Charlie Mike

by Joe Klein

  “What was in the baggie?” Eric asked.

  “They don’t know. They think it was ecstasy or Special K.” (Special K was ketamine, a horse tranquilizer.)

  “I want to hear it from them first before we make any sort of move,” Greitens said.

  So, as they bumped along in the minivan, Kaj called Petty Officer Galvin and asked him to tell Eric the story. The details were precisely as Larsen had reported them. “So what do we do?” Kaj asked.

  “We piss test everyone, the entire squadron,” Greitens said without hesitation. There were two SEAL platoons, plus their two SWCC boat detachments, lashed together for this exercise. The boat detachments were making a tour of southeast Asia, but the two SEAL platoons were probably headed to Iraq or Afghanistan (where SEAL Team One was working both sides of the Pakistani border) immediately after Pattaya. It was assumed that this would be the SEALs’ last deployment before they went to war, and a certain eat-drink-snort-and-be-merry atmosphere prevailed.

  There was no direct evidence of drug use yet, only rumors and suppositions. Eric believed they needed to know precisely how widespread the problem was. “What do you think about a piss test?” Greitens asked Kaj.

  “Absolutely,” Larsen replied. “No question.” This really was a bright-line, Kaj believed. He wasn’t a teetotaler like Eric; he’d go out for a beer with the guys. The SEAL protocol was different from the rest of the military: officers and enlisted men not only could fraternize, they were sort of expected to. They went through every single moment of training together, every single moment of Hell Week; it was part of the ethos that they were brothers, if not quite equals.

  Kaj was ecumenical about drugs outside the military, although he had never used them. His parents were baby boomer academics. His mother, who was in charge of art projects at UC Santa Cruz, called herself a “public intellectual.” An objective observer, Kaj admitted, might call her a hippie. That was another reason why he joined the SEALs after college. “How else was I going to rebel?” he told Eric. “Smoke dope?”

  But this wasn’t marijuana, and all drugs were absolutely forbidden by the SEALs. The squadron was doing live-fire drills with the Thais, using extremely powerful weapons. They were bobbing up and down in Pattaya Bay, firing at targets on a small island; if they weren’t completely clean and clear, they could slip and do some real damage to their fellow seamen, or the Thais, or the local fishing boats, or the helicopters patrolling above. There really was no choice but to drug test Hobbs and his buddies, Larsen believed. But this would be a very big deal, if it happened.

  Eric and Kaj made a flurry of emergency calls to superior officers in California, Guam, Bangkok, and Pattaya as they careened over the dirt roads into the jungle—but it was Friday night in California and Saturday morning in Thailand. No one was at work. They called Petty Officer Galvin and told him that they were intending to drug test the entire detachment.

  And then there they were, at the elephant park. A languid line of ancient beasts with colorful two-seat baskets on their backs awaited them. It didn’t feel right, but Eric shrugged and said, “Well, as long as we’re here, we might as well do this.”

  Their elephant was called Sawang. Kaj was given a box of bananas to feed the animal, who had a general sense of where the bananas were and kept slinging his trunk back, searching for them as the group ambled off into the jungle on a narrow track; at one point Sawang nearly slapped Kaj’s cell phone out of his hands. And then, the phone started to ring. Suddenly, they were sweating in the woolen tropical heat, taking calls from Bangkok, Guam, and Pattaya with the cell phone on speaker as they rolled along in slow motion. The most important instruction came from their immediate superior in Pattaya, Lieutenant Lawrence Bradley, who wanted to discuss the situation face-to-face ASAP. But, they explained, they were on this elephant, splashing along a stream . . .

  That wasn’t the worst part. Petty Officer Galvin and Seaman Reilly called again. “Sir,” they said to Kaj, “you should know that if you piss test everyone, some of the guys in the Mark V team aren’t going to come out so well.” Eric was stunned. His men had been doing drugs? “And sir,” Reilly said to Kaj, “one of our guys says someone laced his drink with drugs a few weeks ago.”

  Kaj looked at Eric and shook his head. Laced his drink? Yeah, right. But there was no escaping it—the entire squadron was now involved: the SEAL platoons, the Mark V detachment, the RHIBs. This was a steaming mess of the highest order.

