Eyes on Target: Inside Stories From the Brotherhood of the U.S. Navy SEALs

by Scott McEwen

  He was sworn in on a Friday morning, married on Friday afternoon, and shipped out to basic training on Monday. “It was all very quick.”

  Months later, he graduated at the top of his boot camp company and won the excellence award as the number one recruit that training session. He was thirty-one years old.

  But Drago still had to get into the SEALs, and his medical file showed that he had a kidney stone.

  In Millington, Tennessee, he went to see a Petty Officer, who was a Navy SEAL motivator there. Drago explained that the kidney stone in his file would keep him out of the SEALs.

  “Yes, I want to see your medical record,” the Petty Officer said.

  Drago handed him the file. The Officer opened it up, looked at it and saw the offending page. “Oh, that’s it.”

  He told him to leave the room and a second later called Drago back in. “What page are you talking about? Can you show it to me?”

  There was no page about a kidney stone in the file. “Do you see any kidney stones anywhere?” he asked.

  Drago said: “Nope, I don’t. I don’t even remember any such page!”

  “Neither do I.”

  Drago passed the medical exam for the SEALs.

  * * *

  Three weeks into BUD/S, Drago’s leg was so swollen by flesh-eating bacteria that he couldn’t put his pants on. He was sent to the infirmary and put into the next BUD/S class, number 185. He would have to start all over again.

  He was determined not to quit. Hell Week came. He started Hell Week with size ten shoes. Soon, the severe training rubbed the skin from his soles and his heels. His feet swelled to size thirteen and a half. “My feet looked like a pepperoni pizza.”

  Still, Drago refused to quit. “It was nothing compared to a Polish prison,” he said.

  One night during BUD/S, a friend asked him why he was so determined. Drago realized that he was tired of hearing men say that they were “trying to be a SEAL” or “giving it their best shot.”

  So when he was asked, he had a powerfully simple response: “I didn’t come here to try to be a SEAL. I came here to become a SEAL. I didn’t come here to try. I’m not trying it. I’m going to be a SEAL unless you just kick me out for something or I break myself. I will be a SEAL.”

  The room was quiet. His powerful determination stunned them.

  * * *

  He passed and, in March 1993, received orders to report to SEAL Team Two.

  At the time, the “welcome to SEAL Teams” was old-school and brutal. Today they may call it hazing… back then “it was just a welcome FNG (Fucking New Guy) to the Teams,” Drago said.

  Every Friday night, the new guys were required to join the older guys to share a keg of beer in the high bay, a tall space in the team compound with cranes and chain lifts. “We FNGs weren’t there to drink beer—we were basically amusement for the experienced guys,” Drago said.

  Drago and the new guys would be dangled upside down by their feet, taped with rigger’s tape, from the rafters or from a crane. They dangled like bats. Sometimes, mercifully they were lowered down to have some beer poured onto them. Other times, they would get beaten up. “It wasn’t called hazing. It was called ‘welcome to the teams.’ ”

  The brutality had a purpose, as it did with other fraternities. It bonded the men together and it built trust. Once everyone was assured that the new guys were tough enough to take it, they knew they could trust them in battle.

  That trust would prove to be essential when Drago was part of the SEAL platoon ordered to hijack a Russian oil tanker.

  * * *

  In the Persian Gulf, in the year 2000, some Russian tankers were illegally moving large shipments for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Violating U.S. and United Nations sanctions gave Hussein a river of cash to feed his war machine and his Baath party cronies—while his people starved. If the United States failed to dam this illegal tide of money, Saddam Hussein would again threaten Israel and America’s Arab allies as well as fund terrorist groups, as he had in the past.

  Drago knew that his mission was important. He, with his platoon, was stationed on an aircraft carrier, the USS John F. Kennedy.

  The target: a Russian oil tanker called the Volgoneft.

  As SEAL snipers circled in helicopters above the contraband tanker, Drago and his teammates fast-roped to the deck of the tanker.

  Drago knew that the team would have to seize the ship before it escaped into Iran’s territorial waters. (Though Iran and Iraq were enemies, they often protected each other’s shipping to vex their shared enemy—Uncle Sam.) Drago’s team would have only minutes.

