Read Online Service: A Navy SEAL at War by Marcus Luttrell - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Marcus Luttrell
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said.
Walking back to my position, where I planned to wedge my butt back onto that rock (I can still feel it after all these years), I was passing through the second bowling alley when the ground began ticking up violently at me. A spray of rocks scattered in all directions—
pfft pfft pfft.
I crouched down. Scanning the mountainscape, I saw three guys on the other side of a pile of small boulders, looking directly at me. They were barely fifty meters away. One of them had his AK-47 leveled right at me. As I ran toward them, seeking cover along the way, the other two opened fire, stitching the ground right across my path. I took another shower of shattered shale. But thanks to their lousy marksmanship, my shorts were still clean. I went prone and pulled my rifleto my eye. I saw an insurgent swing over on me with an RPG. The fight was on.
I pulled the trigger a few times, then got up and moved. I sprinted as fast as I could, covering maybe thirty yards, then stopped to make myself small, hiding behind a wall of rocks. I rose to a knee and fired again. I don’t know how I wasn’t hit, given how exposed I was. Somehow the guy with the RPG circled around below me and unloaded on Senior Chief Healy’s hooch. The detonation turned that big tough bastard loose in a hurry, and he came out of the brush, angry and focused, looking for targets. Meanwhile, on the back side of the hill, Shane Patton had his radio out, calling, “Troops in contact.”
“Where the hell you at, Luttrell?” Healy shouted.
“I’m trying to find the sons of bitches who’re shooting at us,” I said.
Unholy ghosts, those bare-handed butt wipers. After that first dustup, they were swallowed up by the rocks. We never saw them again. The contact lasted no more than five or seven minutes.
Shane Patton’s radio call brought reinforcements, fast. At first an AH-64 came on station—an Apache attack helicopter. Then a Chinook arrived with a dozen more SEALs. Weary from four days of cloud-top air, constant vigilance, and little to eat, we were glad to let them take up the hunt. We climbed on board the helo and choppered back to base. Our relief would spend two more days looking for those insurgents, long enough for a huge thunderstorm to roll in and make their lives miserable for a while. No matter what you see on TV, frogs don’t like to be cold or wet, and our reinforcements got a double dose of it because of the storm.
As I sat in the huge C-17 on my way to Iraq, a lot of things were on my mind, memories both priceless and painful, pushing each other around in my head. As I looked around the plane and watched my teammates, my greatest hope was that every one of them would come home from Iraq, just the way they were now, nothing missing, nothing scarred. But in a place like Ramadi, what were the odds of that happening? The chances of losing someone were high, in spite of everything we did to minimize the risks. The workup. The constant advice and input from experienced senior operators. The pass-downs and intel from the team that preceded us. You put it all together and you tilt the odds in your favor. But bad things are likely to happen. It’s simply a fact; that is war.
After landing in Germany, we laid over for five hours, went wheels-up again, and touched down in Iraq’s desert city of Habbaniyah around 2:30 a.m. local time. We spent the night offloading and staging our gear for the drive west to Ramadi. In Habby, I got to see some old friends from SEAL Team 4, but as usual the time together was short. We hit the rack at about 5:30 a.m. The following afternoon, we loaded up, piled into our Humvees, and began the drive to Ramadi.
A hot and desolate place, hard terrain settled by even harder men. A land of myth and legend, with a long tradition of war, pillage, and slaughter. A people tested by war and famine, baked hard by the sun. It was a land where the warrior’s code binds all men into a ferocious brotherhood, where ancient traditions of
Walking back to my position, where I planned to wedge my butt back onto that rock (I can still feel it after all these years), I was passing through the second bowling alley when the ground began ticking up violently at me. A spray of rocks scattered in all directions—
pfft pfft pfft.
I crouched down. Scanning the mountainscape, I saw three guys on the other side of a pile of small boulders, looking directly at me. They were barely fifty meters away. One of them had his AK-47 leveled right at me. As I ran toward them, seeking cover along the way, the other two opened fire, stitching the ground right across my path. I took another shower of shattered shale. But thanks to their lousy marksmanship, my shorts were still clean. I went prone and pulled my rifleto my eye. I saw an insurgent swing over on me with an RPG. The fight was on.
I pulled the trigger a few times, then got up and moved. I sprinted as fast as I could, covering maybe thirty yards, then stopped to make myself small, hiding behind a wall of rocks. I rose to a knee and fired again. I don’t know how I wasn’t hit, given how exposed I was. Somehow the guy with the RPG circled around below me and unloaded on Senior Chief Healy’s hooch. The detonation turned that big tough bastard loose in a hurry, and he came out of the brush, angry and focused, looking for targets. Meanwhile, on the back side of the hill, Shane Patton had his radio out, calling, “Troops in contact.”
“Where the hell you at, Luttrell?” Healy shouted.
“I’m trying to find the sons of bitches who’re shooting at us,” I said.
Unholy ghosts, those bare-handed butt wipers. After that first dustup, they were swallowed up by the rocks. We never saw them again. The contact lasted no more than five or seven minutes.
Shane Patton’s radio call brought reinforcements, fast. At first an AH-64 came on station—an Apache attack helicopter. Then a Chinook arrived with a dozen more SEALs. Weary from four days of cloud-top air, constant vigilance, and little to eat, we were glad to let them take up the hunt. We climbed on board the helo and choppered back to base. Our relief would spend two more days looking for those insurgents, long enough for a huge thunderstorm to roll in and make their lives miserable for a while. No matter what you see on TV, frogs don’t like to be cold or wet, and our reinforcements got a double dose of it because of the storm.
As I sat in the huge C-17 on my way to Iraq, a lot of things were on my mind, memories both priceless and painful, pushing each other around in my head. As I looked around the plane and watched my teammates, my greatest hope was that every one of them would come home from Iraq, just the way they were now, nothing missing, nothing scarred. But in a place like Ramadi, what were the odds of that happening? The chances of losing someone were high, in spite of everything we did to minimize the risks. The workup. The constant advice and input from experienced senior operators. The pass-downs and intel from the team that preceded us. You put it all together and you tilt the odds in your favor. But bad things are likely to happen. It’s simply a fact; that is war.
After landing in Germany, we laid over for five hours, went wheels-up again, and touched down in Iraq’s desert city of Habbaniyah around 2:30 a.m. local time. We spent the night offloading and staging our gear for the drive west to Ramadi. In Habby, I got to see some old friends from SEAL Team 4, but as usual the time together was short. We hit the rack at about 5:30 a.m. The following afternoon, we loaded up, piled into our Humvees, and began the drive to Ramadi.
A hot and desolate place, hard terrain settled by even harder men. A land of myth and legend, with a long tradition of war, pillage, and slaughter. A people tested by war and famine, baked hard by the sun. It was a land where the warrior’s code binds all men into a ferocious brotherhood, where ancient traditions of
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