Free Honor and Betrayal : The Untold Story of the Navy Seals Who Captured the "Butcher of Fallujah"-and the Shameful Ordeal They Later Endured (9780306823091) by Patrick Robinson

handle in case they need to make high speed over the ground; a long hammer handle would impede progress. But once that handle is fully extended, a skilled SEAL breacher could cannon open almost any door with one enormous swing of this thing.
    Failing that, the breacher carries what SEALs call a “hooly” (short for hooligan—God knows why), which is a long crowbar that will rip the hinges off any door and allow the big man up front to kick it straight in. Tucked into the breacher’s harness belt is the inevitable set of bolt cutters plus a heat torch for cutting through steel.
    The Teams never know what will face them in terms of security, and the breacher must solve the initial entry, which is always violent. And of course, his last resort is, without exception, C-4 explosive. And because they do not wish to knock the entire building down, that high explosive must be carefully designed.
    Thus, the breacher makes his own singular bombs—demolition charges, specially shaped, to blast the doors but not to collapse the house. This stuff never comes prepacked, and an expert needs to prepare it because the SEAL is going to carry in the explosive himself.
    Take, for instance, that some reconnaissance pictures have suggested a heavy mud wall to go through. Thus, the breacher may find himself walking through the moonlit desert with a big bomb in his rucksack and upon whom everyone is dependent for entry into the ops area.
    The problem is that no imagery can ever reveal precisely how many doors need to be breached for the Team to break in. There may be three, for example, each one more difficult and secure than the last. The breacher cannot possibly say, “Sorry, guys. I don’t have any more charges. I guess we better go home.”
    The breacher needs to have every possible device in his personal armory, ready to blast the platoon into the area. And he better get it right if he doesn’t want to become a human bomb.
    It’s the surprise element and the ability to handle the totally unexpected that makes a great breacher. The sudden appearance of a steel door, a barricaded passage, a door that is barred. There may even be a steel wall inserted into the concrete of a building, and that cannot be blasted out without taking down the whole structure.
    Right there the breacher must make fast decisions. And he may have to go to the heat torch to cut the steel. This is hot and noisy and is likely to attract attention, forcing a firefight before the SEALs are even inside.
    And then there’s the sudden shock of a booby trap, the instant secondary blast, detonating from inside the building as soon as the door rockets inward off its hinges. The technique and skills required of the breacher, the lightning sidestep away from the entrance, inch perfect on the turn, is enough to make a matador gasp with admiration.
    And then there’s the possibility of running straight into the barrel of a Kalashnikov gun as the door blows into the house. There’s probably a split second before the enemy recovers from the inward blast of the breacher’s bomb, but no more. And the Team leaders need to move again, with terrific speed, hurling in the grenade with the instinctive reactions of a big-league short stop to first. Nanoseconds matter. Lost seconds might get them all killed.
    And there’s always the possibility the breacher may go down. He’s first in the firing line, and someone has to step up. He must bring an understudy, whose duties would start instantly. If the Team leader arrives at the secondary door inside the building and finds it padlocked or barricaded shut, the number-two breacher must be right at his elbow, with the sledgehammer and the bolt cutters and the C-4. That’s the way it works. No mistakes.
    The breachers have a quaint name for the high-danger area as they enter; they call it the “fatal funnel,” because that’s where the enemy will instinctively shoot. That’s