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

on foot for about 1.5 kilometers, carrying our heavy gear and substantial
firepower, into another violent, enemy-held neighborhood of the city—
an area firmly in the grasp of a brutal insurgency. Driven back from the
areas to the east and the west, enemy fighters chose to stand and fight for
this dirty patch of ground in the city’s geographic center. We took
position in a building just up the street from a mosque that frequently
rallied the call to jihad from its minaret speakers to the hundreds of
well-armed muj that occupied this area.
Not long before, off this very street, a large force of enemy fighters
had attacked a squad of U.S. Marines and pinned them down for several
hours before they could evacuate their wounded. Two weeks before, only
a half block to the south, that street witnessed the destruction of a
heavily armored U.S. mine-clearance vehicle by the massive blast of an
IED. Nearly a dozen American tanks and armored vehicles had been
destroyed in this section of the city. The “vehicle graveyard” back at
Camp Ramadi became the final resting place for their charred wreckage.
The burned-out hulks of blackened, twisted metal stood as a stark
reminder of the intensity of violence in the streets and the many
wounded and killed.
Our SEAL platoon had chosen this particular building for its
commanding views of the area. Most important, it was right in the
enemy’s backyard. Here, insurgent fighters had enjoyed complete safe
haven and freedom of movement. The frequent and intense onslaught of
enemy machine gun fire and RPG rockets now served as a testament that
our presence here was most unwelcome.
We had stirred up a hornet’s nest, but it was exactly where we wanted
to be. Our plan: go where the bad guys would least expect us in order to
seriously disrupt their program, kill as many enemy fighters as we could,