There was general disquiet about the wars against the tribesmen all over the United States. And for SEALS there was something else disquieting: there was a feeling that the US military Rules of Engagement were tying their hands, that even the special operators were being hamstrung by red tape.
This was especially true of the rules that insisted US armed forces were not permitted to open fire on known al-Qaeda killers until they themselves were fired upon. The SEALs had a wry interpretation of this: “You mean I’m not allowed to kill him until after he’s killed me?”
On top of this, 2007 had bestowed a special sadness on all the Teams when one of the top serving combat petty officers, Clark Schwedler of SEAL Team 4, was killed by enemy fire as he and his platoon laid siege to an al-Qaeda stronghold in Anbar Province.
Trapped in the house were the terrorists the SEALs knew had recently downed a coalition helicopter. But they were heavily armed, and the vanguard of the SEAL assault came under attack as they moved forward. Team Leader Clark Schwedler went down in a hail of gunfire, mortally wounded. His SEAL teammate, Special Operations Chief (SOC) Doug Day was hit fifteen times, his rifle shot from his grasp. Doug drew his pistol and shot three of the enemy as he fell to the ground. Another SEAL, who had also been shot, administered life-saving aid to SOC Day after the firefight was won.
The death of SO2 Clark Schwedler was one of those tragedies that affected everyone who had known him. SEALs on the far coast from Team 4’s HQ in Virginia Beach attended a special service for the ex-Michigan State oarsman, who had served four years as a SEAL.
The son of a US judge, C. Joseph Schwedler, Clark was one of the SEALs’ very best battlefield operators, specially selected as combat adviser to the Iraqi Army Second Brigade. Assigned to Special Warfare Task Unit Fallujah, he took part in 108 combat missions and was credited with being the driving force in the unit’s many successes.
Clark’s devotion to the SEALs was timeless. He swore by the core values of the Navy: honor, courage, and commitment. And now he was gone, aged only twenty-seven. And very few of his friends in the Teams were able to stand by that Special Forces tradition of showing no emotion even under the worst circumstances. Clark’s death cast a very long shadow of sadness over the entire brotherhood of SPECWARCOM.
In time they would construct a new building in Team 4’s home at Little Creek, Virginia, and name it for Clark. The SEALs’ desert base near Fallujah would also be named for him: Camp Schwedler. And no young US warriors, arriving there in the ensuing years, would ever need to inquire about the identity of the fallen SEAL commemorated with such honor. Everyone knew about Clark.
And that would include Matt McCabe and Jon Keefe when they too were posted to these war-torn, cruel, and ancient lands.
But for the moment their paths were diverse. Matt was assigned to SEAL Team 10, the newest of the Teams but one that already enjoyed a fearsome reputation as combat warriors. Team 10 was constantly in the hot spots of the war on terror. Always valorous, they returned from each deployment with fewer warriors than when they embarked. Men talked about the curse of Team 10, and the shocking loss of Echo Platoon in the fatal helicopter attempt to rescue Marcus Luttrell and the Red Wings in the Afghanistan mountains, in June 2005, only escalated this talk.
By the time he reached Virginia Beach, the Team was already deployed, and Matt was immediately posted to Germany for a couple of months. When he returned to Virginia he dug himself into an intense regime of hard training, and in January 2008 Jon arrived, having received his Trident and was assigned to the same Echo Platoon, Team 10.
The commanders took one look at his mighty physique and acquainted him with the SEALs’ favorite weapon, the Mark-48 heavy machine gun, which weighed thirty pounds without the big ammunition belts, which the gun depletes by two hundred rounds a minute. When SEALs open fire with this baby, it unleashes shells so fast that its barrel starts to glow red-hot.
Put your head above the parapet when a SEAL master gunner is behind the breach of this thing, and you cannot live. Most of the platoons feel only half-dressed without it, although someone has to carry it on almost every mission. Step forward, Big Jon.
