Inside SEAL Team Six

by Don Mann

  Rounding out the team was another SEAL, Erik Liebermann, who was not only one of the best athletes in the teams but also an exceptional navigator.

  The next Raid Gauloises would be held in the Patagonia region of Argentina in late 1995. Which meant that we had a little more than a year to prepare.

  Mike and Mark were cousins and incredible athletes, but neither of them was really a trained outdoorsman. In fact, they both hated the water and didn’t like being out in the woods at night.

  So a large part of the fifty thousand dollars that they raised from various sponsors was spent on sending them to climbing, kayaking, and mountaineering courses. The five of us also met once a month for three-day nonstop workout sessions, usually in the White Mountains.

  We assembled in southern Argentina in late November of 1995. The area we would be racing through, Patagonia, was a million square miles featuring a harsh combination of ice, snow, glaciers, mountains, heat, and relentless Antarctic winds.

  Race officials informed us that we would be required to ride horses using wooden saddles, like the native gauchos; don snowshoes and crampons; and risk altitude sickness and avalanches—all the time carrying all of our food and gear. They estimated it would take the fifty-five-person teams seven to ten days to complete the five-hundred-mile course. Most teams would average fewer than two hours of sleep per night.

  The reward? Forty thousand dollars to the winning team, which would barely cover the fifteen-thousand-dollar entrance fee and the additional money we had already spent on travel, equipment, and training.

  We weren’t in it for the money.

  Despite all the time they’d spent on training, Mike and Mark began lagging behind from the start of the race. Erik and Juli were always way ahead of them. And I was running back and forth trying to keep the team together so we wouldn’t be penalized for being dispersed.

  Mike and Mark were made up of fast-twitch muscles, which are better suited for sprinting and lifting than for long treks. Like Erik and Juli, I was born with mostly slow-twitch muscles.

  Fast-twitch muscles contract and expand quickly, but get tired fast. Slow-twitch muscles are more efficient at using oxygen to generate fuel, and can fire for a long time before they fatigue.

  Mike and Mark were great guys but constantly complaining. The white-water sections scared them. When we got to the smoother sections of the river, we had to pull their kayaks. They weren’t very good at the climbing or biking sections either.

  Day three we’d climbed to about twelve thousand feet when a bad storm started blowing in. We now had to cross a rocky peak that was covered with snow and ice.

  Juli and Erik went up the side of the cliff without a problem.

  I noticed some loose rock and warned the two cousins that they shouldn’t climb one behind the other; the person ahead might dislodge a rock that would tumble down onto the guy below.

  I ascended and waited with Juli and Erik. The three of us were sitting on the side of the mountain taking in the incredible scenery around us and wondering when the next storm was going to hit when we heard some rocks come loose, then the sound of rocks falling, and then a bloodcurdling scream.

  Mark and Mike hadn’t wanted to be separated. So Mark had ascended the cliff with Mike right below him, just like I had warned them not to do. Mark had knocked a rock loose; that had caused a rock avalanche, and…bam!

  I climbed down to them and found Mike holding his right hand, which had been smashed by a boulder. He was in shock as he looked down at the bloody stump of flesh—all that I could see was a little piece of the palm.

  I quickly wrapped his hand with the military OD green triangular bandage that I was wearing as a headband and yelled to Erik, “Set up a tent. Tell Juli to activate the emergency personal-locator beacon!”

  Juli activated the beacon, and the race organizers in Argentina dispatched a medevac helicopter, which arrived forty minutes later. In the meantime, I bandaged and splinted Mike’s hand and stopped the bleeding.

  We found a small ledge on the side of the mountain for the helo to land, and when it did we carried Mike aboard. Fortunately, the helicopter took off minutes before the storm hit, otherwise Mike would have had to wait until it blew over.

  His cousin Mark was an emotional wreck, so I said to him, “Mark, you might as well leave the race. Take care of your cousin.”

  But Mark was determined to finish.

  Next, we had to descend twenty-five hundred feet down the side of a snowy mountain and climb over another range. The ride was a blast. You basically sat on your backpack, used your ice pick to steer, and glissaded all the way down.

  Juli went first, then Erik.

  Before I left, I asked Mark, “Are you sure you’re going to be okay?”

  He answered, “I’ll be fine; I just need a minute. You go ahead.”

  I went down like a shot.

  At the bottom Erik and Juli asked me, “How do you think he’s going to do?”

  As we watched, Mark stumbled, fell, and tumbled all the way down the mountain. Before he even reached the bottom, we started to set up the tent and radio for medevac. He was badly broken up.

  After Mark was medevaced, all that remained of Team Odyssey was me, Erik, and Juli. We flew through the rest of the course, passing twenty-seven teams in the next two days. Late in the race, I sank into a patch of quicksand.

  Also, during two days of continuous paddling, I saw a beautiful Chinese girl in a traditional costume emerge from the water just in front of my canoe, and I stopped paddling. Erik, who was sitting behind me, asked, “What’s the matter, Don? Are you okay?”

