’t even live long enough to hear my lies about how everything was going to be okay.

A bunch of Marines came. They lifted him off me and put him in the back of a Hummer. We called in a bomb strike and took out the shooting positions where the fire had come from, at the other end of the alley.

I went on back to my block and continued the fight.

I thought about the casualties I’d seen, and the fact that I could be the next one carried out. But I wasn’t going to quit. I wasn’t going to stop going into houses or stop supporting them from the roofs. I couldn’t let down these young Marines I was with.

I told myself: I’m a SEAL. I’m supposed to be tougher and better. I’m not going to give up on them.

It wasn’t that I thought I was tougher or better than they were. It was that I knew that was the way people looked at us. And I didn’t want to let those people down. I didn’t want to fail in their eyes—or in mine.

That’s the line of thinking that’s beaten into us: We’re the best of the best. We’re invincible.

I don’t know if I’m the best of the best. But I did know that if I quit, I wouldn’t be.

And I certainly did feel invincible. I had to be: I’d made it through all sorts of shit without getting killed… so far.

I stayed with Lima for roughly a week, then went back to Kilo. It was terrible to hear who’d been hit and who they’d lost in the time I’d been gone.

Runaway joined me again at Kilo. I had cooled off by now and more or less kept it civil, though my feelings toward him hadn’t changed.

Nor, I guess, had Runaway. It was pathetic.

He was up on the roof with us one night when we started taking shots from insurgents somewhere.

I ducked behind the four-foot perimeter wall. Once the gunfire subsided, I glanced over the roof and looked to see where the shots had come from. It was too dark, though.

More shots were fired. Everybody ducked again. I went down just a little, hoping to see a muzzle flash in the dark when the next shot came over. I couldn’t see anything.

“Come on,” I said. “They’re not accurate. Where are they firing from?”

No answer from Runaway.

“Runaway, look for the muzzle flash,” I said.

I didn’t hear a response. Two or three more shots followed, without me being able to figure out where they’d come from. Finally, I turned around to ask if he had seen anything.

Runaway was nowhere to be found. He’d gone downstairs—for all I know, the only thing that stopped him was the blocked door where the Marines were pulling security.

“I could get killed up there,” he said when I caught up with him.

I left him downstairs, telling him to send up one of the Marines pulling security in his place. At least I knew that guy wouldn’t run.

Our real problem was with the insurgents using the marsh across the river as cover. The river coast was dotted with countless little islands with trees and brush. Here and there an old foundation or a pile of dredged dirt and rock poked up between the bushes.

Insurgents would pop up from the vegetation, take their shots, then squirrel back into the brush where you couldn’t see them. The vegetation was so thick they could get pretty close not just to the river but to us—often within a hundred yards without being seen. Even the Iraqis could hit something from that distance.

Making things even more complicated, a herd of water buffalo lived in the swamp, and they’d tromp through every so often. You’d hear something or see the grass move and not know whether it was an insurgent or an animal.

We tried getting creative, requesting a napalm hit on the marsh to burn down the vegetation.

That idea was vetoed.

As the nights went on, I realized the number of insurgents was growing. It became obvious that I was being probed. Eventually, the insurgents might be able to get enough men together that I couldn’t kill them all.

Not that I wouldn’t have had fun trying.

I was watching from the roof one afternoon when a group of roughly sixteen fully armed insurgents emerged from cover. They were wearing full body armor and were heavily geared. (We found out later that they were Tunisians, apparently recruited by one of the militant groups to fight against Americans in Iraq.)

Not unusual at all, except for the fact that they were also carrying four very large and colorful beach balls.

I couldn’t really believe what I was seeing—they split up into groups and got into the water, four men per beach ball. Then, using the beach balls to keep them afloat, they began paddling across.

It was my job not to let that happen, but that didn’t necessarily mean I had to shoot each one of them. Hell, I had to conserve ammo for future engagements.

I shot the first beach ball. The four men began flailing for the other three balls.

Snap.

I shot beach ball number two.

It was kind of fun.

Hell—it was a lot of fun. The insurgents were fighting among themselves, their ingenious plan to kill Americans now turned against them.

“Y’all gotta see this,” I told the Marines as I shot beach ball number three.

They came over to the side of the roof and watched as the insurgents fought among themselves for the last beach ball. The ones who couldn’t grab on promptly sank and drowned.

I watched them fight for a while longer, then shot the last ball. The Marines put the rest of the insurgents out of their misery.

People think that snipers take such incredibly long shots all the time. While we do take longer shots than most guys on the battlefield, they’re probably a lot closer than most people think.

I never got all caught up in measuring how far I was shooting. The distance really depended on the situation. In the cities, where most of my kills came, you’re only going to be shooting anywhere from two hundred to four hundred yards anyway. That’s where your targets are, so that’s where your shots are.

Out in the countryside, it’s a different story. Typically, the shots out there would run from eight hundred to twelve hundred yards. That’s where the longer-range guns like the .338 would come in handy.

Someone once asked me if I had a favorite distance. My answer was easy: the closer the better.

After a week on the river, I was pulled out, swapping places with another SEAL sniper, who’d been injured briefly earlier in the operation and was ready to get back into action. I’d had more than my fair share of kills as a sniper; it was time to let someone else have a go.

Command sent me back to Camp Fallujah for a few days. It was one of the few breaks in the war that I actually welcomed. After the pace of the battle in the city, I was definitely ready for a brief vacation. The hot meals and showers felt pretty damn good.

After chilling out for a few days, I was ordered back to Baghdad to work with GROM again.

We were on the way to Baghdad when our Hummer was hit by a buried IED. The improvised explosive blew up just behind us; everybody in the vehicles freaked—except me and another guy who’d been at Fallujah since the start of the assault. We looked at each other, winked, then closed our eyes and went back to sleep. Compared to the month’s worth of explosions and shit we’d just lived through, this was nothing.

Now that they were here, I joined them and started doing some DAs. Intel would find an IED-maker or maybe a financer, give us the intel, and we’d go in and snag him. We’d hit them very early in the morning—blow his door down, rush inside, and take him before he even had a chance to get out of bed.

This went on for about a month. By now, DAs were pretty much an old routine; they were a hell of a lot less dangerous in Baghdad than in Fallujah.

We were living out near BIAP—Baghdad International Airport—and working from there. One day, my chief came over and gave me a chiefly grin.

“You’ve got to have some fun, Chris,” he told me. “You need to do a little PSD.”

He was using SEAL sarcasm. PSD stands for “personal security detail”—bodyguard duty. The platoon had been assigned to provide security for high-ranking Iraqi officials. The insurgents had started kidnapping them, trying to disrupt the government. It was a pretty thankless job. So far, I’d been able to avoid it, but it seemed my ninja smoke had run out. I left and went over to the other side of the city and the Green Zone. (The Green Zone was a section of central Baghdad that was created as a safe area for the allies and the new Iraqi government. It was physically cut off from the rest of the city by cement walls and barbed wire. There were only a few ways in and out, and these were under strict control. The U.S. and other allied embassies were located there, as were Iraqi government buildings.)

I lasted an entire week.

The Iraqi officials, so-called, were notorious for not telling their escorts what their schedules were or giving details on who was supposed to be traveling with them. Given the level of security in the Green Zone, that was a significant problem.

I acted as “advance.” That meant I would go ahead of an official convoy, make sure the route was safe, and then stand at the security checkpoint and ID the convoy vehicles as they came through. This way the Iraqi vehicles could move through the checkpoints quickly without becoming targets.

One day, I was advance for a convoy that included the Iraqi vice president. I’d already checked the route and arrived at a Marine checkpoint outside the airport.

Baghdad International was on the other side of the city from the Green Zone. While the grounds themselves were secure, the area around it and the highway leading to the gate still came under occasional fire. It was a prime terror target, since the insurgents could pretty much figure that anyone going in or out was related to the Americans or the new Iraqi government in some way.

I was on radio coms with one of my boys in the convoy. He gave me the details on who was in the group, how many vehicles we had, and the like. He also told me that we had an Army Hummer in the front and an Army Hummer in the back—simple markers I could pass along to the guards.

The convoy came flying up, Hummer in the lead. We counted off the vehicles and lo, there was the last Hummer taking up the rear.

All good.

All of a sudden, two more vehicles appeared behind them in hot pursuit.

The Marines looked at me.

“Those two are not mine,” I told them.

“What do you want us to do?”

“Pull your Hummer out and train that .50 on them,” I yelled, pulling up my M-4.

I jumped out in the roadway, gun raised, hoping that would get their attention.

They didn’t stop.

Behind me, the Hummer had pulled up, and the gunner was locked and loaded. Still unsure whether I was dealing with a kidnapping or just some stray vehicles, I fired a warning shot.

The cars veered off and hauled ass the other way.

Thwarted kidnapping? Suicide bombers who’d lost their nerve?

No. Come to find out, these were two friends of the vice president. He’d forgotten to tell us about them.

He wasn’t too pleased. My command wasn’t too pleased, either. I got fired from my PSD job, which wouldn’t have been all that bad except that I then had to spend the next week sitting in the Green Zone doing nothing.

My platoon leadership tried to get me back for some DAs. But the head shed had decided to stick it to me a bit, and kept me twiddling my thumbs. That is the worst possible torture for a SEAL—missing out on the action.

Luckily, they didn’t hang on to me for too long.

In December 2005, Iraq geared up for national elections, its first since the fall of Saddam—and the first free and fair ones the country had ever held. The insurgency was doing everything it could to stop them. Election officials were being kidnapped left and right. Others were executed in the streets.

Talk about your negative campaigning.

Haifa Street in Baghdad was a particularly dangerous place. After three election officials were killed there, the Army put together a plan to protect officials in the area.

The strategy called for snipers to do overwatches.

I was a sniper. I was available. I didn’t even have to raise my hand.

I joined an Army unit from the Arkansas National Guard, a great bunch of good ol’ boys, warriors all.

One evening, we took over what we thought was an abandoned apartment, since it was empty when we arrived. I was rotating with another sniper, and while I was off, I went hunting around to see if there was something I might use to make the hide more comfortable.

In an open drawer of a bureau, I saw all this sexy lingerie. Crotchless panties, nightgowns—very suggestive stuff.

Not my size, though.

There was often an odd, almost surreal mix of things inside the buildings, items that would seem out of place under the best circumstances. Like the car tires we found on the roof in Fallujah, or the goat we found in the bathroom of a Haifa Street apartment.

I’d see something, then spend the rest of the day wondering what the story was. After a while, the bizarre came to seem natural.

Not quite surprising were the TVs and satellite dishes. They were everywhere. Even in the desert. Many times we’d come upon a little nomad settlement with tents for houses and nothing but a couple animals and open land around them. Still, they were bristling with satellite dishes.

One night, I was on an overwatch and things were quiet. Nights were normally slow in Baghdad. Insurgents usually wouldn’t attack then, because they knew we had the advantage with our technology, including our night-vision gear and infrared sensors. So I thought I’d take a minute and call my wife back home, just to tell I was thinking of her.

I took our sat phone and dialed home. Most times, when I talked to Taya, I’d tell her I was back at base, even though I was really on an overwatch or in the field somewhere. I didn’t want to worry her.

This night, for some reason, I told her what I was doing.

“Is it all right to talk?” she asked.

“Oh yeah, it’s all good,” I said. “There’s nothing going on.”

Well, I got maybe another two or three sentences out of my mouth when someone started firing at the building from the street.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Oh, nothing,” I said nonchalantly.

Of course, the gunfire stoked up real loud as the words came out of my mouth.

“Chris?”

“Well, I think I’m going to get going now,” I told her.

“Are you okay?”

“Oh yeah. It’s all good,” I lied. “Nothing happening. Talk to you later.”

Just then, an RPG hit the outside wall right near me. Some of the building smacked into my face, giving me a couple of beauty marks and temporary tattoos courtesy of the insurgency.

I dropped the phone and started returning fire. I spotted the guys down the street and popped one or two; the snipers who were with me downed a bunch more before the rest got the hell out of there.

Fight over, I grabbed up the phone. The batteries had run out, so I couldn’t call back.

Things got busy for a few days, and it wasn’t until two or three days later when I finally got a chance to call Taya and see how she was.

She started crying as soon as she answered the phone.

It turned out I hadn’t actually ended the call before I put down the phone. She’d heard the whole gunfight, complete with shots and curses, before the batteries had finally run out. Which, of course, happened all of a sudden, adding to the anxiety.

I tried to calm her down, but I doubt what I said really eased her mind.

She was always a good sport, always insisting that I didn’t have to hide things from her. She claimed her imagination was a lot worse than anything that really could happen to me.

I don’t know about that.

My knees were still hurting from being pinned under rubble back in Fallujah. I tried to get cortisone shots but couldn’t. I didn’t want to push too hard: I was afraid of getting pulled out because of my injury.

Every once in a while, I took some Motrin and iced them down; that was about it. In battle, of course, I was fine—when your adrenaline is pumped, you don’t feel anything.

Even with the pain, I loved what I was doing. Maybe war isn’t really fun, but I certainly was enjoying it. It suited me.

By this time, I had a bit of a reputation as a sniper. I’d had a lot of confirmed kills. It was now a very good number for such a short period—or any period, really.

Except for the Team guys, people didn’t really know my name and face. But there were rumors around, and my stay here added to my reputation, such as it was.

It seemed like everywhere I set up, I’d get a target. This started to piss off some of the other snipers, who could spend whole shifts and even days without seeing anybody, let alone an insurgent.

One day, Smurf, a fellow SEAL, started following me around as we went into an apartment.

“Where are you setting up?” he asked.

I looked around and found a place I thought looked good.

“Right there,” I told him.

“Good. Get the hell out of here. I’m taking this spot.”

“Hey, you take it,” I told him. I went off to find another spot—and promptly got a kill from there.

For a while, it didn’t seem to matter what I did, things would happen in front of me. I wasn’t inventing the incidents—I had witnesses for all my shots. Maybe I saw a little farther, maybe I anticipated trouble better than other people. Or, most likely, I was just lucky.

