W e went on DAs for another two and a half weeks, but there was only one where we had anything like real trouble. A guy wanted to fight as we were going in. Unfortunately for him, all he had were his bare fists. Here he’s facing a squad of soldiers, each heavily armed and protected by body armor. He was either stupid or courageous, or maybe both.
The GROM took care of him quickly. One less asshole on the wanted list.
We picked up a pretty wide variety of suspects—financiers for al-Qaeda, bomb-makers, insurgents, foreign insurgents—one time we picked up a truckload of them.
The GROM were a lot like SEALs: extremely professional at work, and very hard-core partiers after hours. They all had Polish vodka, and they especially loved this one brand named Zubrówka.
Zubrówka has been around for hundreds of years, though I’ve never seen it in America. There’s a blade of buffalo grass in each bottle; each blade comes from the same field in Poland. Buffalo grass is supposed to have medicinal properties, but the story related to me from my GROM friends was a lot more colorful—or maybe off-color. According to them, European bison known as wisent roam on this field and piss on the grass. The distillers put the blades in for an extra kick. (Actually, during the process, certain ingredients of the buffalo grass are safely neutralized, so just the flavor remains. But my friends didn’t tell me that—maybe it was too hard to translate.)
I was a little dubious, but the vodka proved to be as smooth as it was potent. It definitely supported their argument that the Russians don’t know anything about vodka and that Poles make it better.
B eing an American, officially I wasn’t supposed to be drinking. (And officially, I didn’t.)
That asinine rule only applied to U.S. servicemen. We couldn’t even buy a beer. Every other member of the coalition, be they Polish or whatever, could.
Fortunately, the GROM liked to share. They would also go to the duty-free shop at Baghdad airport and buy beer or whiskey or whatever the Americans working with them wanted.
I formed a friendship with one of their snipers named Matthew (they all took fake names, as part of their general security). We spent a lot of time talking about different rifles and scenarios. We compared notes on how they did things, the weapons they would use. Later on, I arranged to run some drills with them and gave them a bit of background on how SEALs operate. I taught them how we build our hides inside homes and showed them a few different drills to use to take home and train. We worked a lot with “snaps”—targets that pop up—and “movers”—targets that move left to right and vice versa.
What always seemed interesting to me was how well we communicated without using words, even on an op. They’d turn around and wave me up or back, whatever. If you’re a professional, you don’t need to be told what to do. You read off of each other and react.
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