by Scott McEwen
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Once you spend some time with the SEALs, as we have, their internal inconsistencies become obvious.
They have covert identities and can be very tight-lipped. Ask a SEAL who doesn’t know you, what he does for a living, and he is likely to say that he is “in the military” or “in the Navy” and leave it at that. Yet, once they are among their teammates, they can be very free with their opinions—mercilessly taunting a fellow SEAL who failed in a training evolution or boasting about stealing a girl away from an ordinary mortal. They have little patience for any of their own who miss the standard by even an inch. One SEAL, who took three attempts in order to pass BUD/S, was called a “turd” because he was slow in training or took longer to prepare his gear. Later he was called a “shit bird” because he frequently had driving accidents with a SEAL minisub off of Hawaii. He later won a Navy Cross and other honors. These blunt assessments are common among SEALs. They have no time for “happy talk” or “blowing sunshine up your ass.” SEALs are brutal, because small errors cost lives in training and combat.
Even SEAL officers are brutally and bluntly evaluated by enlisted men. One SEAL officer, whose name is omitted because he is still on active duty, was described to us by a fellow teammate. “He really was a detriment, to be frank. He was so stupid and he was not a top performer,” said Carl Higbie, a SEAL Team Ten member. “He could shoot straight, yeah, but his reasoning skills were not to the caliber of a Navy SEAL.” These kinds of comments are not rare among SEALs, if the men believe a teammate does not measure up.
SEALs are competitive and praise each other in quantitative terms. They will talk about their teammates in terms of body weight or body-fat percentage. They boast about who can bench the most, swim the longest, or shoot the straightest. Cars, stereo, and computer equipment are constant sources of competition among them. And, among SEALs of a certain age, so are girls. SEALs are always keeping score.
They are not politically correct, and enlisted SEALs are often puzzled by the entire notion that certain words or phrases are off limits. If a man has proven himself, words should be harmless to him. If he has not, he has bigger problems than words.
The constant joking and taunting nature of SEAL banter excludes any kind of politically correct restrictions, especially when officers aren’t around. When they do run into political correctness, which is common on civilian college campuses, they tend to refer to it as “bullshit.” SEAL officers often try to keep the comments of their men in bounds—a constant struggle. Still, the officers realize the dangers of being zealous in policing speech. SEAL teams are not political coalitions and every man must be free to express a view in order for missions to succeed.
Tattoos are as common among SEALs as they are among South Sea Islanders. But sometimes they lead to trouble. After a stint in the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division, Denny Chalker joined the Navy and was admitted to BUD/S. There instructors spotted his tattoo on his arm (“God is my jump master”) and they used it in place of his name. “Instead of ‘Chalker’ being called out, it was “Where is ‘God is my jump master’?”1
Many will admit to being adrenaline junkies. To relax, they race motorcycles, surf big waves, ski black diamond trails, or scale icy mountains. Brandon Webb, a former SEAL Team Three member and SEAL Head Sniper instructor, bought a thirty-five-year-old Soviet Yak-52 trainer aircraft. It is old, poorly built, and has few flight instruments. It had crashed before. He would often hold mock dogfights with former SEALs in other aircraft. When Webb showed a Hollywood producer a picture of his plane, the man asked: “You actually go up in that?”
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Though most SEALs are not Irish, many of their rituals revolve around fighting, drinking, and death.
Bar fights are common. At one time, so were fights on duty. In the 1970s, when a dispute started, someone would say: “Take it behind the conex box,” Zub recalls.
The conex box was a shipping container at Coronado that was too high and too long for officers to see around or over. It was a black hole where SEALs would go to fight SEALs. The routine was always the same. Two men would go behind the box and emerge, a few minutes later, bloody, dirty, and sandy. No one would join them to watch, and no one would ever talk about it. “There was no bragging. It was just kept real quiet,” Zub said.
But it settled things.