Assuming being a target for people who want to kill you can be considered luck.

One time, we were in a house on Haifa Street, where we had so many snipers that the only possible place to shoot from was a tiny window above a toilet. I had to actually stand up the whole time.

I still got two kills.

I was just one lucky motherfucker.

The elections came and went.

The media back in the States made a big thing of the Iraqi government elections, but it was a nonevent for me. I wasn’t even out that day; I caught it on TV.

I never really believed the Iraqis would turn the country into a truly functioning democracy, but I thought at one point that there was a chance. I don’t know that I believe that now. It’s a pretty corrupt place.

But I didn’t risk my life to bring democracy to Iraq. I risked my life for my buddies, to protect my friends and fellow countrymen. I went to war for my country, not Iraq. My country sent me out there so that bullshit wouldn’t make its way back to our shores.

I never once fought for the Iraqis. I could give a flying fuck about them.

With Baghdad settling down, at least for the moment, the head shed decided they wanted to open up a SEAL base in Habbaniyah.

Habbaniyah is twelve miles to the east of Fallujah, in Anabar Province. It wasn’t quite the hotbed of the insurgency that Fallujah had been, but it wasn’t San Diego, either. This is the area where before the First Gulf War, Saddam built chemical plants devoted to manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, such as nerve gas and other chemical agents. There weren’t a lot of America supporters out there.

There was a U.S. Army base though, run by the famous 506th Regiment—the Band of Brothers. They’d just come over from Korea and, to be polite, had no fucking clue what Iraq was all about. I suppose everybody’s gotta learn the hard way.

Habbaniyah turned out to be a real pain in the ass. We’d been given an abandoned building, but it was nowhere near adequate for what we needed. We had to build a TOC—a tactical operations command—to house all the computers and com gear that helped support us during our missions.

Our morale sunk. We weren’t doing anything useful for the war; we were working as carpenters. It’s an honorable profession, but it’s not ours.

One day, the Army asked for a sniper overwatch for a 506th convoy that was coming into base.

I went out with a small team and we took down a three- or four-story building. I set up in the top floor and started watching the area. Pretty soon the convoy headed down the road. As I was watching the area, a man came out of a building near the road and began maneuvering in the direction the convoy was going to take. He had an AK.

I shot him. He went down.

The convoy continued through. A bunch of other Iraqis came out and gathered around the guy I’d shot, but nobody that I could see made any threatening motions toward the convoy or looked to be in a position to attack it, so I didn’t fire.

A few minutes later, I heard on the radio that the Army is sending a unit out to investigate why I shot him.

Huh?

I had already told the Army command on the radio what had happened, but I got back on the radio and repeated it. I was surprised—they didn’t believe me.

A tank commander came out and interviewed the dead man’s wife. She told them her husband was on his way to the mosque carrying a Koran.

Uh-huh. The story was ridiculous, but the officer—whom, I’m guessing, hadn’t been in Iraq very long—didn’t believe me. The soldiers began to look around for the rifle, but by that time so many people had been in the area that it was long gone.

The tank commander pointed out my position. “Did it come from there?”

“Yes, yes,” said the woman, who, of course, had no idea where the shot had come from, since she hadn’t been anywhere nearby. “I know he’s Army, because he’s wearing an Army uniform.”

Now, I was two rooms deep, with a screen in front of me, wearing a gray jacket over my SEAL camis. Maybe she hallucinated in her grief, or maybe she just said whatever she thought would give me grief.

We were recalled to base and the entire platoon put on stand-down. I was told I was not “operationally available”—I was confined to base while the 506th investigated the incident further.

The colonel wanted to interview me. My officer came with me.

We were all pissed. The ROEs had been followed; I had plenty of witnesses. It was the Army “investigators” who had screwed up.

I had trouble holding my tongue. At one point, I told the Army colonel, “I don’t shoot people with Korans—I’d like to, but I don’t.” I guess I was a little hot.

Well, after three days and God only knows how much other “investigation,” he finally realized that it had been a good kill and dropped the matter. But when the regiment asked for more overwatches, we told them to fuck off.

“Any time I shoot someone, you’re just going to try and have me executed,” I said. “No way.”

We were heading home in two weeks anyway. Aside from a few more DAs, I spent most of that time playing video games, watching porn, and working out.

Taya:

I’d left the States some seven months before, only ten days after my son was born. I loved him, but as I mentioned earlier, we hadn’t really had a chance to bond. Newborns are just a bundle of needs—feed them, clean them, get them to rest. Now he had a personality. He was crawling. He was more of a person. I’d seen him growing up in the photos Taya had sent me, but this was more intense.

He was my son.

We’d lie on the floor in our pajamas and play together. He’d crawl all over me and I’d boost him up and carry him all around. Even the simplest things—like him touching my face—were a joy.

But the transition from war to home was still a shock. One day, we’d been fighting. The next, we’d crossed the river to al-Taqaddum Airbase (known to us as TQ) and started back for the States.

War one day; peace the next.

Every time you come home, it’s weird. Especially in California. The simplest things can upset you. Take traffic. You’re driving on the road, everything’s crowded, it’s craziness. You’re still thinking IEDs—you see a piece of trash and you swerve. You drive aggressively toward other drivers, because that’s the way you do it in Iraq.

I would shut myself in for about a week. I think that’s where Taya and I started having problems.

We had a long break from war, but we were busy the whole time, retraining and, in some cases, learning new skills. I went to a school run by FBI agents and CIA and NSA officers. They taught me how to do things like pick locks and steal cars. I loved it. The fact that it was in New Orleans didn’t hurt, either.

Learning how to blend in and go undercover, I cultivated my inner jazz musician and grew a goatee. Lock-picking was a revelation. We worked on a variety of locks, and by the end of the class I don’t think there was a lock that could have kept me or anyone else in our class at bay. Stealing cars was a little harder, but I got pretty good at that, too.

We were trained to wear cameras and eavesdropping devices without getting caught. To prove that we could, we had to get the devices into a strip club and return with (video) evidence that we’d been there.

The sacrifices you make for your country…

I stole a car off Bourbon Street as part of my final. (I had to put it back when we were done; as far as I know, the owner was none the wiser.) Unfortunately, these are all perishable skills—I can still pick a lock, but it’ll take me longer now. I’ll have to brush up if I ever decide to go crooked.

The Fourth of July 2005 was a beautiful California day: perfect weather, not a cloud in the sky. My wife and I took our son and drove out to a friend’s house in the foothills outside of town. There we spread a blanket and gathered in the tailgate of my Yukon to watch the fireworks display put on at an Indian reservation in the valley. It was a perfect spot—we could see down as the fireworks came up to us, and the effect was spectacular.

I’ve always loved celebrating the Fourth of July. I love the symbolism, meaning of the day, and of course the fireworks and the barbecues. It’s just a wonderful time.

But that day, as I sat back and watched the red, white, and blue sparkles, sadness suddenly spread over me. I fell into a deep black hole.

“This sucks,” I muttered as the fireworks exploded.

I wasn’t critiquing the show. I had just realized that I might never see my friend Marcus Luttrell again. I hated to be unable to do anything to help my friend, who was facing God only knew what kind of trouble.

We’d gotten word a few days before that he was missing. I’d also heard through the SEAL grapevine that the three guys he was with were dead. They’d been ambushed by the Taliban in Afghanistan; surrounded by hundreds of Taliban fighters, they fought ferociously. Another sixteen men in a rescue party were killed when the Chinook they were flying in was shot down. (You can and should read the details in Marcus’s book, Lone Survivor.)

Because of what I’d done in Fallujah, I was pulled out a few times to talk to head shed types about how I thought snipers should be deployed. I was now a Subject Matter Expert—an SME in militarese.

I hated it.

Some people might find it flattering to be talking to a bunch of high-ranking officers, but I just wanted to do my job. It was torture sitting in the room, trying to explain what the war was like.

They’d ask me questions like, “What kind of gear should we have?” Not unreasonable, I guess, but all I could think of was: God, you guys are really all pretty stupid. This is basic stuff you should have figured out long ago.

I would tell them what I thought, how we should train up snipers, how we should use them. I suggested more training about urban overwatches and creating hides in buildings, things I’d learned more or less as I went. I gave them ideas about sending snipers into an area before the assault, so they could provide intel to the assault teams before they arrived. I made suggestions on how to make snipers more active and aggressive. I suggested that snipers take shots over the heads of an assault team during training, so the teams could get used to working with them.

I told the brass about gear issues—the dust cover of the M-11, for example, and suppressors that jiggled at the end of the barrel, hurting the accuracy of the rifle.

It was all extremely obvious to me, but not to them.

Asked for my opinion, I’d give it. But most times they didn’t really want it. They wanted me to validate some decision they’d already made or some thought they’d already had. I’d tell them about a given piece of gear I thought we should have; they’d answer that they’d already bought a thousand of something else. I’d offer them a strategy I’d used successfully in Fallujah; they’d quote me chapter and verse on why it wouldn’t work.

While we were training up for our next deployment, the platoon got a group of new guys. A few of them stood out—Dauber and Tommy, for example, who were both snipers and corpsmen. But I think the new guy who made the biggest impression was Ryan Job. And the reason was that he did not look like a SEAL; on the contrary, Ryan looked like a big lump.

I was floored that they let this guy come to the Team. Here we all were, buff, in great shape. And here was a round, soft-looking guy.

I went up to Ryan and got in his face. “What’s your problem, fat fuck? You think you’re a SEAL?”

We all gave him shit. One of my officers—we’ll call him LT—knew him from BUD/S and stuck up for him, but LT was a new guy himself, so that didn’t carry too much weight. Being a new guy, we would have beat Ryan’s ass anyway, but his weight made things a lot worse for him. We actively tried to make him quit.

But Ryan (whose last name was pronounced “jobe,” rhyming with “ear lobe”) wasn’t a quitter. You couldn’t compare his determination with anyone else’s. That kid started working out like a maniac. He lost weight and got into better shape.

More importantly, anything we told him to do, he did. He was such a hard worker, so sincere, and so damn funny, that at some point we just went, I love you. You are the man. Because no matter how he looked, he truly was a SEAL. And a damn good one.

We tested him, believe me. We’d find the biggest man in the platoon and make him carry him. He did it. We’d have him take the hardest jobs in training; he did them without complaint. And he’d crack us up in the process. He had these great facial expressions. He could point his upper lip, screw his eyes around and then twist in a certain way, and you’d lose it.

Naturally, this ability led to a certain amount of fun. For us, at least.

One time we told him to go do the face to our chief.

“B-but…” he stammered.

“Do it,” I told him. “Go get in his face. You’re the new guy. Do it.”

He did. Thinking Ryan was trying to be a jerk, the chief grabbed him by the throat and tossed him to the ground.

That only encouraged us. Ryan had to show the face a lot. Every time, he’d go and get his ass beat. Finally, we had him do it to one of our officers—a huge guy, definitely not someone to be messed with, even by another SEAL.

“Go do it to him,” one of us said.

“Oh God, no,” he protested.

“If you don’t do it right now, we’re going to choke you out,” I warned.

“Can you please just choke me out right now?”

“Go do it,” we all said.

He went and did it to the officer. He reacted about how you would expect. After a little while, Ryan tried to tap out.

“There’s no tapping out,” he snarled, continuing his pounding.

Ryan survived, but that was the last time we made him do the face.

With our deployment rapidly approaching, our platoon was beefed up. Command brought a young SEAL named Marc Lee over from another unit to help round us out. He immediately fit in.

Marc was an athletic guy, in some ways exactly the sort of tough physical specimen you expect to be a SEAL. Before joining the Navy, he had played soccer well enough to be given a tryout with a professional team, and may very well have been a pro if a leg injury hadn’t cut short his career.

But there was a lot more to Marc than just physical prowess. He’d studied for the ministry, and while he left because of what he saw as hypocrisy among the seminary students, he was still very religious. Later on during our deployment, he led a small group in prayer before every op. As you’d expect, he was very knowledgeable about the Bible and religion in general. He didn’t push it on you, but if you needed or wanted to talk about faith or God, he was always willing.

Not that he was a saint, or even above the horseplay that is part of being a SEAL.

Soon after he joined us, we went on a training mission in Nevada. At the end of the day, a group of us piled into a four-door truck and headed back to the base to get to bed. Marc was in the back with me and a SEAL we’ll call Bob. For some reason, Bob and I started talking about being choked out.

With new-guy enthusiasm—and maybe naiveté—Marc said, “I’ve never been choked out.”

“’Scuse me?” I said, leaning over to get a good look at this virgin. Being choked out is a mandatory SEAL occupation.

Marc looked at me. I looked at him.

“Bring it on,” he said.

As Bob leaned over, I dove and choked Marc out. My work completed, I leaned back.

“You mother,” said Bob, straightening. “I wanted to do it.”

“I thought you were leaning over to let me get him,” I told him.

“Hell no. I was just handing my watch up front so it wouldn’t get broken.”

“Well, okay,” I said. “He’ll wake up, then you get him.”

He did. I think half the platoon had a shot at him before the night was out. Marc took it well. Of course, as a new guy, he had no choice.

I loved our new CO. He was outstanding, aggressive, and stayed out of our hair. He not only knew each one of us by name and face, he knew our wives and girlfriends. He took it personally when he lost people, and yet was able to stay aggressive at the same time. He never held us back in training, and, in fact, approved extra training for snipers.

My command master chief, whom I’ll call Primo, was another top-notch commander. He didn’t give a flying fuck about promotions, about looking good, or covering his butt: he was all about successful missions and getting the job done. And he was a Texan—as you can tell, I’m a little partial—which meant he was a bad-ass.

His briefs always started the same way: “What are you sons of bitches doing?” he’d snarl. “Are you gonna get out there and kick some ass?”

Primo was all about getting into battle. He knew what SEALs are supposed to do, and he wanted us to do it.

He was also a good ol’ boy off the battlefield.

You always have team guys getting in trouble during off-time and training. Bar fights are a big problem. I remember him pulling us aside when he came on.

