sometimes people will ask me like uh did you get were you ever scared and the answer is yeah I was and um one of the one of the times that was the scariest for me was actually on a sniper OverWatch on my first appointment where we started getting murdered and um sort of like kind of unpack unpack that um typically we would you know we'd we'd go in at night and we would take a house that we thought would give us good sight lines for whatever we wanted to watch and one one day we were
watching I think we were watching MSR Michigan for people planning v-bids or not V bits I'm sorry IEDs we also knew that some partner forces were going to be patrolling through that area so we wanted to make sure that if they came under contact that we could support them and so I remember we came in you know in the middle of the night um there was a family in the house and when when there is and there often was you you can do a couple things you can either you can either uh make them stay
in the house or you can let them you can let them go and either way um especially at that point in the war that was in 2006 um the locals kind of knew what was going on whether you let them out or you kept them because they would kind of do check in on people because they knew that type of stuff happened like if if the Ryan family didn't come out send their kids to school by you know zero eight hundred they knew there was a good chance the Americans were in their house right um
or if you let them go they're probably going to tell people hey there's Americans in our house and so I remember going in there and then you know taking this house that we thought had good sight lines and then um getting all getting all set up and ready to go for the next day and as a new guy you know my job wasn't to be on a sniper rifle my job was to hold security and so I remember my job was to watch the west side of the house and so they you know I found
a good spot by by a window a little bit back into the room where I could watch you know pretty much everything that was going down on the left side of the house and you know I took off a lot of my gear but just had like my frags like laid out laid out by you know by the window and I had a Mark 48 machine gun and um you know as the sun came up and most of our snipers we probably had four or five snipers on the op most of them were facing north
watching this MSR Michigan you know road that was out in front of the house and uh I remember I don't I don't know maybe Maybe I don't know maybe an hour or so after daylight one of our snipers took a shot killed you know killed a bad guy and then probably you know probably three or more three or four more times our snipers started just started engaging people I remember one of them you know one of them shot this uh this guy in this car um on my side of the house where I could see
it like he it was uh shot into a car windshield like the front the front windshield I remember looking out the side of my window and sure enough this right in the driver's side you know front of this windshield had a big old spider spider vein bullet hole in it and this guy was dead one of our sniper shot him through the head and um it was it was in it was it got pretty Eerie really quick because um he they the sniper shot him right in front of a school whoa and So within and
I was so I was watching this everybody's amped up shots are being fired we're starting to kill bad guys and I remember um probably 10 minutes later a bunch of women and children first a couple women or a couple kids I think came out saw it and then the screaming started right these women and children are just screaming and crying and then I remember them pulling his dead body out of the car and pulling him into the school and my Spidey senses were through the started going through the roof it just made so like my
Spidey Sense is new yeah they were like there's no there's no better way to start a fight than to rile up women and children because as they get riled up emotions start getting riled up and then people want revenge and I just knew it I knew we were gonna get hit and so sure enough like 45 minutes later you know the Small Arms start you know first it's indirect you can just hear it cracking over you know cracking over the heads and uh and then it starts getting more direct and you can start to hear
it you know you know hitting the building a little bit and uh you know all everybody's on full alert just ready to rock and roll and I don't know maybe 10 or 15 minutes later the first mortar you hear it pop up in the air and uh there's a guy named Mike one of our snipers who is on the same level as me we weren't on the roof we were on the the level below the roof and he had he had propped his Mark 11 up on a desk and that's what he was using as
his platform and Mark 11's a sniper rifle for those Mark 11 is like a it's like a sniperized AR-10 or a 762 magazine fed sniper rifle and with with a suppressor on it and uh I remember Mike Mike was a badass like Mike was you know tough as nails but definitely the type of guy you don't want to mess with and I remember as soon as that first um you know mortar round popped up in the air I heard Mike's voice change and he yells over to me he's like tape cover and uh and I
was like if Mike's telling me that and I can hear it in his voice this is serious and so first first more round comes up you know here at ex here it explode not a direct hit and then they just start popping these mortar rounds up in the air and I'll tell you Sean I don't think I've ever been as scared in my life because it is like the movies man you know if you you can hear those things whistling through the air and the difference like when you get shot at it happens so fast
