The Operator by Robert O'Neill

Author:Robert O'Neill
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

When people think of SEALs and Army Special Forces, they probably imagine a fierce rivalry. Well, they wouldn’t be wrong. As I said, a lot of SEAL commanders would have balked at an assignment in which we were, nominally at least, reporting to their commander. But from the start we were glad to be working with them, and we benefited from their expertise in the most exciting (and fun) style of attack, which they were doing daily while crushing the enemy.

On one such adventure, they hit a convoy of bad guys that included too many vehicles for them to handle. Two of the cars got away. Fortunately, we had several assets in the sky, and the Air Force was able to watch and follow the vehicles to their safe house. Both vehicles parked, and five insurgents went into one of three adjacent houses.

Back at the Baghdad Airport, we were in the operations center monitoring the houses as the higher-ups decided what to do. The bosses were discussing the possibilities: Should we send in an assault team? Army Special Forces had killed all of the other insurgents so it might well make sense to interrogate someone to find out more about their cell. Should we “go kinetic,” which means drop some bombs on the house? That would certainly kill all of them, but we’d get no further intelligence.

As the conversation went on, someone suggested a third option: “Send in TF Blue,” which was us—Task Force Blue, as in Navy Blue. The idea was batted around for a bit when finally an officer from the Special Air Service (SAS) announced, “Yeah, send in TF Blue. It’s just like going kinetic. Only you can tell them to bring one out alive!” He was semi-joking. But the commander actually said to us, “Hey, you guys have been killing everybody. Try to bring one back alive so we can interrogate him.”

The intel folks in the Joint Operations Center (JOC) kept eyes on the target while we planned the hit. The house was quiet: lights off and no sign of activity. So we said, “You know what? It’s been a long deployment. Forget hiking in. Let’s just fly in and land right in front. We’ll clear the whole place in ten minutes and leave. The night will be over and we can come back and hang out with our weird furniture.”

We chose a landing spot a hundred meters from the front door. It was dangerous because we knew they were bad guys, that they were armed, and that they were spooked. But even if they came out shooting, we thought we could get the drop on them. Our plan was complacent, overconfident. When things go so right for so long, you stop thinking about ways things can go wrong. This is how success can kill.

We took off in three Black Hawks and beelined for the houses. We were only in the air for a short while when the call came from the pilots: “Ten minutes.”

The

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