“That’s the mission, gentlemen. It’s a shitty one, too—a real goatfuck, if you ask me. But guess what? We don’t have to like our mission—we just have to do it.
“So, when the training gets hot and heavy and you think ‘I’m tired’ or ‘The old man’s pushing too hard’ or you’re scared because we’re going too fast and it’s gonna be a motherfucking meat-grinder, remember—you don’t have to like it. You just have to do it.
“Now you know what our mission is. Every time you go through a training mode, I want you to think of how you’re going to apply that training to these targets. Every time you think I’m being too tough on you, think of those targets. Every time you want to ease up, think of those targets.
“That’s the whole goddamn story in a nutshell, gentlemen. It comes down to this: I’m giving you the tools. I’m giving you the opportunity. I’m giving you the support, and the backstops. If there is shit, I will take it for you. If there is flak, I’ll absorb it for you. All you have to worry about is getting so fucking good at your jobs that you can fucking do anything. And leave those cocksucking, cunt-breath, pusnuts, shit-for-brains, pencil-pushing Pentagon assholes to me. That’s my fucking job. I don’t have to like it, either. All I have to do, is do it.”
Chapter 19
I’VE OFTEN BEEN ASKED IF I EVER FELT LIKE PLEADING guilty because I screwed with the system for so many years. Didn’t I feel guilty for using so much profanity? Didn’t I feel guilty about the strong-arm methods I used to get what I wanted? Didn’t I feel guilty about making my superiors eat shit?
My answer has always been the same: guilty—absolutely. Guilty as charged. Guilty of putting my men before bureaucratic bullshit. Guilty of spending as much money as I can get my hands on to train my men properly. Guilty of preparing for war instead of peace. Of all these things am I indeed guilty. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima fucking culpa.
So, while my men flew off to Florida to start “dirty dozen” training at Eglin Air Force Base, I mud-wrestled the bureaucracy over how SEAL Team Six would be run, and where it fit in the chain of command. They got to throw themselves out of planes, fast-rope from choppers, and shoot until they were blue in the face. I got to fight the paper war, page by goddamn page. I didn’t like it. But I did it.
On the charts, Six was assigned to the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command—JSOC—Brigadier General Dick Scholtes, who lived at Ft. Bragg. He, in turn, was responsible to the NCA—the National Command Authority—managed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. My philosophical outlook about how this progression worked was simple: the president owns me, the JCS manages me, and JSOC tells me when I can break wind. So far as I was concerned, the Navy’s administrative chain of command had only one function to perform for SEAL Team Six—the triple—S function, as in “Sit down, shut up, and shell out.”
Organizationally, it was SURFLANT—SURface Force AtLANTic—that was my money manager. That’s where all of SEAL Six’s bills got paid. But according to the Navy’s bureaucracy, SURFLANT and SEAL Six were not supposed to talk directly. Instead, an organizational interface was inserted. Why? That’s a good question, to which I do not have an answer. One rationalization I came up with was that SURFLANT couldn’t speak SEAL, and I allegedly couldn’t speak Navy. Whatever the case, the interface assigned to come between us was NAVSPECWARGRU TWO, which was run by Commodore Ted Lyon.
Ted wasn’t good at speaking either SEAL or Navy. But he was fluent in gibberish. To make matters even more pleasant, Ted had convinced himself he was a significant component of my chain of command.
We fought. He saw me as a recalcitrant junkyard dog who had to be brought to heel, so he yanked my chain at every conceivable opportunity. I saw him as a small-minded pismire, and when he tried to yank, I gnawed chunks out of him. He questioned virtually all the specialized equipment I purchased, memoing Washington that it was irregular and unnecessary. I ordered German-made Draeger bubbleless lungs for Six. Ted said we couldn’t have them because one, they were foreign purchases, and two, we had current-model Emerson units available to us. I steamrolled over him and got the Draegers.
Next, I bought German Heckler & Koch MP5, 9mm submachine guns. He complained again. “Why foreign guns? We can get MAC-10s for a third the price.”
“Because the HKs are better, Ted. They’re more accurate. They’re more consistent. They adapt well to our mission.”
“I’m dead set against it.”
He called his rabbis, and I called mine. SEAL Team Six got HKs.