  Eric Greitens had been a Navy SEAL for eighteen months. He had graduated from the SEALs’ notorious two-year BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL) training program in late 2002. And from the start, Eric intended that his command of the twelve-man Mark V detachment—his first SEAL assignment—would be exemplary. He had inherited an office cubicle lined with pictures of near-naked women on Harleys. He took down the pictures and replaced them with quotations from Churchill and Patton and his favorite, from Thucydides: “Any nation that draws too great a distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.”

  He knew that his men were smart; they had to be to qualify for SWCC. But they were the sort of guys who’d been bored by school. As a result, they weren’t very confident about their intelligence. Eric started with a group discussion about the Thucydides quote. “What does this mean?” he asked them. There were no immediate takers. “What this means is that as warriors we have to be thoughtful fighters. We have to be people who are thoughtful about our discipline.”

  There was a didactic and almost condescending quality to Eric’s formulation, but somehow he was able to get away with it, Kaj thought, because he was so guileless. It was a weird quality. Eric’s earnestness would have been gagging if it had come from a base of moral smugness, but he wasn’t at all smug. He didn’t act like an Oxford hotshot or a more-righteous-than-thou humanitarian. He was a pleasant surprise, in that way, to his fellow SEAL officers, and especially to his men.

  They called him Mr. G, but also, during BUD/S, they began to call him Obi-Wan after he began to perform magic on their behalf with the SEAL trainers. Somehow—and just how he did it was a serious topic of conversation—Mr. G was able to manipulate the trainers and win his men small concessions, here and there, amid the daily torture. Even Kaj saw this as a form of witchcraft. “Hey, Mr. G,” they would say whenever they were scheduled to do something illogical by the trainers. “Can you go and do your Obi-Wan hand thing?” This was a reference to the Star Wars scene in which Luke Skywalker and his aged mentor Obi-Wan Kenobi are trying to sneak the two droids, R2-D2 and C-3PO, through a desert checkpoint. They’re confronted by soldiers, and Obi-Wan mesmerizes them with a flick of his hand. “These are not the droids you’re looking for,” he says calmly. The troopers let them pass.

  And Eric did have a weird sort of calm power over the instructors. He knew how to reason with them, respectfully. The trainers were mostly noncoms, and they understood that he had the makings of a good officer, the sort of man they’d want leading them in enemy territory. And so, if an instructor told Eric’s squad to run across the training facility to the chow hall, have lunch, and be back in twenty minutes, Eric could calmly make the argument that they didn’t really need to be back in twenty minutes, they’d just be hanging around the grinder—the asphalt physical training area—with nothing to do, and anyway, he had looked at the chow schedule and knew the next team wasn’t due into the hall until thirty minutes later . . . and the instructor would somehow succumb. “Yeah, sure, Greitens, just have them back on time.” (This also meant that Eric, who ate last, would get to enjoy a full meal.)

  Little things like that—having enough time to finish their meal—meant everything to the men, who were inevitably exhausted and dirty and hurting after the nonstop runs and swims and log-carrying and boat drills and killer PT that were their daily diet of pain in the first phase of BUD/S training. Eric’s constant awareness of their needs and his desire to get as many of them as possible
through the training had an impact. His men thought of him as sane, solid, and paranormal in their defense. Mr. G never lost his cool.

  Philosophical conversations became a regular thing for Eric’s SWCC team, and as time went on, they really did become conversations rather than Greitens monologues. He started a book group for his team. He chose the books. He’d gotten the idea from his own superior officer, Lieutenant Commander Charles Mellman, Jr., who had assigned him a book of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays to read and report on at the end of Eric’s two-year BUD/S training process. Mellman was, Eric believed, an exemplar of the warrior intellectual—as was Master Chief Will Guild, the noncommissioned officer in charge of SEAL training who taught an ethics class during the final phase of BUD/S. Mellman enjoyed the Oxford kid. They talked about SEAL culture and how to deepen the training. Mellman asked Greitens to write, specifically, about how Emerson’s philosophy applied to the SEALs.