But early days in the Teams are critical times for new men. Everyone wants to impress, and everyone steps up his regime, relentless swimming, weights in the gym, workouts, running, and the countless sets of push-ups, one hundred a time—not much different from BUD/S ... “PUSH ’EM OUT!”
In the company of iron men excelling is hard, but everyone tries. No exceptions. You would not be here if you were not that type of man. And already that ethos of self-starting begins to work its way deep into every man’s psyche.
“What happens if the guy is unfit and can’t lift Jon?” says Matt. “I’ll tell you what—I have to go and carry him myself. For a few moments we’re in disarray. And disarray is not good where we work. You’re coming with us? Get fit, and stay fit. Fat bastards need not apply, because a half-fit guy on ops may be fatal.”
The upshot of these unwritten rules means that all SEALs are hair-trigger sensitive to their own reputations and how their teammates perceive their character. The same question is asked of them all: What can you bring to the fight?
Thus, every SEAL is judged by his appearance, and every one of them wants to be seen and admired, as a guy who will “get someone’s back” when the chips are down. Every SEAL wants to be looked up to, which is why they are, almost without exception, big, powerful, hard-trained warriors, the very frontline of US military muscle.
Jon “rogered” all of that. And although he never expected to become Inter-Service 100-meter-sprint champion or even make the mountaineering team, he brought an immense competitive edge with him from Coronado. He also knew that his road to true excellence rested in his enormous strength.
And he really saw himself out there in front, smashing his way into the enemy’s inner sanctums, battering his way forward with the platoon right behind him, ready to seize their objective.
Big Jon had decided to become a “breacher,” the guy who breaks down doors. And although this may sound like a perfect spot for your pet gorilla, in fact, it is no such thing. It is a highly specialized task that an expert must carry out.
When a Team goes in for an assault on the enemy, they may not yet know what kind of a barricade stands before them. And they may not need to know. Because this is the problem of the breacher, and the SEALs have a special school, an extensive course, to train these men.
The standard tool of their trade is a sledgehammer, with a retractable handle in case they need to make high speed over the ground; a long hammer handle would impede progress. But once that handle is fully extended, a skilled SEAL breacher could cannon open almost any door with one enormous swing of this thing.
Failing that, the breacher carries what SEALs call a “hooly” (short for hooligan—God knows why), which is a long crowbar that will rip the hinges off any door and allow the big man up front to kick it straight in. Tucked into the breacher’s harness belt is the inevitable set of bolt cutters plus a heat torch for cutting through steel.
The Teams never know what will face them in terms of security, and the breacher must solve the initial entry, which is always violent. And of course, his last resort is, without exception, C-4 explosive. And because they do not wish to knock the entire building down, that high explosive must be carefully designed.
Thus, the breacher makes his own singular bombs—demolition charges, specially shaped, to blast the doors but not to collapse the house. This stuff never comes prepacked, and an expert needs to prepare it because the SEAL is going to carry in the explosive himself.
Take, for instance, that some reconnaissance pictures have suggested a heavy mud wall to go through. Thus, the breacher may find himself walking through the moonlit desert with a big bomb in his rucksack and upon whom everyone is dependent for entry into the ops area.
The problem is that no imagery can ever reveal precisely how many doors need to be breached for the Team
to break in. There may be three, for example, each one more difficult and secure than the last. The breacher cannot possibly say, “Sorry, guys. I don’t have any more charges. I guess we better go home.”
The breacher needs to have every possible device in his personal armory, ready to blast the platoon into the area. And he better get it right if he doesn’t want to become a human bomb.
It’s the surprise element and the ability to handle the totally unexpected that makes a great breacher. The sudden appearance of a steel door, a barricaded passage, a door that is barred. There may even be a steel wall inserted into the concrete of a building, and that cannot be blasted out without taking down the whole structure.
Right there the breacher must make fast decisions. And he may have to go to the heat torch to cut the steel. This is hot and noisy and is likely to attract attention, forcing a firefight before the SEALs are even inside.
