And every step of the way, on any SEAL operation, the unexpected can happen, especially at night, when most Black Ops take place. If, for instance, they meet up with a new group, probably from another Team, the first thing that happens is the radios must be synchronized, changed, in order to have standard codes, to allow everyone to be in contact whenever necessary.
But the big, heavy central radio transmitter is entirely different. This thing weighs about twenty-five pounds, and the comms operator carries it in a backpack. Matt, when qualified, would assume this duty, hauling the extra load across the desert without a word of complaint. He remembers that even Jon, one of the Team’s resident packhorses, was startled when he saw it. “Wow!” said Big Jon, “Sonofabitch looks like a nuclear bomb!”
The sight of it was one thing, but for Matt, learning the areas of modern radio communication from scratch was entirely another.
First there was command and control, the SEAL standard practice of communicating every duty of every man in the patrol, thereby ensuring that even the most minor change was instantly communicated back to the Team leader and then to the Blue Force Picture back at command.
This is the hub of every operation, the one ops room where everything is reported and where they know every last detail of the mission, particularly the GPS reading that displays precisely where the Team is in the middle of some godforsaken pitch-black Iraqi desert, probably surrounded by bloodthirsty, tribal cut-throats.
It needs to be right there on the Blue Force Picture, accurate to the finest degree, so that any major rescue or deployment of reinforcements happens instantly, no delays. It’s the sole responsibility of the comms operator to ensure that every last vestige of his platoon’s information is communicated back to command.
Matt had to master the system of multiple channels. He needed to understand the complications of the SEAL reconnaissance men (recce), the shadowy warriors who operate way out in front of the main force, on their own, working in pairs and communicating back to the platoon their precise whereabouts, the terrain, the dangers, the areas of possible ambush.
This information initially comes back from the recce guys directly to the platoon comms man, who’s working closely with the Team leader and helping to make fast decisions. In addition, he must keep them posted on the Blue Force Picture, and all this in the middle of the night, moving behind enemy lines, watching through the green mist of the night-vision goggles.
Then there’s the assault itself, the moment the SEALs go in. Everything gets reported: the volume of return fire, if any; the requirement for high explosive, casualties, prisoners, booby traps, and the route back out of the battle zone.
The comms man here is working flat out, probably accessing the satellite, aiming his transmitter, trying not to shout, pretending to be calm—all possibly under fire himself. And everything’s still encrypted, incomprehensible to anyone else, and the comms guy is interpreting it, even if the roof’s falling in around him.
Right now every single aspect of this wildly complicated process matters. The comms operator is checking that he’s still making contact, perhaps giving a fast “satellite shout”—making doubly sure he’s on the exact right angle to the heavens where, somewhere, twenty-two thousand miles above the earth, his electronic contact is speeding through inner space, somehow transmitting back to a guy like Matt, confirming the code numbers.
Right here the operator’s fingers are flying over the dials on the twenty-five pound heavyweight transmitter. For the moment this is the mission critical, and everything affects the outcome: the atmospherics matter, any radio wave can be disrupted, and the operator needs to keep checking.
And there’s a whole load of taboos every operator must remember, the first one being, “For chrissakes, don’t key up on the radio if the EOD [Explosive Ordnance Disposal team] is working anywhere close.” One wrong electronic pulse can instantly detonate an enemy IED or booby trap, and this may kill or badly wound the front line of the platoon. Don’t think it hasn’t happened. The SEALs have learned a lot of lessons the hard way.
In addition, the comms man must be on high alert for the need to call for medevac in case SEALs have been seriously hurt and cannot return to base any other way. There must also be constant communication with their close-air support, a heavily gunned aircraft flying a pattern high above them, in case the terrorist opposition is so numerous that they need to be taken out en masse before they do serious damage to SEAL personnel.
