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

jarring THWACK! He and a handful of other SEALs rotated every few
minutes as they hammered through the thick wall. It was painfully slow,
back-breaking work. We needed a hole big enough for operators with
rucksacks and heavy gear to walk through onto the flat rooftop of the
one-story building next door.
In the meantime, our EOD operators carefully went to work on the
IED planted at our doorstep. Through meticulous investigation, they
uncovered two 130mm rocket projectiles whose nose cones were packed
with Semtex, a plastic explosive. Had they not discovered the device—
and had we triggered it—the massive explosion and deadly shrapnel
could have wiped out half our platoon. We couldn’t leave this IED here
to kill other U.S. Soldiers, Marines, or innocent Iraqi civilians. So EOD
carefully set their own explosive charge on it to set it off (or “blow it in
place”) where it lay. Once prepared, the EOD operators notified me and
waited for the command to “pop smoke” and ignite the time fuse that
would initiate the charge.
After a solid twenty minutes of furious sledgehammering, the LPO
and his rotating crew of BTF SEALs finally broke through the concrete
wall. They were winded and sweating profusely in the sweltering heat,
but we now had an alternate exit that would enable us to circumvent the
IED threat.
Everyone double-checked their gear to ensure we left nothing behind,
then we lined up next to the jagged hole in the wall and made ready to
exit the building.
“Stand by to break out,” I said over the intersquad radio. SEALs and
Iraqi soldiers shouldered their rucksacks. “Pop smoke,” I passed to the
waiting EOD techs. One popped smoke while the other started a
stopwatch that counted down to detonation. We now had only a few