And then there’s the sudden shock of a booby trap, the instant secondary blast, detonating from inside the building as soon as the door rockets inward off its hinges. The technique and skills required of the breacher, the lightning sidestep away from the entrance, inch perfect on the turn, is enough to make a matador gasp with admiration.
And then there’s the possibility of running straight into the barrel of a Kalashnikov gun as the door blows into the house. There’s probably a split second before the enemy recovers from the inward blast of the breacher’s bomb, but no more. And the Team leaders need to move again, with terrific speed, hurling in the grenade with the instinctive reactions of a big-league short stop to first. Nanoseconds matter. Lost seconds might get them all killed.
And there’s always the possibility the breacher may go down. He’s first in the firing line, and someone has to step up. He must bring an understudy, whose duties would start instantly. If the Team leader arrives at the secondary door inside the building and finds it padlocked or barricaded shut, the number-two breacher must be right at his elbow, with the sledgehammer and the bolt cutters and the C-4. That’s the way it works. No mistakes.
The breachers have a quaint name for the high-danger area as they enter; they call it the “fatal funnel,” because that’s where the enemy will instinctively shoot. That’s where the SEALs come under first fire. The role of the breacher requires high courage, and a lot of it. And that was Big Jon’s stock in trade. Was he scared? Hell no. They’d taught him to be a US Navy SEAL. And everyone knows they’re invincible. Jon loved every last and precious moment of it.
Any time you are privileged enough to see a SEAL Team on television, laying siege to some terrorist stronghold in Iraq or Afghanistan, remember you are watching the maestros of assault at work, banging and blasting their way forward to achieve their mission. You are seeing the results of hours and hours of practice, months and months of training, men whose unquestioning dedication to the American flag is, very simply, without end.
Sometimes they pay the highest possible price. And when these men make their final journey home, the Stars and Stripes always drapes the coffin. A rigid SEAL guard of honor stands motionless at the head for the duration of the journey, no matter the distance, which is often half a world away. No SEAL ever dies in vain. For each fallen man a new piece is added to the great mosaic of the Teams—a place where courage and daring are always paramount, but where valor is the unending constant.
And in the cold January of 2008, Jon stepped into the sharp end of this brotherhood. By year’s end he would be a highly qualified Team 10 breacher, and after that would come the unit-level training (ULT), the last few months of fine tuning that everyone receives before deployment, probably to Iraq, possibly to Afghanistan.
Meanwhile Matt McCabe had arrived back from Germany and quickly discovered that the relentless search for perfection had not abated, even in the established Teams. His best friend, Jeff (no proper names for serving Special Forces), had been “rolled back” (sent to retake a course), so the first thing Matt did was to meet and befriend a big powerful new guy from Coronado, Jon Keefe.
Within a few weeks Jeff and Jon showed up in Team 10, in which Matt was in hard training, and the three of them became buddies, traveling out to Reno, Nevada, for a part of a Special Forces driving course. This may sound like a huge amount of fun, but the SEALs treat it with the same grim, hard-eyed proficiency as pool comp.
SEALs need to be able to drive Humvees like stock-car drivers. The day may come when they need either a fast getaway or even (much more likely) a surprise arrival in a combat zone, and they do not want to be looking around for a decent driver.
In those platoons, as ever, everyone needs to be able to do everything. When three regular SEAL drivers arrive in Reno, they are just that—regular drivers. When they return to Virginia Beach they will be world-class experts in rallying—racing over rough terrain, up mountains, down escarpments, and through streams.
SEAL drivers may need to operate at high speed in any war zone. As men may be wounded, it may be necessary to engage in a running firefight from the vehicle, and the nearest man to the wheel needs to get in and move it. He’ll need all the steering, braking, and timing skills they taught him in Reno.
All three of them loved it up there on the high slopes of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, as they slid, skidded, and tore up the mountain shale, hard cornering and making high-speed U-turns. And they all passed the examinations. It ended in late March, and they took a long weekend to drive down the Nevada border, crossing the enormous Yosemite State Park and heading for the ski slopes of Squaw Valley, California.
