No Easy Day

by Mark Owen

For the next forty-five minutes, they took turns lobbing questions at me. I’d never been under fire like this. I didn’t know that before I arrived, the board had already talked to my platoon chief and commander at SEAL Team Five. They had an idea of who I was, but this was the only time they’d get a chance to size me up in person.

  To this day, I can’t remember who sat on my oral board. To me, they were just high-ranking operators who held my future in their hands. It was up to me to convince them to select me.

  But my poor physical fitness score wasn’t helping my case.

  “Do you know who you are screening for?” one of the chiefs said. “Do you know what you’re trying out to do? This is the entry-level test. You’re getting ready for the big leagues here and this is what you show?”

  I didn’t hesitate. I knew they’d hit me on this and I only had one play.

  “I take full responsibility,” I said. “I am embarrassed to sit here and show you that PT score. All I can tell you is if I show up, if I am selected, those scores are never going to happen again. I am not going to give you any excuses. That is on me. It is on nobody but myself.”

  I searched their faces to see if they believed me. There was no indication if they did or not. All I got were blank stares. The barrage of questions continued, designed to keep me off balance. They wanted to see if I could keep my composure. If I can’t sit in a chair and answer questions, then what am I going to do under fire? If they wanted to make me uncomfortable, they succeeded, but mostly I was embarrassed. These were people who I looked up to and aspired to be like and here I was, a young SEAL who had barely passed his sit-up test.

  At the end of the board, they dismissed me.

  “We’ll let you know within the next six months if you have been selected.”

  As I left the room I figured I had a fifty-fifty chance of making it.

  Back at Camp Pendleton, I smeared fresh green paint on my face and snuck back into the field to join my teammates for the last few days of the training mission.

  “How did it go?” my chief asked when I linked up with the team.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  I wasn’t telling anyone about the fitness test. I knew there was a real chance I had failed.

  I was in the middle of my SEAL Team Five deployment to Iraq when I finally got the news. My platoon chief called me into our operations center.

  “You screened positive,” he said. “You’ll be getting orders to Green Team when we get back.”

  I was shocked because in my mind I had been preparing myself for the worst. I had it in my head I would have to re-screen. Now that I had been selected, I was committed to not making the same mistakes. I knew I would show up at Green Team prepared.

  CHAPTER 2

  Top Five/Bottom Five

  My lungs burned and my legs ached as I ran back from the ladder in the humid Mississippi summer. The pain was less physical and more about pride. I was screwing up. The pressure I was putting on myself was worse than anything I’d hear from the instructors. The mistake I’d made in the kill house was a result of losing focus, and I knew that was unacceptable. I knew I wouldn’t be in the course much longer if I couldn’t block out the pressure and focus on the tasks at hand. Candidates could get cut from the course on any given day.

  I ran back and stood outside the house. I could hear the crack of rifle fire inside as other teams cleared rooms. We had a few minutes to catch our breath before going back in for yet another iteration.

  Tom had climbed down from the catwalk and was outside when I got back. He pulled me aside.

  “Hey, brother,” he said. “It was exactly the right move in there. You covered your buddy, but there was no ‘moving’ call.”

  “Check,” I said.

  “I know back in your old command you guys did things your way and maybe you didn’t need the call there,” Tom said. “But here, we want textbook CQB and we want the verbage we asked for. If you are lucky to complete this training and go to an assault squadron on the second deck, trust me, you won’t be doing basic CQB. But here, under pressure, you need to prove to us that you can do even the most basic CQB. We have a standard, and you can’t move without a moving call.”

  The “second deck” was where all of the assault squadrons worked at the command back in Virginia Beach. During our first days in Green Team, we were told we were not allowed to go up to the second floor of the building. It was off-limits until graduation.

  So, getting to the second deck was the goal. It was the prize.

  I nodded and slid a new magazine into my rifle.

  That night, I grabbed a cold beer and spread my cleaning kit out on the table. I took a long pull and savored the fact I survived, another bite out of the proverbial elephant. I was one step closer to the second deck.

  During our CQB block of training, we lived in two large houses located near the shooting ranges and kill house. They were basically massive barracks beat to hell after hundreds of SEAL and Special Forces training rotations. The rooms were filled with bunk beds, but I spent most of my time downstairs in the lounge area. There was a pool table and a 1980s big-screen TV usually tuned to a sporting event. It was more background noise as guys cleaned their weapons or shot pool and tried to unwind.

  The SEAL community is small. We all know each other or have at least heard of one another. From the day you step onto the beach to start BUD/S, you are building a reputation. Everybody talks about reputation from day one.

  “Saw you on the ladder today,” Charlie said to me as he racked up the balls for another game of pool. “What did you fuck up?”

  Charlie was big in both stature and wit. He was a huge man with hands the size of shovels and giant shoulders. Standing about six foot four inches tall, he weighed in at two hundred and thirty pounds. His mouth was as big as his body. He kept up a steady stream of smack talk, day and night.

  We called him “the Bully.”

