by Owen, Mark
“Hey, buddy, just relax,” I said.
All I needed him to do was remember everything I had told him.
“Green light, GO!”
The jumpmaster pointed off the ramp.
Up ahead, everyone started waddling to the ramp and diving off one by one. As we got closer to the ramp, I could see the sky and water meet at the horizon. I reached up and tapped my passenger on the shoulder twice and screamed over the wind into his ear.
“HANG!”
That was the signal to get into position. I wanted his toes hanging over the edge of the ramp so when we dove out I didn’t rake his shins on the ramp.
He froze. I could feel his feet try and dig into the ramp. I tapped him again and yelled.
“HANG!”
Again, he didn’t move.
We didn’t have time to wait. I pushed him forward and we dove off the ramp.
The drogue chute popped off my back. The small parachute helped stabilize us and controlled our speed during free fall. Just like during hundreds of other jumps, I went through my checks and pulled the handle and opened the main canopy.
Suddenly, all the airplane noise bled away and everything was perfectly quiet. The only sound was the chute snapping in the wind.
Looking around, it was beautiful. The fresh air was a welcome relief from the C-17 cabin. The sky and water were the same crystal blue and only a few wispy clouds were high above us. Scanning below me, I could see a maelstrom of parachutes all circling the four gray boats bobbing on the ocean below.
It looked like a World War II dogfight as my teammates swooped around in circles avoiding one another and coming to rest in the ocean.
The water was calm, with very small waves. Not far off I could see the flat deck of the USS Boxer waiting for us. As we came in, I flared out the parachute and splashed down into the bathtub-temperature water. Unhooking the communications specialist, I started to work my way out of the parachute harness.
We weren’t more than twenty yards from the boat. Sliding my flippers off my ankles, where I’d taped them for the jump, I started to swim over to the communications specialist. Behind me, the chute started to slip below the surface as the reserve parachute filled with water, dragging it to the bottom. I swam up to the communications specialist as he paddled, in a life jacket, toward the ladder hanging off the boat.
“How was it, dude?” I said.
“That was crazy,” he said.
It was the first time I saw him smile since the ramp opened.
Climbing aboard the HSAC, I found a place near the front while we waited to get a head count. Since the boats were only built for twelve people, it got crowded quickly. I climbed to the bow and let my feet dangle in the water. I let the current push my fins around.
“Hey man, did you see any sharks?” one teammate said to me as he climbed into the bow area.
“No,” I said. I knew the waters around here were infested, but I hadn’t noticed anything coming in.
“Dude, as I was coming in I saw this massive shadow below,” he said.
I slid my fins closer to the boat.
During our flight over, Phillips tried to escape, ratcheting up tensions. He made it into the water before being fished out at gunpoint. The pirates bound the captain’s hands and threw a phone and American two-way radio into the ocean, thinking the captain was somehow taking orders from the ship.
By now, the lifeboat was out of fuel and was adrift. Commander Frank Castellano, captain of the USS Bainbridge, persuaded the pirates to be towed by the destroyer, and to allow the ship’s rigid-hulled inflatable boat to deliver food and water. During one of the supply runs, the fourth pirate, Abduhl Wal-i-Musi, asked for medical attention for a cut hand. He was transferred to the Bainbridge for treatment. He’d been injured when Phillips attempted to escape.
After setting up on the USS Boxer on Saturday, we sent a small team over to the USS Bainbridge. The rest of the squadron was told to hold tight. In the event that the lifeboat made landfall, we would be forced to attempt a rescue mission on shore.
The team that went over to the Bainbridge was made up of an assault team, multiple snipers, and a small command element. The SEALs set up an overwatch position on the fantail of the Bainbridge. Snipers started a rotating watch as negotiations continued. We waited patiently for the situation to develop.