“Listen, I know you’re going to get into fights,” he told us. “So here’s what you do. You hit fast, you hit hard, and you run. If you don’t get caught, I don’t care. Because when you get caught is when I have to get involved.”

I took that advice to heart, though it wasn’t always possible to follow.

Maybe because he was from Texas, or maybe because he had the soul of a brawler himself, he took a liking to me and another Texan, whom we called Pepper. We became his golden boys; he’d cover our asses when we got in trouble. There were times when I may have told off an officer or two; Chief Primo took care of it. He might chew me out himself, but he always smoothed the way with head shed. On the other side of things, he knew he could count on Pepper and me to get a job done if it needed doing.

While I was home, I had a pair of new tattoos added to my arm. One was a Trident. Now that I felt like a real SEAL, I felt I had earned it. I had it put on the inside of my arm where not everyone would see, but I knew it was there. I didn’t want it to be out there bragging.

On the front of my arm, I had a crusader cross inked in. I wanted everyone to know I was a Christian. I had it put in in red, for blood. I hated the damn savages I’d been fighting. I always will. They’ve taken so much from me.

While I was home, Taya became pregnant with our second child. Again, that was a lot of strain for my wife.

My father told Taya that he was sure once I saw my son and spent time with him, I wouldn’t want to reenlist or go back to war.

But while we talked a lot about it, in the end I didn’t feel there was much of a question about what to do. I was a SEAL. I was trained for war. I was made for it. My country was at war and it needed me.

And I missed it. I missed the excitement and the thrill. I loved killing bad guys.

“If you die, it will wreck all our lives,” Taya told me. “It pisses me off that you would not only willingly risk your life, but risk ours, too.”

For the moment, we agreed to disagree.

A few days before we were scheduled to deploy, I went to the doctor to see about getting a cyst in my neck removed. Inside his examining room, he numbed the area around it with a local anesthesia, then they stuck a needle in my neck to suction the material out.

I think. I don’t actually know, because as soon as the needle went in, I passed out with a seizure. When I came to, I was out flat on the examining table, my feet where my head should have been.

I had no other ill effects, not from the seizure or the procedure. No one really could figure out why I’d reacted the way I did. As far as anyone could tell, I was fine.

But there was a problem—a seizure is grounds for being medically discharged from the Navy. Luckily, there was a corpsman whom I’d served with in the room. He persuaded the doctor not to include the seizure in his report, or to write what happened in a way that wouldn’t affect my deployment or my career. (I’m not sure which.) I never heard anything about it again.

You would think an army planning a major offensive would have a way to get its warriors right to the battle area.

You would think wrong.

Because of the medical situation with the cyst and then my daughter’s birth, I ended up leaving the States about a week behind the rest of my platoon. By the time I landed in Baghdad in April 2006, my platoon had been sent west to the area of Ramadi. No one in Baghdad seemed to know how to get me out there. It was up to me to get over to my boys.

A direct flight to Ramadi was impossible—things were too hot there. So I had to cobble together my own solution. I came across an Army Ranger who was also heading for Ramadi. We hooked up, pooling our creative resources as we looked for a ride at Baghdad International Airport.

At some point, I overheard an officer talking about problems the Army was having with some insurgent mortarmen at a base to the west. By coincidence, we heard about a flight heading to that same base; the Ranger and I headed over to try to get onto the helicopter.

A colonel stopped as we were about to board.

“Helicopter’s full,” he barked at the Ranger. “Why do you need to be on it?”

“Well, sir, we’re the snipers coming to take care of your mortar problem,” I told him, holding up my gun case.

“Oh yes!” the colonel yelled to the crew. “These boys need to be on the very next flight. Get them right on.”

We hopped aboard, bumping two of his guys in the process.

Ramadi was in al-Anbar, the same province as Fallujah, about thirty miles farther west. Many of the insurgents who’d been run out of Fallujah were said to have holed up there. There was plenty of evidence: attacks had ratcheted up ever since Fallujah had been pacified. By 2006, Ramadi was considered the most dangerous city in Iraq—a hell of a distinction.

My platoon had been sent to Camp Ramadi, a U.S. base along the Euphrates River outside the city. Our compound, named Shark Base, had been set up by an earlier task unit and was just outside the wire of Camp Ramadi.

When I finally arrived, my boys had been sent to work east of Ramadi. Arranging transportation through the city was impossible. I was pissed—I thought I’d gotten there too late to join in the action.

Looking for something to do until I could figure out how to get with the rest of the platoon, I asked my command if I could sit out on the guard towers. Insurgents had been testing the perimeters, sneaking as close as they dared and spraying the base with their AKs.

“Sure, go ahead,” they told me.

I went out and took my sniper rifle. Almost as soon as I got into position, I saw two guys skirting around in the distance, looking for a spot to shoot from.

I waited until they popped up behind cover.

Bang.

I got the first one. His friend turned around and started to run.

Bang.

Got him, too.

I was still waiting for a chance to join the rest of my platoon when the Marine unit at the northern end of the city put in a request for snipers to help with an overwatch from a seven-story building near their outpost.

The head shed asked me to come up with a team. There were only two other snipers at the base. One was recovering from wounds and looped out on morphine; the other was a chief who appeared reluctant to go.

I asked for the guy who was on morphine; I got the chief.

We found two 60 gunners, including Ryan Job, to provide a little muscle, and with an officer headed out to help the Marines.

Seven Story was a tall, battered building about two hundred yards outside the Marine outpost. Made of tan-colored cement and located near what had been a major road before the war, it looked almost like a modern office building, or would have if it weren’t for the missing windows and huge holes where it had been hit by rockets and shells. It was the tallest thing around and had a perfect vantage into the city.

We went out in early evening with several Marines and local jundis for security. The jundis were loyal Iraqi militia or soldiers who were being trained; there were a number of different groups, each with its own level of expertise and efficiency—or, most often, the opposite of both.

While there was still light, we got a few shots here and there, all on isolated insurgents. The area around the building was pretty rundown, a whitewashed wall with a fancy iron gate separating one sand-strewn empty lot from another.

Night fell, and suddenly we were in the middle of a flood of bad guys. They were on their way to assault the Marine outpost and we just happened to be along the route. There were a ton of them.

At first, they didn’t realize we were there, and it was open season. Then, I saw three guys with RPGs taking aim at us from about a block away. I shot each of them in succession, saving us the hassle of ducking from their grenades.

The firefight quickly shifted our way. The Marines called us over the radio and told us to collapse back to them.

Their outpost was a few hundred treacherous yards away. While one of the 60 gunners, my officer, and I provided cover fire, the rest of our group went downstairs and moved over to the Marine base. Things got hot so fast that by the time they were clear we were surrounded. We stayed where we were.

My boys returned from their adventures out east soon afterward. They greeted me with their usual warmth.

“Oh, we know the Legend’s here,” they said as soon as they saw me. “All of a sudden we hear there’s two kills at Camp Ramadi. People are dying up north. We knew the Legend was here. You’re the only motherfucker who’s ever killed anyone out there.”

I laughed.

The nickname “the Legend” had started back in Fallujah, around the time of the beach ball incident, or maybe when I got that really long shot. Before that, my nickname had been Tex.

Of course, it wasn’t just “Legend.” There was more than a little mocking that went with it—THE LEGEND. One of my guys—Dauber, I think it was, even turned it all around and called me THE MYTH, cutting me down to size.

It was all good-natured, in a way more of an honor than a full-uniform medal ceremony.

Our platoon had its own nickname, one that went beyond Cadillac.

We called ourselves the Punishers.

For those of you who are not familiar with the character, the Punisher debuted in a Marvel comic book series in the 1970s. He’s a real bad-ass who rights wrongs, delivering vigilante justice. A movie by the same name had just come out; the Punisher wore a shirt with a stylized white skull.

Our comms guy suggested it before the deployment. We all thought what the Punisher did was cool: He righted wrongs. He killed bad guys. He made wrongdoers fear him.

That’s what we were all about. So we adapted his symbol—a skull—and made it our own, with some modifications. We spray-painted it on our Hummers and body armor, and our helmets and all our guns. And we spray-painted it on every building or wall we could. We wanted people to know, We’re here and we want to fuck with you.

It was our version of psyops.

You see us? We’re the people kicking your ass. Fear us. Because we will kill you, motherfucker.

You are bad. We are badder. We are bad-ass.

Our sister platoon wanted to use the template we used to mark our gear, but we wouldn’t let them. We told them we were the Punishers. They had to get their own symbol.

Fallujah had been taken in an all-out assault, moving through the city in a very organized fashion. While it had been successful, the attack had also caused a lot of damage, which had supposedly hurt support for the new Iraqi government.

You can argue whether that’s true or not—I sure would—but the top American command didn’t want the same thing to happen in Ramadi. So, while the Army worked on a plan for taking Ramadi with minimal destruction, we went to war in the area nearby.

We started with DAs. We had four interpreters—terps, as we called them—who helped us deal with the locals. At least one and usually two would go out with us.

One terp we all really liked was Moose. He was a bad-ass. He’d been working since the invasion in 2003. He was Jordanian, and he was the only one of the terps we gave a gun. We knew he would fight—he wanted to be an American so bad he would have died for it. Every time we got contacted, he would be out there shooting.

He wasn’t a great shot, but he could keep the enemy’s heads down. Most importantly, he knew when he could and couldn’t shoot—not as easy a call as it might seem.

There was this little village outside Shark Base we called Gay Tway. It was infested with insurgents. We would open the gates, walk out, and hit our target. There was one house we went to three or four times. After the first time, they didn’t even bother putting the door back.

Why they kept going back to that house, I don’t know. But we kept going back, too; we got to know the place pretty well.

It didn’t take too long before we started getting a lot of contact in Gay Tway and the village of Viet Ram. An Army National Guard unit covered that area, and we started working with them.

Among our first jobs was to help the Army reclaim the area around a hospital along the river in Viet Ram. The four-story concrete building had been started and then abandoned a few years before. The Army wanted to finish it for the Iraqis; decent medical care was a big need out there. But they couldn’t get close to it to do any work, because as soon as they did, they came under fire. So we went to work.

Our platoon, sixteen guys, teamed up with about twenty soldiers to clear the nearby village of insurgents. Entering town early one morning, we split up and started taking houses.

I was at point, carrying my Mk-12, the first guy in each building. Once the house was secure, I’d go up to the roof, cover the guys on the ground, and look for insurgents, who we expected to attack once they knew we were there. The group leapfrogged forward, clearing the area as we went.

Unlike in the city, these houses weren’t right next to each other, so the process took longer and was more spread-out. But soon enough, the terrorists realized where we were and what we were up to, and they put together a little attack from a mosque. Holed up behind its walls, they started raining AK fire at a squad of soldiers on the ground.

I was up on one of the roofs when the fight started. Within moments, we started firing everything we had at the bad guys: M-4s, M-60s, sniper rifles, 40-mm grenades, LAW rockets—everything we had. We lit that mosque up.

The momentum of the battle quickly shifted in our favor. The soldiers on the ground began maneuvering to assault the mosque, hoping to catch the insurgents before they could slide back into whatever sewer they’d emerged from. We shifted our fire higher, moving our aim above their heads to allow them to get in.

Somewhere in the middle of the fight, a piece of hot brass from another gun—probably an M-60 machine gun next to me—shot against my leg and landed in my boots next to my ankle. It burned like hell, but I couldn’t do anything about it—there were too many bad guys popping up from behind the walls, trying to get my people.

I was wearing simple hiking boots rather than combat boots. That was my normal style—they were lighter and more comfortable, and ordinarily more than enough to protect my feet. Unfortunately, I hadn’t bothered to lace them up very well before the battle, and there was a space between my pants and the boot where the brass happened to fall after it ejected.

What had the instructors told me in BUD/S about not being able to call “time out” in battle?

When things quieted down, I stood up and pulled out the casing. A good wedge of skin came out with it.

We secured the mosque, worked through the rest of the village, then called it a day.

We went on patrols with the Army unit several more times, trying to reduce resistance in the area. The idea was simple, if potentially risky: we’d make ourselves visible, trying to draw fire from the insurgents. Once they showed themselves, we could fire back and kill them. And usually we did.

Pushed from the village and the mosque, the insurgents retreated to the hospital. They loved hospital buildings, not only because they were big and usually well-made (and therefore protective), but because they knew we were reluctant to attack hospitals, even after they were taken over by terrorists.

It took a while, but the Army command finally decided to attack the building.

Good, we all told them when we heard the plan. Let’s go do it.

A night or two later, I found myself walking in the dark through a nearby village, stepping over bodies—not of dead people, but sleeping Iraqis. In the warm desert, Iraqi families would often sleep outside.

I was on my way to take up a position so we could overwatch a raid on the marketplace where one of the insurgents had a shop. Our intelligence indicated this was where the weapons in the car we’d blown up had come from.

Four other guys and I had been dropped off about six kilometers away by the rest of the team, which was planning to mount a raid in the morning. Our assignment was to get into place ahead of them, scout and watch the area, then protect them as they arrived.

It wasn’t as dangerous as you might think to walk through insurgent-held areas at night. They were almost always asleep. The Iraqis would see our convoys arrive during the day, and then leave before it got dark. So the bad guys would figure we were all back at the base. There’d be no guards posted, no lookouts, no pickets watching the area.

Of course, you had to watch where you stepped—one of my platoon members nearly stepped on a sleeping Iraqi as we walked to our target area in the dark. Fortunately, he caught himself at the last second, and we were able to walk on without waking anyone. The tooth fairy had nothing on us.

We found the marketplace and set up to watch it. It was a small row of tiny, one-story shacks used as stores. There were no windows—you open a door and sell your wares right out of the hut.

Not too long after we got to our hide, we received a radio call telling us that another unit was out somewhere in the area.

A few minutes later, I spotted a suspicious group of people.

“Hey,” I said over the radio. “I see four guys carrying AKs and web gear, all mujed out. Are these our boys?”