  They landed on the steel deck and ran toward the bridge. Within three minutes, they had tied up the captain and the bridge crew. Belowdecks, another SEAL team was surprising the engine room crew.

  But the Russian captain wasn’t ready to give up. He kept barking in Russian, telling his crew not to cooperate. He was betting that the Americans would not understand. But Drago did. He had been forced to learn Russian in Polish schools. Drago grabbed him by his cap and led him to a small access door into the ship’s main chimney. He said, in Russian: “If you don’t shut up, I am going to shove you in and lock you in this chimney, and if you don’t fit I will beat you in and you’ll be sitting there quietly.”

  The Russian captain, shocked by Drago’s command of his language and his commanding personality, bowed his head. He would cause no more trouble.

  Drago enjoyed his moment with the Russian. After a childhood of pain, it was a little justice.

  * * *

  Life in the SEAL teams is dangerous, but it is always leavened with humor.

  In planning a snatch-and-grab mission in Iraq, the intelligence briefer warned that there were two large dogs hidden behind twelve-foot-high concrete walls in the target’s Baghdad compound. The target was a terrorist leader. If the dogs barked, any hope of surprising the insurgent leader would be lost. Still, Drago didn’t like the idea of killing the dogs. “I like dogs. I like animals, so I didn’t like that idea, but you have to do what you have to do.”

  It was a joint operation between the SEALs and the GROM, a Polish Special Forces unit. The briefer was a part of the Polish team.

  Later that night, the SEAL team approached the concrete wall of the target’s compound. A teammate silently scaled the ladder and poked his head over the top of the wall, then scanned the yard with his night-vision goggles. At another place, a GROM lookout climbed into place.

  The radio crackled. Drago heard, in Polish, an urgent whisper: “I see two huge dogs. Damn! Fucking huge!”

  Drago sighed. This was going to be tough.

  Yet, he followed the plan, climbed the ladder, and dropped into the compound. His teammates dropped in behind him. As Drago ran toward the house, he saw the “dogs” that the Poles were talking about—two skinny cows. They were mindlessly chewing grass.

  They quickly entered the house and captured the target without firing a shot. It was a “perfect op”—what SEALs call an operation when no shots are fired. Except for the cow-dog confusion.

  They returned to base to debrief.

  After the mission, Drago looked in the conference room and saw the poor guy who made the call about the two big “dogs.”

  His other teammates had made up flash cards, similar to the ones used to train soldiers to recognize aircraft by their outlines. One of the teammates held up a card. “What’s this?”

  The lookout looked glum. “Dog.”

  Another card was held up. “What’s this?”

  “Cow.”

  “What’s this?”

  “Chicken.”

  Drago walked out because he was laughing so hard.

  * * *

  In Iraq, Drago was a liaison officer between the SEALs and the GROM. “So I was sort of double-dipping. I was going on missions with GROM and with our guys.”

  Drago and his team were hunting an insurgent leader, a former general in Saddam Hussein’s army who was organizing armed atta
cks on Americans.

  When they found him, he was hiding in a house with blast-proof doors. “So we prepared an appropriate charge capable to blast through such doors. As we were coming to the doors (I was the lead breacher on this mission) I noticed that the intel was wrong—there was a solid door but not as strong as the intel indicated. I am breacher, and it is my expertise. I need to know such things. Powerful explosive charges placed on weak doors would destroy the whole room and might kill the occupant. I changed the charge to a smaller one, appropriate for the construction of the door (our entry point). It happened that [the target] was awakened, possibly by the barking dogs, and for some reason decided to walk to the door and put his ear to it while holding the doorknob, as I blasted through his door.”

  The explosion just threw the door away and left him standing in place. “It didn’t even throw him on the ground—he was dazed, he didn’t know what was going on.”

  The general was left holding only the doorknob, like a cartoon character.

  Drago used a zip-tie handcuff as a tourniquet for the general’s bleeding hand.