On Sunday, we suddenly got word that Phillips was now on board the USS Bainbridge and safe. Soon all the guys were back and I ran into my friend Gary. He was in the class ahead of me during BUD/S. Gary came to Green Team a few years after me. He started his SEAL career driving mini-subs. It was funny to think of him folding his six-foot-four-inch frame into the sub. He was awarded a Silver Star on the last deployment. He literally stitched up five guys trying to flank his element during a mission in Kandahar. Gary went over to the Bainbridge and was in charge of interrogating the captured pirate Wal-i-Musi.
We shook hands.
“Dude, holy shit, give me some scoop.” I said.
“We caught the last one when he popped his head up and smoke checked all three,” Gary said.
Gary told me he was tasked with talking to the injured pirate, Musi. Gary hoped the pirate could persuade his comrades to surrender. Gary started killing Musi with kindness when he got to the Bainbridge.
“Hey, man, want some ice cream?” he said. “How about a cold Coke?”
Musi and Gary struck up a quick friendship over food and comfort. Gary kept Musi out in the open so the other pirates could see him drinking Cokes and eating ice cream. Since the pirates still on the lifeboat had to yell back and forth to negotiate.
“I can’t hear,” Gary told Musi. “Tell them to pull the rope in.”
Musi agreed and the line got shorter and shorter, the lifeboat inching closer to the Bainbridge. The seas were getting rough and with no engine the lifeboat was getting tossed around. As it got dark, Gary and his teammates pulled the lifeboat even closer. It was pitch-black and there was no way the pirates could tell they were being pulled closer to the USS Bainbridge. On the fantail, Gary and his teammates scanned the lifeboat. Infrared lasers that can be seen only through night vision goggles danced over the skin of the boat.
One of the pirates always sat on top of the covered area keeping watch; engaging him would be simple. They could also see one pirate through the window steering the boat, another relatively easy target. But the third pirate was always hidden, and they needed to take out all three at the same time. The only way to take the shots and ensure Phillips’s safety was to get the third pirate to expose himself. Finally, after hours of waiting, on Sunday night the third pirate’s head and shoulders emerged from the rear hatch of the lifeboat. That was all the snipers needed. The orders stated, only act if Phillips’s life was in imminent danger. With tensions already high, and fearing for Phillips’s safety, my teammates opened fire. In seconds, all three pirates crumbled under the barrage.
After the last of the sniper shots rang out, the team on the fantail heard one unmistakable crack from a pirate’s AK-47. The single shot echoed over the water, and my teammates were immediately deflated. The stakes were high. Washington was getting frequent updates, and they were watching drone feeds of the lifeboat. The commanding officer of DEVGRU and our squadron commander were both on the USS Boxer.
Fearing the worst and not knowing if Phillips was dead or wounded, two snipers near the towline jumped up and started to slither down the rope to the boat. There was no time to waste. Balancing on top of the towline, which bobbed inches above the dark waves, they reached the boat in minutes. Armed with only pistols, they boarded the lifeboat and swung inside the enclosure. There was a single opening into the raft, making them an easy target for even a wounded pirate.
Entering the life raft, they quickly and methodically reengaged each pirate, making sure there was no more threat. They found Phillips tied up in the corner, unhurt. The USS Bainbridge‘s rigid-hull inflatable boat carrying a handful of SEALs was shadowing the lifeboat.
When they heard the shots, the boat raced in and the SEALs pulled Phillips off the lifeboat.
Back on the Bainbridge, before the last shot rang out, Gary grabbed Musi and slammed him onto the deck.
“You’re going to jail,” he said. “Your buddies are dead. You’re useless to me now.”
With his hands cuffed and a hood pulled over his head, Musi was led away.
Gary met Phillips at the fantail. The captain was confused and disoriented as he climbed on board the Bainbridge.
“Why did you guys have to do that?” Phillips said.
He was suffering from a minor case of Stockholm syndrome and in the shock of the shootings, he didn’t understand what had just happened and why.
Phillips underwent a medical exam and was found to be in relatively good condition. It didn’t take long before the Stockholm syndrome wore off. He was thankful for what my teammates had done. He called his family and was flown to the USS Boxer before heading home to Vermont.
