by Don Mann
Part of our mission was to train the security details assigned to guard friendly heads of state. The United States had a vested interest in keeping certain world leaders, prime ministers, and presidents alive. So we would train the protective details of many Middle East heads of state. This could be a challenge because compared to U.S. security, most of the Middle East protective details were very poorly trained, ineffective, and even dangerous. We also trained our allied military troops in marksmanship, CQB, small-unit tactics, defensive driving, and protective operations.
In Serbia I worked closely with an Army captain whose eyes would fill with tears when he talked about the atrocities he and his men had committed during the ethnic cleansing that had taken place there.
I completed one training assignment with ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■ operator and hero of Black Hawk Down. One night, while Paul and I were teaching low-light and no-light shooting to some Middle Eastern soldiers, I said to the translator, “Tell the men to be careful that their light doesn’t go on accidentally. Because if the enemy sees it, they will shoot at the light.”
Paul said, “That’s exactly what happened to me in Mogadishu.”
“What do you mean?”
“My light accidentally went on and I was shot at. But the skinnies missed, and then I put them all down.”
I was in Israel when Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing Israeli radical who opposed Rabin’s signing the Oslo Peace Accords. I watched as hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets to light memorial candles and sing peace songs while angry mourners rioted.
A few years later, I was training a group of Palestinians in protective operations. One night after work I went out to dinner with a group of Palestinian officers, who started to open up after a couple of drinks.
One of them turned to me and said, “All we want to do is to be able to pray. Has anyone ever told you that you can’t worship in your church?”
“No.”
“Has anyone ever told you that you can’t go home for three or four days?”
Another one of the officers said, “All we want is the land that used to be ours, and to be able to drive to church, drive home, and drive to work.”
I was interested in hearing their perspective. Of course, they didn’t mention the fact that Palestinians were hitting Israel with bombs and rockets all the time.
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When my mother became ill, I stopped deploying as often. Memorial Day weekend 2001 I spent visiting her and my father in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where they had retired to a nice home near a golf course. My poor mom was suffering from emphysema and lung cancer and had to breathe through a respirator.
As I kissed her good-bye to return to Virginia Beach to pick up my daughter, my mom whispered, “Don, don’t leave.”
I said, “Don’t worry, Mom. The nurse is here to take care of you. And I’ll be back.”
Again, she said, “Don’t go.” I saw fear in her eyes.
While my dad was down the road at the VFW, where he served as state commander, a thunderstorm moved into the area, and my parents’ house was struck by lightning. The window between the porch and the bedroom exploded, and the porch caught fire.
As my mother lay in bed too weak to move or call for help, flames from the porch started to spread down the hallway. A neighbor saw the flames and ran into the house to try to rescue her.
The nurse who was with her disconnected my mother’s frail eighty-five-pound body from the respirator and was running out of the room with my mother in her arms when the flames reached the oxygen tanks and the house exploded. The nurse survived, but my mother and the Good Samaritan neighbor died in the fire.
My father called me in tears with the awful news. I got into my car and drove as fast as I could back to my parents’ home. All that remained was charred wood and ashes.
The first thing I did was visit the neighbor’s wife to express my thanks and condolences.
She said, “I always knew that my husband was going to die helping someone. I’m just sorry he couldn’t do more.”
I couldn’t believe the depths of her compassion and kindness. Her husband had died eight hours earlier trying to save my mother, and she was apologizing to me!
I drove to the morgue to view my mother’s body. Her face was charred black. Even with all my combat medical experience and training, I couldn’t take it. I broke down and ran into the woods in tears.
My mother had been afraid of fire her whole life. She’d always been so good to me, and she had asked me not to leave her.
I felt as if I’d let her down one last time.
I had to keep busy, and by the summer of 2001, I was spending about half my time doing weapons and tactics training and the other half training, racing, climbing, and producing extreme sporting events.
That changed when al-Qaeda terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. My focus immediately switched to the war on global terrorism. Sports took a backseat.
