by Scott McEwen
When Olson assumed command of Naval Special Warfare Command (which commands all SEAL teams) in 1999, he immediately started reshaping the SEALs. His cultural influence continued to be felt when he rose to commander of all special operations (SOCOM) in 2007. He retired from the Navy in 2011, when he relinquished command of SOCOM to Admiral William H. McRaven. It marked the first time that command of SOCOM shifted from one SEAL officer to another. (SOCOM includes Army, Navy, Marine, and Air Force components.)
So Olson had the chops to win the respect of the SEALs. But it was his personality—the opposite of Marcinko’s—that surprised them. Zinke said, “He was quiet.”
“He’s not the bull in the room. And when you look at the personalities between Dick Marcinko and Eric Olson, it’s a big difference. One is bravado and in your face, and the other one is quiet, very thoughtful. I think the teams followed Olson’s lead and his personality. I think Olson had a profound influence on the change of culture of the teams, probably more than anyone else,” he said.
It wasn’t an easy evolution, several SEALs said.
Olson made several changes immediately. All SEALs under his command would be in uniform while on duty without exception. Regulation haircuts were once again required. Earrings were banned.
And the way Olson communicated the new policies was different, too. “I remember when his new policies came in, he didn’t go down to the team rooms and explain it. He made a video, which we all watched. This was a very tough group, that was very senior enlisted driven, and these were hard, hard men. They were kind of, they had their ways and in order to change the culture, you know, it was hard.”
The SEALs did not like it. But the video format itself was a message. These policy changes were not subject to a back-and-forth discussion, like in the Marcinko days. Instead it was a command.
Olson made it clear to the men of the SEAL teams that they had to change or they had to leave. Many did. The old guard that had served enough time to earn a pension quickly retired. Others stuck it out until they made their twenty years, qualified for a pension, and then they, too, left. Some even departed before they could secure a pension. The cultural shift was too much of a shock. Within four years, most of the old guard—officers and enlisted—were gone. Tens of millions of dollars’ worth of training and experience left with them. It was a real loss, though few dared say so.
“I think they looked at what the future was going to be and didn’t want any part of it,” Zinke said.
A new SEAL team culture emerged, one that won the confidence of Big Navy’s admirals. It was clean-cut and by the book. It was more like the U.S. Army’s elite Delta Force. It narrowed the cultural gap between regular and irregular (special) forces.
* * *
By the end of his second stint with Team Six, Zinke began to see the well-oiled machine that Six had become. In 2004, Zinke was assigned as deputy and acting commander, Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force—Arabian Peninsula in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, where he led a force of special operations personnel in Iraq in the conduct of 360 combat patrols, 48 Direct Action missions, and hundreds of sensitive operations. He was responsible for killing or capturing 72 known enemies, insurgents, and terrorists. By the end of 2006, he was awarded two Bronze Stars for combat.
However much the technology had changed, Zinke noticed that the attitudes of SEALs had been transformed. “I can’t overemphasize enough the ability of them to make the decision, and it’s tied to their trigger finger. If you’re not compliant, there’s ways of making you comply, but if you’re a threat in that environment, you will die in a hurry,” Zinke said.
In the mind of every SEAL in a covert operation, Zinke explained, is a rapid calculation beyond words. “They’re only engaging what goes through their mind, which is threat/nonthreat.” It doesn’t really matter who has a gun. The decision is: is that target presenting himself as a threat? SEALs call this “threat/no threat.” It is a nearly instantaneous categorization of people that they encounter during operations. Honing this ability takes thousands of hours of training, in the “Kill House” training sites and in firefights far from home. It is imperative to the survival of the man and those working with him.
Zinke cited the Osama bin Laden raid as an example of the lightning fast “threat/no threat” calculation: “I think they honestly were looking at what they were trained to do and I don’t think you can deviate from that, because that’s what they do every time: does he have a weapon?” That is really the only consideration. “I think he [Osama bin Laden] presented himself as a threat and they took the shot. I don’t think they even thought about it.”
He pointed out that there were others in the bin Laden compound who were not shot, Zinke added: “The other guys along the way, if also presented as a threat, and they would have been killed.” The fact that civilians were not killed during a high-adrenaline operation is a testament to SEAL training, he said.
Like many within the teams, Zinke thinks too much media coverage—from the New Yorker magazine to a Hollywood film—is a kind of poisoned gift, a necklace with a sharp, rusty edge. “I think you know very well the SEALs have been glamorized recently. But, I think people oftentimes forget how hard, and ultimately ‘blue collar tough’ the job is when you’re involved in day-to-day training. You’re not jumping out of airplanes every day. There’s a certain grind to it, and you have to be dedicated to be good. It’s a lot of time away from your family, the divorce rate is really high. The number of days deployed remains well over two hundred, I’m sure. That’s the job that we forget.”
The SEAL community is very tight, and there’s a lot of sadness within it. “There’s sadness over how many SEALs we’ve lost, of how many only sons that we’ve lost,” Zinke said, with no attempt to mask his pain. “It is a tremendous amount of emotions when you have parents of a SEAL, their only son, and they’re so proud that their son is a SEAL, and he gets killed.”
