Exclusive: The Trouble with Task Unit Bruiser
Jocko Willink, a Navy SEAL officer turned author and podcaster, has threatened to sue me over this story about allegations of civilian killings by his men in Iraq.
The trouble began, Marine Capt. Ryan Thornton said, with the arrival of a new group of Navy SEALs in the spring of 2006.
Thornton had deployed to Ramadi earlier that year as the executive officer of India Company, 3rd Battalion, 8th Marines. His mission, like that of many others at the time, was not only to fight al-Qaida in Iraq but also to forge fragile alliances with local sheiks—men whose loyalty was essential to any hope of restoring stability to the capital of Anbar Province.
Instead of routing out insurgents block-by-block as Coalition forces had done in Fallujah, commanders in Ramadi wanted to make the local civilian leaders allies in the fight against the terrorists in their midst.
The city of 400,000 on the banks of the Euphrates was a stronghold of the insurgency. Gunfights were routine. Abu Musab Zarqawi’s terrorist group, al-Qaida in Iraq, roamed the streets and mounted well-organized attacks. By early spring, however, Thornton said the military had made inroads. Relationships with tribal leaders were improving. Trust was beginning to take hold.
Then the SEALs arrived.
This unit was unlike the other professional special operators the Marines had worked with previously. This new group of SEALs patrolled Ramadi with Marvel’s “Punisher” skulls spray-painted on their body armor. The Marines saw Punisher skulls—a symbol of retribution and violence—as a surefire way to alienate the local population, the military hoped to win over. And painting a black skull on yourself in a city full of enemy snipers wasn’t the best tactical decision either. At a distance, the skulls looked like the same black dots that Marines shot on the rifle range.
Then, the real trouble started.
Thornton says the sheiks began asking why civilians were getting killed. Unarmed men were being gunned down in the streets.
One case in particular marked a turning point. In May 2006, an elderly Iraqi was shot and killed while doing yard work—raking gravel—at his home in Ramadi. Thornton says the local sheiks abruptly stopped meeting with the U.S. military in response.
Thornton told me another Marine company commander briefed him that the SEALs were responsible for the elderly man’s slaying. When the SEALs discovered the man was unarmed, they rolled up the body in a carpet and tried to dispose of it. Thornton says he was told to prepare for retaliation. Following this incident, he says, a Marine was shot in the head on what was supposed to be a routine patrol. (The incident with the body in the carpet was recorded in a secret U.S. Army field report. The report, published by WikiLeaks, blamed insurgents. Thornton says he doesn’t know who filed the report or why.)
Thornton told his story—first on a podcast and now, here, under his full name—after quietly struggling for years with his belief that the SEALs’ out-of-control behavior in Ramadi may have claimed the lives of Americans. More than 50 servicemen and women, including 17 Marines and two SEALs, were killed in action over the six months that the SEAL unit was in Ramadi, according to a Defense Department casualty database. Thornton says he provided his account not for his benefit or publicity but in the hopes it would prompt others to come forward.
“Gut-shooting women”
After the incident with the body in the carpet, Thornton says the sheiks warned the Marines that more retaliations were coming. “There’s a group of Americans that are killing innocent women and children and shooting Iraqis in the street for doing absolutely nothing,” Thornton told me in a phone interview. “The sheiks are going to be cooperative? Absolutely not. They are telling people: ‘Don’t trust the Americans. If you need to fight the Americans, go ahead and do it. Do what you need to do.’ I know that because I was in those fucking meetings. I saw the change when this SEAL unit was there. That’s the change that SEAL unit did to the entire battlespace.”
Ramadi quickly spiraled out of control. According to the Army’s official history of the Iraq War, Gen. George Casey, the senior Coalition commander in Iraq, observed in May 2006 that “no one is really in control of the city right now, not the government, not the terrorists, not the coalition.” Sean MacFarland, the Army colonel Casey sent to “fix” Ramadi, arrived in June to find the enemy controlling the city center. He joked that areas of the city map should be labeled, “Here be monsters.” (MacFarland, now a retired lieutenant general, didn’t respond to a request seeking comment but wrote in a military journal that he had a “particularly good working relationship” with the SEALs in Ramadi.)
To Thornton, it was obvious that the SEALs, who he says were “gut-shooting women from their firing position of the hospital,” were not only directed to act the way they did but were also protected by their leadership. In a letter describing his experiences, Thornton said the combined leadership of the 3/8 Marines and other local units reported the SEALs’ “wild and wanton acts of violence” to their chain of command, “but our reports fell on deaf ears.”
It was not until September 2006, when al-Qaida in Iraq kidnapped and murdered a sheik and launched a brazen attack on a tribally-connected police station, that local leaders joined forces with the U.S. military to drive out the terrorists in what became known as the Anbar Awakening.
