Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win

the most dangerous place in Iraq, accounting for the majority of U.S.
casualties in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Of all the places in Anbar, the
city of Ar Ramadi was the most deadly. Located on the Euphrates River,
Ramadi, with four hundred thousand residents, was the capital of Anbar
Province and the epicenter of the violent Sunni insurgency. The city was
strewn with rubble-pile buildings, burned-out hulks of twisted metal that
had once been vehicles, and walls marred by bullet holes. Giant bomb
craters from IEDs^1 dotted the main roads through town. Thousands of
heavily armed Sunni insurgent fighters loyal to al Qaeda in Iraq
controlled some two-thirds of the geographic area of the city. U.S. forces
couldn’t even begin to penetrate these areas without sustaining massive
casualties. Al Qaeda in Iraq claimed the city as the capital of their
caliphate.
Valiant U.S. Army Soldiers and Marines ran convoys and patrols
along the deadly, heavily IED’ed roads. They conducted cordon and
search operations into enemy territory and engaged in fierce fighting.
Most of the several thousand U.S. troops in Ramadi were located on
large secure bases outside the city itself. But along the main road
through the city, a string of isolated U.S. Marine and Army outposts
were constantly under attack.
The level of determination and sophistication from insurgent fighters
in Ramadi was alarming—far beyond what any of us in Task Unit
Bruiser had seen on previous deployments. Several times a week, groups
of twenty or thirty well-armed enemy fighters launched hellacious
attacks on U.S. forces. These were well-coordinated, complex attacks
executed simultaneously on multiple U.S. outposts separated by several
kilometers. They were hardcore muj.
Many enemy attacks followed a similar pattern. Each began with a