* * *
Zinke was elected to the Montana State Senate in 2008 and now represents District 2, which includes the cities of Whitefish, Columbia Falls, and all of Glacier National Park.
He has been asked by many to run for the U.S. Congress in 2014. He may be on his way to joining another elite club, with its own traditions, rules, and initiation rites. If he does enter national politics, one of his goals will be to protect the SEALs from excessive bureaucracy. The United States, he said, still needs its pirates.
CHAPTER 4
Drago’s War
We will call him “Drago,” because that is how he is known in the teams and because he remains under threat from terrorists.
His tale has never been told before,1 and it illustrates the openness of SEALs to new talents. He was one of the oldest men, and one of the few Polish immigrants, to join the SEALs. More tellingly, his story illuminates a key chapter in the development of the SEALs.
He was also the only SEAL to serve a prison sentence before joining the teams—but that was in another country, in a brutal time.
* * *
Drago came screaming into the world in 1962, in Lodz, Poland. A crowded industrial city beset by food and fuel shortages. Most of the damage of World War II, which had ended in 1945, remained unrepaired. Bomb craters in parks became muddy wading holes, and the rusting ruins of factories became playgrounds for poor kids like Drago.
As with most Poles, his family was divided between the pull of its centuries-old Roman Catholic traditions and the new totalitarian Soviet Communist ideology imposed by Poland’s Russian masters.
The conflict simmered and flared not just in Drago’s country but inside his family. His parents had met as teachers, but their lives veered in different directions. His father became a local leader of the Communist Party in Western Poland. He quit his job teaching art history to devote himself full-time to the Communist cause. In time, his father’s faithfulness to the Communists would be rewarded when he was made department director for theaters and museums at the Polish Ministry o
f Art. His mother never stopped loving her life in the classroom, and she became an accomplished teacher. She received few raises or praises for her hard work, but she believed her reward was in the next life. She was a devout Catholic.
His parents’ views of human nature and morality were antagonistic opposites. Drago’s father, and the Communists generally, saw masses of men who were entitled by History to commit atrocities, because the ends justified the means. Drago’s mother believed that each individual would be judged at the end of time by a fair but firm God, and that every needless misery inflicted on another would be punished. The love his parents shared could not bridge their dueling values.
His parents fought around the clock, most often on Sundays. Communists are required to be atheists; the Soviet leader would tolerate no other gods before him. Yet Drago’s mother wanted to take her son to church.
By the time Drago was four years old, the cold peace between his mother and father became molten opposition. One Sunday morning, his father blocked the door as his wife and his young son were dressing for church. In those days, Poles proudly wore their finest clothes to Sunday Mass.
His father was adamant and would not move from the doorway. “You cannot go because I will lose my job,” he pleaded. “They are going to fire me. You cannot go to church.”
Drago’s mother wouldn’t listen to her husband. She was more worried about her son’s soul than her mate’s job.
As the couple argued, Drago watched as his mother calmly opened the window to the street. In the window frame, his grandmother appeared. As his father continued to bar the door, his mother passed the boy out of the window. His grandmother took Drago into her arms. She set the boy gently on the sidewalk and led him by the hand to church.
Her defiant plan had been worked out in advance. His father was furious.
Drago learned a life lesson that would later aid him in the SEALs: Every obstacle can be overcome with persistence and creativity.
* * *
Later, Drago’s father took the young boy on a train trip to see his own mother. She was delighted to see her grandson, but the boy asked her a question that touched off a conversational firestorm. Since he often heard his parents arguing about Communism, he asked his grandmother: “What is a Communist?”
He still remembers her answer. “They are Satan’s henchmen. They are evil people, they are Satans. They murder innocent people.”
“You mean like the real Satan?” Drago asked. He was picturing a red-skinned monster with horns and fire.
“Yes,” she said without hesitation. “They have a hose, they breathe fire, and they are nasty and dangerous, and you need to avoid them.”
His father had defined his life by the long climb up the Communist ladder. And he was sitting in his own mother’s kitchen as she called Communists like him “Satans.” He tried to talk as quietly as he could. “Ma, you cannot talk that way. I am not Satan.”
His own mother looked at her only son. “If you sold your soul to them, you are Satan to me.”
Drago never forgot that moment. Both of his grandmothers and his mother were uncompromising in their principles—even if their views offended family members. Drago learned to hold on to his beliefs no matter what the world thought. This lesson would serve him well in prison and in the SEALs.
* * *
Dictatorship is always a slow-moving civil war of the rulers against the ruled. And civil wars divide families, too.
By the 1970s, the struggle between Communism and freedom divided his parents. They were exhausted by arguments and beyond reconciliation. His father joined the government bureaucracy in Warsaw, then a two-hour train ride away, and his mother stayed in Lodz. Drago lived with her and his younger brother and sister.
