Still, there is a danger in giving yourself over too completely to the thrill of war, and I was coming very close to crossing that line before I’d even fired a fatal shot. The danger is not that you will lose yourself, though that is always possible, but that you will lose sight of the greater purpose of each mission. On this second trip there were times when I didn’t fully appreciate the danger of some of the situations that we were inserting ourselves into night after night, what with our crazy high operational tempo. I was never reckless, but there were times when I wasn’t necessarily seeing the full field, and when that happens, bad things can follow.
Those first few months, we were blowing down doors and dodging bullets nearly every night, but it never really felt like we were being tested too badly—at least not beyond what our training had prepared us for—so it never felt like I’d been able to take my training wheels off to see what I was really made of.
Then, with two months left on the six-month trip, things started to change. We were re-deployed 250 kilometers to the southeast, to a city called Ramadi.
At this stage of the war, the vibe in Ramadi was totally different. In recent weeks the insurgency had been getting pretty nasty in that area and the place had turned into a fucking tinderbox, one that would explode a couple months later as the Second Battle of Ramadi—a six-month pitched battle that involved the famous Task Unit Bruiser led by Jocko Willink of SEAL Team Three. It’s also where Chris Kyle got his nickname “The Devil of Ramadi.” Ramadi produced dozens of American casualties, a Medal of Honor recipient, and God knows how many bronze and silver stars. Many brave Americans sacrificed a lot on those streets. And unlike the insurgents my unit encountered in and around Anbar, the fighters infesting the streets of Ramadi were willing to stand their ground and fight to the death.
I learned that fact firsthand during one of the first raids we conducted in our new AO (area of operation). The Stryker (an eight-wheeled armored fighting vehicle) my squad was riding in was repositioning to track down some enemy combatants that had just run from a target building. As we sped down an alleyway, one of them cooked off a command-detonated IED. Well, this is new. The explosion blew off two of our vehicle’s front tires and stopped us in our tracks. Thankfully, no one was severely injured. We all kind of looked around, made sure our dicks were still intact, and gave a “Roger Up.” Good to go.
Much of the next few weeks were just like that: testy, dynamic engagements, random gunfire from afar, IEDs here and there. Then, the week before we were set to leave and rotate back to the United States, we got a TST (time-sensitive target) out in some farmland west of the city. Initially, I didn’t think much of it, but when we learned that the target was a transient house for foreign fighters making their way into Ramadi, my spidey sense started to tingle. This wasn’t going to be a normal mission—I could feel it. Not that you can ever really put your finger on “normal” in the middle of a war, but something about this objective felt unsettled.
When we finally got spun up, I found myself in the middle of the helicopter between Sgt. Brehm and my squad leader, Sgt. Ricardo Barraza. These guys were two of the most legitimate badasses in the battalion. Within the tight-knit Ranger community, they were legends. But more personally, they had basically raised me since my first deployment, and I considered them family. When I showed up to the battalion with training but no combat experience, they strived to teach me what it truly means to be a Ranger: how to think, how to fight, how to carry yourself. And if the reactions of my friends to how much I’d changed when I returned home on block leave after that first stint in Mosul were any indication, Brehm and Barraza had been great mentors.
On this mission, we had good, timely intelligence that our target was holed up somewhere inside one of four buildings that were a solid six-kilometer infil from the HLZ (helicopter landing zone). We were in full kit, which meant we were each rolling up with eighty to a hundred pounds’ worth of gear on us. I still remember that ruck so vividly. We were headed to what turned out to be a big farm in this quaint little village that is probably as close as Iraq will ever get to Little House on the Prairie. Almost immediately, we found ourselves amidst the worst possible terrain for fighting and stealth movement—a poorly maintained patchwork of plots segmented by these weird crumbling plow rows that prevented us from going straight toward the target for any meaningful distance before having to weave around one thing or climb over something else. In a few spots, we had to place ladders over open trenches just to get to walkable ground. By the time we reached the outskirts of the village and set up our ORP (operational reference point), nearly every member of the team had eaten shit at least once on the uneven ground.
With four buildings to hit, the ground force commander quickly delegated which target buildings were first and which squad would be assaulting each. The intelligence that we had indicated that the bad guys, if they were still there, were most likely to be in one or two of the four structures, so we broke up the unit into two assault squads and two support squads and decided to hit the buildings simultaneously. When everyone was clear on the plan, my squad began maneuvering toward the first building. I was uncomfortable from the moment we entered the village. The walls were low-cut and close together, with very little space between buildings. We had to walk in single file, making it tactically challenging to maneuver. We immediately found ourselves in a compromised position, and that is no way to start your approach.
Our target was a rudimentary Iraqi village house. It was 1,200 to 1,400 square feet at most, the walls were made of mud-based concrete, and the floors inside were almost certainly going to be filthy, hard-packed mud as well. We decided to set an ECT (explosive cutting charge) and go in loud while 2nd Squad took down the other building. As far as we knew, no one had any idea we were there.
As we entered the first room of the house, an enemy combatant bolted toward a bookshelf in the corner. I cut an angle on the room to clear my barrel from Sgt. Brehm and moved to squeeze the trigger to engage. Then, in what felt like milliseconds before I let the first round go, he suddenly stopped, put up his hands, and kneeled on the floor.
For some reason I couldn’t explain, I didn’t fire immediately. I felt like I still needed to give these people the benefit of the doubt, no matter who they were. This guy was giving up, so I had to let him give up. Saying those words again to myself more than a decade later, they sound so foreign. Twenty-two-year-old Mat would have blown this fucking guy’s head off. But for nineteen-year-old Mat, even for all of his obsession with war and with killing bad guys, it wasn’t so black-and-white. Plus, when you’re confronted with this crazy situation for the first time, it’s completely unnerving. You aren’t thinking about the lights going out on the enemy or how you are going to tell this story in a book someday. All you’re really trying to do is to see the full picture and make the correct decisions so that you and your brothers can get back home safe.
When I got up closer, that’s when I saw the AK-47 on the shelf, well within arm’s reach. Fortunately, Brehm saw it first and tackled the guy, then beat the shit out of him until I grabbed the weapon, locked and cleared it, and had a teammate zip-tie him so we could continue moving through the rest of the building.