Web gear is webbing or vest and strap gears used to hold combat equipment. The men I saw looked like mujahedeen—by “all mujed out” I meant they were dressed the way insurgents often did in the countryside, wearing the long man-jammies and scarves. (In the city, they often wore Western-style clothes—tracksuits and warm-ups were big.)

The four men were coming from the river, which would be where I expected the guys to be coming from.

“Hold on, we’ll find out,” said the com guy on the other end of the radio.

I watched them. I wasn’t going to shoot them—no way I was going to take a chance and kill an American.

The unit took its time responding to our TOC, which, in turn, had to get a hold of my platoon guys. I watched as the men walked on.

“Not ours,” came the call back finally. “They cancelled.”

“Great. Well I just let four guys go in your direction.”

(I’m sure if they had been out there, I never would have seen them. Ninjas.)

Everybody was pissed. My guys back at the Hummers sat ready, scanning the desert, waiting for the muj to appear. I went back to my own scan, watching the area they were supposed to hit.

A few minutes later, what did I see but the four insurgents who’d passed me earlier.

I got one; one of the other snipers got another before they could take cover.

Then another six or seven insurgents appeared behind them.

Now we were in the middle of a firefight. We started launching grenades. The rest of the platoon heard the gunfire and came hard. But fighters who’d stumbled past us melted away.

The element of surprise lost, the platoon went ahead with the raid on the marketplace in the dark. They found some ammo and AKs, but nothing important in terms of a real weapons cache.

I think all SEALs highly respect our brothers in the elite anti-terror unit you’ve read so much about at home. They are an elite group within an elite group.

We didn’t interact with them in Iraq much. The only other time I had much to do with them came a few weeks later, after we got into Ramadi proper. They had heard we were out there slaying a huge number of savages, and so they sent one of their snipers over to see what we were doing. I guess they wanted to find out what we were doing that worked.

Looking back, I regret not having tried to join. At the time, they weren’t using snipers as heavily as the other teams were. The assaulters were doing the majority of the work, and I didn’t want to be an assaulter. I was loving what I was doing. I wanted to be a sniper. I was getting to use my rifle, and killing enemies. Why give it up, move to the East Coast, and become a new guy all over again? And that’s not even considering the BUD/S-like school you have to get through to prove you belong.

I would have had to spend a number of years as an assaulter before working my way up to be a sniper again. Why do that when I was already sniping, and loving it?

But now that I’ve heard about their ops and what they accomplished, I think I should have gone for it.

The guys have a reputation for being arrogant and more than a little full of themselves. That’s plain wrong. I had the opportunity to meet a few after the war when they came out to a training facility I run. They were extremely down-to-earth, very humble about their achievements. I absolutely wished I was going back out with them.

The offensive in Ramadi had yet to start, officially, but we were getting plenty of action.

One day, intel came in concerning insurgents planting IEDs along a certain highway. We went out there and put it under surveillance. We’d also hit the houses and watch for ambushes on convoys and American bases.

It’s true that it can be difficult to sort out civilians from insurgents in certain situations, but here the bad guys made it easy for us. UAVs would watch a road, for example, and when they saw someone planting a bomb, they could not only pinpoint the booby-trap but follow the insurgent back to his house. That gave us excellent intel on where the bad guys were.

Terrorists going to attack Americans would give themselves away by moving tactically against approaching convoys or when coming close to a base. They’d sneak around with their AKs ready—it was very easy to spot them.

They also learned to spot us. If we took over a house in a small hamlet, we would keep the family inside for safety. The people who lived nearby would know that if the family wasn’t outside by nine o’clock in the morning, there were Americans inside. That was an open invitation for any insurgent in the area to come and try to kill us.

It became so predictable, it seemed to happen according to a time schedule. Around about nine in the morning you’d have a firefight; things would slack off around midday. Then, around three or four in the afternoon, you’d have another. If the stakes weren’t life and death, it would have been funny.

And at the time, it was funny, in a perverse kind of way.

You didn’t know which direction they’d attack from, but the tactics were almost always the same. The insurgents would start out with automatic fire, pop off a bit here, pop off there. Then you’d get the RPGs, a flurry of fire; finally, they’d scatter and try to get away.

By early June, the Army had come up with a plan to take Ramadi back from the insurgents. In Fallujah, the Marines had worked systematically through the city, chasing and then pushing the insurgents out. Here, the insurgents were going to come to us.

The city itself was wedged between waterways and swampland. There was limited access by road. The Euphrates and the Habbaniyah canal bounded the city on the north and west; there was one bridge on either side near the northwestern tip. To the south and east, a lake, swamps, and a seasonal drainage canal helped form a natural barrier to the countryside.

The U.S. forces would come in from the perimeters of the city, the Marines from up north, and the Army on the other three sides. We would establish strongholds in various parts of the city, demonstrating that we were in control—and essentially daring the enemy to attack. When they did attack, we would fight back with everything we had. We’d set up more and more footholds, gradually extending control over the entire city.

The place was a mess. There was no functioning government, and it was beyond lawless. Foreigners entering the city were instant targets for killing or kidnapping, even if they were in armored convoys. But the place was a worse hell for ordinary Iraqis. Reports have estimated that there were more than twenty insurgent attacks against Iraqis every day. The easiest way to be killed in the city was to join the police force. Meanwhile, corruption was rife.

The Army analyzed the terrorist groups in the city and decided there were three different categories: hard-core Islamist fanatics, associated with al-Qaeda and similar groups; locals who were a little less fanatic though they still wanted to kill Americans; and opportunistic criminal gangs who were basically trying to make a living off the chaos.

The first group had to be eliminated because they would never give up; they would be our main focus in the coming campaign. The other two groups, though, might be persuaded to either leave, quit killing people, or work with the local tribal leadership. So, part of the Army plan would be to work with the tribal leadership to bring peace to the area. By all accounts, they had grown tired of the insurgents and the chaos they had brought, and wanted them gone.

The situation and plan were a lot more complicated than I can sum up. But to us on the ground, all of this was irrelevant. We didn’t give a damn about the nuances. What we saw, what we knew, was that many people wanted to kill us. And we fought back.

There was one way the overall plan did affect us, and not for the better.

The Ramadi offensive wasn’t supposed to be just about American troops. On the contrary, the new Iraqi army was supposed to be front and center in the effort to retake the city and make it safe.

The Iraqis were there. Front, no. Center—as a matter of fact, yes. But not quite in the way you’re thinking.

The thin dust from the dirt roads mixed with the stench of the river and city as we came up into the village. It was pitch-black, somewhere between night and morning. Our target was a two-story building in the center of a small village at the south side of Ramadi, separated from the main part of the city by a set of railroad tracks.

We moved into the house quickly. The people who lived there were shocked, obviously, and clearly wary. Yet they didn’t seem overly antagonistic, despite the hour. While our terps and jundis dealt with them, I went up to the roof and set up.

It was June 17, the start of the action in Ramadi. We had just taken the core of what would become COP Iron, the first stepping stone of our move into Ramadi. (COP stands for Command Observation Post.)

I eyed the village carefully. We’d been briefed to expect a hell of a fight, and everything we’d been through over the past few weeks in the east reinforced that. I knew Ramadi was going to be a hell of a lot worse than the countryside. I was tense, but ready.

With the house and nearby area secured, we called the Army in. Hearing the tanks coming in the distance, I scanned even more carefully through the scope. The bad guys could hear it, too. They’d be here any second.

The Army arrived with what looked like a million tanks. They took over the nearby houses, and then began building walls to form a compound around them.

No insurgents came. Taking the house, taking the village—it was a nonevent.

Looking around, I realized the area we had taken was both literally and figuratively on the other side of the tracks from the main city. Our area was where the poorer people lived, quite a statement for Iraq, which wasn’t exactly the Gold Coast. The owners and inhabitants of the hovels around us barely scratched out a living. They couldn’t care less about the insurgency. They couldn’t care even less about us.

Once the Army got settled, we bumped out about two hundred yards to protect the crews as they worked. We were still expecting a hell of a fight. But there wasn’t much action at all. The only interesting moment came in the morning, when a mentally handicapped kid was caught wandering around writing in a notebook. He looked like a spy, but we quickly realized he wasn’t right in the head and let him and his gibberish notes go.

We were all surprised by the calm. By noon, we were sitting there twiddling our thumbs. I won’t say we were disappointed but… it felt like a letdown after what we had been told.

This was the most dangerous city in Iraq?

A few nights later, I climbed into a shallow Marine Corps riverboat known as a SURC (“small unit riverine craft”), ducking down onto the deck behind the armored gunwale. The Marines manning 60s near the bow kept watch as the boat and a second one with the rest of our group slipped upriver, heading quietly toward our insertion point.

Insurgent spies hid near the bridges and in various spots in the city. Had we been on land, they would have tracked our progress. But on the water, we weren’t an immediate threat, and they didn’t pay much attention.

We were traveling heavy. Our next stop was near the center of the city, deep in enemy territory.

Our boats eased into shore, running right up onto the bank of the canal. I rose and walked across the little bow doors, nearly losing my balance as I stepped off onto land. I trotted up the dry land, then stopped and waited for the rest of the platoon to rally around me. We’d taken eight Iraqis with us in the boats; counting our terps, we were just over two dozen strong.

The Marines slid back into the water and were gone.

Taking point, I started moving up the street toward our target. Small houses loomed ahead; there were alleys and wider roads, a maze of buildings, and the shadows of larger structures.

I hadn’t gotten very far when the laser on my rifle crapped out. The battery had died. I halted our advance.

“What the hell’s going on?” asked my lieutenant, coming up quickly.

“I need to change out my battery real quick,” I explained. Without the laser, I would be aiming blind—little better than not aiming at all.

“No, get us out of here.”

“All right.”

So I started walking again, taking us up to a nearby intersection. A figure appeared in the darkness ahead, along the edge of a shallow drainage canal. I caught the shadow of his weapon, stared for a moment as I made out the details—AK-47, extra mag taped to one in the rifle.

Muj.

The enemy. His back was turned and he was watching the street rather than the water, but he was well-armed and ready for a fight.

Without the laser, I would have been shooting blind. I motioned to my lieutenant. He came up quick, right behind me, and—boom.

He took down the insurgent. He also damn near put a hole in my eardrum, blasting a few inches from my head.

There was no time to bitch. I ran forward as the Iraqi fell, unsure whether he was dead or if there were others nearby. The entire platoon followed, spreading out and “busting” the corners.

The guy was dead. I grabbed his AK. We ran up the street to the house we were going to take, passing some smaller houses on the way. We were a few hundred yards from the river, just off two main roads that would control that corner of the city.

Like many Iraqi houses, our target had a wall around it approximately six feet tall. The gate was locked, so I slung my M-4 on my shoulder, took out my pistol, and hauled up onto the wall, climbing up with one hand free.

When I got to the top, I saw there were people sleeping in the courtyard. I dropped down inside their compound, holding my gun on them, expecting one of my platoon mates to come over after me to open the gate.

I waited.

And waited. And waited.

“Come on,” I hissed. “Get over here.”

Nothing.

“Come on!”

Some of the Iraqis started to stir.

I eased toward the gate, knowing I was all alone. Here I was, holding a pistol on a dozen insurgents for all I knew, and separated from the rest of my boys by a thick wall and locked gate.

I found the gate and managed to jimmy it open. The platoon and our Iraqi jundis ran in, surrounding the people who’d been sleeping in the courtyard. (There’d been a mix-up outside, and for some reason they hadn’t realized I was in there alone.)

The people sleeping in the courtyard turned out to be just a regular extended family. Some of my guys got them situated without firing any shots, rounding them up and moving them to a safe area. Meanwhile, the rest of us ran in to the buildings, clearing each room as quickly as we could. There was a main building, and then a smaller cottage nearby. While my boys checked for weapons and bombs, anything suspicious, I raced to the rooftop.

One of the reasons we’d selected the building was its height—the main structure was three stories tall, and so I had a decent view of the surrounding area.

Nothing stirred. So far, so good.

“Building secure,” the com guy radioed to the Army. “Come on in.”

We had just taken the house that would become COP Falcon, and, once more, done so without a fight.

Our 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.

The Army rolled in with tanks, armored vehicles, and trucks. Soldiers humped sandbags and reinforced weak spots in the house. The house we were on was at the corner of a T-intersection of two major roads, one of which we called Sunset. The Army wanted the spot because of its strategic location; it was a choke point and a pretty clear presence inside the city.

Those factors also made it a prime target.

The tanks drew attention right away. A couple of insurgents began moving toward the house as they arrived. The bad guys were armed with AKs, maybe foolishly thinking they could scare the armor off. I waited until they were two hundred yards from the tanks before picking them off. They were easy shots, nailed before they could coordinate an organized attack.

If the action around COP Iron had been dull to none, the action around COP Falcon was the exact opposite: intense and thick. The Army camp was a clear threat to the insurgents, and they wanted it gone.

A flood of bad guys came at us. That only made it easier for us to defeat them.

Very shortly after Ramadi started, I reached a huge milestone for a sniper: I got my 100th and my 101st confirmed kills for that deployment. One of the guys took a photo of me for posterity, holding up the brass.

There was a little bit of a competition between myself and some of the other snipers during this deployment, to see who got the most kills. Not that we had all that much to do with the numbers—they were more a product of how many targets we had to shoot at. It’s just the luck of the draw—you want to have the highest numbers, but there’s not much you can do about it.

I did want to be the top sniper. At first, there were three of us who had the most kills; then two of us started pulling away. My “competition” was in my sister platoon, working on the east side of the city. His totals shot up at one point, pulling ahead.

Our big boss man happened to be on our side of the city, and he was keeping track of how the platoons were doing. As part of that, he had the sniper totals. He tweaked me a little as the other sniper pulled in front.

“He’s gonna break your record,” he’d tease. “You better get on that gun more.”

Well, things evened out real fast—all of a sudden I seemed to have every stinkin’ bad guy in the city running across my scope. My totals shot up, and there was no catchin’ me.

Luck of the draw.

With the initial attacks dying down after a couple of days, we foot-patrolled back to COP Falcon from Four Story. There we met with the captain of the force, and told him that we wanted to be based out of Falcon rather than having to go all the way back to Camp Ramadi every few days.