  A former deck seaman, Charlie grew up in the Midwest and joined the Navy after graduation. He spent about a year chipping paint and brawling with his crewmates in the fleet before going to BUD/S. The way Charlie told it, being out in the fleet was like being in a gang. He told stories about fights on the ship and in port or on cruise. He hated being on the ships and wanted nothing more than to become a SEAL.

  Charlie was one of the top candidates in the class. He was consistently smart and aggressive, and it didn’t hurt that his last job before Green Team was as a CQB instructor for the East Coast SEAL Teams. The kill houses came naturally to him. And he was a crack shot to boot.

  “No move call,” I said.

  “Keep it up and you’ll be back in San Diego working on that tan,” he said. “At least you’ll be ready for next year’s calendar.”

  SEALs are based in two places—San Diego, California, and Virginia Beach, Virginia. A healthy rivalry existed between the two groups, based mostly on geography and demographics. The difference between the teams is minimal. Teams on both coasts did the same missions and had the same skill set. But West Coast SEALs have the reputation of being laid-back surfers and the East Coast guys are thought of as Carhartt-wearing rednecks.

  I was a West Coast SEAL, so hanging with Charlie meant a steady diet of digs, especially about the calendar.

  “Right, Mr. May?” Charlie said, snickering.

  I didn’t appear in it, but some of the teammates put out a calendar a few years back for charity. The pictures were cringe-worthy shots of guys without shirts on the beach or near the gray-hulled ships in San Diego. The move may have helped feed the poor or fight cancer, but it brought on years of mocking from the East Coast teams.

  “No one wants to make a calendar of pasty white East Coast guys,” I said. “I am sorry if we have our shirts off enjoying the sunny San Diego weather.”

  It was a battle that would never end.

  “We’ll settle this on the range tomorrow,” I said.

  ______

  My fallback was always shooting. I didn�
��t have the wit to go up against Charlie or the other smooth talkers in Green Team. It was widely known that my jokes were always weak. It was better to beat a quick retreat and then do my best to outshoot those guys the next day. I was an above-average shot, since I’d pretty much grown up with a gun in my hand during my childhood in Alaska.

  My parents never let me play with toy guns because by the time I was finished with elementary school I was carrying a .22 rifle. From an early age, I knew the responsibility of handling a firearm. For our family, a gun was a tool.

  “You need to respect the gun and respect what it can do,” my father told me.

  He taught me how to shoot and be safe with my rifle. But that didn’t mean I didn’t learn that lesson the hard way before it completely stuck with me.

  After one hunting trip with my father, it was freezing out, too cold to stand outside and clear our rifles. I joined the rest of my family in the house. My mother was in the kitchen preparing dinner. My sisters were at the kitchen table playing a game.

  I pulled off my gloves and started to clear my rifle. My father had taught me how to clear the chamber several times, emphasizing safety. First, take out the magazine and then work the action to eject any rounds before looking in the chamber and then dry firing in a safe direction into the ground.

  On this particular occasion, I wasn’t paying attention and I must have chambered a round, and then I slid the magazine out. Pointing the gun toward the floor, I took it off of safe and squeezed the trigger. The bullet exploded from the barrel and buried itself into the floor in front of the wood stove. I hadn’t been paying attention because I was trying to warm up. The boom echoed throughout the house.

  I froze.

  My heart was beating so hard it hurt my chest. My hands were shaking. I looked at my father, who was looking at the tiny hole in the floor. My mother and sisters came running over to see what happened.

  “You OK?” my father asked.

  I stammered a yes and checked the rifle to make sure it was clear. With my hands still shaking, I put the rifle down.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I forgot to check the chamber.”

  I was more embarrassed than anything else. I knew how to handle my rifle, but I’d gotten careless because I was more focused on getting warm. My father cleared his own rifle and hung up his coat. He wasn’t angry. He just wanted to make sure I knew what happened.

  Kneeling down next to me with my rifle, we went through the steps again.

  “What did you do wrong? Talk me through it,” he said.

  “Take the magazine out,” I said. “Clear the chamber. Check it. Take it off of safe and pull the trigger in a safe direction.”

  I showed him how to clear it properly a couple of times, and then we hung the gun in the rack near the door. It takes only one time to screw things up. And I learned from it. It was a huge lesson, and I never forgot again.

  Just like I never forgot another “moving, move” call after that day in the kill house.

  Our daily schedule in Green Team during the CQB portion started at dawn. We worked out as a class each morning. Then, for the rest of the day, half of the thirty-man class would go to the range and the other half would go to the kill house. At lunch, we’d switch.

  The ranges were some of the best in the world. This wasn’t your basic range where you shot at targets from a line. No, we’d race through obstacles, fire from the skeletons of burnt-out cars, and do a set of pull-ups before racing to shoot a series of targets. We always seemed to be moving. We already had the basics down, we were learning to shoot in combat. The instructors worked to get our heart rates up so that we had to control our breathing while we shot.

  Our training facility had two kill houses. One was made of stacked railroad ties. It had a few long hallways and basic square rooms. The newer house was modular and could be reconfigured to resemble conference rooms, bathrooms, and even a ballroom. We rarely saw the same layout more than once. The goal was to throw something new at us each day to see how we handled it.