you don't really have time to be scared right but with the with with mortar rounds incoming like and you can hear those things whistling for five six seconds in the air the whole time you're thinking is this it I wonder if if this you know if this is a direct hit if this hits this house we're done and uh thankfully um these guys really didn't want it I could tell they didn't want an extended fight they kind of wanted to just um see if they could hit us with the mortar rounds and then and then
get the hell out of here so we didn't pinpoint their location and kill them but because I think they only launched like four or five more rounds one of them I do remember one of them though hit on the west side of the house probably like 60 yards from my window and frag you know flew up and through the window and that you know that was you know pretty pretty close but I'm just glad that you know they they were off on their on their shots but then um our aoic at the time called in
already and uh from uh I think from from habania and that was pretty cool to hear the big guns start you know start going off in the distance and then the tree line that we thought we were taking the mortars from you know started getting started getting rocked and and the fight the fight was over at that point but that's always that's a scary feeling man not only not only here in Mortar rounds you know you know whistle whistle through the air and not knowing where they're gonna hit and you're taking Small Arms fire but
like when you're when you're in a sniper OverWatch or a situation like that you're you're usually in one of the worst neighborhoods on planet Earth and there's like 10 to 15 of you and you're in somebody else's City and you're constantly thinking how many how many bad guys can they muster to send at us yeah and if you know when you know that you're probably not going to get extracted till Nightfall because nobody wants to risk the vehicles in in the daylight which you know we didn't always own we usually own the night you know
that we we could be in for it you know for a while yeah it's that it's like a Feeling I've been in a couple of similar situations and uh it's like feeling of helplessness there's nothing you can do yeah you can't figure out where it's coming from if you can like it's the true line you can yeah there's no target to shoot you're just gonna eat it and hope it stops them you know hope you don't eat it and hope it stops soon and there's it's completely out of your control yeah but yeah damn how
did you guys get out of there like I said they I think I think on that off we were gonna stay for a couple days but I think they decided to pull us I think they pulled us that night and as soon as it as soon as it got Nightfall um we uh we went to a rally point and and uh you know the our guys came in and picked us up yeah but other team guys are yeah yeah yeah damn and when you say 10 to 15 guys they're spread out in different ops right
no on that one we were all in the same we were all in that one we were all in the same house but yeah that does happen sometimes where you spread them out but I want to say there were probably there were probably 10 12 guys on that op okay and then we had our partner for us was downstairs holding holding security um but yeah it was uh you know it was an interesting you know definitely in that was probably it wasn't the closest call I've ever had but it was the most scared I've ever
been be in combat just because the anticipation factor that come with mortars and you just being able to hear it for five six seconds before it hits somewhere and you're wondering where it's gonna hit that you know that yeah what was the closest goal the closest call would be would have been on my next on my on my next platoon my third and final platoon and we uh we got ambushed by three three guys at about 110 yards and and I was like laying in the street nowhere to go just watching Tracer rounds just fly
over us oh [ __ ] yeah it was it was pretty wild man um I uh I was Point man that night and so I was leading us we had like a 600 600 yard Patrol into the target house that we were gonna hit and we were going after a dude that was making v-bids and IEDs and just a really bad dude and if unfortunately it was the first night that we'd give in our partner Force the eight digit grid coordinates of the Target that we were going to hit and sure enough we got lit
up you know that's been going on in Warfare for a long time you know just partner force is playing both sides of the yeah you know the the fence and uh it was It was kind of uh surreal just because the uh there were I think two guys had an egg two guys had AKs and then one guy had a um it looked like an rpk a belt-fed heavy machine gun and he had he had built it together probably two two belts probably 200 rounds of tracer so you could just see every round just like
flying over your head and thank God they were shooting you know maybe a foot or so high and so none of us got hit but when when I went back that night and looked at it on the uh because we had a pre we had a predator we had two Apaches and then a C-130 overhead and I watched the Predator feed and we actually used some of the tools to like measure how far we were from them and uh it was 110 yards which is not it that's not far for those type of weapons at
all so that was definitely the my closest call hey everybody I'm Sean Ryan click here to subscribe to the Sean Ryan Show YouTube channel for the hottest and most compelling interviews that you will not see anywhere else I've also made a playlist of all the previous SRS episodes so they're easy to find you can find that right here