The Navy leased us four Jeep Eagles as tactical-ops cars. We used them, but to be honest, they weren’t going to be much help to us. For exercises in the States they were fine. But overseas, it’s hard to find spare parts for Eagles. Besides, in the regions of the world we’d be playing, just driving an American car gets you undue attention. So, using a couple of contacts I had in Bonn, I finagled two customized, armored Mercedes 500-series sedans, and four Mercedes jeeps for $160,000, a discount of more than 60 percent. From the outside, the sedans looked like the big cars common to Europe, the Middle East, and all through the Americas. But on the inside they’d been customized for the German counterterror unit, GSG-9—with hidden firing ports, ram bumpers, concealed police-type lights, sirens, and communications packages. The jeeps had roof turrets and other goodies.
Ted went ballistic. But I shoved the Mercedes down his throat, closed his mouth, worked his jaws, and made him swallow.
In between bouts with Ted I’d drop in on my men as they progressed through the training cycle. By mid-October, everyone had qualified in HALO—High Altitude, Low Opening—parachute work (even Command Master Chief Mac, who had to be dragged off the C-130’s ramp on his first jump). We’d also begun working on fast-roping, which was a way of putting six men on the deck from a height of sixty feet in less than four seconds.
The ropes we used were British—a reverse-weave, soft, twisted nylon line, which allowed us to brake ourselves with our hands. Unlike rappelling, which uses a line attached to a safety belt, fast-roping was simply a controlled fall. If, for example, we wanted to fast-rope onto the fantail of a moving ship, our chopper would make its approach at wave-top level from the rear so as to escape detection. Its sound would be masked by the ship. Then, at the last moment, the chopper would quickly rise or “flare” above the stern, hover as two ropes were kicked out and six men went down them, then perform a rapid turn and disappear.
The technique calls for split-second timing and first-rate flying. The chopper pilot must compensate for the weight shift as the lines are tossed and the men throw themselves onto them. He also has to move with the ocean swells. A five-foot sea can mean a nasty ten-foot drop at the end of the rope if the pilot screws up.
Shooting exercises were progressing, too: the Team was getting more and more accurate by the day. At first, I’d been able to hold my own with any of the men at Six. Now, it was me who’d end up buying the beer after a couple of hours on the range. The seven-man boat crews were shooting so much now—in the range of three thousand rounds per man per week—that some of the Berettas developed fissure cracks beneath the receivers and had to be modified so extensively by the manufacturer that SEAL Team Six in essence had custom-made pistols.
Not everything went smoothly. We had our first training fatality at Eglin. It happened during a live-fire, room-clearing exercise, and the victim was Six’s one Chinese American SEAL, a youngster I’ll call Donnie Lee.
In a remote corner of Eglin we built a series of four-byfour posts with canvas stretched between them to simulate rooms. The rooms, which could be configured any way we wanted them—big, small, rectangular, square, trapezoidal—also had doorposts and plywood doors. Inside the canvas walls, silhouette targets representing hostage-takers and their hostages would be set up. The object of the exercise was for pairs of SEALs to go into the rooms and “clear” them, killing the bad guys without harming the hostages. The drill was a common one for hostage-rescue teams. Indeed, Charlie Beckwith had
used much the same technique in training Delta some years previously.
The goal was to build your shooters’ speed and hone their intuition. An operator who can distinguish a good guy from a bad guy in a second is of no use whatsoever. Civilians can tell good guys from bad guys in about eight-tenths of a second. CT operators must act in hundredth-of-a-second increments—and their decisions have to be made both instinctively and correctly.
Hostage rescue is also a painstakingly choreographed exercise. Split-second moves have been rehearsed for months in almost every possible combination, so that if A happens, then the operators react instinctively with B. On this particular day, we’d begun by working with revolvers. This is significant, because we carried our .357s uncocked and fired them doubleaction.
After a break, the teams switched to Berettas. These are double-action semiautomatic pistols. For room-clearing, we carried them with a live round in the chamber and the hammer back, which made them into single-action guns. The amount of pressure needed to fire a pistol single action is significantly less than in double-action mode. Additionally, we reversed the order in which the men went through the door. Normally, a pair of SEALs would always hit the door in the same sequence. But sometimes we reversed them on purpose—because, in real life, Mr. Murphy’s law applies. We wanted to be ready for what can go wrong—because it will, indeed, go wrong.