  The pace of training was fast. The instructors didn’t wait for people to catch up. It was a speeding train, and if you didn’t catch on by the first day, you would most likely be heading back to your previous unit in very short order. Like a reality show, each week our numbers grew smaller as guys washed out. It was all a part of preparing us for the real world, and ferreting out the “Gray Man.” He was the guy who blended into the group. Never the best guy, but also not the worst, the Gray Man always met the standards, exceeding them rarely, and stayed invisible. To root out the Gray Man, the instructors gave us a few minutes at the end of the week to perform peer rankings.

  We sat at beat-up picnic tables under an awning. The instructors gave each one of us a piece of paper.

  “Top five, bottom five, gentlemen,” one of the instructors said. “You’ve got five minutes.”

  We each had to make an anonymous list of the five best performers in the class and the five worst. The instructors didn’t see us all hours of the day, so top-five-bottom-five allowed them to get a better sense of who was really performing well. A candidate could be a great shot and do everything perfectly in the kill house, but outside of training he wouldn’t be easy to work with or live with. The instructors took our top-five-bottom-five and compared them with their lists. Our assessment contributed to the fate of a candidate because it drew a clearer picture of the student.

  At the beginning, it was kind of obvious who the bottom five were in the class. It was easy to see the weak links. But as those guys started to disappear it wasn’t so easy to pick the bottom five anymore.

  Charlie was always in my top five. So was Steve. Like Charlie, Steve was an East Coast SEAL. I used to hang out with Steve and Charlie on the weekends and during our training trips.

  If Steve wasn’t working, he was reading, mostly nonfiction with an emphasis on current events and politics. He also had a decent stock portfolio, which he monitored on his laptop during the few hours of downtime. Not only was he an outstanding SEAL, he could talk politics, investing, and football at the same level.

  He was thick, not lean like a swimmer but more like a linebacker. Charlie used to joke that Steve looked like a groundhog.

  He was one of the few who routinely kicked my ass with a pistol. At the end of each day, I would always check his score to see if he beat me. Like Charlie, Steve had been a CQB instructor for the East Coast teams before coming to Green Team. He had three deployments, and he was one of the few East Coast guys with any combat experience. At that time, only West Coast teams had deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. Steve had deployed to Bosnia in the late 1990s and his team got into a firefight, one of the few before September 11.

  Charlie and Steve always seemed to end up on the top of my list. As more and more guys washed out, the task became harder and harder.

  “Coming up with bottom five is kicking my ass,” I said to Steve one night.

  We were both sitting at the table in the range house cleaning our rifles.

  “Who were your bottom five last week?” he said.

  I rattled off some names, many of the same guys on Steve’s list.

  “I don’t know who to put down this week,” I said.

  “Ever think of putting yourself down there?” Steve said.

  “I got three names. The last two, I don’t know,” I said. “I guess we could use our own names. I don’t want to throw someone else under the bus.”

  I didn’t think either of us was doing badly in the class.

  “I’m going to risk it,” Steve said. “We need five names.”

  A few weeks earlier, we tried to leave the bottom five blank. As a class, we decided to rebel and stand up to the instructors. It didn’t last long. We spent the rest of the night running and pushing cars for hours, instead of unwinding after a long day of training.

  That Friday, I put my own name down on the bottom five. So did Steve. He was willing to stand up for what was right. Steve was a leader in the class, an
d when he came up with ideas, guys listened.

  By the end of the CQB block of training in Mississippi, we had lost about a third of the class. The guys who washed out couldn’t process information fast enough to make the correct split-second decision. It wasn’t that they were bad guys, because a lot would re-screen and make it through on their second try. Those who didn’t would go back to their regular teams, where they’d typically excel.

  The rumor around the command was if you passed the CQB block of training, you had a more than fifty-fifty chance of passing Green Team. The instructors heard the same rumor, so when we got back to Virginia Beach, they kept the pressure on, never letting us forget that we were a very long way from being done.

  ______

  We were only three months into a nine-month training course. The next six months wouldn’t be any easier. After CQB, we went on to train on explosive breaching, land warfare, and communications.

  One of the SEALs’ core jobs is ship boarding, called “underways.” We spent weeks practicing boarding a variety of boats from cruise ships to cargo vessels. Although we spent a lot of time in Afghanistan and Iraq, we needed to be proficient in the water. We rehearsed “over the beach” operations where we would swim through the surf zone and patrol over the beach and conduct a raid. Afterward, we’d disappear into the ocean, linking up with our boats offshore.

  During the last month of training we practiced VIP security details. Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s first security detail were SEALs from the command. We also attended an advanced course in SERE, or Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape.

  The key to the course was managing stress.

  The instructors kept everyone tired and on edge, forcing us to make important decisions under the worst conditions. It was the only way the instructors could mimic combat. Success or failure of our missions was a direct reflection of how each operator could process information in a stressful environment. Green Team was different than BUD/S because I knew just passing the swim or run and being cold, all without quitting, wasn’t enough.