  “I don’t want to hit the girl.” Of course, there was no girl.

  The three of us made it to the finish along with about half of the teams that had entered, but our finish was unofficial because we didn’t have a full team.

  That was my first adventure race and I loved it. I was getting tired of the triathlons, with just the three sports. Adventure racing was much more exciting. By this time I had competed in over a thousand endurance competitions and I was looking for something more—and I had found it. So I immediately started planning and training for the next Raid, which was going to take place in South Africa in 1996.

  That summer I was training with a group of athletes who were interested in participating too. Five of us paddled for twelve hours, then drove to the mountains in western Virginia and ran with packs and boots for fifty miles. Following that we mountain biked for another fifty miles with backpacks.

  After we returned to Virginia Beach, we rode our bicycles another sixty miles at high speed (about twenty-three miles an hour, average).

  As soon as the bike ride was over, I flew to Atlanta with a group of ST-6 operators to provide liaison and security to the Atlanta Summer Olympics, where 10,320 athletes from 197 countries were going to compete in 271 events. We landed, were briefed about the area we would be operating in and the mission, and were told we had ten hours before we had to report to FBI headquarters.

  We were staying in a military barracks near a small park outside of Atlanta, which we were told was a known site of drug deals and homosexual hookups. Beyond the park stood several wooded mountains. Even though I was exhausted, I did a twelve-mile mountain-trail run.

  On the way to the barracks, I stopped at the base gym to finish my three-day nonstop workout. I crushed myself on the leg-extension machine. Usually I could lift 340 pounds, but this time I could only lift around 30—I was beat!

  Wanting to push myself until I didn’t have anything at all left, I started to run back to the barracks, passing through the park that we had been told to avoid. When I stopped behind a tree to urinate, I pissed pure blood.

  I’d done this other times during ultra-distance runs and wasn’t particularly concerned. But now I felt light-headed and collapsed to the ground.

  I woke up minutes later by the tree, with my shorts down, wondering where the heck I was. I couldn’t even remember the name of the city, or the state
.

  I pulled up my shorts and started to walk. And as I did, my head started to clear.

  Later, when I explained to the guys on the ST-6 security detail what had happened to me, they joked to the FBI guys that I’d been assaulted in the park.

  On the night of July 27, 1996, thousands of spectators gathered in the town square area of Centennial Olympic Park for a late-night concert by Jack Mack and the Heart Attack, whose big hit was “Cardiac Party.” Sometime around midnight, someone planted a green U.S. military field pack containing three pipe bombs surrounded by nails underneath a bench near the base of a concert sound tower. The bombs weighed more than forty pounds and used a steel plate as a directional device.

  Security guard Richard Jewell discovered the suspicious field pack and alerted Georgia Federal Bureau of Investigation officers. Nine minutes later, the bomber called 911 and alerted authorities.

  I was on duty at the operations center with an FBI agent when we got the call. It went something like “My brother-in-law is a nut. He told us that he built a pipe bomb and that he would be famous at these Olympics.”

  We’d received dozens of similar calls.

  But we decided to take this call seriously and alert authorities, who started to clear concertgoers from the park. At 1:20 a.m., while Richard Jewell and other security officials were in the process of ushering people out, the bomb exploded, killing one woman and injuring over a hundred others. Another man, a Turkish photographer, died from a heart attack while running away from the blast.

  President Bill Clinton condemned the bombing as “an evil act of terror” and vowed, “We will spare no effort to find out who was responsible for this murderous act. We will track them down. We will bring them to justice.”

  Thirty-four-year-old Richard Jewell was initially lauded as a hero. But three days it came out in the news that the FBI was treating him as a suspect. They conducted several searches of the house where he lived with his mother. Several months later, the investigating U.S. attorney cleared Jewell of all charges.

  The investigation stalled until early 1997, when the Atlanta bombing was linked to two other bombings in the Atlanta area. After a massive manhunt, fugitive Eric Robert Rudolph was arrested in Murphy, North Carolina, and sentenced to life in prison.

  As the advanced-training officer at ST-6, I organized and conducted elaborate training exercises—capability exercises (CAPEX), we called them. Sometimes we’d rent commercial cruise liners for a week at a cost in excess of a million dollars and practice taking them down.

  Often we deployed all three SEAL assault teams, along with the snipers, breachers, and coxswains, and worked with helicopters and ships. We would spend an entire week climbing up the sides of the ship from the cigarette boats, rappelling down from the helos, taking down the ship’s ballroom, disabling the engines, and defusing elaborate IEDs. It was an exercise in coordination with the air assets, boat assets, assault teams, and ship crews.

  We also practiced jumping from passenger jets. We’d be sitting in a Boeing 727 with the passengers in the front of the plane and our parachutes stashed in the luggage compartment. Once we got close to our target, we’d move to the back of the aircraft, which would be partitioned off by a curtain.