In the heat of battle it’s not unusual for comms to be monitoring on two different frequencies, and this can make life very difficult. Events happen so swiftly in any assault situation that it’s imperative that everything is perfect before the platoon embarks. Which is why any SEAL Team, wherever it is headed, takes the word of the comms operator very seriously.
Thus, Matthew McCabe, formerly of Perrysburg, Ohio, was destined to join this mobile Tower of Babel just as soon as he was relocated to Iraq, which was formerly Babylon and home to the original biblical tower, the base of which, locals say, remains near the city of Hillah in the Babil Governate.
“You’ll probably get pretty good reception out there,” said Jon, swinging his sledgehammer. “Fallujah’s only a couple of hours from where the tower once stood, that’s gotta give us great lines of communication, help us do some bad-ass smiting of the al-Qaeda-ites.”
So while the teachers in Comms School prepared Matt to become a maestro of the airwaves, Jon was about to begin the longest journey of all SEAL programs—the Team-run ULT. Both men had to complete it, which entailed months of work and travel—from Virginia to Florida, Tennessee, Arkansas, Kentucky, Nevada, and Louisiana.
They perfected their diving skills off Key West. In Indiana they used a run-down four-story lunatic asylum on a miles-long vast campus to practice a SEAL takeover of a building—charging through the old dusty corridors, racing up staircases, perfecting their clearance techniques, and shouting commands.
“[If] anyone from outside had seen us, they’da thought the original residents had never left,” recalled Matt.
In Tennessee they attended an intensive course in advanced shooting, as all SEALs must be able to shoot faster and straighter than anyone else. Both men passed with flying colors—the beady-eyed outdoorsman from Virginia and the SEAL from Ohio who was now privately aiming for SEAL leadership as a career.
There was little doubt that long before they were both through with ULT both of them knew precisely how to assault a house or even an entire street full of al-Qaeda or Taliban terrorists. More likely, both. Less certain was their grasp of how to commandeer an entire village without wiping out the populace.
For this, Team 10 sent them to the gigantic sprawl of Fort Knox, Kentucky, the 109,000-acre Army post that lies to the south of Louisville and covers parts of three counties. It also houses the US Bullion Depository.
Matt and Jon found themselves working in a mock city, with its own school and hospital, water tower, soccer field, and every other building you could imagine. The US Army whistles up battalions of civilians and pays them to defend the place. The SEALs don’t actually shoot them, but the Army make it as realistic as possible, hiring Iraqis who speak only in Arabic and are ordered to get in the way at all times in order make Team 10 understand what a royal pain in the ass it is when people deliberately obstruct and cannot understand you anyway.
The idea is to get the newest SEALs accustomed to conditions in an Iraqi township, where everyone tries to get in the way and no one even pretends to understand what is being said to them, however politely.
That facility inside Fort Knox is the best of its kind in the United States, providing the most realistic predeployment conditions for a group of men soon to be transported to the frontline of the War on Terror, in one of the world’s true hell holes—the ruins of Fallujah and its surrounding Islamist lands.
And all of this was leading up to the final months of pure preparation the SEALs need to undergo. This is Squadron Integrated Trainin
g, where they again intensify the tried-and-tested methods of SEAL assault—mobility assault, urban warfare, land warfare, attack from the water. And this time they are working closely with Team 10 veterans, men who have fought in the worst possible conditions, like North Baghdad after the fall of Saddam.
Team 10 contained some of the most expert warfighters in the world, SEALs who had fought in the gigantic Shi’a slum of Sadr City in northeast Baghdad, headquarters of the feared Mahdi Army. For four years after 2004 the US Army had practically laid siege to this rubble-strewn wasteland of poverty and death.
Thousands of civilians died in Sadr City, wiped out on a daily basis by suicide bombs, RPGs, gunfire, and reckless al-Qaeda attacks. For weeks on end the US troops had been in a backs-to-the-wall situation, only to come charging back, forcing the Mahdis to surrender and ask for terms, over and over.
