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

watch it. As the sound came to life and the images appeared, they were as vivid as my memory.
    All the way back. I felt drawn to the experiences, the men I fought with, and the memories shared. I felt life lived at its fullest. Althoughsomeone had taken Chris’s life on that February day, they couldn’t take my memories of him. The same is true of Biggles, Marc Lee, D-Rock, JT, and the others who helped shape who I am. I was being drawn to another life. I was back to where I’d started again. Back to the Teams.

ONE
TADPOLE
    “It pays to be a winner.”
    —unofficial motto of the SEAL Teams
    W HEN I WAS a child, I was sometimes described as “tenacious,” which is really just a euphemism for stubborn. Whatever the case, I’ve always been one to travel my own path, even when it meant making decisions that didn’t make much sense to others around me. At times, I refused to give up on things that no one saw much merit in. Other times, I changed course abruptly when it seemed to make sense to stay put.
    My tenacity littered my central Connecticut childhood with a strange dichotomy of accomplishments and incompletions: I pitched on a Little League baseball team that nearly won the New England title, then quit the next year to focus on soccer, a sport I wasn’t nearly the same standout in. I was a Boy Scout for more than ten years and then quit before making Eagle Scout because the idea of the project was too tedious to me. Similarly, I quit my high school golf team when I got bored with the sport, despite excelling at it. Instead, I took up swimming and competed at the state level by my senior year.
    I was in possession of one of the worst things a teenager lacking real motivation can have: God-given talent. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be good. I did, and I toed the line. I went to class and stayed on the honors list, but nothing challenged me enough to feel invested. I consistently earned high marks and praise without ever feeling truly tested. At my all-boys Catholic prep school, the stakes were never high enough for me to commit 100 percent of my effort to securing my future.
    At eighteen, I saw college mostly as an opportunity to get out on my own. I stumbled through two semesters at James Madison University in Virginia, failing spectacularly with about a 0.7 GPA. By the fall of 2001, I was a nineteen-year-old undergrad with a Mohawk, any number of bruises or shiners acquired in brawls and fistfights, and a general ambivalence toward just about everything that wasn’t girls, booze, or rugby.
    Although I couldn’t make it to class or turn in my assignments, my first attempt at college wasn’t a complete loss. Early in my first semester, I stumbled into the Rugby House on Harrison Street, and it quickly became my home away from home. The rugby team took me under their collective wing. They were young men with names like Blumpkin (RIP), Strapper, Spidey, Beardo, Reeper, Snorty, Metal Head Nick, Dirty Dustin, AY, and Weird Jason. On Bastard Wednesdays we finished a keg while listening to metal, playing beer pong, and lifting weights. Chicks dared not enter. We hosted theme parties. We brawled with fraternity boys. We crushed it on the pitch against a large portion of our opponents.
    I embraced the lifestyle, some might say a little too much. My parents were not impressed when they showed up at Parents’ Weekend and I had a black eye I’d gotten in a match. They didn’t love my Mohawk. I found my niche in the team, however, and I did well for myself. If my stint as a young college student taught me anything, it’s that I am a pack animal.
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    I woke up in the Rugby House on September 11, 2001, and logged on to AOL Instant Messenger. The scrolling ticker disclosed the same awful news the rest of the world was learning. For whatever reason, the magnitude of the situation didn’t really register at first. It seemed surreal. I brushed my teeth, got dressed, and casually answered my mom’s call when my phone