The rest of us spent a few more days on the USS Boxer, waiting for follow-on orders before moving ashore and then flying home. It felt good to finally save a life instead of just taking guys out. It was cool to do something outside of Iraq and Afghanistan. I was happy to do something different. But the downside was we got a glimpse of the Washington machine and just how slow the decision-making could be. We were ready to launch on this days before we actually got the call. But the Captain Phillips mission renewed our capabilities and put us on Washington’s radar for other high-profile missions.
CHAPTER 7
The Long War
My legs ached and my lungs burned as I raced up the mountain.
It was summer 2009 and we were about eight thousand feet up in the central Afghan mountains two hours south of Kabul. After the Phillips rescue, we returned home, trained for several months, and then deployed on schedule to Afghanistan.
I could see the infrared laser from the aerial drone tracking the movement of eight fighters who ran out of the target compound when we arrived. Our team tore off after them as soon as the helicopter’s ramp hit the ground.
“Alpha Team has visual on squirters,” was all I heard Phil say over the radio.
The fighters were headed for a ridgeline three hundred meters north of the compound. We were trying to cut them off while the rest of the troop took down the compound. As we closed on their position, I looked back to see Phil and the rest of the team close behind. It was our first mission on this deployment, and we were still getting used to the altitude.
Seeing the rest of the team moving into position, I snapped back around and shouldered my rifle. The enemy fighters were setting up a fighting position roughly one hundred and fifty yards away. I could barely keep my laser steady after the five-hundred-meter run in all of my gear, but I managed to lock on to the fighter with a PKM machine gun. Squeezing off multiple rounds, I watched him fall. By then, my teammates arrived and opened fire, dropping two more fighters before the rest disappeared over the ridgeline and out of sight.
Leaving their dead, the remaining fighters raced down the backside of the ridge.
“We have five hotspots moving to the north toward several compounds,” I heard the drone pilot say in my radio. I could see the laser from the drone moving down the backside of the hill.
Phil gave the team a nod, and we were off on another dead sprint to close the distance.
As we crested the top of the ridgeline, we slowed down, careful not to rush into a hasty ambush. I saw three bodies lying there, one with the machine gun and one with an RPG. We were lucky to take out their two biggest guns in the first seconds of the fight.
The dead fighters were dressed in baggy shirts and pants and black Cheetahs, high-top Puma-like sneakers worn by Taliban fighters. It was a running joke in the squadron that if you wore black Cheetahs in Afghanistan, you were automatically suspect. I’ve never seen anyone but Taliban fighters in those sneakers.
From the ridgeline, we could see the surviving fighters tearing down the backside of the hill. Phil snatched the RPG lying next to one of the dead fighters and fired it at the group as they ran off. The rocket landed nearby, and the shrapnel peppered the fighters as they ran.
Dropping the launcher, he turned to me. Over the radio, we were getting calls about close air support, or CAS. An AC-130 gunship was circling above us.
“CAS IS COMING ON STATION,” Phil literally screamed at me from two feet away.
The RPG had knocked out his hearing.
“I can hear you,” I said. “Stop screaming.”
“WHAT?” Phil said.
For the rest of the night, I could hear Phil before I saw him. Every word out of his mouth came in a scream.
We watched from the ridgeline as the AC-130’s 20mm cannon pounded the fighters. Sending the combat assault dog, which Phil had nicknamed the “hair missile,” ahead, we spent the rest of the night chasing down the remaining fighters. All of them were either mortally wounded or dead.
Phil and another assaulter chased a fighter into one of the compounds, while the rest of us started to clear a field of waist-deep grass. The AC-130 was reporting more hotspots. We launched the hair missile and he locked on to the scent of a fighter about fifty feet to my right. I could hear the fighter start screaming as the dog attacked.
Calling the dog off, the assaulters threw hand grenades into the ditch where the fighter waited to ambush us. As they moved up to clear the ditch, I started to move forward.