He gave us the in-law suite. We were the Army’s in-laws.

We also told him that we would help him clear whatever area he wanted. His job was to clear the city around COP Falcon, and ours was to help him.

“What’s the worst spot you got?” we asked.

He pointed it out.

“That’s where we’re going,” we said.

He shook his head and rolled his eyes.

“You guys are crazy,” he said. “You can have that house, you can outfit it however you want, you can go wherever you want. But I want you to know—I’m not coming to get you if you go out there. There are too many IEDs, I’m going to lose a tank. I can’t do it.”

Before 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.

In 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.

It 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.

Our sister platoon was on the east side of the city, helping the Army put in COPs there. And to the north, the Marines were doing their thing, taking areas, holding and clearing them of insurgents.

We went back for a few days to work with the Marines when they took down a hospital north of the city on the river.

The insurgents were using the hospital as a gathering point. As the Marines came in, a teenager, I’d guess about fifteen, sixteen, appeared on the street and squared up with an AK-47 to fire at them.

I dropped him.

A minute or two later, an Iraqi woman came running up, saw him on the ground, and tore off her clothes. She was obviously his mother.

I’d see the families of the insurgents display their grief, tear off clothes, even rub the blood on themselves. If you loved them, I thought, you should have kept them away from the war. You should have kept them from joining the insurgency. You let them try and kill us—what did you think would happen to them?

It’s cruel, maybe, but it’s hard to sympathize with grief when it’s over someone who just tried to kill you.

Maybe they’d have felt the same way about us.

People back home, people who haven’t been in war, or at least not that war, sometimes don’t seem to understand how the troops in Iraq acted. They’re surprised—shocked—to discover we often joked about death, about things we saw.

Maybe it seems cruel or inappropriate. Maybe it would be, under different circumstances. But in the context of where we were, it made a lot of sense. We saw terrible things, and lived through terrible things.

Part of it was letting off pressure or steam, I’m sure. A way to cope. If you can’t make sense of things, you start to look for some other way to deal with them. You laugh because you have to have some emotion, you have to express yourself somehow.

Ninety-six Americans were killed during the battle of Ramadi; countless more were wounded and had to be taken from the battlefield. I was lucky not to be one of them, though there were so many close calls I began to think I had a guardian angel.

One time we were in a building and we were hosed down by the insurgents outside. I was out in the hallway, and as the shooting died down, I went into one of the rooms to check on some of my guys. As I came in, I jerked straight back, falling backward as a shot came in through the window at my head.

The bullet flew just over me as I fell.

Why I went down like that, how I saw that bullet coming at me—I have no idea. It was almost as if someone had slowed time down and pushed me straight back.

Did I have a guardian angel?

No idea.

“Fuck, Chris is dead,” said one of my boys as I lay on my back.

“Damn,” said the other.

“No, no,” I yelled, still flat on the floor. “I’m good, I’m good. I’m okay.”

I checked for holes a few dozen times, but there were none.

All good.

All Americans were wanted men in Ramadi, snipers most of all. Reportedly, the insurgents put out a bounty on my head.

They also gave me a name: al-Shaitan Ramadi—“the Devil of Ramadi.”

It made me feel proud.

The fact is, I was just one guy, and they had singled me out for causing them a lot of damage. They wanted me gone. I had to feel good about that.

They definitely knew who I was, and had clearly gotten intelligence from some fellow Iraqis who were supposedly loyal to us—they described the red cross I had on my arm.

The other sniper from my sister platoon got a bounty on his head as well. His ended up being more—well, that did make me a little jealous.

But it was all good, because when they put their posters together and made one of me, they used his photo instead of mine. I was more than happy to let them make that mistake.

The bounty went up as the battle went on.

Hell, I think it got so high, my wife may have been tempted to turn me in.

We helped set up several more COPs, and meanwhile our sister platoon did the same on the eastern side of the city. As the weeks turned into months, Ramadi started to change.

The place was still a hellhole, extremely dangerous. But there were signs of progress. The tribal leaders were more vocal about wanting peace, and more began working together as a unified council. The official government still wasn’t functioning here, and the Iraqi police and army were nowhere near capable of keeping order, naturally. But there were large sections of the city under relative control.

The “inkblot strategy” was working. Could those blots spread over the entire city?

Progress was never guaranteed, and even when we succeeded for a while there was no guarantee things wouldn’t go backward. We had to return to the area near the river around COP Falcon several times, providing overwatch while the area was searched for caches and insurgents. We’d clear a block, it would be peaceful for a while, then we’d have to start all over again.

We worked a bit more with the Marines as well, stopping and inspecting small craft, going after a suspected weapons cache, and even running a few DAs for them. A few times we were tasked to check and then blow up abandoned boats to make sure they couldn’t be used for smuggling.

Funny thing: the SBU unit that had blown us off earlier heard about how much action we were getting and contacted us, asking now if they could come up and work with us. We told them thanks but no thanks; we were doing just fine with the Marines.

One very hot summer day we took a small apartment building with a good view of one of the major east-west roads through the center of Ramadi. It was four stories high, the staircase lined with windows, the roof open and with a good view of the area. It was a clear day.

Ryan was joking with me as we went in. He was cracking me up—he always made me laugh, made me relax. Smiling, I posted him to watch the road. Our troops were working on a side street on the other side of the roof, and I figured that if the insurgents were going to launch an ambush or try and attack us, they would come down that road. Meanwhile, I watched the team on the ground. The assault began smoothly, with the soldiers taking first one house and then another. They moved quickly, without a snag.

Suddenly, shots flew through our position. I ducked down as a round hit the cement nearby, splattering chips everywhere. This was an everyday occurrence in Ramadi, something that happened not once a day but several times.

I waited a second to make sure the insurgents were done firing, then got back up.

“You guys all right?” I yelled, looking down the street toward the soldiers on the ground, making sure they were okay.

“Yeah,” grunted the other sniper.

Ryan didn’t answer. I glanced back and saw him, still down.

“Hey, get up,” I told him. “They stopped firing. Come on.”

He didn’t move. I went over.

“What the hell?” I yelled at him. “Get up. Get up.”

Then I saw the blood.

I knelt down and looked at him. There was blood all over. The side of his face had been smashed in. He’d taken a bullet.

We had pounded into him the fact that you have to always have your weapon up and ready; he’d had it up and scanning when the bullet hit. It apparently got the rifle first, then ricocheted into his face.

I grabbed the radio. “Man down!” I yelled. “Man down!”

I dropped back and examined his wounds. I didn’t know what to do, where to start. Ryan looked as if he’d been hit so bad that he was going to die.

His body shook. I thought it was a death spasm.

Two of our platoon guys, Dauber and Tommy, ran up. They were both corpsmen. They slipped down between us and started treating him.

Marc Lee came up behind them. He took the 60 and began laying down fire in the direction the shots had come from, chasing the insurgents back so we could carry Ryan down the stairs.

I picked him up and held him up over my shoulder, then started to run. I reached the stairs and started going down quickly.

About halfway, he started groaning loudly. The way I was holding him, the blood had rushed into his throat and head; he was having trouble breathing.

I set him down, even more worried, knowing in my heart he was going to die, hoping that somehow, some way, I might do something to keep him going, even though it was hopeless.

Ryan began spitting blood. He caught his breath—he was breathing, a miracle in itself.

I reached out to grab him and pick him up again.

“No,” he said. “No, no I’m good. I got this. I’m walking.”

He put an arm around me and walked himself down the rest of the way.

Meanwhile, the Army rolled a tracked vehicle, a personnel carrier, up to the front door. Tommy went in with Ryan and they pulled away.

I ran back upstairs, feeling as if I’d been shot and wishing that it had been me, not him, who was hit. I was sure he was going to die. I was sure I’d just lost a brother. A big, goofy, lovable, great brother.

Biggles.

Nothing I’d experienced in Iraq had ever affected me like this.

We collapsed back to Shark Base.

As soon as we got there, I shed my gear and put my back against the wall, then slowly lowered myself to the ground.

Tears started flowing from my eyes.

I thought Ryan was dead. Actually, he was still alive, if just barely. The docs worked like hell to save him. Ryan would eventually be medevac’d out of Iraq. His wounds were severe—he’d never see again, not only out of the eye that had been hit but the other as well. It was a miracle that he lived.

But at that moment at base, I was sure he was dead. I knew it in my stomach, in my heart, in every part of me. I’d put him in the spot where he got hit. It was my fault he’d been shot.

A hundred kills? Two hundred? More? What did they mean if my brother was dead?

Why hadn’t I put myself there? Why hadn’t I been standing there? I could have gotten the bastard—I could have saved my boy.

I was in a dark hole. Deep down.

How long I stayed there, head buried, tears flowing, I have no idea.

“Hey,” said a voice above me, finally.

I looked up. It was Tony, my chief.

“You wanna go get some payback?” he asked.

“Fuck yeah I do!” I jumped to my feet.

The intel put the bad guys in a house not too far from where Ryan had been hit. A couple of Bradleys drove us over to a field near the house. I was in a second vehicle; some of the other guys had already gone into the house by the time we arrived.

As soon as the ramp dropped on our Bradley, bullets started flying. I ran to join the others; and found them stacking to go up the stairs to the second floor. We were huddled together, facing downward, waiting to move up.

Marc Lee was at the lead, above us on the steps. He turned, glancing out a window on the staircase. As he did, he saw something and opened his mouth to shout a warning.

He never got the words out. In that split second, a bullet passed right through his open mouth and flew out the back of his head. He dropped down in a pile on the steps.

We’d been set up. There was a savage on the roof of the house next door, looking down at the window from the roof there.

Training took over.

I scrambled up the steps, stepping over Marc’s body. I sent a hail of bullets through the window, flushing the neighboring roof. So did my teammates.

One of us got the insurgent. We didn’t stop to figure out who it was. We went on up to the roof, looking for more of our ambushers.

Dauber, meanwhile, stopped to check Marc. He was hurt pretty bad; Dauber knew there was no hope.

We had a memorial service at Camp Ramadi for Marc Lee. SEALs from every part of Iraq came in for it. And I believe the entire Army unit we’d been working with showed up. They had a lot of concern for us; it was unbelievable. I was very moved.

They put us on the front row. We were his family.

Marc’s gear was right there, helmet and Mk-48. Our task unit commander gave a short but powerful speech; he teared up and I doubt there was a dry eye in the audience—or the camp, for that matter.

As the service ended, each unit left a token of appreciation—a unit patch or coin, something. The captain of the Army unit left a piece of brass from one of the rounds he’d fired getting us out.

Someone in our platoon put together a memorial video with some slides of him, and played it that night with the movie showing on a white sheet we had hung over a brick wall. We shared some drinks, and a lot of sadness.

Four of our guys accompanied his body back home. Meanwhile, since we were on stand-down and not doing anything, I tried to go see Ryan in Germany, where he was being treated. Tony or someone else in the head shed arranged to get me on a flight, but by the time everything was set up, Ryan was already being shipped back to the States for treatment.

Brad, who’d been evac’d earlier because of the frag wound in his knee, met Ryan in Germany and went back to the States with him. It was lucky in a way—Ryan had one of us to be with him and help him deal with everything he had to face.

We’d been in that war for four years, through countless hairy situations, and no SEAL had ever died. It had looked like the action in Ramadi, and all Iraq, was starting to wind down, and now we’d been hit terribly hard.

We thought we would be shut down, even though our deployment still had a couple of months to run. We all knew the politics—my first two commanders had been ultra-cautious pussies, who got ahead because of it. So we were afraid that the war was over for us.

Plus, we were seven men short, cut nearly in half. Marc was dead. Brad and Ryan were out because of their wounds. Four guys had gone home to escort Marc’s body home.

We worked back into things slowly, starting with brief overwatches with the Army. Our missions would last for an overnight or two in Injun country. A tank got hit by an IED, and we went out and pulled security on it until it could be recovered. The work was a little lighter, easier than it had been. We didn’t go as far from the COPs, which meant that we didn’t draw as much fire.

With our heads back in the game, we started to extend. We went deeper into Ramadi. We never actually went to the house where Marc had been shot, but we were back in that area.

Our attitude was, we’re going out there and we’re getting the guys who did this back. We’re going to make them pay for what they did to us.

One day we were out on an op near Sunset and another street, which came off on a T intersection. Dauber and I were up on a roof, watching to see what the locals were up to. Dauber had just gone off the gun for a break. As I pulled up my scope, I spotted two guys coming down the street toward me on a moped.

The guy on the back had a backpack. As I was watching, he dropped the backpack into a pothole.

He wasn’t dropping the mail; he was setting an IED.

“Y’all gotta watch this,” I told Dauber, who picked up his binoculars.

I let them get to about 150 yards away before I fired my .300 Win Mag. Dauber, watching through the binos, said it was like a scene from Dumb and Dumber. The bullet went through the first guy and into the second. The moped wobbled, then veered into a wall.

Two guys with one shot. The taxpayer got good bang for his buck on that one.

Sometimes it seemed like God was holding them back until I got on the gun.

“Hey, wake up.”

I opened my eyes and looked up from my spot on the floor.

“Let’s rotate,” said Jay, my LPO. He’d been on the gun for about four hours while I’d been catching a nap.

“All right.”

I unfolded myself from the ground and moved over to the gun.

“So? What’s been going on?” I asked. Whenever someone came on the gun, the person he was relieving would brief him quickly, describing who’d been in the neighborhood, etc.

“Nothing,” said Jay. “I haven’t seen anyone.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

We swapped positions. Jay pulled his ball cap down to catch some sleep.

I put my eye near the sight, scanning. Not ten seconds later, an insurgent walked fat into the crosshairs, AK out. I watched him move tactically toward an American position for a few seconds, confirming that he was within the ROEs.

Then I shot him.

“I fuckin’ hate you,” grumbled Jay from the floor nearby. He didn’t bother moving his ball cap, let alone get up.

“Our daughter is sick. Her white blood cell count is very low.”

