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

was lucky, but more often than not he made his luck.
If Chris or any of our SEAL shooters could PID—positively identify
—a bad guy with a weapon committing a hostile act or determine
reasonable certainty of hostile intent, they were cleared to engage. They
didn’t need my permission. If they asked for it, that meant reasonable
certainty of hostile intent was in question.
“Can you PID?” I asked.
“Just saw a dark shape of a man with a scoped weapon for a split
second,” replied Chris. “Then he stepped back from the window and
disappeared behind a curtain.”
“Roger that,” I said. “What building again?” I checked the battle map
that labeled each building or structure in the sector with a number. All of
us in this U.S. Army brigade task force operation, including a half dozen
different U.S. Army and Marine Corps battalions and thousands of
Soldiers and Marines on the ground, were operating on the same battle
map, which was crucial. But matching the numbers and street names on
the map to what we were seeing in front of us on the ground could be
quite a challenge. Here there were no streets signs or address numbers.
This was Ramadi. Amid the urban sprawl of trash-covered streets and
alleyways were huge bomb craters and walls pockmarked by bullets and
spray-painted with Arabic jihadist graffiti, which our interpreters
translated for us, such as: “We will fight until we reach either of the two
heavens: victory or martyrdom.” We were here to ensure it was the
latter.
Ahead of a huge Army force of U.S. Soldiers on foot, M1A2 Abrams
Main Battle Tanks and M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, our SEAL platoon
had foot-patrolled into the area in the early morning darkness. We set up
our sniper overwatch position in a two-story building a few hundred