As a schoolteacher, his mother began attending secret nighttime meetings and helped form an independent trade union. Later that union secretly merged into Solidarity, a national union of unions that represented millions of workers standing up to Communism. The irony of workers organizing into unions in order to fight the Soviet “worker’s paradise” was lost on no one.
Drago, too, joined the anti-Communist underground. Lech Walesa had emerged as the national leader of the Solidarity union, battling police in the Gdansk shipyards. By age twenty, Drago and a friend were printing an underground newspaper—really, a double-sided, single-sheet leaflet. It was a dangerous thing to do. “At the time,” Drago recalls, “you could go to jail just for having a typewriter. They [the Communists] controlled everything.”
Distributing the paper was the riskiest part of the job. After printing a few hundred copies at a friend’s house, Drago would walk the streets of Lodz and press them into people’s hands. “It was kind of naïve, because you know what you’re doing, that you’re going to get caught. But we didn’t care at the time,” he told us.
Drago soon felt a policeman’s grip on his shoulder. He was arrested for a crime to be named later. At first, he was held in Lodz City jail, alongside common criminals, while the police brutally tried to learn the names of his accomplices. He didn’t give in. He had grown up hard and tough, and they couldn’t make him feel afraid.
Fighting the guards became a full-time job. “When I was in jail, I didn’t obey the rules. We had our own rules. We were political prisoners, but we never considered ourselves criminals.”2
The fight began with chairs. The prison chairs had no backs, and guards would beat prisoners who leaned against walls or slouched in chairs. When he arrived at the city jail, he was told to sit bolt upright, like a department store mannequin. Drago decided to break the rules, and lean back on the wall. A guard saw him and roughly dragged him out of the cell. The guard yelled and threatened.
Once he was back in the cell, Drago vowed to escalate his disobedience. He laid on the bed. “They came in, they dragged me out, and they beat the hell out of me.”
Back in his cell, he immediately climbed back into bed.
Drago refused to give up. It was a contest of wills. Eventually the guards gave up, but not before writing a complaint letter to his mother saying that Drago didn’t follow prison rules and was disobedient.
* * *
After many months and time in two prisons, Drago was released. The Communist rulers bowed to pressure from the Solidarity union, Pope John Paul II, President Ronald Reagan, and most of the civilized world. A general amnesty was announced, and Drago was set free.
But he was still watched. Often a policeman would stop Drago on the sidewalk and drag him into a patrol car. He would sit in the cage in the back as the police drove around the city in circles. Then, hours later, one would say: “Okay, get out.” He would walk home wondering how long he would be free.
Drago realized that one day the police could pick him up and he would disappear, as so many Poles had vanished before. He had heard about their unmarked graves in the Katyn Forest. So he went to the U.S. embassy.
An American diplomat asked him where in America he wanted to go.
He said, “I don’t ever want to be cold again. The hotter the place, the better.”
He was asked: “How about Memphis, Tennessee?”
“Memphis, Tennessee?” he wondered. “I know Elvis Presley is from Memphis, Tennessee, but that is all I know.” The diplomat showed him a map. Then he said it was warm there.
Drago shouted with joy. “Yes!”
Three anxious months later, in March 1984, he had a visa and a plane ticket to the United States.
He was thrown into an alien world with technologies and people he could barely understand. “I didn’t speak English. Now, I know we were poor. At that time I didn’t know that we were poor. I just was living my life, but I remember my mom had to put newspaper sometimes into our jackets as insulation to shield us from freezing winds during harsh Polish winters. We didn’t have the right clothes. We could not afford it.” In Poland he was often hungry. “We had the coupons for each month and we were allowed to eat only so much meat, so much sugar. I don’t remember what
the portions were, but they were very small. Even with coupons, I remember my mom had to stand in lines at five a.m. to buy bread. Sometimes, by the time she made through the line, everything was sold… well, that meant we were going to school hungry. She was trying her best, and my siblings knew it.”
* * *
He began his American dream by working as a part-time janitor, sweeping out schools. Then he found a job answering the phones at a car-parts shop. He didn’t have to use much English, but it was good practice. By 1988, by being friendly and working hard, he won a job as shop technician in a Mercedes-Benz dealership. “I was making really good money and enjoying life.”
The first Gulf War came in January 1991.
* * *
He had just become a U.S. citizen and wanted to serve his new land. “I announced to my friends, I say, ‘I’m leaving. I’m going to fight in the war.’ ”
“And they told me I was crazy. ‘What do you mean?’ ” Drago said. “This is my country and it’s fighting the war, so I’m just going to go fight the war for my country.” He’d made up his mind.
At first, he tried to join the U.S. Army. He didn’t know the difference between the Army and the Navy. Then, by chance, he met some Navy SEALs at a skydiving event. They told him that the Army was like the post office with guns. If he wanted action, he should join the SEALs.
He went to see the Navy recruiter the next day. Most of the process had been completed by Army recruiters, so once the screening was complete, he went back to the Navy office. On Thursday, he asked, “When will I ship out to boot camp?” The answer was “Monday.”