I held the phone a little tighter as Taya continued to talk. My little girl had been sick with infections and jaundice for a while. Her liver didn’t seem to be able to keep up with the disease. Now the doctors were asking for more tests, and things looked real bad. They weren’t saying it was cancer or leukemia but they weren’t saying it wasn’t. They were going to test her to confirm their worst fears.

Taya tried to sound positive and downplay the problems. I could tell just from the tone of her voice that things were more serious than she would admit, until finally I got the entire truth from her.

I am not entirely sure what all she said, but what I heard was, leukemia. Cancer.

My little girl was going to die.

A cloud of helplessness descended over me. I was thousands of miles away from her, and there was nothing I could do to help. Even if I’d been there, I couldn’t cure her.

My wife sounded so sad and alone on the phone.

The stress of the deployment had started to get to me well before that phone call in September 2006. The loss of Marc and Ryan’s extreme injuries had taken a toll. My blood pressure had shot up and I couldn’t sleep. Hearing the news about my daughter pushed me to my breaking point. I wasn’t much good for anyone.

Fortunately, we were already winding down our deployment. And as soon as I mentioned my little girl’s condition to my command, they started making travel arrangements to get me home. Our doctor put through the paperwork for a Red Cross letter. That’s a statement that indicates a service member’s family needs him for an emergency back home. Once that letter arrived, my commanders made it happen.

I caught a military charter, first to Kuwait, then to the States. I was in civilian clothes, and with my longer hair and beard, I got hassled a bit, since no one could figure out why someone on active duty was authorized to travel in civilian clothes.

Which, looking back, is kind of amusing.

I got off the plane in Atlanta, then had to go back through security to continue on. It had taken me a few days to make it this far, and when I took my boots off, I swear half a dozen people in line nearby keeled over. I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten through security quite as fast.

The doctors performed all sorts of tests on my little girl. Some of them really pissed me off.

I remember especially when they took blood, which they had to do a lot. They’d hold her upside down and prick her foot; a lot of times it wouldn’t bleed and they’d have to do it again and again. She’d be crying the whole time.

These were long days, but eventually the docs figured out that my daughter didn’t have leukemia. While there was jaundice and some other complications, they were able to get control of the infections that had made her sick. She got better.

One of the things that was incredibly frustrating was her reaction to me. She seemed to cry every time I held her. She wanted Mommy. Taya said that she reacted that way to all men—whenever she heard a male voice, she would cry.

Whatever the reason, it hurt me badly. Here I had come all this way and truly loved her, and she rejected me.

Things were better with my son, who remembered me and now was older and more ready to play. But once again, the normal troubles that parents have with their kids and with each other were compounded by the separation and stress we’d all just gone through.

Little things could really be annoying. I expected my son to look me in the eye when I was scolding him. Taya was bothered by this, because she felt he wasn’t accustomed to me or my tone and it was too much to ask a two-year-old to look me in the eye in that situation. But my feeling was just the opposite. It was the right thing for him to do. He wasn’t being corrected by a stranger. He was being disciplined by someone who loved him. There’s a certain two-way road of respect there. You look me in the eye, I look you in the eye—we understand each other.

Taya would say, “Wait a minute. You’ve been gone for how long? And now you want to come home and be part of this family and make the rules? No sir, because you’re leaving again in another month to go back on training.”

We were both right, from our perspectives. The problem was trying to see the other’s, and then live with it.

I’d been home for roughly two weeks when a SEAL friend of mine called and asked what was up.

“Nothing much,” I told him.

“Well, who did y’all lose?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“I don’t know who it was, but I heard you lost another.”

“Damn.”

I got off the phone and started calling everyone I knew. I finally got a hold of someone who knew the details, though he couldn’t talk about them at the moment, because the family had not been informed yet. He said he’d call me back in a few hours.

They were long hours.

Finally I found out Mike Monsoor, a member of our sister platoon, had been killed saving the lives of some of his fellow platoon members in Ramadi. The group had set up an overwatch in a house there; an insurgent got close enough to toss a grenade.

Obviously, I wasn’t there, but this is the description of what happened from the official summary of action:

He was later awarded the Medal of Honor.

A lot of memories about Mikey came back as soon as I found out he’d died. I hadn’t known him all that well, because he was in the other platoon, but I was there for his hazing.

I remember us holding him down so his head could be shaved. He didn’t like that at all; I may still have some bruises.

After the funeral we went to a local bar for the wake proper.

As always, there were a bunch of different things going on at our favorite nightspot, including a small party for some older SEALs and UDT members who were celebrating the anniversary of their graduation. Among them was a celebrity I’ll call Scruff Face.

Scruff served in the military; most people seem to believe he was a SEAL. As far as I know, he was in the service during the Vietnam conflict but not actually in the war.

I was sitting there with Ryan and told him that Scruff was holding court with some of his buddies.

“I’d really like to meet him,” Ryan said.

“Sure.” I got up and went over to Scruff and introduced myself. “Mr. Scruff Face, I have a young SEAL over here who’s just come back from Iraq. He’s been injured but he’d really like to meet you.”

Well, Scruff kind of blew us off. Still, Ryan really wanted to meet him, so I brought him over. Scruff acted like he couldn’t be bothered.

All right.

We went back over to our side of the bar and had a few more drinks. In the meantime, Scruff started running his mouth about the war and everything and anything he could connect to it. President Bush was an asshole. We were only over there because Bush wanted to show up his father. We were doing the wrong thing, killing men and women and children and murdering.

And on and on. Scruff said he hates America and that’s why he moved to Baja California. 9/11 was a conspiracy.

And on and on some more.

The guys were getting upset. Finally, I went over and tried to get him to cool it.

“We’re all here in mourning,” I told him. “Can you just cool it? Keep it down.”

“You deserve to lose a few,” he told me.

Then he bowed up as if to belt me one.

I was uncharacteristically level-headed at that moment.

“Look,” I told him, “why don’t we just step away from each other and go on our way?”

Scruff bowed up again. This time he swung.

Being level-headed and calm can last only so long. I laid him out.

Tables flew. Stuff happened. Scruff Face ended up on the floor.

I left.

Quickly.

I have no way of knowing for sure, but rumor has it he showed up at the BUD/S graduation with a black eye.

I am by no means a bad-ass, or even an extremely skilled fighter, but several instances have presented themselves. I would rather get my ass beat than look like a pussy in front of my boys.

I have had other run-ins with fighters. I like to think I’ve held my own.

While I was serving with my very first platoon, the whole SEAL team went to Fort Irwin in San Bernardino out in the Mojave Desert. After our training sessions, we headed into town and found a bar there, called the Library.

Inside, a few off-duty police officers and firemen were having a party. A few of the women turned their attention to our guys. When that happened, the locals got all jealous and started a fight.

Which really showed some truly poor judgment, because there had to be close to a hundred of us in that little bar. A hundred SEALs is a force to be reckoned with, and we did the reckoning that day. Then we went outside and flipped over a couple of cars.

Somewhere around there, the cops came. They arrested twenty-five of us.

The Ramadi offensive would eventually be considered an important milestone and turning point in the war, one of the key events that helped Iraq emerge from utter chaos. Because of that, there was a good deal of attention on the fighters who were there. And some of that attention eventually came to focus on our Team.

As I hope I’ve made clear, I don’t feel SEALs should be singled out publicly as a force. We don’t need the publicity. We are silent professionals, every one of us; the quieter we are, the better able we are to do our job.

Unfortunately, that’s not the world we live in. If it were, I wouldn’t have felt it necessary to write this book.

Let me say for the record that I believe the credit in Ramadi and in all of Iraq should go to the Army and Marine warriors who fought there as well as the SEALs. It should be fairly proportioned out. Yes, SEALs did a good job, and gave their blood. But as we told the Army and Marine officers and enlisted men we fought beside, we’re no better than those men when it comes to courage and worth.

I’d first hurt my knees in Fallujah when the wall fell on me. Cortisone shots helped for a while, but the pain kept coming back and getting worse. The docs told me I needed to have my legs operated on, but doing that would have meant I would have to take time off and miss the war.

So I kept putting it off. I settled into a routine where I’d go to the doc, get a shot, go back to work. The time between shots became shorter and shorter. It got down to every two months, then every month.

I made it through Ramadi, but just barely. My knees started locking and it was difficult to get down the stairs. I no longer had a choice, so, soon after I got home in 2007, I went under the knife.

The surgeons cut my tendons to relieve pressure so my kneecaps would slide back over. They had to shave down my kneecaps because I had worn grooves in them. They injected synthetic cartilage material and shaved the meniscus. Somewhere along the way they also repaired an ACL.

I was like a racing car, being repaired from the ground up.

When they were done, they sent me to see Jason, a physical therapist who specializes in working with SEALs. He’d been a trainer for the Pittsburgh Pirates. After 9/11, he decided to devote himself to helping the country. He chose to do that by working with the military. He took a massive pay cut to help put us back together.

I’d pushed my body as far as I could before getting the operations. Now the thing that was deteriorating was even more important than my knees—my marriage.

This was the roughest of a bunch of rough spots. A lot of resentment had built up between us. Ironically, we didn’t actually fight all that much, but there was always a lot of tension. Each of us would put in just enough effort to be able to say we were trying—and imply that the other person was not.

After years of being in war zones and separated from my wife, I think in a way I’d just forgotten what it means to be in love—the responsibilities that come with it, like truly listening and sharing. That forgetting made it easier for me to push her away. At the same time, an old girlfriend happened to get in contact with me. She called the home phone first, and Taya passed the message along to me, assuming I wasn’t the type of guy she had to worry about straying.

I laughed off the message at first, but curiosity got the best of me. Soon my old girlfriend and I were talking and texting regularly.

Taya figured out that something was up. One night I came home and she sat me down and laid everything out, very calmly, very rationally—or at least as rational as you can be in that kind of situation.

“We have to be able to trust each other,” she said at one point. “And in the direction we’re going, that’s not going to work. It just won’t.”

We had a long, heartfelt talk about that. I think we both cried. I know I did. I loved my wife. I didn’t want to be separated from her. I wasn’t interested in getting divorced.

If things had worked according to “normal” procedures, I would have been given a long break and a long stretch of shore duty after my second deployment. But for various reasons, that didn’t happen.

The Team promised that I’d have a break after this deployment. But that didn’t work either. I wasn’t real happy about it. I lost my temper talking about it, as a matter of fact. I’d guess more than once.

Now, I like war, and I love doing my job, but it rankled me that the Navy wasn’t keeping its word. With all the stress at home, an assignment that would have kept me near my family at that point would have been welcome. But I was told that the needs of the Navy came first. And fair or not, that’s the way it was.

Usually, when you come home, a few guys will rotate out of the platoon. Officers will usually change out. A lot of times the chief leaves, the LPO—lead petty officer—becomes the chief, and then someone else becomes LPO. But other than that, you stay pretty tight-knit. In our case, most of the platoon had been together for many years.

Until now.

Trying to spread out the experience in the Team, command decided to break up Charlie/Cadillac Platoon and spread us out. I was assigned to Delta, and put in as LPO of the platoon. I worked directly with the new chief, who happened to be one of my BUD/S instructors.

We worked out our personnel selections, making assignments and sending different people off to school. Now that I was LPO, I not only had more admin crap to deal with, but couldn’t be point man anymore.

That hurt.

I drew the line when they talked about taking my sniper rifle away. I was still a sniper, no matter what else I did in the platoon.

Besides finding good point men, one of the toughest personnel decisions I had to make involved choosing a breacher. The breacher is the person who, among other things, is in charge of the explosives, who sets them and blows them (if necessary) on the DA. Once the platoon is inside, the breacher is really running things. So the group is entirely in his hands.

There’s a postscript to the story about “some guy” and my broken hand.

The incident happened while we were training in an Army town. I knew pretty much when I punched him that I’d broken my hand, but there was no way in hell that I was going to the base hospital; if I did, they’d realize I was (a) drunk and (b) fighting, and the MPs would be on my ass. Nothing makes an MP’s day like busting a SEAL.

So I waited until the next day. Now sober, I reported to the hospital and claimed I had broken my fist by punching out my gun before I actually cleared the doorjamb. (Theoretically possible, if unlikely.)

While I was getting treated, I saw a kid in the hospital with his jaw wired shut.

Next thing I knew, some MPs came over and started questioning me.

“This kid is claiming you broke his jaw,” said one of them.

“What the hell is he talking about?” I said, rolling my eyes. “I just came in off a training exercise. I broke my damn hand. Ask the SF guys; we’re training with them.”

Not so coincidentally, all of the bouncers at the bar where we’d been were Army SF; they would surely back me up if it came to that.

It didn’t.

“We thought so,” said the MPs, shaking their heads. They went back over to the idiot soldier and started bitching him out for lying and wasting their time.

Serves him right for getting into a fight started by his girlfriend.

I had to wear a cast for a few weeks, but more and more I got into the swing of things. The pace built up as we got ready to ship out. There was only one down note: we had been assigned to a western province in Iraq. From what we had heard, nothing was going on there. We tried to get transferred to Afghanistan, but we couldn’t get released by the area commander.

That didn’t sit too well with us, certainly not with me. If I was going back to war, I wanted to be in the action, not twiddling my (broken) fingers in the desert. Being a SEAL, you don’t want to sit around with your thumb up your ass; you want to get in the action.

Still, it felt good to be getting back to war. I’d been burned out when I came home, completely overwhelmed and emotionally drained. But now I felt recharged and ready to go.

I was ready to kill some more bad guys.

It seemed like every dog in Sadr City was barking.

I scanned the darkness through my night vision, tense as we made our way down one of the nastiest streets in Sadr City. We walked past a row of what might have been condos in a normal city. Here they were little better than rat-infested slums. It was past midnight in early April 2008, and, against all common sense but under direct orders, we were walking into the center of an insurgent hellhole.

Like a lot of the other drab-brown buildings on the street, the house we were heading to had a metal grate in front of the door. We lined up to breach it. Just then, someone appeared from behind the grate at the door and said something in Arabic.

Our interpreter stepped over and told him to open up.