  As he came around, the Iraqi general heard the operators from GROM talking, he spoke to them in Polish. “Hey! Hey! Stop for a second! You are Polish guys? Hey, get me out of here. The Americans are after me. Get me out of here! I have money! I have whatever! Get me out of here.”

  The Poles asked him to verify his name. He said, “Yeah, yeah, that’s me.”

  The Polish commander said to Drago: “Hey, we have the son of a bitch.”

  The general started crying. “You bastards, I’m going to catch you. How can you do this to me?”

  The general had learned Polish while he attended flight training in Poland, when that country was a satellite of the Soviet Union. Iraq was also a Soviet ally in the 1980s.

  For Drago, he found that his unique history was constantly an unexpected asset in the SEALs.

  He remains grateful to America and to the SEALs for giving him a new life. “But you know what, only in America, the only country in the world that you can come with nothing and through hard work and determination you can succeed and become a valuable member of this great society. I came with the bag of clothes, not even speaking English, and now I am on the tip of the spear of the most elite force of our country. It is amazing. It can’t happen any other place in the world but America. I love America. Everything I have I owe to America and its wonderful people. Often people ask me: ‘You’re Polish American?’ and I always say, ‘No, I don’t believe in that. I don’t believe in being Something-American. You’re either American or not, and I am an American.’ ”

  CHAPTER 5

  Afghanistan: Operation Red Wings

  Ringed by razor wire, Asadabad is a lonely U.S. outpost in Eastern Afghanistan’s Kunar Valley. Its outer concrete walls are pockmarked with bullet holes and the brown-red burns of exploded grenades. At night, the wind is cold and constant, blowing around debris of past battles.

  Asadabad was called a forward operating base, because nothing lies in front of it except the shadowy enemy. The attackers are mostly Taliban and a pickup crew of militants, who would climb up the steep, snaking goat paths from Pakistan. The border is unmarked and unfenced—an invisible line that the Americans knew by GPS and the enemy by tradition. All other American or allied forces lay to Asadabad’s rear, a hard day’s drive or a long helicopter journey from the south or the west. Help was far away and the enemy was close.

  In June 2005, Asadabad was home to the U.S. Marines of the Second Battalion, Third Regiment. The Taliban had welcomed them with a rain of rocket attacks. Day and night, the base was rocked by mortars and probed by sniper shots. No wonder the Marines called Asadabad “A-bad.”

  Every move against the enemy failed to stop the attackers. The Marines had sent foot patrols into the steep, dry hills, fired fusillades of mortars, and called in air strikes. The explosions echoed down the rocky valley walls. But, the next day, the attackers were back.

  To rid themselves of the constant assaults by Taliban forces, which were led by a warlord named Ahmed Shah, the Marines called Special Operations Command (SOCOM) for help.

  Operation Red Wings was born. Some accounts refer to it as “Operation Red Wing,” but that is incorrect. It’s named after an NHL franchise team (the Red Wings), as are all other operations in that operational series.

  That fateful call set in motion the bloodiest battle in the forty-five-year history of the SEALs and the largest air search-and-rescue mission since the end of the Vietnam War, and it yielded the first Medal of Honor for a SEAL in the war on terror. It was a horror show that produced heroes and corpses.

  * * *

  Senior Crew Chief Dan Healy was in charge of planning the SEAL component of Operation Red Wings.

  He had grown up near the New Hampshire coast and drifted into the Navy with a friend. Soon, he was determined to join the SEALs, and he made it through BUD/S on his first attempt. He spent the bulk of his SEAL career shuttling between Southern California and Hawaii, usually as an instructor. He won high marks from his SEAL students for his patience and his gung-ho attitude. And, they said, he was fun to party with.

  Healy was determined to prove himself. Ever since the September 11 attacks, he was bucking to get in combat. Now in Afghanistan, in 2005, he finally got his chance. He was a few months into his first deployment in Afghanistan when his commander asked him to plan the SEAL component of Operation Red Wings. Working out of a cubicle choked with maps and intelligence reports, he became obsessed with finding the Taliban warlord killing the Marines in A-bad.