Even under my night vision goggles, it was difficult to see. The grass was thick and hard to walk through. Behind me, I could hear intermittent gunfire as Phil and another assaulter were in a firefight with a barricaded shooter in one of the compounds. My gun was up and I tried to use my laser to illuminate a path through the grass. I could see burnt patches ahead of me where 20mm shells had hit.
Every step was measured.
I saw a dark shadow at my feet, underneath my night vision goggles. I lifted my foot to step on it, assuming it was a log or a branch, when I heard a man gasp. I jumped back and opened fire. It scared the shit out of me.
Taking a second to confirm I didn’t actually shit myself, I got my nerves under control. I moved up to search the body. He must have been dead before I got there. The weight of my foot on his chest forced the air out of his lungs. The body was singed from the 20mm rounds. After a quick search, I found an AK-47 and a chest rack.
Back in Jalalabad, we posed for some pictures after the mission. Phil, wearing a black Under Armour skullcap, had the RPG draped over his shoulder. The picture would be a reminder of the time he cut down the enemy with their own RPG and blew out his hearing.
It was a good night’s work and a great start to a lively deployment. That night, we killed more than ten fighters and suffered no casualties. As usual, it was a combination of skill and luck. Without a doubt, the shooter in the ditch would have ambushed us, which proved the value of the combat assault dog.
Since arriving at the unit, my life had been a series of highs from great operations and then days of lows waiting for the next mission. If we weren’t deployed, we were training to deploy. We’d alternate deployments between Iraq and Afghanistan. The pace was nonstop. It didn’t matter if you were single or married with kids. Our whole world was focused on our work. It was our number one priority.
It isn’t smart for me to get too much into families for security reasons, but it is also dishonest to make you think we didn’t have them. We had wives, kids, girlfriends, ex-wives, and parents and siblings all vying for our time. We tried to be good fathers and spouses, but after years of fighting the war it was hard to be present even when we were at home.
We lived with one eye on the news, waiting for the next Captain Phillips story. When we trained, we did it in a way that was as accurate as possible. We were too busy doing our normal deployment, training, and keeping the wheels on the bus at home to think of much else.
For the most part, our families understood the lifestyle. When we’re gone
eight to ten months out of the year on training or deployment, they always ended up being the last priority.
They wanted us home.
They wanted us safe.
They knew very little of what was really going on in our lives. They never experienced the satisfaction of knowing that every IED maker or al Qaeda fighter we killed made the world a little safer, or at least made life easier for the soldiers patrolling along the roads in Afghanistan. They might understand it in theory, but they were always left at home to worry.
The families waited for the men in dress uniforms to arrive at their door and deliver the news that we weren’t coming home. The SEAL community has lost a lot of great guys, and DEVGRU alone has lost more than its share. Those sacrifices have not been for nothing. The lessons we learned and the heroic actions of our brothers were not going to be in vain. We knew the risks on deployments and in training. We knew how to live with them, and we understood that we had to sacrifice to do this job. Our families, like my father who hadn’t wanted this lifestyle for me, didn’t always understand.
Just before my high school graduation in Alaska, I told my parents my plan to enlist. My parents weren’t pleased. My mother didn’t let me play with G.I. Joe or other military toys when I was younger because they were too violent. I still joke with my mother that had she let me play with action figures and get it out of my system I might not have joined the military.
Before graduation, I sat in the kitchen and talked on the phone with recruiters. At first, I think my parents thought it was a phase. But soon they realized how serious I was about joining the Navy.
My father sat me down to talk about my plans and about college.
“I just don’t want you in the military,” he finally said.
He wasn’t a pacifist by any means, but he’d grown up during Vietnam and knew how war impacted people. A lot of his friends had been drafted and hadn’t come back. He didn’t want his son to ever go to war. But I didn’t hear the concern in his voice or the nervousness about his only son putting himself in harm’s way. I just heard him tell me what I couldn’t do.