The man inside said he didn’t have a key.

One of the other SEALs told him to go get it. The man disappeared, running up the stairs somewhere.

Shit!

“Go!” I yelled. “Break the grate the fuck in.”

We rushed in and started clearing the house. The two bottom levels were empty.

I raced up the stairs to the third floor and moved to the doorway of a room facing the street, leaning back against the wall as the rest of my guys stacked to follow. As I started to take a step, the whole room blew up.

By some miracle, I hadn’t been hit, though I sure felt the force of the blast.

“Who the fuck just threw a frag!” I yelled.

Nobody. And the room itself was empty. Someone had just fired an RPG into the house.

Gunfire followed. We regrouped. The Iraqi who’d been inside had clearly escaped to alert the nearby insurgents where we were. Worse, the walls in the house proved pretty flimsy, unable to stand up to the rocket grenades that were being fired at us. If we stayed here, we were going to get fried.

Out of the house! Now!

The last of my guys had just cleared out of the building when the street shook with a huge force: the insurgents had set off an IED down the street. The blast was so powerful it knocked a few of us off our feet. Ears ringing, we ran to another building nearby. But as we were fixing to enter it, all hell broke loose. We got gunfire from every direction, including above.

A shot flew into my helmet. The night went black. I was blind.

It was my first night in Sadr City, and it looked like it was soon going to be my last on earth.

Until that point, I had spent an uneventful, even boring fourth deployment in Iraq.

Delta Platoon had arrived roughly a month before, traveling out to al-Qa’im in western Iraq, near the Syrian border. Our mission was supposed to involve long-range desert patrols, but we’d spent our time building a base camp with the help of a few Seabees. Not only was there no action to speak of, but the Marines who owned the base were in the process of shutting it down, meaning that we’d have to move out soon after we set it up. I have no idea what the logic was.

Morale had hit rock bottom when my chief risked his life early one morning—by that I mean he entered my room and shook me awake.

“What the hell?” I yelled, jumping up.

“Easy,” said my chief. “You need to get dressed and come with me.”

“I just got to sleep.”

“You’ll want to come with me. They’re putting together a task unit over in Baghdad.”

A task unit? All right!

It was like something out of the movie Groundhog Day, but in a good way. The last time this had happened to me, I was in Baghdad heading west. Now I was west, and heading east.

Why exactly, I wasn’t sure.

According to the chief, I had been chosen for the unit partly because I was qualified to be an LPO, but mostly because I was a sniper. They were pulling snipers from all over the country for the operation, though he had no details of what was being planned. He didn’t even know whether I was going to a rural or urban environment.

Shit, I thought, we’re going to Iran.

They were wrong.

There I was, shot in the head and blind. Blood streamed down my face. I reached up to my scalp. I was surprised—not only was my head still there, but it was intact. But I knew I’d been shot.

Somehow I realized that my helmet, which hadn’t been strapped, had been pushed back. I pulled it forward. Suddenly I could see again. A bullet had struck the helmet, but with incredible luck had ricocheted off my night vision, slamming the helmet backward but otherwise not harming me. When I pulled it forward, I brought the scope back down in front of my eyes, and could see again. I hadn’t been rendered blind at all, but in the confusion I couldn’t tell what was going on.

A few seconds later, I got hit in the back with a heavy round. The bullet pushed me straight to the ground. Fortunately, the round hit one of the plates in my body armor.

Still, it left me dazed. Meanwhile, we were surrounded. We called to each other and organized a retreat to a marketplace we’d passed on the way in. We started laying down fire and moving together.

By this time, the blocks around us looked like the worst scenes in Black Hawk Down. It seemed like every insurgent, maybe every occupant, wanted a piece of the idiot Americans who’d foolishly blundered into Sadr City.

We couldn’t get into the building we retreated to. By now we’d called for QRF—a quick response force, a fancy name for the cavalry. We needed backup and extraction—“HELP” in capital letters.

A group of Army Strykers came in. Strykers are heavily armed personnel carriers, and they were firing everything they had. There were plenty of targets—upward of a hundred insurgents lined the roofs on the surrounding streets, trying to get us. When they saw the Strykers, they changed their aim, trying to take out the Army’s big personnel carriers. There they were overmatched. It started looking like a video game—guys were falling off the rooftops.

“Motherfucker, thank you,” I said aloud when the vehicles reached our building. I swear I could hear a cavalry horn somewhere in the background.

They dropped their ramps and we ran inside.

“Did you see how many motherfuckers were up there?” said one of the crewmen as the vehicle sped back to the base.

“No,” I answered. “I was too busy shooting.”

“They were all over the place.” The kid was stoked. “We were dropping them and that wasn’t even half of them. We were just laying it down. We thought y’all were fuckin’ done.”

That made more than two of us.

We felt happy and grateful to have been rescued. We also felt like total asses.

Trying to sneak into Sadr City was not going to work, and command should have known that from the start. The bad guys would always know we were there. So we would just have to make the most of it.

Two days after getting our butts kicked out of the city, we came back, this time riding in Strykers. We took over a place known as the banana factory. This was a building four or five stories high, filled with fruit lockers and assorted factory gear, most of it wrecked by looters long before we got there. I’m not sure exactly what it had to do with bananas or what the Iraqis might have done there; all I knew at the time was that it was a good place for a sniper hide.

Wanting a little more cover than I would have had on the roof, I set up in the top floor. Around nine o’clock in the morning, I realized the number of civilians walking up and down the street had started to thin. That was always a giveaway—they spotted something and knew they didn’t want to end up in the line of fire.

A few minutes later, with the street now deserted, an Iraqi came out of a partially destroyed building. He was armed with an AK-47. When he reached the street he ducked down, scouting in the direction of the engineers who were working down the road on the wall, apparently trying to pick one out to target. As soon as I was sure what he was up to, I aimed center-mass and fired.

He was forty yards away. He fell, dead.

An hour later, another guy poked his head out from behind a wall on another part of the street. He glanced in the direction of the T-wall, then pulled back.

It may have seemed innocent to someone else—and certainly didn’t meet the ROEs—but I knew to watch more carefully. I’d seen insurgents follow this same pattern now for years. They would peek out, glance around, then disappear. I called them “peekers”—they “peeked” out to see if anyone was watching. I’m sure they knew they couldn’t be shot for glancing around.

I knew it, too. But I also knew that if I was patient, the guy or whoever he was spotting for would most likely reappear. Sure enough, the fellow reappeared a few moments later.

He had an RPG in his hand. He knelt quickly, bringing it up to aim.

I dropped him before he could fire.

Then it became a waiting game. The rocket was valuable to them. Sooner or later, I knew, someone would be sent to get it.

I watched. It seemed like forever. Finally, a figure came down the street and scooped up the grenade launcher.

It was a kid. A child.

I had a clear view in my scope, but I didn’t fire. I wasn’t going to kill a kid, innocent or not. I’d have to wait until the savage who put him up to it showed himself on the street.

I ended up getting seven insurgents that day, and more the next. We were in a target-rich environment.

Because of the way the streets were laid out and the number of insurgents, we were getting close shots—a number were as close as 200 yards. My longest during this time was only about 880; the average was around 400.

The city around us was schizophrenic. You’d have ordinary civilians going about their business, selling things, going to market, whatever. And then you’d have guys with guns trying to sneak up on the side streets and attack the soldiers putting up the wall. After we began engaging the insurgents, we would become the targets ourselves. Everyone would know where we were, and the bad guys would come out of their slug holes and try and take us down.

It got to the point where I had so many kills that I stepped back to let the other guys have a few. I started giving them the best spots in the buildings we took over. Even so, I had plenty of chances to shoot.

One day we took over this house and, after letting my guys choose their places, there were no more windows to fire from. So I took a sledgehammer and broke a hole in the wall. It took me quite a while to get it right.

When I finally set up my place, I had about a three-hundred-yard view. Just as I got on my gun, three insurgents came out right across the street, fifteen yards away.

I killed all of them. I rolled over and said to one of the officers who’d come over, “You want a turn?”

As always, there were moments of high anxiety mixed with bizarre events and random comic relief.

One day at the tail end of an op, I hustled back to the Bradley with the rest of the guys. Just as I reached the vehicle, I realized my sniper rifle had been left behind—I’d put it down in one of the rooms, then forgotten to bring it with me when I’d left.

Yeah. Stupid.

I reversed course. LT, one of my officers, was just running up.

“Hey, we gotta go back,” I said. “My gun’s in the house.”

“Let’s do it,” said LT, following me.

We turned around and raced back to the house. Meanwhile, insurgents were sweeping toward it—so close we could hear them. We cleared the courtyard, sure we would run into them.

Fortunately, there was no one there. I grabbed the rifle and we raced back to the Bradleys, about two seconds ahead of a grenade attack. The ramp shut and the explosions sounded.

“What the hell?” demanded the officer in charge as the vehicle drove off.

LT smirked.

“I’ll explain later,” he said.

I’m not sure he ever did.

It took about a month to get the barriers up. As the Army reached its objective, the insurgents started to give up.

It was probably a combination of them realizing the wall was going to be finished whether they liked it or not, and the fact that we had killed so many of the bastards that they couldn’t mount much of an attack. Where thirty or forty insurgents would gather with AKs and RPGs to fire on a single fence crew at the beginning of the op, toward the end the bad guys were putting together attacks with two or three men. Gradually, they faded into the slums around us.

Muqtada al-Sadr, meanwhile, decided it was time for him to try and negotiate a peace with the Iraqi government. He declared a ceasefire and started talking to the government.

Imagine that.

With things relatively calm in Sadr City, we were given a new area to target. IED-makers and other insurgents had set up shop in a series of villages near Baghdad, trying to operate under the radar as they supplied weapons and manpower to fight Americans and the loyal Iraqi forces. The Mahdi army was out there, and the area was a virtual no-go zone for Americans.

We had worked with members of 4–10 Mountain Division during much of the Sadr City battle. They were fighters. They wanted to be in the shit—and they certainly got their wish there. Now as we bumped out into the villages outside the city, we were happy to have a chance to work with them again. They knew the area. Their snipers were especially good, and having them along improved our effectiveness.

There were lighter moments, but even some of those were shitty. Literally.

Our point man, Tommy, was a great guy but, as it turned out, a terrible point in a lot of ways.

Or maybe I should say sometimes he was more of a duck than a point man. If there was a puddle between us and the objective, Tommy took us through it. The deeper the better. He was always having us walk through the worst possible terrain.

It got so ridiculous that finally I told him, “One more time, I’m going to whup your ass, and you’re fired.”

On the very next mission, he found a path to a village that he was sure would be dry. I had my doubts. In fact, I pointed them out to him.

“Oh, no, no,” he insisted, “it’s good, it’s good.”

Once we were out in the field, we followed him across some farmland on a narrow path that led to a pipe across a path of mud. I was at the back at the group, one of the last to come across the pipe. As I stepped off, I sunk right through the mud and into crap up to my knee. The mud was actually just a thin crust atop a deep pool of sewage.

It stunk even worse than Iraq usually stunk.

“Tommy,” I yelled, “I’m going to whip your ass as soon as we get to the house.”

We pushed on to the house. I was still in the rear. We cleared the house and, once all the snipers were deployed, I went to find Tommy and give him the thrashing I’d promised.

Tommy was already paying for his sins: when I found him downstairs, he was hooked up to an IV and puking his brains out. He had fallen into the muck and was completely covered with shit. He was sick for a day, and he smelled for a week.

Every article of clothing he’d been wearing was disposed of, probably by a hazmat unit.

Served him right.

One night we entered another village and took over a house at the edge of some large open fields, including one used for soccer. We set up without a problem, surveying the village and preparing for any trouble we might face in the morning.

The tempo of the ops had slowed quite a bit over the past week or two; it looked as if things were slacking down, at least for us. I started thinking about going back west and rejoining my platoon.

I set up in a room on the second floor with LT. We had an Army sniper and his spotter in the room next to us, and a bunch of guys on the roof. I’d taken the .338 Lapua with me, figuring that most of my shots would be on the long side, since we were on the edge of the village. With the area around us quiet, I started scanning out farther, to the next village, a little more than a mile away.

At some point I saw a one-story house with someone moving on the roof. It was about 2,100 yards away, and even with a twenty-five power scope I couldn’t make out much more than an outline. I studied the person, but at that point he didn’t seem to have a weapon, or at least he wasn’t showing it. His back was to me, so I could watch him, but he couldn’t see me. I thought he was suspicious, but he wasn’t doing anything dangerous, so I let him be.

A little while later an Army convoy came down the road beyond the other village, heading in the direction of the COP we had staged out of. As it got closer, the man on the roof raised a weapon to his shoulder. Now the outline was clear: he had a rocket launcher, and he was aiming it at Americans.

RPG.

We had no way of calling the convoy directly—to this day I don’t know exactly who they were, except that they were Army. But I put my scope on him and fired, hoping to at least scare him off with the shot or maybe warn the convoy.

At 2,100 yards, plus a little change, it would take a lot of luck to hit him.

A lot of luck.

Maybe the way I jerked the trigger to the right adjusted for the wind. Maybe gravity shifted and put that bullet right where it had to be. Maybe I was just the luckiest son of a bitch in Iraq. Whatever—I watched through my scope as the shot hit the Iraqi, who tumbled over the wall to the ground.

“Wow,” I muttered.

“You dumb lucky fucker,” said LT.

Twenty-one hundred yards. The shot amazes me even now. It was a straight-up luck shot; no way one shot should have gotten him.

But it did. It was my longest confirmed kill in Iraq, even longer than that shot in Fallujah.

The convoy started reacting, probably unaware of how close they’d come to getting lit up. I went back to scanning for bad guys.

By now, my guys had left al-Qa’im and were at a place called Rawah, also out west near the Syrian border. Once again they’d been put to work building barracks and the rest.

I got lucky; I missed the construction work. But there wasn’t much going on when I arrived, either.

I was just in time for a long-range desert patrol out on the border. We drove out there for a few days hardly seeing a person, let alone insurgents. There had been reports of smuggling across the desert, but if it was going on, it wasn’t going on where we were.

