Part 21 (1/2)
I'd seen that bullets, even from pistols, could easily go through a helmet, so I didn't have much incentive to deal with the discomfort. The general exception to this was at night. I'd wear the helmet so I had a place to attach my night vision to.
Otherwise, I usually wore a ball cap: a platoon cap with a Cadillac symbol adapted as our unit logo. (While officially we were Charlie Platoon, we usually took on alternate names with the same letter or sound at the beginning: Charlie becomes Cadillac, etc.)
Why a ball cap?
Ninety percent of being cool is looking cool. And you look so much cooler wearing a ball cap.
Besides my Cadillac cap, I had another favorite-a cap from a New York fire company that had lost some of its men during 9/11. My dad had gotten it for me during a visit, after the attacks, to the ”Lions Den,” a historic city firehouse. There he met members of Engine 23; when the firemen heard that his son was going to war, they insisted he take the hat.
”Just tell him to get some payback,” they said.
If they're reading this, I hope they know that I did.
On my wrist, I'd wear a G-Shock watch. The black watch and its rubber wristband have replaced Rolex Submariners as standard SEAL equipment. (A friend of mine, who thought it was a shame the tradition died, recently got me one. I still feel a little strange wearing a Rolex, but it is a throwback to the frogmen who came before me.)
In cool weather, I brought a personal jacket to wear-a North Face-because, believe it or not, I had trouble convincing the supply mafia to issue me cold-weather gear. But that's a rant for a different day.
I would stick my M-4 and ten mags (three hundred rounds) in the front compartments of my web gear. I would also have my radio, some lights, and my strobe in those pockets. (The strobe can be used at night for rendezvousing with other units or aircraft, s.h.i.+ps, boats, whatever. It also can be used to identify friendly troops.)
If I had one of my sniper rifles with me, I would have some two hundred rounds in my backpack. When I carried the Mk-11 instead of the Win Mag or .338, then I wouldn't bother carrying the M-4. In that case, the sniper rounds would be in my web gear, closer at hand. Rounding out my ammo were three mags for my pistol.
I wore Merrill high-top hiking boots. They were comfortable and held up to the deployment.
GET UP, KYLE
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 ma.s.sive amounts of bad guys. And I'm going to be in the middle of it.
AN ARMED CAMP
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.)