Donnie had been backup man all morning. Now he was first through the door. As his panner, whom I’ll call Jake, followed, Jake stumbled, lurched forward, and squeezed off one round into Donnie Lee’s back.
The wound wasn’t fatal, and he was taken to the base hospital quickly. I arrived just after they’d wheeled him into the operating room. Donnie was a good kid—a little green, but his instincts were okay. He had a ready smile, and he’d do anything you asked him to do. What upset me so much about this screwup was that it had been done to him, not by him. Thoroughly depressed, I sat on institutional furniture holding a paper cup of vending-machine coffee and waited until the doctor came out to give me a verdict. It was optimistic. I was somewhat relieved.
After two days or so, we moved Donnie to a Navy hospital—where the doctors insisted on opening him up once again. After that second operation, the kid took a turn for the worse—who wouldn’t have, after being slit open from stem to stern twice in a week. I was still upset about the accident, but had conditioned myself to accept the fact that SEAL Six would take fatalities during training. But I kept my word to the men: before twenty-four hours had elapsed, Donnie Lee’s partner, Jake, was no longer a member of SEAL Team Six. In fact, Jake was no longer even a SEAL. I had him transferred to another branch of the Navy altogether. He had committed the ultimate SEAL sin—he had injured his swim buddy. If we had been on an actual operation, I don’t think Jake would have survived it.
We flew Donnie Lee’s mother in from Hawaii. The situation was toughest on her. She had no idea what Donnie bad been doing and couldn’t understand how he’d gotten hurt. What made it worse was that I couldn’t tell her anything.
“How was he injured?” Mrs. Lee would ask again and again.
“In training.”
“What kind of training?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, I just can’t say.”
After about a week, Donnie developed a bad staph infection. Then he went comatose. Every day, I’d spend a couple of hours at the hospital, watching the kid on his respirator. I took to yelling at him. “Get the fuck up, Donnie,” I’d shout.
Often, as I did that, he’d twitch. Mrs. Lee would get all excited. “He hears you—he hears you,” she’d tell me.
She was a mommy: right until the end, she never gave up.
Donnie’s death didn’t interrupt the pace or intensity of our training schedule. I couldn’t allow it to. In the real world, you don’t stop and suck your thumb and talk and talk and talk. Not when there’s a mission in front of you. All those Hollywood movies where some kid dies in training and his best friend goes into a funk and can’t fly (Top Gun comes to mind) or do his job are utter bullshit.
If my men couldn’t hack it, they knew they’d be gone. Not in months or in weeks or in days—but in hours or minutes. You don’t give second chances in elite units; you don’t coddle your men or spend a lot of time playing touchie-feelie with them. That’s why they’re elite units in the first place. Men volunteer for Delta Force or SEAL Team Six because they want to do things no one else has ever done. They do not volunteer for medals or glory or attaboys. They volunteer because they want to push themselves beyond any range of experiences they’ve known before—and either succeed or die trying. That is not hyperbole. That is simple fact.
So, death or no death, we kept working. It was important not to stop. I wanted SEAL Six to push the edge of the envelope—to be able to hit the enemy’s back door in a way no one had ever done it before. I broke the team into two sections—Blue and Gold—and while Blue drove to Louisiana and practiced climbing oil rigs in the Gulf, Gold flew to Arizona, where I rented thirty miles of airspace, and we started HAHO—High Altitude, High Opening—jump exercises.
The technique made sense to me. You’re a bad guy. You hear a plane. You look up. A bunch of pus-nuts asshole SEALs are dropping in on you. So you wax them as they float down. Fuck the phoques. But with HAHO, the plane is flying at thirty thousand feet, and maybe twenty miles away. You never see it. You never hear it. And then all of a sudden, it’s “April fool, motherfucker, your ass is grass.”