  The essay opened with a famous Emerson citation: “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.” To which Greitens responded: “Naval Special Warfare has an uncomfortable relationship with the idea of conformity.” He then launched a direct assault on the training he had received and SEAL culture in general: “Students at BUD/S spend countless hours listening to instructors,” he wrote. “The truth about this time is that an inordinately large portion of it is spent listening to stories of sex and drinking.” He believed this was creating a dangerous ethos—“that what is ‘special’ about Naval Special Warfare is the way that Team guys party, rather than the way we go to war.”

  There wasn’t enough time spent studying SEAL fighting traditions, the strategy and tactics of clandestine warfare. “Without this sense of tradition, it is not surprising that some men come to believe that what is ‘special’ about Naval Special Warfare is that they get to wear their hair a bit long, carry a Spyderco, and sport shades.”

  Mellman was so surprised by the candor and freshness of the document that he passed it on to Master Chief Guild, who said, “This is fucking brilliant.”

  It was also trouble. The Naval Special Warfare community is tight and gossipy. Word began to spread about the essay: Greitens had ratted out the instructors. In response, Guild held a meeting and distributed copies of the essay to his entire teaching staff. “I know you’ve heard about this. Now read it carefully,” he said. When they finished, he asked, “What do you think?” Guild was an enormous man, a figure of real authority, a career SEAL, including seven years at Development Group (also known as SEAL Team Six). The instructors were wary; they didn’t have much to say. Guild got to the point. “If you’ve got a problem with the student who wrote this, and you’re intending to take retribution, I want your papers on my desk tonight because you’re not working here anymore.”

  Mellman and Guild were exactly the sort of people Eric had hoped to find in the SEAL Teams. He wanted the SWCCs in his boat team to be able to think and make ethical judgments for themselves. He and Kaj had their men read novels that were about honor and write essays. The men hated it, but they made it through the ordeal and grew closer. One of Eric’s favorites, Petty Officer Second Class Jeff Griffen, told the men, “LT [Greitens] has a different way of doing things. And you know what, it’s the right way.”

  But if members of his boat team were doing drugs, Eric’s way had been a failure.

  As Lieutenant Lawrence Bradley saw it, he was looking at a story told by two relatively junior SWCC crewmen implicating Hobbs, the highest-rated officer in the last SEAL Team One evaluation cycle. Before he did anything, he wanted to talk to Kaj’s storytellers—and, with great courage, they told him the same story they had told Greitens and Larsen. He then called in the young SEAL who had established “security” at the bathroom door in the Electric Blue club. He denied everything. “Everything’s fine,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Those [SWCC] guys must have been drunk.” This became the operative narrative in the SEAL platoons: the SWCC boat crews had screwed up. They were the ones, not the SEALs, being investigated for drugs. Greitens and Larsen were lousy leaders.

  “Do you know what’s going on?” Hobbs warned Greitens back at the hotel. “You gotta watch out for your guys, because something’s going down.”

  “Are you talking about drugs?” Greitens asked.

  And Hobbs said, “Yeah, so if you’ve got any of your guys that you’re worried about, you might want to let them know.”

  “Thanks,” Greitens replied. “I got it.”

  That night—it was still Saturday, an endless day—Greitens contacted his highest-ranking enlisted man, Chief Petty Officer Don Curtis, and said, “Hey, Don, we’ve got a problem here.” Eric could see that Curtis was thinking about the usual hassles: one of the engines was down again, or the Thais had changed the time of the exercises. “We’ve got a drug problem in the detachment.”

  Curtis was stunned, distraught. He was responsible for unit discipline. He didn’t want to have to deal with drugs—but he knew he had to. It was the worst part of his job. And this was a crucial moment. Later, when the story came out, more than a few SEALs believed that the Oxford boy should have handed the problem to Curtis and told him to take care of it, with the assumption that Curtis would issue a quiet warning and the whole thing would go away. But Eric simply could not do that; it would run counter to everything he believed about honor and responsibility. And the most serious problem was not in his boat crew. It was Hobbs, who was distributing the stuff. “Kaj and I have put our detachments on lockdown,” he told Curtis. “No one leaves the hotel. Everyone stays in their rooms. We don’t want them congregating. Tomorrow we’re going to question them.”