But it was all to no avail. The fighting always started again. US patrols were repeatedly ambushed as they picked their way through the ruins in search of the senior Mahdi commanders, whose crimes against humanity were boundless and whose military assaults on innocent Sunnis will go down in infamy.
SEALs were especially competent in these nighttime raids, trying to locate and kill/capture the Mahdi gunmen responsible for this age of living misery in Baghdad. Several of Matt and Jon’s new teammates had crept through those Baghdad shadows, trying to locate the dead spots, into which the enemy could not see.
These were Team 10 men who’d evaded the deadly al-Qaeda snipers, hidden in the rubble, perched high behind the shells of buildings that had been blasted asunder by the US onslaught. Thus, the serving SEALs had instincts that had been honed in one of the most lethal war zones since World War II.
In battle they’d shot and killed desert tribesmen whose own instincts made them as dangerous as an Apache war party. The Mahdi warriors were grim, furtive fanatics, silent as cats and well hidden and armed. And they asked for no mercy, nor did they offer it, consumed as they were with a profound hatred of America and her allies.
The Team 10 men who had returned from Iraq were expert in urban warfare, and in the great traditions of the SEAL Teams, their duty was to pass that knowledge on to a new generation, highlighting lesson one: it’s so much harder to fight through a city that has been hit by high explosive than one that still stands.
Giant heaps of rubble and ruined buildings make perfect redoubts for guerrilla killers. A trained Navy SEAL can take one look down a blasted road in any desert city and understand precisely the spots where the enemy may lurk. He’s not always right, but that’s the way to bet.
And in the long weeks Matt and Jon spent in the United States developing high skills in urban warfare, these vastly experienced Team 10 fighters were on hand to point out the dangers and the opportunities. None of them was especially polite, but all of the new SEALs knew exactly what they meant.
Inserting the words “dimwit,” “asshole,” and “jackass” into most sentences served, if anything, to make them listen carefully to the training that would prepare them for the dangers they would face when they moved behind proper enemy lines in the not-too-distant future.
And through this final six months, they kept traveling: three or four more trips to California and full mission profiles conducted in Fort Polk, in the woodlands of West Louisiana out near the Texas border.
Part of the objective of all this was to instill in the new SEALs that they may have satisfied the instructors at BUD/S back in Coronado, but they have one further hurdle to clear—the toughest one of all. Because now each man has to be accepted into a Team, one that is already bristling with bloodied SEAL warriors.
These iron-souled veterans are the ones who make the final decisions about whether Matt, Jon, and the very few surviving others were fit and proper candidates to be given the green light.
And once more these seasoned SEALs put Matt and Jon through their paces, making them revisit the skills learned in assembling weaponry, checking that each man’s fitness level was still high, that he could, with ease, run four miles under full gear along the sand in under thirty-two minutes.
Even under the most stressful battle conditions, all SEALs must be capable of eight-minute miles on the stopwatch—even Matt, who was hauling the platoon’s heavy transmitter. That’s an astonishing level of fitness, and nothing else will do. And into this latest regime of physical excellence the veterans threw a water obstacle course, forcing the new men to utilize brute strength and fast, smooth techniques in the pool.
They were made to swing, slide, balance, climb, fall in, get out, and, finally, go like hell for the line. Of course it was always a freestyle race for second place, because the winner was not only the best swimmer; he was also the strongest. And the biggest.
“But you should have been there the day Jon fell off one of the high ropes and hit the water,” said Matt. “I thought a killer whale had landed in the pool!”
From moment of entry into Coronado to the moment a candidate is accepted into a SEAL Team, it’s nothing less than a war of attrition. So many good men, most of whom will go on to do well in the surface Navy or the submarine force, are unsuited for the world of the Navy SEALs. That’s no disgrace; it’s just a statement of nature. And even those who collect their Tridents after BUD/S cannot be certain that the regulars who make up the Teams will accept them.