We began using our chutes as parasails; we bought minibottles of oxygen to keep us from blacking out, strapped lights to our helmets, and compasses to our wrists. We jumped at night from C-141 StarLifters flying so high that, without the compasses, we couldn’t tell the lights of Phoenix from the lights of Tucson. During a day HAHO exercise, one of my better jumpers, a guy I’ll call Nestle, malfunctioned at about twenty thousand feet. He tried to cut away—that is, release his bad chute, free-fall a couple of thousand feet, and then deploy his backup. He did the cutaway successfully, but his backup chute malfunctioned, too.
The death was listed as a sport-chute accident at the private facility from where we’d taken off, and Nestle’s body was taken to the morgue. Then, within hours, a local reporter started asking questions about the forty or so “sport jumpers” who were renting an entire airpark and jumping out of big black birds that had no markings. That was us. I wasn’t even on site, but Trailer Court and another of my fast-thinking officers spent a tense day. They ended up kidnapping Nestle’s body from the local morgue and getting it to a military installation before the authorities and the press caught up with them. SEAL Six was not in a position to be questioned by anybody.
By the time I showed up, Gold Team had already resumed its HAHO training. The men knew they couldn’t afford to break stride—so they didn’t. Their quiet, fierce determination to go on made me proud—which is a simple way of saying a complex thing.
Let me explain. As a SEAL, you don’t spend a lot of time philosophizing about what you do. Like the ad says, you Just Do It. But those of us who have been SEALs know what “doing it” means—we know about playing with pain. We know that death is always a very real possibility. Those are facts of life. But we do not dwell on them.
Sports broadcasters—especially those who do NFL games—spend a lot of time talking about how players play through broken bones, or sprained or dislocated joints. The players themselves don’t do a lot of talking. They just grit their teeth and hit the line. That’s the way SEALs are, too.
With HAHO and HALO jumps under our belts, I began to ask how else we could hit bad guys through the back door. It occurred to me that a covert insertion could be performed effectively by jumping out of a commercial jet. All you need to do is get the jet moved off its scheduled course for a few minutes because of “engine trouble” or “cabin pressure malfunction.”
For example: say we’ve been assigned to infiltrate Libya and blow up a chemical-weapons plant Qaddafi says doesn’t exist, or hit a training
camp deep in the Libyan desert and take out two dozen Abu Nidal terrorists. Solution: we commandeer—with the assistance of the local government, of course—a scheduled Egyptair or Royal Air Maroc flight that passes through Libyan airspace in the vicinity of the facility we want to visit. The authorities send the passengers away but get the plane off the ground on schedule—with us on board instead. Once it approaches the target area, the pilot calls in a flight irregularity and drops the plane from, say, thirty-nine thousand to about thirty-two thousand feet for a few minutes, and veers somewhere between fifty and a hundred miles off course. At the right moment, Six goes out the door. Then the pilot radios that everything’s been fixed and resumes his course. Meanwhile, we parasail another forty miles, land, form up, hit the plant or kill the terrorists, then exfiltrate quietly. Doom on you, Muammar.
No one in the military had ever done that sort of thing before. So I leased us a 727 and two pilots from Braniff Airlines, and with Horseface in the copilot’s seat, we flew over rural Arizona and practiced flinging ourselves out of the plane.
These exercises were no fun for Dickie, either. I’d made a commitment to the men that they’d never be asked to do anything I wouldn’t do first. “I won’t order you to fuck anybody I wouldn’t fuck, and I’m not gonna order you to go anywhere I won’t go,” is how I put it. So I threw myself out of planes with Gold team, revived myself with Bombay and Ben-Gay, flew to Louisiana, and went oil-rig climbing with the Blues. Then I’d crawl back to Little Creek, where Ted Lyon used me as his personal punching bag.
He wasn’t the only one. The secrecy surrounding Six affected my home life more than any other job I’d ever had. Kathy couldn’t enjoy any of the perks or social bonuses a CO’s wife usually enjoys, such as being near the top of the base’s pecking order, enjoying the deference of the younger wives, and a lot of increased visibility. I was top secret. I was on the road. Not only was she cut out of the normal office gossip, but she was alone most of the time. When I’d commanded SEAL Team Two I’d been on the road a lot, too. But back then, she’d been able to share her troubles with other young mothers. Now she was older than most of the officers’ wives, our kids were teenagers—and didn’t need her as much—and she neither knew what I was doing nor was able to talk about the little bit she might have guessed at. The bottom line is that our relationship suffered.
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