Another SEAL, Ryan Job, put it this way: “Despite what your momma told you, violence does solve problems.” (After being shot in the face in Ramadi, Iraq, Job died on an operating table in Phoenix, Arizona.)
Today, fights still occur, but they are much more likely to happen off base. On-duty fights can now lead to dismissal from the SEAL teams or even courts-martial.
SEALs drink at reunions, graduations, and deaths, and after work. It remains an informal weeding-out process. “There are team guys and then there are guys in the teams,” Zub said. There are guys with a strong sense of brotherhood, but there are some who merely do their jobs.
Commander Dick Marcinko, the founder of SEAL Team Six, was legendary for drinking with the enlisted men under his command. After a hard training evolution in the waters off Virginia Beach, he would invite his men to a dive bar. (Later, he bought a nearby bar, the iconic bar called the Raven.) They would stay until closing time and sometimes beyond.
Zub first met Marcinko in 1982, when a Navy buddy introduced them in a San Diego bar named El Capitan.
Marcinko didn’t act like any naval officer that Zub had ever seen before. While other Navy men could be hard drinkers and admirers of female bodies, Marcinko took it to a whole new level. He bragged about out-drinking men and bedding women. He pulled out what Zub remembers as a “wad of money,” and he gave Zub and his two former Navy buddies a few hundred bucks each. As the drinking progressed, Marcinko revealed that he was wearing a small-caliber pistol on each ankle and two knives hidden on his body. Then he fanned out a stack of fake identification cards. “It was wild,” said Zub.
They went on a tour of bars on Shelter Island and strip clubs that ended at dawn.
In the 1970s and 1980s, after-work drinking sessions would either strengthen the bonds among men or mark out the man who could not be a team player. Swimming in alcohol together, for building trust among the SEALs, was once as important as swimming in water together. Drinking wasn’t just accepted, it was encouraged. “Alcohol is a truth serum. You’ve got a problem with somebody, you keep it under your hat. You get drinking, the hat comes off,” Zub said. Those drinking sessions would settle disputes and reestablish equilibrium.
In those days, SEALs seemed safest in rough seas and most at risk when the water was small, flat, and cubed. Drinking caused divorces, DUIs, and even deaths.
Now drinking is much more carefully done. Just as attitudes about drinking have changed in American society, so have they shifted among the SEALs. Today a single DUI offense usually leads to dismissal from the SEAL teams. In 2010, Virginia Beach police stopped a new SEAL. The legal blood-alcohol limit was 0.08 at the time. The SEAL, who submitted to a Breathalyzer, was measured at 0.09. He had been in the teams for only a few weeks, and he knew that the ticket would cost him his career. “You don’t have to do this,” he pleaded. He briefly explained the training and the sacrifice that got him to that point and the fact that he had only two beers in an hour. The cop, as he recalls, was heartless. “Yes, I do.” He was exiled from the teams as soon as the officer-in-charge learned of his offense. He spent the rest of his time in the Navy aboard ship and left the service bitterly disappointed.
Once it was a badge of honor to have alcohol stashed in your locker or to sneak a drink on base. Today, even drinking in war zones is forbidden. SEALs still drink—it remains a vital part of their culture—but they do so off duty and off base, and they make sure that their girlfriend or a taxi driver takes them home. Not getting caught is also a key part of the SEAL way.
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SEALs are often treated as the bastard stepchildren of the Navy. Deployed outside the U
nited States, they often grow long, shaggy beards and wander around base in flip-flops and cutoffs. David B. Rutherford, a SEAL Team One combat medic, remembers walking into a chow hall outside of Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 2002. A full-bird colonel started shouting at Rutherford and his teammates to shave and wear appropriate desert “digital” camouflage uniforms—or go somewhere else.
Rutherford was returning from “an op” in the mountains that had lasted for seven months, directing air strikes against al Qaeda and Taliban fighters. “I don’t even know the gross ordnance dropped. I lost track at five hundred thousand pounds” in the first few months. The flip-flops and the beards were essential for blending with their local allies and, therefore, not becoming a target for enemy snipers.