  We’d open the door to the luggage compartment and retrieve our parachutes, then crank open the back door of the jet. The first four guys would position themselves on the stairs. When the green light went on, they jumped. Then the rest of the team would run down the steps and jump. We needed to exit quickly so that the separation between all the jumpers in the air wasn’t too great. We usually achieved a tight stack and flew, bumping canopies.

  We even had passenger jets specially designed so the seats would turn around to make room for us to don our chutes. We practiced this often.

  In addition to being the ST-6 advanced-training officer, I served as the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) officer, which became the most important program that ST-6 was involved with at the time. We went from a counterterrorism team to a counter-WMD team. Part of my responsibility was to help track and recover approximately two hundred nuclear weapons that had gone missing when the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1990.

  A large number of these had vanished from Soviet stockpiles in the Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, which had been part of the Soviet Union. Pyotr Simonenko, head of the Ukrainian Communist Party, admitted to reporters, “Out of 2,400 nuclear warheads which were on Ukrainian territory, only 2,200 can be accounted for. Nobody,” he said, “has any idea where the other 200 deadly warheads have gone.”

  Maybe he didn’t, but we did. Most of them were recovered. But a number of former Soviet nukes found their way to North Korea, where they were being hidden in large underground tunnels.

  ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​ door was not a problem. But breaching tunnels fortified with layers of concrete and steel was a completely different challenge.

  Upon learning that there were tunnels of similar size and reinforcement throughout Europe, we coordinated training with some of our NATO counterparts. We surveyed their tunnels to test their vulnerability to an attack. This was very valuable information to the host nation and also taught us a great deal about what it would take.

  Many of the tunnels had been built during World War II to serve as bomb shelters. In Norway, there was one twenty-six miles long that served as a hydroelectric plant. Another tunnel had been converted into a huge underground ice-skating rink.

  I can’t say much more about the WMD program except that it was a success. The team I worked with also helped locate and recover a number of former Soviet nuclear scientists who were selling their bomb-making expertise to other countries.

  But not everything at ST-6 was so life and death—or limited to official business. Once I was traveling with a new ST-6 corpsman named Reed to do some Pararescue training with the PJs in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

  As we checked into the hotel, I noticed some pamphlets on the front desk advertising local activities. One devoted to a balloon festival caught my attention.

  I turned to Reed and said, “Hey, Reed, why don’t we go jump out of a balloon this weekend?”

  He looked at me like I was crazy and answered, “I don’t know, Don. We don’t even have parachutes.”

  “We’ll have to find some.”

  First, I had to see if I could find a balloonist who would let us jump from his hot-air balloon. Everybody I contacted said no.

  Eventually I located this old hippie with a gray beard and long hair. He said, “Sure, dude. But last time I let a jumper out, I smashed into the mountains and ripped off my kneecap.”

  He explained that when someone jumps out of the basket, the balloon loses so much weight that it goes spastic.

  But he was a cool guy and willing to try again. He told us that he’d be going aloft early the next morning when the air was thick, which enabled the balloons to get off the ground. We agreed to meet at 0300.

  Now Reed and I had to find chutes. At the time all of us at ST-6 were jumping with MT1X parachutes, which were also used by the Air Force. So we went over to the air loft at the USAF base
and found the chief rigger. Reed and I were these longhaired guys who didn’t look like normal military. And we didn’t have our jump logs with us, because we hadn’t planned on jumping during the trip.

  I went up to the chief rigger and said, “I’m Chief Mann and this is my teammate Reed. We are both SEAL medics going through the PJ course. And we’d like to ask you if we could borrow a couple of MT1X chutes for a balloon jump tomorrow.”

  The rigger looked at me like I was crazy and said, “Sorry, Chief, but no way.”

  Another rigger who was packing reserve chutes on the other side of the room called us over after the chief rigger left.

  He said, “Guys, I’ll be on duty tonight, and see that table over there? The door will probably be unlocked, and there will be two MT1X parachutes lying on that table. If they happen to be gone when I come back, I’ll need them back by tomorrow night.”

  We went out and bought him a case of beer, then returned later and took the parachutes off the table.

  Reed and I didn’t have jump boots, suits, helmets, or altimeters. Nor did we have time to repack the chutes.

  We found our way to the large, open desert field where the Albuquerque balloon festival was taking place. Some balloons were already going up, and others were filling with heated air.

  The basket could only accommodate two people at a time, so I climbed in first with the old hippie. He turned a valve, releasing propane from the tank, which caused the flame under the balloon to grow larger and fill the balloon with hot (lighter) air. The balloon started to rise gently from the ground.

  Looking out from the basket, I was treated to an amazing sight—hundreds of different-colored balloons decorated the sky that changed hue by the second as the sun crept over the horizon.

  I was taking it all in when the old hippie said, “Okay, dude. You can jump anytime.”