Read The Last Punisher: A SEAL Team THREE Sniper's True Account of the Battle of Ramadi for Free Online

hours. As the saying goes, it’s the most fun you never want to have again.
    On one of the last nights in Kodiak, I was camped with my squad of about ten guys when Matz had the watch. He shook me awake. “Lacz,” he hissed, “bear!”
    “Bullshit,” I answered, still half-asleep.
    “No bullshit,” he whispered. “Bear!”
    I opened my eyes and looked in the direction he was pointing. Sure enough, a large grizzly sow was making her way into our camp. I sat up cautiously and began alerting the others. Bito had already climbed about fifteen feet up a tree and was tossing the bear our freeze-dried Mountain House meals.
    “What the fuck,” I muttered. I grasped on to a branch and began climbing another tree nearby. I thought we were all safely in the limbs overhead when a flash went off. KPM, a Golden Gloves boxer from Philly, stood about ten feet from the bear with a disposable Kodak camera. He was frantically snapping pictures of her, pausing after each one to wind the film. The clicking sound of his thumb turning the little gear was audible even to me up in my tree. The sow stood up on her hind legs and KPM snapped one last shot before running away. He found a tree of his own and we all waited in silence while the bear rummaged through our camp for a few minutes and then wandered away.
    “You’re fucking crazy,” I told KPM.
    “Yo, Kev, but these are going to be awesome pictures,” he said.
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    Because my original military specialty was medical corpsman, I was sent to the Army’s 18D Special Operations Combat Medic School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. In July 2004, I classed up with my 18D peers, training alongside other members of the Special Operations community: Army Green Berets, Navy corpsmen assigned to Marine Recon, or Ranger medics. For six months, we learned tactical combat casualty care.
    We also learned a lot of civilian medicine, and I spent a month on rotation in Jacksonville, Florida, at Shands Jacksonville, a level 1 trauma center. As I helped treat car accident victims, gunshot wounds, and drug overdoses, I began to picture myself in combat, practicing what I’d learned. Elbow deep in a body cavity, I could feel my resolve fortifying like armor.
    I finished 18D in January 2005, and it was finally time to get to a platoon. It was time to pick our billets and the SEALs who graduated bickered over what was available. I had graduated the highest and could have picked first, but some of the other guys had family ties and reasons to want to go to either coast. I wanted to go to a Team on the West Coast but not enough to deprive somebody of proximity to his family. I let the three guys with preferences pick, and then it came down to my roommate, Sean, and me. There was a spot on each coast, and we both wanted San Diego.
    We decided to flip a coin.
    I won and got my pick. By a sheer stroke of luck, I was headed to SEAL Team THREE.

TWO
NEWGUY
    “Do your job.”
    —Bill Belichick
    I MAY BE THE only SEAL to have ever driven up to the Team on his first day in a minivan. I was twenty-three, fresh out of Special Operations combat medic school, and driving my parents’ hand-me-down Chevy Venture. It wasn’t exactly cool by Teamguy standards, and it’s very possible that I hold this unique distinction because no other newguy has ever been stupid or masochistic enough to essentially paint a target on his forehead by driving Mommy’s minivan to meet a bunch of guys who kill people for a living. Eventually, I figured the only thing to do was make it cooler, so some buddies and I spray-painted it flat black with flames on the hood, iron crosses on the hubcaps, and “Polish Pride” across the body. We called it the “Murder Van.”
    Most of SEAL Team THREE was deployed in Iraq and Asia when I checked in to Charlie Platoon in January 2005. My main objective at that point was to avoid any unwanted attention from the few nondeployed Teamguys whose boredom might bring on any number of sadistic hazing