Adam Gamal (a pseudonym created to keep his family safe from harm) served in the most elite unit in the US Army and deployed more than a dozen times. His awards include the Bronze Star Medal, the Purple Heart, and the Legion of Merit. Below is an excerpt from Adam’s book (written with Kelly Kennedy) about his unit―a military group so clandestine even its name is classified.
We went wherever the Army needed us. If we were tracking bad guys and they popped up in Timbuktu, then that’s where we went. But a group of us stayed on the pulse of East Africa. This small group constantly briefed everybody else about what was going on so that, even when we were not deployed, we knew what needed to be done. We didn’t miss a beat when we went back—always knew who the new players were and where the power struggles were and who was sleeping with whose wife and who was trying to stab somebody else in the back.
Days of Our Lives, Unit-style.
Al-Qaeda is just like any other dysfunctional organization. There might have been a smart, well-educated guy, but he wasn’t as strong as the thug. There were guys who were so smart we knew we’d never catch them. They simply did not leave a trace. They planned everything. But the alpha guy wasn’t necessarily the smart guy. In al-Shabaab, in Somalia, the thug was in charge.
We had no choice but to work well together—we never knew what we would encounter.
In one country, we often felt as if we were being followed.
We were, generally speaking.
But once, we were driving—to lunch or work or a meeting with a source—and a car in front of us started swerving back and forth.
That seems bad.
We looked behind us to make sure no one was acting up on the other end. Is this guy trying to harass us? Back and forth, back and forth. Is he trying to block us? We figured the best way to deal with the situation was to get out of the situation—and to figure out if we were even part of the situation.
We pulled up next to the car, using the defensive-driving techniques we had been taught.
Back and forth, back and forth.
And we laughed.
The man drove with one hand. In that hand, he also had a chunk of khat—basically a stimulant that’s popular in some areas of the Middle East and Africa that’s made from twigs from a shrub. Every time he wanted another bite of khat, he turned the wheel so the drug was near his mouth, tore a chunk off with his teeth, and then turned the wheel back.
Back and forth.
Here we were, all paranoid because we were in the kind of place that makes you paranoid, and this fucker was just trying to get a hit.
Another time, we flew from the capital to a coastal city to go after a target. One of their guys got into our aircraft, sat on the floor, and pulled out a bag of khat.
“Hey, what’s going on?” the pilot asked. “He’s sitting on the floor and using drugs on a US aircraft?”
“You want to tell him?” I asked. “If he wants to sit on the floor, he can sit on the floor. We’re going to go, we’re going to detain some guys, and we’re gonna call it a day.” We learned to pick our battles.
During my travels in northern Africa, I found the same hateful cassette tapes I had heard as a child in Alexandria.
Those hateful messages could lead to dangerous days for us.
We were once in a country in the Middle East, tracking training camps and so on, and we went to a small city on the Red Sea—there were four of us. Of course, we didn’t have Google Maps, so we were running on Garmin. We had a general idea of where we were—a point on a map—but not the “what” of where we were. We ended up on a tiny street, and we had no choice but to continue down that street.
All of a sudden, we were surrounded by AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades, and grenades laid out on tables for sale.
Shit.
I drove. The guy sitting next to me was Mexican American, so he could pass. The guy in the back, Sonny, was Italian American, so he could pass. But Deacon? Deacon was six feet, five inches and blond.
“Deacon. Get the fuck down.”
He slumped down as much as a six-foot-five dude can just as we approached a checkpoint. This was not a government checkpoint. This was an illegal weapons dealer checkpoint.
There were kiosks filled with handguns, Russian weapons, helmets, military uniforms. And about halfway through, we hit the checkpoint in the middle.
“What are you guys doing here?” the guy at the checkpoint asked, in Arabic. I mean, I can easily pass for an Arab, but maybe not someone who should have been in that market.
“I’m just an Egyptian guy,” I said. “I work for the phone company. I think we’re lost.”
“Yes,” he said. “You are.”
But the street was too small for a U-turn.
“Can we just keep going?” I asked.
“Let me get you to the other side,” he said.
He jumped up on the running board, arm slung through the window holding on to the grab handle, Deacon huddled down in the back seat holding his breath.
We drove about half a mile like that, him chatting with people along the way.
“Yeah, yeah—they got lost.”
We got to the end, and he gave us directions.
I didn’t think we were going to live through that one.
Copyright © 2024 by Adam Gamal and Kelly Kennedy.
Adam Gamal is a pseudonym created to keep the author and his family safe from harm. Gamal served in the most elite units in the US Army, deployed more than a dozen times, and finally retired in 2016. His awards include the Bronze Star Medal, the Purple Heart, and the Legion of Merit. He is currently an international consultant for a security organization.
Kelly Kennedy served as a soldier in Desert Storm and Mogadishu, Somalia. She has written for The Salt Lake Tribune, The Portland Oregonian, The Chicago Tribune, and Army Times. She is the author of They Fought for Each Other: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Hardest Hit Unit in Iraq and the coauthor, with Kate Germano, of Fight Like a Girl: The Truth Behind How Female Marines are Trained. She lives in Virginia.