  On the morning of June 27, 2005, Healy called together four members of SEAL Team Ten: communications officer Dan Dietz, sniper Matthew Axelson, medic Marcus Luttrell, and Lt. Michael Murphy, the unit’s commanding officer.

  Raised in Littleton, Colorado, Dietz as a youngster wanted to be a ninja until he found out it wasn’t really a profession, his mother said. After becoming a SEAL, he slept through his alarm one morning. As Dietz rushed in late for duty, he impressed everyone with his abject apology and even volunteered his own punishment. A SEAL officer remembers that day well: “He gave himself a harsher punishment than I would have given him”—in this case, running in combat boots and cleaning out a storage locker. His willingness to hold himself accountable impressed everyone, the officer said. Dietz had recently married Maria. She went by the nickname “Patsy” and was madly in love with him. Their long overseas phone calls were legendary.

  Matthew Axelson was a sniper. “Axe,” as the team called him, was a high achiever whose family lived off a quiet cul-de-sac, a few miles from Apple Computer’s headquarters in suburban Cupertino, California. His plan was to serve his country until he turned twenty-five and then become a schoolteacher in Chico. His wife, Cindy, was impressed by his humility. When people asked Axelson what he did, he would just say he was “in the Navy.” Besides golf, good beer, and California, Axelson loved being a SEAL. Tall and good-natured, he was respected in the teams for his hard-core training regimen and his uncomplaining professionalism.

  From the small ranch town of Willis, Texas, medic Marcus Luttrell had trained since he was 15 to join the SEALs. He and his twin brother, Morgan, both dreamed of becoming SEALs. The twins found a Texan who agreed to train them before they joined the Navy at eighteen. They ran for hours down dusty country roads with concrete blocks on both shoulders. They climbed ropes and spent hours in cold-water pools. After high school, they joined the Navy and were selected for SEAL training. They each made it through BUD/S on their first try. Later, the twins commissioned a special tattoo: each would have half of the SEAL trident tattooed on his back. When they stood together, the tattoos formed one large SEAL insignia. Tattoos are a common way to celebrate the successful completion of BUD/S, but the ambitious size and complexity of their back tattoos quickly became the talk of the teams.

  Lt. Michael Murphy, the team’s commander, hailed from Patchogue, New York. He stitched a patch from the New York City Fir
e Department inside his uniform. The September 11 attacks were “a major motivator” for him, one team member recalls. He proposed to his fiancée, Heather Duggan, under the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree in 2003. She immediately said yes, as the ice skaters circled on the rink below. The couple planned to marry as soon as he returned from Afghanistan, and he counted the days on his cell phone.

  Healy didn’t waste time with preliminaries. The team would be going deep into enemy territory.

  The plan was simple. A helicopter would insert the SEAL team at night a few miles from a village where the warlord Ahmed Shah was supposedly holed up, if the intelligence reports were right. They would rope down and find a concealed position. If they spotted Shah, they would radio “eyes on target,” and an eighty-man Quick Reaction Force would swoop in to capture or kill him. If Murphy’s team succeeded, the attacks on the Marines at A-bad would cease.

  On an impulse or a premonition, Axe decided to pack a few extra magazines of ammunition. Luttrell saw him, wondered about the extra weight, and then took a few extra magazines for himself. Resupply would be impossible in the field, and running out of ammo in a firefight is a death sentence that the lazy impose on themselves. As it turned out, they would need every round.

  * * *

  With their weapons and gear, the four SEALs boarded a U.S. Army 160th Special Aviation helicopter. It thundered off toward the drop zone: a field of waist-high grass and rotting stumps. Illegal loggers had long since cleared the trees, making it ideal for a Taliban ambush. It was still dark when they arrived. The men slid silently down ropes from the hovering chopper.

  The helicopter sound faded away into the night sky and was gone. The four SEALs were on their own in what they called “Indian country.” They waited in frozen silence for 15 long minutes, straining their ears for the noise of enemy movement. They heard only the wind and the rattle of bony branches of shrubs. They were alone, on a high plateau, in the Taliban’s backyard. And, so far, no one had spotted them.