He just shook his head in disbelief at the colonel. “The ridiculousness that pollutes DoD [Department of Defense],” he says he thought.
Later, “Big Navy,” what SEALs call the rest of the navy, managed to get his beard and take away his ability to operate in Afghanistan. A senior Navy officer was arriving to inspect SEAL Team One. His Master Chief told him the rank “deserved a show of respect.” He was told to shave and wear a clean and complete uniform. It hurt his “operational readiness,” he said, but he understood. “It is challenging to find the fusion between Big Army/Navy and SoF [Special Operations Forces],” he said.
SEALs pay a high price for their high performance. “We are the ultimate war fighters and dysfunctional human beings,” Rutherford said. “It’s two sides of the same coin.”
He explains that many SEALs struggle to define themselves after they leave the teams. No one asks, he said, “What happens to the operator after the op?” He compared leaving the teams to leaving the MS-13 gang. “The commitment level and the violence level are similar,” he said. Of course, SEALs aren’t criminals. But their adjustment to civilian life can be hard and that posttraumatic stress syndrome is a genuine cost of battle.
SEALs also have a strange relationship with sleep. Two-man sniper teams will often hole up in a “hide” for two days, without food and with little water. One is always at the gun while the other sleeps. On a C-130 in Iraq, SEALs will lace their arms in the cargo netting to form a human hammock or simply lay flat on a shipping container. Within minutes after takeoff, they all will be asleep. On long flights, only the pilots will stay awake. SEALs will awaken only to pee in a bucket at the back of the plane and immediately return to sleep. It is known as “sleep discipline,” the ability to stay alert when needed and to fall sleep within minutes.
SEALs don’t usually learn languages like Green Berets and other special forces do; they often operate without words in any language. When sweeping buildings in Iraq, some SEALs operated alongside the Polish counterterrorist forces known as GROM. The Poles spoke very little English, and the SEALs spoke no Polish. Hand signals and eye movements allowed the teams to operate fluidly, shooting insurgents without speaking to each other.
Unlike other members of the Navy, SEALs are usually excellent shots. They drill constantly to maintain their accuracy and rate of fire. Marcinko told us that SEALs would routinely use some 3,500 rounds of ammunition per week in target practice. (By contrast, the average big city police department uses fifty rounds every year per officer in its qualification tests.) SEALs would use even more ammunition in “kill house” exercises, plywood buildings packed with obstacles and dummies that spring up in surprising places. SEALs would have a fraction of a second to decide if each dummy represented a civilian or a target and to place their rounds accurately. Their timing and accuracy was constantly evaluated. One of the key attributes of any SEAL is the rapid categorization—immediately classifying someone as a “threat or no threat,” explains Ryan Zinke, a former SEAL Team Six assault element leader.
As a result, SEALs are likely the best close-quarters combat fighters in the world.
Over time, the missions of the SEALs would have them farther away from the waters from which the frogmen sprung. Today, in Afghanistan, a SEAL jokes that the only water near him is in his CamelBak, a plastic pouch with a long, strawlike drinking tube that is worn on the back. The frogs now operate far from the sea.
Like the samurai of a bygone age, SEALs often have personal relationships with their knives and firearms. Some still carry a Spyderco, but many prefer the 5½-inch Benchmade brand knife. It is a third hand, used for cutting line, slicing open food pouches, and sometimes silently dispatching a foe.
Few of the weapons used by SEALs are standard issue. A modified M-4 carbine is common, although the modifications are as individual as the SEALs themselves. Shotguns are often used for clearing rooms, especially pump-action Remington 870s. A SIG Sauer .45-caliber pistol, as a backup weapon, is considered a necessity. “Nothing has the stopping power of a forty-five,” one SEAL told us. It replaced the M1911 A1, which didn’t tend to survive saltwater conditions. The Beretta 92-F, named after SEAL Chuck Fellers, is another favorite.