Marine Sgt. Graham Platner deployed to Ramadi in March 2006 with the 3rd Battalion, 8th Marines, Kilo Company, which was responsible for securing the city center. Platner was a machine gunner and was often assigned to protect Ramadi’s dingy, weed-strewn government center from terrorists who mounted regular attacks on it from the abandoned buildings that surrounded it.
An armored platoon drove the province’s governor to the center in the morning, where he sat in a usually empty office while a SEAL sniper team sometimes set up on the roof. The SEAL snipers took out legitimate targets, Platner said, but they also fired on civilians. “I did see a SEAL sniper team set up on the roof of the government center and shoot a random guy walking across the road who seemed to not require shooting,” Platner told me. The man was unarmed and wasn’t displaying hostile intent. “My memory is they said he was a spotter, but we knew what people spotting actually looked like, and that wasn’t it,” Platner said. He also heard multiple first-hand accounts from other Marines who saw similar things. “You could come up with a reason to shoot damn near anybody in that city,” Platner told me.
Years later, the Marines learned that these SEALs were part of Task Unit “Bruiser,” one of the most decorated units in Naval Special Warfare history. Fourteen SEALs were awarded Silver Stars, the military’s third-highest decoration for valor, in Ramadi in 2006, according to USA Today. Task Unit Bruiser’s members included Jonny Kim, who became a Harvard-trained physician and NASA astronaut. (Kim didn’t respond to a message sent to NASA’s public affairs office.) The unit’s commanding officer, former Lt. Cmdr. John “Jocko” Willink, is now a leadership guru, popular podcaster, and best-selling author. But the unit’s best-known member was Chris Kyle, who wrote a No. 1 best-selling memoir, American Sniper, which became one of the most financially successful war movies ever made.
Questions have swirled around Task Unit Bruiser for years. A member of SEAL Team Six, who observed Task Unit Bruiser’s operations in Ramadi in 2006, reported that SEAL snipers, and Chris Kyle in particular, were shooting unarmed men, women, and children. Eric Deming, a former Navy SEAL, has publicly called out Willink’s poor leadership of Task Unit Bruiser, saying it contributed not only to the unnecessary deaths of innocent Iraqi civilians but also to the preventable deaths of Marines and SEALs in Ramadi.
Jocko responds
In a statement I’m posting here, Jocko Willink told me there was intense scrutiny on Kyle and the other snipers he oversaw. “Task Unit Bruiser’s deployment was one of the most observed, tracked, and documented deployments in the history of Naval Special Warfare,” Willink said. “Every enemy fighter engaged with lethal force was documented with sworn statements and investigated to ensure the Rules of Engagement were followed. Every single engagement by all members of Task Unit Bruiser was deemed within the Rules of Engagement. No women or children were ever engaged.”
Willink concluded his statement by saying, “Any and all individuals who make allegations without regard to the well-documented records regarding our missions, and based on ‘edited’ videos, or on rumor or conjecture, clearly expose themselves to swift legal action for making, disseminating, or publishing such false and defamatory statements.”
Still, Willink acknowledged on his podcast that Task Unit Bruiser snipers killed unarmed civilians in a “small number” of instances in Ramadi. These shootings were immediately investigated and deemed to fall within the Rules of Engagement:
“We engaged hundreds of enemy. Did we have a small number of engagements where military-aged males were maneuvering or behaving in a manner that was congruent with enemy tactics? And they got shot?
Yes, that absolutely happened. Guys digging holes, guys maneuvering in a tactical manner toward friendly forces, guys driving past clearly marked checkpoints. Like, there were some cases where this type of behavior was identified by snipers, and the snipers deemed that military-aged males were displaying hostile intent, meaning this sniper is looking at someone maneuvering, running, digging a hole, driving, and decided, hey, this person needs to be killed, they're a threat, they have hostile intent.
Sometimes, there was a warning shot, if possible. Sometimes there wasn't. And then, once neutralized, those individuals that were shot were inspected. And if it became clear, once the target was neutralized, that they ultimately were not a threat, then we initiated the investigation.”
Willink didn’t respond when I asked how many times this occurred.
Willink said civilian killings would have been impossible to conceal in Ramadi. Terrorists used civilian deaths for anti-American propaganda. U.S. commanders met the governor of Al Anbar province, apologized for civilian killings, and paid reparations. The local population staged a handful of large protests over civilian deaths. Any SEAL caught behaving the way the Marines described would have been stopped immediately, Willink said, and he would have been arrested.
“To think that you could be out there just killing people was just, it’s a just a completely insane thought,” Willink said on another podcast. “Every civilian casualty was a catastrophe.”