On the day of the attack, I was at a U.S. base overseas training a group of Egyptian commandos in M4 marksmanship and weapons drills. Right after we heard the news, the chief of the base directed us to disarm the Egyptians, stay armed ourselves, and not allow the Egyptians to leave their barracks.
The air was suddenly thick with distrust. I understood that the world had changed immediately and that the United States would be engaged in a war against Islamic terrorists that would last for decades.
Since 9/11, I’ve been working to help defend our country in a number of different capacities—training people for BUD/S and teaching military, special-police units, and government agencies how to do VBSS; CQB; fast-roping; diving; shooting; urban, jungle, desert, and arctic warfare; and more.
I’ve deployed to the Middle East many times. In fact, I traveled to Afghanistan soon after the fall of the Taliban in late 2001 to train the security detail of President Hamid Karzai. I was with him in February of 2002 when he teared up after learning that one of his ministers had been assassinated.
When one of the Americans on my team in Afghanistan got sick late one Christmas night, I drove to a clinic to get some medicine for him. On my way I was stopped at an intersection that was blocked by a large tractor-trailer.
A British MP came up to my window and said, “Yo, mate, you might want to go the other way. This truck is filled with explosives and could blow up half the city.”
The day after the incident with the tractor-trailer, I learned that one of our vehicles had gotten stuck in a mud-filled ditch just outside the city. I threw some chains in the back of my armored vehicle and drove to the site as fast as I could.
When you’re trapped like that in a hostile environment, you have two choices: call for help and sit in your vehicle until help arrives, or have someone hold security while someone else tries to get the vehicle out of the ditch.
You try not to escalate the situation. Which means that you don’t point your weapon at a crowd, instigating trouble. Instead, you constantl
y scan the area using all of your senses, looking in people’s eyes and at their hands.
Hands hold things that can kill you. If you see someone raise a weapon, you have no choice but to eliminate the threat.
As I drove up to the scene, I saw about twenty Afghan men, women, and children closing in around the vehicle. Some of the men were armed. Practically everyone in Afghanistan seems to own an AK-47. They cost about fourteen dollars on the street, less than a pair of Nike sneakers.
I made my way through the crowd and saw that the American holding security was standing with his M4 pointed toward the ground and his mouth frozen open with fear. His partner, meanwhile, was trying to hook a line to the back of their stuck vehicle, without security.
Stepping into the middle of the circle, I motioned to the Afghans who had gathered to back away. I spoke in a firm voice because I didn’t want to make them angry. They started to retreat, which gave us room to hook a cable to the vehicle, and we towed it out of there without incident.
Another time, a successful Afghan construction contractor I was working with was kidnapped and held for ransom. One night he’d entered his driveway, and a black SUV had pulled in right behind him; four armed men wearing balaclavas and CT gear got out. They hog-tied the contractor and drove him through several Afghan military checkpoints without being stopped, which is usually unheard-of.
He was taken to a house and up flights of stairs, where the kidnappers instructed him to call his family on his cell phone. They were demanding three hundred thousand dollars. His family managed to raise two hundred thousand dollars in a week. The kidnappers accepted the lesser amount and released him. I treated his injuries, which included a dislocated shoulder and some minor lacerations.
After the contractor was released, he told me that he was sure that officials from the Karzai government and local banks had been part of the kidnapping ring. It explained, he said, why his kidnappers were able to pass through government roadblocks without a problem and how they knew that he had a lot of money in the bank.
Things weren’t any less complicated in Iraq, where I’ve also spent a good deal ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■
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Unlike many of the Afghans and Iraqis I’ve encountered, the Kurds, who occupy northern Iraq and make up about 17 percent of Iraq’s total population, seem to appreciate Americans and what our country is trying to achieve.
The first time I arrived in Iraqi Kurdistan, my interpreter explained the absence of trees. “Saddam had them all burned down so that when he attacked, people couldn’t hide behind them.”
When I pointed out that there seemed to be many more women on the streets than men, he said, “That’s because Saddam had the men killed.”
Then when I noticed a large number of little boys and girls with cysts on their necks and faces, he said, “That’s because the gas that Saddam used against us gets into the DNA and is passed from one generation to the other.”