There Matt was the expert, once making an unbelievable Black run down from the rampart of Squaw Peak, nearly eighty-nine hundred feet above sea level, and disappearing at about 100mph down the steep Siberia Slope. “I never thought I’d see him again!” says Jon.
“You know, that’s the thing about Matt. He can just do so many things so well, better than most people. But he never goes on about it. Just does ’em. He could win the light-heavyweight championship of the world and forget to tell you. It’s what I first liked about him. He was never Mr. Too Cool, like a lot of guys are. He’s a real easy character to like, I’ll tell you that.”
For the record it should be recorded here that Jon forgot to mention for this book that he was one of the fastest high school swimmers on the East Coast of the United States. He even forgot to mention his state championship and longstanding Virginia 50-yard-freestyle record. Someone else told the author.
Reminded, he said, pretty laconically, “Yeah, I guess I could chug along okay some days.”
“It’s what I first liked about Jon,” says Matt. “He never tried to be the coolest guy around. Not even one time when he won a 5.5-mile SEAL swim race in the Pacific out near San Clemente Island. Sonofagun won. I never saw it, but everyone was talking about it. When I asked him, he said it was probably a fluke—he wasn’t real sure the others were trying!”
When Matt and Jon reached their Teams, Special Training took a diverse turn. As Jon concentrated on becoming expert at demolishing anything that stood in his Team’s way, Matt headed for probably the most cerebral part of SEAL Team missions: the complex business of communications.
For those who would specialize in this slightly secretive section of the dark arts, there was a demanding course in the on-base Comms School. This starts a candidate off right at the basics, which all SEALs must master (just in case), and runs all the way through to advanced satellite communications and space-age battlefield techniques, the ones that ensure no one is out of the loop.
The sheer complexity and myriad chances of the system going down appealed to Matt. Confident now that his goof-off schooldays were way behind him, he had already decided that a career in the SEALs was his natural spot in this world and that, in the long term, an officer’s commission was not beyond him.
He swiftly grasped that communications on any mission was the heart and soul of the operation, the mission’s critical path. Without top-class comms, there can be only chaos. Every SEAL
is obliged to read Marcus Luttrell’s Lone Survivor, and every SEAL shudders at those terrible moments when the Red Wings’ chief comms man, Danny Dietz, could not raise home base to provide help.
And Danny was an expert. A real expert. And he simply could not make the connection. Up there in the high peaks of the Hindu Kush, towering rock faces and steep escarpments that rose above and below them blocked the quivering electronic signal lancing out from Danny’s transmitter.
By the time the Red Wings had fallen down two mountains and been shot God-knows-how-many times, Danny’s radio gear was history. In the end it was Lieutenant Michael Murphy’s final sacrificial action—moving into a bullet-raked clearing and punching in the numbers on his satellite phone—that finally raised a five-alarm uproar on the Bagram Base.
By now Danny had died, and the other three were all badly wounded. Murphy’s final act contravened the general practice of not using these special phones unless the situation was dire. And Mike Murphy knew that his situation was as dire as it gets. In the final few minutes of his life, mortally wounded, he made the connection, the very best he could do, which was only to be expected from a SEAL officer of his supreme quality.
Everyone knew the legend of the Red Wings and understood that that disaster, at least partly, involved faulty communications, when they were unable to summon help.
And so Matt went to yet another school as a part of his Special Training course. And right there he became acquainted with the regular SEAL radio that everyone takes on every mission. It’s about nine inches long and fits into a special slot in the harness. With its antennae extended, it enables all the operators to talk to each other—probably across distances of five hundred meters, depending on the terrain and line of sight.
The problem is that this radio is encrypted, which although it makes it impossible for the enemy to listen in, it also increases the time required to program the radio and set it up with very complex codes before a mission.
Honor and Betrayal : The Untold Story of the Navy Seals Who Captured the Butcher of Fallujah -and the Shameful Ordeal They Later Endured (9780306823091) Page 6