And into this final examination process stepped Matt McCabe and Jonathan Keefe in the spring of 2009. This last stage required them to face up to the challenge alone, each in a separate space, each of them facing some kind of a Spanish Inquisition without any teammates, neither left nor right, to help.
One largely unknown aspect of SEALs is that the ritual of entry to the Teams requires them to formally surrender their Trident as soon as they report. They are then required to earn it over again.
This second ceremony is not so grandiose or public, but in its way it is even more meaningful. Because right here the Trident is represented. It’s an old-school tradition, as the veterans gather in the fenced-off platoon hut.
There, in Echo Platoon’s private recreation room, with its plain chairs, television, murals of fallen brothers ... and a bar, they call in the future heroes of SEAL Team 10. When each man arrives the veterans already know his specialty, and they grill him relentlessly.
For Matt they demanded that this twenty-three-year-old comms operator from Ohio understood every last nuance of his chosen trade. They bounced him up and down over frequencies, satellite link-ups, and emergency procedures. Making him change the “freqs,” contact the recce men, keep the line open to command, aim the transmitter high if there’s a sudden change in atmospherics, find the satellite, and check the codes.
These vastly experienced warfighters found no fault in Matt, though they were by no means through. Using a large city map attached to the wall, they next pointed out a major building in the downtown area and informed Matt he was a Ground Force SEAL commander and that his mission was to take that building, coming in from outside the city. How did he propose to do that?
Matt had a pretty well-rehearsed plan to deal with this section, but the vets turned a straightforward leader’s response into a diatribe of staccato interruptions, designed to illuminate the sudden unpredictability of a battle zone: “What about this? What about that? What if this section is fortified? What if the door is barricaded? What if you meet heavy resistance right here? You got a comms hookup to the backup group? Did he get the codes before you left?”
The interrogation seemed unending. But, as one of the vets mentioned to Matt later, “I might be serving right alongside you in some madhouse in the Middle East—I just need to know you understand precisely what you’re doing.”
And it was not over yet. One by one these veterans, SEALs who had come back in one piece from the embattled slums of Sadr City, issued a succession of diabolical scenarios from the worst war zones in which they had served—not just Iraq but also Afghanistan, both Kabul and the mountains of the Hindu Kush.
> What would you do if ...? If such-and-such broke out, would you attack or find cover? You’re pinned down and the transmitter has been destroyed ... what now? You got ’em trapped inside, but they have a ton of explosive—do you take out the building, even though there’s a bad guy in there and you want him alive?
At the end of it Matt was sent to a room to await the outcome of the other candidates’ examinations.
When Jon came in, the vets knew all about him, the swimmer who’d trained to be a breacher. And every man in that room was aware that in the zone everyone relied on the man who carried the big hammer—his strength, his ability to make specialized explosive charges, his speed of reaction, his assessment of the obstacles facing them.
And they bombarded the breacher from Virginia with question after question, probing into how thoroughly he knew his new trade, demanding answers, demanding assessments of when to resort to explosives, when the overwhelming noise is justified over the sudden rip of the “hooly” as it splinters the door post.
There’s a group of very bad guys behind a steel barricade. They’re armed and dangerous. Do you blast the Team in, or take it slower and cut the steel with the heat torch?
Several of the questions fired at Jon required a thoughtful answer, and he provided two or three solutions that required a fast battlefield assessment of the advantages of sudden unstoppable attack over waiting for the enemy to mount a heavy machine gun.
When all the interrogators were nodding quietly in agreement, they switched to the difficult scenarios, informing Jon he was now a Ground Force commander, and how the hell did he propose to capture this downtown building?
Like Matt, Jon knew his assault book backward and forward, and he offered a careful study of his plan of attack, utilizing all of the battlecraft he had had been taught throughout these long months of both practical and written examinations.
At the conclusion this baptismal rite of passage they reached a natural conclusion. And Jon was sent to join Matt and the others to await the verdict of their elders and, almost certainly, betters.
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 7