Since leaving the Navy, Willink has become a leadership expert. A thickset man with a close-cropped head who wears a resting expression of menace, Willink co-authored Extreme Ownership, a best-selling book, in 2015. Today, he and some of the men he commanded in Task Unit Bruiser teach businesses the philosophy that leaders must be responsible for everything.
According to a former Task Unit Bruiser sniper, Willink’s leadership in Ramadi and a fixation with enemy kill totals caused friction in the ranks. “Jocko and the officers had decided to feed their combat addiction with any ops they could get for us,” former SEAL Kevin “Dauber” Lacz wrote in his 2016 book, The Last Punisher. “The higher the body count rose, the more the leadership wanted to add to it, no matter the risk.” Lacz says he and others were troubled by the “daytime presence patrols” that used him and his teammates to draw enemy fire. “Basically, we were supposed to walk down the street in the middle of the day until somebody shot at us. Then, we would try to kill them,” Lacz explained. (Willink has said the patrols were intended to win over the civilian population.)
Things came to a head on Aug. 2, 2006. Lacz’s teammate, Ryan Job, was blinded by enemy fire on a mission in Ramadi. Commanders sent the SEALs back to the scene later the same day on what Lacz called a “retaliation mission.” That decision cost Marc Lee his life. The 28-year-old from Hood River, Oregon, was felled by enemy fire, making him the first SEAL killed in Iraq. Morale in Task Unit Bruiser plummeted. “Daytime patrols stopped not because Teamguys were adverse to patrolling in the daylight but because there was true resentment in the ranks toward the reckless nature of the decision-making process,” Lacz wrote.
The “Legend” of Chris Kyle
The two ex-Marines, Thornton and Platner, told their stories about Task Unit Bruiser in May on Green Beret Chronicles, a YouTube show popular in military circles.
Daniel Blackwell, a former enlisted Marine who said he served under Thornton, posted a YouTube video response. “Ramadi,” he says, “was a shitshow.” But Blackwell, who criticized his former XO’s leadership, says he never heard any reports of the SEALs doing anything inappropriate. He said his memory of events is that Task Unit Bruiser worked well with the 3/8 Marines.
Others had a different recollection. After appearing on the podcast, Platner heard from a Marine who investigated the shooting of two men on a moped by a SEAL sniper in Ramadi. Platner didn’t realize until I told him that the shooter, in that instance, was Chris Kyle.
Kyle is known as the deadliest sniper in U.S. military history, and the moped story became another part of the Kyle legend. Kyle wrote that he saw the man on the back of the moped drop a backpack containing an improvised explosive device (IED) into a pothole. Kyle then fired a single .30-caliber round that killed both men, as he put it, “like a scene from Dumb and Dumber.”
Kyle says the July 2006 shooting later became “controversial.” The Marines witnessed the incident, and, to them, it looked like the men on the moped were unarmed and showed no hostile intent. A Marine patrol checked the pothole and found no trace of the IED. (Kyle said someone made off with it.) A military JAG lawyer questioned Kyle, but nothing came of it. “Fortunately,” Kyle wrote, “there were plenty of witnesses to what had happened.” One of them was Lacz, who signed a statement that lethal force was justified.
Word started to spread in the SEAL community in 2006 that Kyle was shooting unarmed civilians. As the enemy kill totals soared in Ramadi, a member of SEAL Team Six, Jim Foreman, was sent to observe operations. Journalist Matt Cole reported in his 2022 book Code Over Country that Foreman told his superiors that Task Unit Bruiser snipers were shooting unarmed men, women, and children. Kyle, in particular, stood out for his willingness to fire on targets others wouldn’t touch, like a boy who insurgents had forced to serve as an enemy spotter. Cole reported that Kyle not only shot the boy in the street, but when the boy’s family rushed to help him, he shot at them, too, but missed. Kyle still recorded four enemy kills. (Foreman did not respond to messages left seeking comment.)
Civilian killings also figured in the well-publicized defamation lawsuit against Kyle brought by former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura, who served as a member of the Navy Underwater Demolition/SEAL Teams during Vietnam. Kyle boasted that he decked Ventura in a 2006 bar fight after the former governor allegedly told him that, in Iraq, “We were doing the wrong thing, killing men and women and children and murdering.” In 2014, a federal court jury in Minneapolis concluded that Kyle’s story was not true and awarded Ventura $1.85 million. After an appeal, Ventura reached a confidential settlement with Kyle’s estate.
