His Marines and a full platoon of Iraqi soldiers had been engaged in a
vicious firefight with the enemy fighters inside that house and couldn’t
dislodge them. Whoever they were, they had put up one hell of a fight. In
the gunny’s mind, for us to even approach that place was pretty much
suicidal. I nodded at my senior enlisted SEAL, who nodded back, and we
moved across the street toward the enemy-infested house. Like most of
the houses in Iraq, there was an eight-foot concrete wall around it. We
approached the door to the compound, which was slightly open. With my
M4 rifle at the ready, I kicked the door the rest of the way open only to
find I was staring at one of my SEAL platoon chiefs. He stared back at
me in wide-eyed surprise.
“What happened?” I asked him.
“Some muj entered the compound. We shot one of them and they
attacked—hard-core. They brought it.” I remembered what the gunny
had just told me: one of their Iraqi soldiers had been shot when he
entered the compound.
At that moment, it all became clear. In the chaos and confusion,
somehow a rogue element of Iraqi soldiers had strayed outside the
boundaries to which they had been confined and attempted to enter the
building occupied by our SEAL sniper team. In the early morning
darkness, our SEAL sniper element had seen the silhouette of a man
armed with an AK-47 creep into their compound. While there were not
supposed to be any friendlies in the vicinity, there were many enemy
fighters known to be in the area. With that in mind, our SEALs had
engaged the man with the AK-47, thinking they were under attack. Then
all hell broke loose.
When gunfire erupted from the house, the Iraqi soldiers outside the
compound returned fire and pulled back behind the cover of the concrete
jeff_l
(Jeff_L)
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