Free The Last Punisher: A SEAL Team THREE Sniper's True Account of the Battle of Ramadi by Kevin Lacz, Ethan E. Rocke, Lindsey Lacz Page A

them things were fine, and everything was going great. In the back of my mind, I was thinking about going out on my first op. Getting shot or blown up was a very real possibility, but that’s not something you share with somebody back home. Those possibilities are part of the job, and how you deal with them defines you as an operator. There’s a lot of stuff you don’t tell the people you love.
    I willed the hours to tick by like a kid on Christmas Eve. I hit the range with my M4 to make sure my dope was dialed in (the settings on my rifle sights) before settling in to prepare the medical brief for the op order. This was one of my biggest responsibilities. The brief covered plans such as what to do if a man went down on the way to the target . . . on target . . . during exfiltration, etc. It’s your basic planning for every conceivable mission scenario distilled into a PowerPoint presentation. The medical slides were an important part of the brief. Where someone was going if they got shot and who was going to transport them was nothing to breeze through.
    When all the prep work was done, I headed to dinner with the other newguys. We ate lunches in our small, private chow hall on Sharkbase, but for dinner we usually drove to the bigger Army chow hall on Camp Ramadi. Besides, the PX sold Copenhagen, and if you didn’t get there on shipment day, the Texas boys would clean the place out in short order.
    I piled into a Toyota Hilux with Marc Lee, Ryan Job, Biff, and Jonny. Jonny had just finished his daily call to his girlfriend. He used to take a lot of flak for the amount of time he spent calling, IM’ing, writing letters to, and phoning her. If there was a way to communicate with her, he exhausted it. He probably floated a message in a bottle down the Euphrates one night. If he thought an Iraqi pigeon would have made it with a message all the way to her house in the States, hewould have tried it. He once got his ass chewed for sitting behind a generator on the satellite phone during a mortar attack on Sharkbase. The rest of us ran for cover, and he had one of his hour-long conversations, oblivious to the overhead threat because of the noise from the generator.
    “So anybody know what’s up with this place we’re headed into?” I asked from the passenger seat. “What are the atmospherics?”
    Jonny was driving dangerously and first to speak up. “Hell if I know, bro. I’m just operating on the assumption it’s like the rest of Ramadi: shitty. As long as we don’t get blown up on the ride over, I think we’ll be good.”
    “Jonny, you think you’re gonna be okay to see the enemy tonight through them tiny slits for eyes?” Marc said from the backseat, recycling one of our go-to jokes. Military humor in general is dark, crass, and often tasteless and offensive by civilian standards, but for us, mildly racist jabs like Marc’s were a great way to defuse tension before an op.
    “Yeah, I think I’ll be okay,” Jonny said. “I just hope nobody mistakes you for muj tonight, bro. I don’t want to have to bandage you up after Dauber gets too excited and accidentally shoots your ass.”
    Muj (pronounced “Mooj”) was our term for the insurgents we fought. It was short for mujahideen, which is a broad term for one engaged in jihad and is what a lot of the insurgents called themselves.
    “Ha! No shit, right? Dauber will shoot a motherfucker straight up,” Ryan said from behind me. “What do you think, Dauber?”
    “I guess we’ll see,” I said. “But if I do, it won’t be Marc. I don’t have enough magnification on my scope to see them tiny arms.”
    “You shoot me in a dream, you better wake up and apologize,” Marc said.
    The Reservoir Dogs reference made me smile, and I fired back. “I wouldn’t shoot you, man. You’re my favorite Iraqi.”
    “You two aren’t gonna kiss now, are you?” Biff said as we bouncedover uneven terrain on our way to Camp Ramadi. The cackling continued as we pulled