Kyle’s prowess as a sniper came up during the Ventura lawsuit. Kyle single-handedly accounted for nearly half of Task Unit Bruiser’s kills. Yet other snipers in Task Unit Bruiser, questioned by Ventura’s lawyer, David Bradley Olsen, seemed at a loss to explain why Kyle had so many more kills than they did. Kevin Lacz said he had seven “confirmed” kills, one-thirteenth of Kyle’s numbers in Ramadi. Lacz and other Task Unit Bruiser snipers defaulted to the same word-for-word explanation for Kyle’s runaway body count. “He’s always in the right place at the right time,” Lacz said.
Kyle’s tendency to be in the right place at the right time led his teammates to call him “The Legend.” After retiring from the Navy, the former Texas ranch hand embraced the nickname and built a legend for himself with help from Hollywood and his publisher. “The Navy credits me with more kills as a sniper”—160—“than any other American service member, past or present,” he wrote in American Sniper. But he boasted that the actual number was closer to twice as much.
Kyle was shot and killed in 2013 at a Texas shooting range by Eddie Ray Routh, a Marine veteran struggling with PTSD. He was 38.
A Navy investigation later found that Kyle had overstated his medals in the book, claiming two Silver Stars and five Bronze Stars when his record supported one Silver Star and four Bronze Stars.
A competition for bodies
Most military snipers don’t brag about their kill numbers, and the Pentagon doesn’t track them. SEAL leadership emphasizes “mission success, team effectiveness, and the overall strategic impact of operations,” said Cmdr. Ben Tisdale, a spokesman for Naval Special Warfare Command. During the Battle of Ramadi, however, SEAL snipers competed to see who got the most kills. “You know, it was just a little friendly competition between the platoons,” Jeremiah “JP” Dinnell, another SEAL sniper in Task Unit Bruiser, said in a deposition for a libel lawsuit filed over Kyle’s book.
Both Kyle and Dinnell said the competition was encouraged by the unnamed “boss” of Task Unit Bruiser. (Willink was the commanding officer of Task Unit Bruiser.) Reviewing the sniper totals, Kyle said the SEAL boss “tweaked” him as another sniper took the lead. “He’s gonna break your record,” Kyle quotes the commander as saying. “You better get on that gun more.” Dinnell, with 47 kills, said he was Kyle’s rival, and this passage in American Sniper rang true. “I could just hear our boss heckling him back and forth,” Dinnell said in a deposition. Willink didn’t respond when I asked him whether he encouraged this competition.
The boss’ heckling lit a fire under Kyle. “All of a sudden,” Kyle wrote, “I seemed to have every stinkin’ bad guy in the city running across my scope. My totals shot up, and there was no catchin’ me.” According to Kyle’s Silver Star citation, he recorded “91 confirmed enemy fighters killed and dozens more probably killed or wounded” in 125 days in Ramadi. That astonishing figure works out to one “confirmed” kill every 33 hours
Military snipers can rack up high body counts in a short amount of time. Over 13 days in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004, Sgt. Ethan Place, a Marine sniper, killed 32 insurgents trying to sneak into position to attack Echo Company of the 2nd Battalion, 1st Regiment. However, Place’s Silver Star citation doesn’t mention the figure 32. “He didn’t kill 32 people. He saved numerous lives by protecting our perimeter,” Sgt. Maj. William Skiles told the Los Angeles Times. “That’s how the Marines look at it.”
There’s a good reason why the Marines don’t compete for kill totals, and their commanders don’t push them to kill more people. The hard-won lesson of Vietnam was when the body count is the measure of success, war becomes a numbers game, and dead civilians get counted as enemy kills. (“Confirming” kills in Vietnam was rumored to involve collecting severed human ears.) As former Marine Lt. Philip Caputo wrote in his Vietnam War classic A Rumor of War, “The pressure on unit commanders to produce enemy corpses was intense, and they, in turn, communicated it to their troops. This led to such practices as counting civilians as Viet Cong. ‘If it’s dead and Vietnamese, it's VC,’ was our rule of thumb in the bush. It is not surprising, therefore, that some men acquired a contempt for human life and predilection for taking it.”
Now, Marines who served in Ramadi in 2006 alongside Task Unit Bruiser have come forward after nearly two decades to reveal that SEAL snipers were shooting and killing unarmed civilians. The Marines can’t say for certain Kyle was the one responsible, but they have not forgotten what happened in Ramadi after the SEALs arrived.
Amy Forsythe, a former Marine combat correspondent who served as a public affairs officer in Ramadi in 2006, told me the SEALs were “reckless” and said they appeared to be responsible for much of the chaos in the region.
“But no one wanted to call them out because they were SEALs,” Forsythe said.
From my experience working with, being attached to various seal teams, Code Over Country is the most precise look into the seal team CULT-ure.
Guys trained to break things not win hearts and minds are sent in by lying scumbags in Washington Cheney bush and the rest of the mil industrial spook media complex and 20 years later its a problem?