Meanwhile, it was hot. It was 120 degrees at least, and we were driving in Hummers that had no air-conditioning. I grew up in Texas, so I know warm; this was worse. And it was constant; you couldn’t get away from it. It hardly cooled off at night—it might fall to 115. Rolling down the windows meant taking a risk if there was an IED. Almost worse was the sand, which would just blow right in and cover you.

I decided I preferred the sand and IED danger to the heat. I rolled down the windows.

Driving, all you saw was desert. Occasionally, there would be a nomad settlement or a tiny village.

We linked up with our sister platoon, then the next day we stopped at a Marine base. My chief went in and did some business; a little while later he came out and found me.

“Hey,” he told me, grinning. “Guess what—you just made chief.”

Willie Nelson cranked through the speaker system of our Hummer as we set out for our base the next day. Music was about the only diversion we had out here, outside of the occasional stop in a village to talk to the locals. Besides the old-school country my buddy behind the wheel preferred, I listened to a bit of Toby Keith and Slipknot, country and heavy metal vying for attention.

I’m a big believer in the psychological impact of music. I’ve seen it work on the battlefield. If you’re going into combat, you want to be pumped up. You don’t want to be stupid crazy, but you do want to be psyched. Music can help take the fear away. We’d listen to Papa Roach, Dope, Drowning Pool—anything that amped us up. (They’re all in heavy rotation on my workout mix now.)

But nothing could amp me up on the way back to base. It was a long, hot ride. Even though I’d just gotten some good news about my promotion, I was in a dark mood, bored on the one hand, and tense on the other.

Back at base, things were incredibly slow. Nothing was going on. And it started to get to me.

As long as I had been in action, the idea of my being vulnerable, being mortal, had been something I could push away. There was too much going on to worry about it. Or rather, I had so much else to do, I didn’t really focus on it.

But now, it was practically all I could think of.

I had time to relax, but I couldn’t. Instead, I’d lie on my bed thinking about everything I’d been through—getting shot especially.

I relived the gunshot every time I lay down to rest. My heart thumped hard in my chest, probably a lot harder than it had that night in Sadr City.

Things seemed to go downhill in the few days after we got back from our border patrol. I couldn’t sleep. I felt very jumpy. Extremely jumpy. And my blood pressure shot up again, even higher than before.

I felt like I was going to explode.

Physically, I was beat up. Four long combat deployments had taken their toll. My knees felt better, but my back hurt, my ankle hurt, my hearing was screwed up. My ears rang. My neck had been injured, my ribs cracked. My fingers and knuckles had been broken. I had floaters and decreased vision in my right eye. There were dozens of deep bruises and an assortment of aches and pains. I was a doctor’s wet dream.

But the thing that really bothered me was my blood pressure. I sweated buckets and my hands would even shake. My face, pretty white to begin with, became pale.

It was late August when I left. As usual, it was almost surreal—one day I was in the war; the next I was home. I felt bad about leaving. I didn’t want to tell anyone about the blood pressure, or anything else. I kept it to myself as best I could.

To be honest, it felt a little like I was ducking out on my boys, running away because my heart was pounding funny or whatever the hell it was doing.

Nothing that I had accomplished earlier could erase the feeling that I was letting my boys down.

I know it doesn’t make sense. I know I had accomplished a huge amount. I needed a rest, but felt I shouldn’t take one. I thought I should be stronger than was possible.

To top things off, some of the medication apparently didn’t agree with me. Trying to help me sleep, a doctor back home in San Diego prescribed a sleeping pill. It put me out—so much so that when I really woke up I was on base with no recollection of working out at home and driving myself to base. Taya told me about my workout and I knew I had driven to work, because my truck was there.

I never took that one again. It was nasty.

While I was home, I got involved in a fairly interesting scientific program relating to stress and combat situations.

It used virtual reality to test what sorts of effects battle has on your body. In my case, specifically, they monitored my blood pressure, or at least that was the one measurement that really interested me. I wore a headpiece and special gloves while viewing a simulation. It was basically a video game, but it was still pretty cool.

Well, in the simulations, my blood pressure and heart rate would start out steady. Then, once we got into a firefight, they would drop. I would just sit there and do everything I had to do, real comfortable.

As soon as it was over and things were peaceful, my heart rate would just zoom.

Interesting.

The scientists and doctors running the experiment believe that during the heat of the battle, my training would take over and would somehow relax me. They were really intrigued, because apparently they hadn’t seen that before.

Of course, I’d lived it every day in Iraq.

My enlistment was coming to an end. The Navy kept trying to entice me to stay, making different offers: handle training, work in England, anything I wanted just so I would stay in the Navy.

Even though I had told Taya I wouldn’t reenlist, I wasn’t ready to quit.

I wanted to go back to the war. I felt I’d been cheated on my last deployment. I struggled, trying to decide what to do. Some days, I was through with the Navy; other days, I was ready to tell my wife the hell with it, and reenlist.

We talked about it a lot.

Ryan and I remained close after he returned to the States; in fact, our friendship grew even stronger, which I wouldn’t have thought possible. I felt drawn to him by his tremendous spirit. He’d been a warrior in combat. Now he was an even greater warrior in life. You never completely forgot that he was blind, but you also never, ever got the impression that his disability defined him.

He had to get a prosthetic eye made, because of his wounds. According to LT, who went with him to pick it up, he actually had two—one was a “regular” eye; the other had a golden SEAL trident where the iris ordinarily would be.

Once a SEAL, always a SEAL.

I’d been with Ryan a lot before he got hurt. A lot of the guys on the team had a wicked sense of humor, but Ryan was in a class by himself. He’d get you in stitches.

He wasn’t any different after he got shot. He just had a very dry sense of humor. One day a young girl came up to him, looked at his face, and asked, “What happened to you?”

He bent down and said, in a very serious voice, “Never run with scissors.”

Dry, droll, and a heart of gold. You couldn’t help but love him.

After her son’s death, Marc Lee’s mom, Debbie, became almost a surrogate mother to the other members of our platoon. A very courageous woman, she has dedicated herself to helping other warriors as they have made the transition from the battlefield. She’s now president of America’s Mighty Warriors (www.AmericasMightyWarriors.org) and has done a lot personally for veterans through what she calls “random acts of kindness” inspired by Marc’s life and a letter he wrote to her before he passed away.

There’s nothing random about Debbie; she’s a dedicated and hardworking woman, as devoted to her cause as Marc was to his.

Before he died, Marc wrote an incredible letter home. Available at the site, it told a moving story about some of the things he saw in Iraq—a terrible hospital, ignorant and despicable people. But it was also an extremely positive letter, full of hope and encouraging all of us to do some small part for others.

To my mind, though, whatever he wrote home doesn’t adequately describe the Marc we all knew. There was a lot more to him. He was a real tough guy with a great sense of humor. He was a gung-ho warrior and a great friend. He had unshakable faith in God and loved his wife with might. Heaven is surely a better place because he’s there, but earth has lost one of its best.

Deciding to leave the Navy was hard enough. But now I was going to be out of a job. It was time to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.

I had a number of options and possibilities. I’d been talking with a friend of mine named Mark Spicer about starting a sniper school in the States. After twenty-five years in the British Army, Mark retired as a sergeant major. He was one of the foremost snipers in their army, and had served over twenty years as a sniper and sniper platoon commander. Mark has written three books on sniping and is one of the world’s leading experts on the subject.

We both realized there was and is a need for certain types of very specific training for military and police units. No one was providing the sort of hands-on instruction that would help prepare their personnel for the different situations they might find. With our experience, we knew we could tailor courses and provide enough range time to make a difference.

The problem was getting everything together to do it.

Money, of course, was a pretty big consideration. Then, partly by chance, I happened to meet someone who realized the company could be a good investment, and who also had faith in me: J. Kyle Bass.

Kyle had made a lot of money investing, and when we met, he was looking for a bodyguard. I guess he figured, “Who better than a SEAL?” But when we got talking and he asked where I saw myself in a few years, I told him about the school. He was intrigued, and rather than hiring me as his bodyguard, he helped provide the financing for our company. And just like that, Craft International was born.

I was still conflicted about leaving the Navy, but knowing that I was going to start Craft gave me more incentive. When the time finally came, I couldn’t wait.

After all, I was going back home. Was I in a hurry? I got out of the Navy November 4; on November 6, I was kicking Texas dust.

While I was working on Craft International, my family stayed back in the San Diego area, the kids finishing up with school and Taya getting the house ready to sell. My wife planned to have everything wrapped up in January so we could be reunited in Texas.

They came out at Christmas. I’d been missing the kids and her terribly.

I pulled her into the room at my parent’s place and said, “What do you think about going back by yourself? Leave the kids with me.”

She was tickled. She had a lot to do, and while she loved our children, taking care of them and getting the house ready to sell was exhausting.

I loved having my son and daughter with me. I had a big assist from my parents, who helped watch them during the week. Friday afternoons I’d take the kids and we’d have Daddy vacations for three and sometimes four days at a shot.

People have an idea in their heads that fathers aren’t able to spend comfortable time with very young children. I don’t think that’s true. Hell, I had as much fun as they did. We’d mess around on a trampoline and play ball for hours. We’d visit the zoo, hit the playgrounds, watch a movie. They’d help Dad grill. We all had a great time.

With all this good stuff going on, you’d think I was living a fairy tale or a perfect life. And maybe I should be.

But real life doesn’t travel in a perfect straight line; it doesn’t necessarily have that “all lived happily ever after” bit. You have to work on where you’re going.

And just because I had a great family and an interesting job didn’t mean things were perfect. I still felt bad about leaving the SEALs. I still resented my wife for presenting me with what felt like an ultimatum.

So even though life should have been sweet, for some months after getting out of the service, it felt like it was plunging down a mineshaft.

I started drinking a lot, pounding back beers. I’d say I went into a depression, feeling sorry for myself. Pretty soon drinking was all I did. After a while, it was hard liquor, and it was all through the day.

I don’t want to make this sound more dramatic than it really is. Other people have faced more difficult problems. But I was certainly headed in the wrong direction. I was going downhill and gathering speed.

Then one night I turned a corner too fast in my truck. Now, maybe there were extenuating circumstances, maybe the road was slippery or something else was out of whack. Or maybe that guardian angel that had saved me back in Ramadi decided to intervene.

Whatever. All I know is I totaled my truck and came out without a scratch.

On my body. My ego was something else again.

The accident woke me up. I’m sorry to say that I needed something like that to get my head back straight.

I still drink beer, though not nearly to excess.

I think I realize everything I have, and everything I could lose. And I also understand not just where my responsibilities are but how to fulfill them.

I’m starting to understand the contributions I can make to others. I realize that I can be a complete man—taking care of my family and helping in a small way to take care of others.

Marcus Luttrell started an organization called Lone Survivor Foundation. It gets some of our wounded warriors out of the hospital and into situations where they can enjoy themselves a little. After being wounded in Afghanistan, Marcus said he healed twice as fast at his mom’s ranch than he had in the hospital. Something about the open air and being able to roam around naturally helped the process. That’s one of the inspirations for his foundation, and it’s become one of my guiding principles as I try to do my small share.

I’ve gotten together with some people I know around Texas who have ranches and asked if they could donate their places for a few days at a time. They’ve been more than generous. We’ve had small groups of servicemen disabled in the war come in and spend time there hunting, shooting guns on a range, or just hanging out. The idea is to have a good time.

I should mention that my friend Kyle—the same guy who was a driving force behind getting Craft afloat—is also extremely patriotic and supportive of the troops. He graciously allows us to use his beautiful Barefoot Ranch for many of our retreats for the wounded troops. Rick Kell and David Feherty’s organization, Troops First, also works with Craft to help as many wounded guys as we can.

Hell, I’ve had a bunch of fun myself. We go hunting a couple of times a day, shoot a few rounds on the range, then at night trade stories and beers.

It’s not so much the war stories as the funny stories that you remember. Those are the ones that affect you. They underline the resilience of these guys—they were warriors in the war, and they take that same warrior attitude into dealing with their disabilities.

As you’d expect if I’m involved, there’s a lot of bustin’ going on back and forth, giving each other hell. I don’t always get the last laugh, but I do take my shots. The first time I had some of them out to one of the ranches, I took them out on the back porch before we started shooting and gave them a little orientation.

“All right,” I told them, picking up my rifle, “since none of you are SEALs, I better give you some background. This here is a trigger.”

“Screw you, Squid!” they shouted, and we had a good time from there on out, pushing each other and making fun.

It’s taken a while, but I have gotten to a point where being a SEAL no longer defines me. I need to be a husband and a father. Those things, now, are my first calling.

Being a SEAL has been a huge part of me. I still feel the pull. I certainly would have preferred having the best of both worlds—the job and the family. But at least in my case, the job wouldn’t allow it.

I’m not sure I would have either. In a sense, I had to step away from the job to become the fuller man my family needed me to be.

I don’t know where or when the change came. It didn’t happen until I got out. I had to get through that resentment at first. I had to move through the good things and the bad things to reach a point where I could really move ahead.

Now I want to be a good dad and a good husband. Now I’ve rediscovered a real love for my wife. I genuinely miss her when I’m on a business trip. I want to be able to hug her and sleep next to her.

I’m not the same guy I was when I first went to war.

No one is. Before you’re in combat, you have this innocence about you. Then, all of a sudden, you see this whole other side of life.

I don’t regret any of it. I’d do it again. At the same time, war definitely changes you.

You embrace death.

As a SEAL, you go to the Dark Side. You’re immersed in it. Continually going to war, you gravitate to the blackest parts of existence. Your psyche builds up its defenses—that’s why you laugh at gruesome things like heads being blown apart, and worse.

Growing up, I wanted to be military. But I wondered, how would I feel about killing someone?

Now I know. It’s no big deal.

I did it a lot more than I’d ever thought I would—or, for that matter, more than any American sniper before me. But I also witnessed the evil my targets committed and wanted to commit, and by killing them, I protected the lives of many fellow soldiers.