SEALs often have extensive gun collections in their homes. Firearms are the tools of the trade, but they seem to also have a totemic value among SEALs. Most gun collections are measured in dozens and many in the hundreds.
An extraordinary pain threshold is assumed among SEALs—as is the ability to govern their emotions, especially fear. After one training evolution, one SEAL told another: “You’re bleeding.” With some surprise and some interest, the other said: “Oh yeah? From where?”
His comrade pointed to the blood running down his leg.
When other SEALs are told this story by one of us, they shrug. So?
Most telling is the SEALs’ relationship with the bell during BUD/S. Ring the bell and you’re out of the teams immediately. Officially, it is known as “Dropped by Request,” or DOR.
The bell is always with them during basic training. At meals. At the obstacle course. In the exercise yard, known as “the grinder.” On long beach runs, they haul it in a truck bed. At sea, it is in a nearby boat. It is always within reach, for a man ready to signal that he has had enough, that he is done.
When the men are running with heavy logs on their shoulders or struggling in the surf with hypothermia, the instructors taunt them: “Just ring the bell. There are doughnuts and hot coffee waiting.”
“The reason that the bell exists is because when you’re in battle, there is no bell,” one SEAL instructor told us. “And we want to know who needs [that bell] and who doesn’t.”
The SEALs are composed entirely of men who saw the bell, heard its mournful clang, and refused to ring it. They refused to give up.
In the almost fifty-year existence of the U.S. Navy SEALs, not one has surrendered or been taken captive. The bell, in their mythology and in their lives, has done its job.
This is no accident. It is the result of a long history of fortunate accidents in the evolution of the SEALs. It is a culture made by the hammers of hard experience.
Their story begins on a dark beach, ill lit by moonlight.
CHAPTER 1
The Froggy Origins of the Navy SEALs
Fort Pierce sits on a serpentine, sandy barrier island, several hours north of Palm Beach, Florida. Aside from a chain-linked fence around a string of Navy bunkers and buildings and a small town with a five-and-dime store and a few bars, it was uninhabited and alone. On a night in the winter of 1942, viewed from the sea, it was a desolate strip of palm trees washed by the cold Atlantic waves—much as the Spanish explorers might have seen it centuries earlier. No lights appeared on shore and the moon revealed no landmarks.
Swimming with the tide, men with blackened faces and air tanks on their backs swam up to the empty beach. They were met with large concrete Xs and barbed wire, painted to blend into the night.
Without a word, the frogmen began their work, cutting through obstacles.
The halo of a flashlight beam soon found them. The voice of an officer carried over the crash of the waves: “Chief, your men will have to try that again.”
The exercise of the U.S. Navy’s first U
nderwater Demolition Teams had been going on for weeks. The men, known as frogmen, were training to clear beach obstacles and to attach limpet mines to enemy vessels.
Less than a year before, the Japanese had attacked the U.S. Navy, Marine Corps, and Army bases at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, violently shoving America into World War II. The early Sunday morning surprise attack, when most men were asleep or at services, came in two waves, with a total of some 350 Japanese bombers, fighters, and other attack aircraft. Some 2,403 Americans (including civilians) died in the December 7, 1941, attack, which sank or capsized four battleships, sank three cruisers, and three destroyers (the cruisers and destroyers were later raised and re-built), along with a number of minesweepers and auxiliary craft. Four other battleships were so severely damaged that they would not be put to sea until the following year. Of the 402 American aircraft stationed in Hawaii on that day, 169 were destroyed and another 159 crippled, many of them on the ground, according to U.S. Navy records. The Japanese lost only 29 planes and no ships. It was the biggest defeat in American naval history.
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Meanwhile, the navy was already developing new techniques for amphibious landings. The slaughter of British forces attempting to land on hostile beaches in Turkey during the Gallipoli campaign in World War I had concentrated the minds of senior officers. They knew that any future war would mean masses of men on the beach under withering fire.