  The confessions came easily enough. “I’ll talk to you,” said one of Eric’s crewmen, “but I only want to talk to LT.” When the others left the room, the young crewman began to cry. “Yeah, I’ve been doing drugs,” he said, and he proceeded to implicate Hobbs and another member of Greitens’s crew who was the intermediary between Hobbs and the boat teams, distributing the ecstasy and ketamine.

  That Monday, Hobbs and five of his SEALs, plus the three SWCCs who’d been implicated, were sent to Bangkok for urinalyses. Hobbs tested positive for cocaine and was immediately relieved of duty. He would spend the summer in the brig and be court-martialed that fall. He was charged with using cocaine and ecstasy, distributing ketamine, and conduct unbecoming an officer.

  All the men involved were relieved of duty. The two SEAL platoons were sent back to Coronado, their chances of an immediate deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan obliterated. One of the SEALs convicted of drug use later committed suicide.

  Greitens was mostly infuriated with Hobbs, who was the alpha dog, the ranking SEAL in a squadron of very young men, many of them out on their first deployment. Hobbs had set the example; the others might never have considered using drugs if they hadn’t seen a SEAL platoon leader not only wasted, but also dealing. Eric felt terrible for the members of his boat team who had admitted to drug use and were cashiered; they were good men. They would always have to live with this. But most of his team had been better men—they had resisted the temptation, had not been led astray. He thought back to his Emerson paper: if they’d been trained properly, this might never have happened. “If you had told them,” Eric mused later, “what happens when we go to Thailand is that every night, everybody goes out . . . and we play chess, they would have gone out and played chess.”

  Perhaps, but after their nightly game of chess, they would have gravitated toward the tattoo parlors and nightclubs on Walking Street—they were, after all, men in their early twenties, men who could be facing crazy-dangerous deployments downrange before too long. Eric knew that sailors had been drawn to the fleshpots since before the Greek fleet destroyed the Persians at Salamis. He assumed his crew understood the rules, but he blamed himself for not sending the message more directly.

  There would be ramifications across the SEAL and SWCC communities. Rear Admiral Maguire knew that he had a major mess on his hands;
Thailand was just a symptom of a much larger problem. SEALs were coming home from their seven-month deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan hooked on adrenaline and unable to figure out how to decompress. The work they were doing in the field was stellar, but there were all sorts of fights and craziness in the bars back home. After Thailand, Maguire ordered a urinalysis across the Naval Special Warfare community and a hair analysis in Development Group because he’d heard rumors of a major problem in the super-qualified secret unit that eventually became a bit too well-known as SEAL Team Six. The results were devastating. There was significant use of methamphetamines in SEAL Team Six; an investigation revealed that SEALs were not only using but also dealing the drugs. The news dribbled into the Navy Times on September 4, 2004: Chief Aviation Boatswain Mate John F. Holcombe was arrested by the local police in Virginia and charged with possession of methamphetamine with the intention to sell. The story was hushed up quickly; Seal Team Six, like its Army equivalent Delta Force, didn’t officially exist.

  There were repercussions for Eric as well. When his Mark V boats moved on to their next deployment in the Philippines, the first question his new superior officer SEAL Commander Pete Stonecraft asked was, “What the fuck happened in Thailand?” He asked it harshly, like a slap in the face. “Why the fuck did you do that? You’ve created this huge mess. You don’t know Hobbs, you don’t know these guys—those were SEAL platoons. You’re not even operating as a SEAL on this deployment. You’re a SWCC. Why didn’t you have your Chief handle it? Tell them to quit it or there would be hell to pay. That’s how it’s done.”

  “Sir,” Greitens replied evenly, “guys can’t do drugs and shoot bullets past other guys’ heads.” But now he knew. Stonecraft was a SEAL’s SEAL. His judgment on Thailand would be the final verdict—not with the brass, perhaps, but within the more macho sectors of the brotherhood. Eric would never be considered a real SEAL by those guys.