After a rowdy good-bye party—the navy calls it a “hail and farewell”—I was out-processed the next day. I cleaned out my cage and my desk. As I walked around the buildings, I said good-bye to many friends. The wishes were cordial, but people looked at me sideways. I was no longer a shooter; I was no longer a member of the tribe. I was out. I had done the one thing that no SEAL is ever permitted to do: I had quit. And now, even with the handshakes, the jokes, and the backslapping, I was already a memory. I had set myself apart.
Lenny and Dougie came to debrief me, a bit more seriously this time, because I was going into the real world. Going out and staying out. I surrendered my military ID cards and my several passports. I was allowed to keep one, a plain civilian model, “clean” papers that I had not used to travel. I watched as a CANCELED stamp was thumped across my other documents. Finally, I walked into the captain’s office. I read and signed my fitness report, my report card as an officer. It would be the final entry into my service record. Even though I had resigned my commission, Bob Gormly had recommended me for early promotion. It was the best and most complimentary evaluation I’d ever received. I thanked him, and he thanked me. He wished me luck on the outside, and I was gone.
As I drove toward the front gate of the base, a marine sentry leaned out from the guard shack. He raised a white-gloved palm at my car as he stepped into the road. I stopped. As I rolled down my window to ask why, he took a paint scraper to my windshield and quickly removed the base sticker from the glass. Lenny and Dougie had called ahead and told the sentry to stop my car. There would be no more driving onto the base. Balling up my sticker in his hand, the marine walked away without a word. The last thing that connected me to the Team had been peeled off and tossed into a trash can.
I sat behind the wheel of my car and felt numb. The weight of everything seemed to cave in on me. I felt like a man who had lived a hundred lives and died a hundred times. The realization that I was now a civilian was crushing.
I drove home as tears ran down my face.
Incredibly, the radio in my car played Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”
MARGOT AND I SEPARATED that fall. The time apart was my idea, and it hurt Margot very much. I had intended to enroll in the University of Virginia for a summer term. I’d planned to take organic chemistry, calculus, and a few other science courses I would need to round out my psych degree. When I got out of the Teams, I’d planned to sit the MCAT exams and try to get into medical school. I never enrolled. A dull sort of ennui clung to me. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I did nothing.
I started to have nightmares that I was sinking through deep ocean water. The dreams were always without sound. Blue, infinite blue above and beneath, and nothing beyond the suffocating sensation of plummeting into emptiness. I would wake shouting.
Margot had wanted me to stay in the navy. She used to say that there were two kinds of Navy SEAL: the kind who could do anything, and the kind who couldn’t do anything else. Maybe she thought I was the latter. Maybe she knew I would not be happy doing anything else.
I did my best to move on. I had missed the start of the summer semesters. Med school was a delusion, and I would have to start making money somehow. I thought blithely that I would become a writer. Margot told me that I had lost my mind. She was probably right. My making a living as a writer would be a struggle for more than the usual reasons. Like my father and my brother, I am dyslexic.
Back in college, I had written a screenplay with a friend, Richard Murphy, whom I’d met during my internship. It was the story of a man who escapes from prison and hides out as a counselor in a summer camp for retarded adults. We’d written it with high hopes. No one wanted to buy it, and I went off and joined the navy. Murph is a good and constant friend and managed to track me down at SEAL Team Four.
“Hey,” he had said on the telephone, “I’ve got some news for you. You remember that crummy screenplay we wrote back in L.A.?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, it got nominated for a Focus Award. I got in the master-of-fine-arts program for screenwriting at NYU, and we’re going to be signed by the William Morris Agency.”
I became the only naval officer in America to have a William Morris agent. Murph and I wrote another screenplay, this one about Ernest Hemingway in Cuba at the start of World War II. It was cobbled together from pages we sent to each other, Murph in New York and me in Honduras, Lebanon, and the Dominican Republic. I wasn’t sure this stuff would go anywhere, but I enjoyed the research, I enjoyed writing, and I liked working with Murph. We sent in the script, and it sold in a week, optioned by Bob Nixon, a former ABC producer who’d just taken Jimmy Buffett into Cuba to visit Hemingway’s farm outside of Havana. Bob said that as he read the screenplay, he’d been sure we had visited Hemingway’s finca. We’d read about it in a book.
That summer, working in the spare bedroom in our house, I wrote a screenplay on my own. It was the story of three officers and their trials through BUD/S. I pecked it out on a manual typewriter and finished it on a 512K Macintosh computer. I sent it to my agent. It was optioned by Orion Pictures.
If anything, this small success seemed to drive Margot and me further apart. We started to have arguments. They were not loud, but they settled nothing and made everything worse. I was in another wild spiral, but this time it wasn’t the result of a parachute malfunction. Margot’s patience never ran out; she never gave up on us, but I gave up on her and on myself. I moved to Manhattan. A very strange thing to do, because I am not a person who likes cities.
I fell in love, suddenly and completely, with a Cuban actress. I was separated from Margot, though we were still married; I was messing around, as usual. My new love put into me a melancholy, contradictory feeling: a dull shame like fog and a thrill like bright sunshine. Magda Esteffan and I moved into an apartment on Seventy-eighth Street and Second Avenue, not far from the Carlisle Hotel. Magda worked as a cabaret singer and got bit parts, mostly commercials. I would meet her late at night, after she’d sung her sets, and we would go out to dinner at three A.M. We slept during the day, and when she’d go off to work, I would stay in the apartment and rewrite the script for Orion. It was as much of a bohemian lifestyle as I have ever led. The city was overwhelming for me, and I never did quite get used to it. Magda and I were in love, and time went by very quickly.
We lived in Manhattan about a year, then moved to Los Angeles. I had three thousand dollars to my name, but I was determined to write for a living. We moved into a small apartment in Marina del Rey. I was lucky enough to find another writing assignment, and then another. Orion Pictures made my first movie, Navy SEALs, and Universal Studios hired me to write Darkman. Several more screenwriting deals followed. Margot and I were divorced, an extremely civil affair conducted by mail, and Magda and I broke up. I made a lot of money and spent all of it. I wrote more screenplays.
I married again, because I am persistent and because I do not like to be alone. Julia Craig was beautiful, athletic, and intelligent. She had rowed crew at Princeton, and her father, like mine, was career military. We seemed well matched, but love had somehow bloomed between two very incompatible people. Our marriage was a disaster, and our divorce was long and unpleasant. I went broke again, made more money, and lost that, too. I was getting very good at barely getting by.
IN LOS ANGELES I would often be asked if I missed it, “it” being, I guess, the SEAL Teams. The question would often be posed with a glance to my expanding midsection, and I will admit that since I got out, my age in years and the waist of my trousers in inches seemed to be on a merge plot. I would usually answer that I missed the guys. The teamwork. Sometimes I would answer that I did it as long as I thought I could, and that I got out at the top of my game. Both of these statements were true as far as they went, but they meant nothing. What, honestly, do you say to someone who has not been there? What do you say to someone who’s never jumped out of a commercial airliner, or sunk a ship by affixing a limpet mine, or kil
led a sniper: what do you say to someone who couldn’t have the wildest fucking idea, not one clue in the world, what it was like?
Sometimes the questioners were more direct. Sometimes I was asked how many people I killed. I became adept at turning away the question with a question of my own: “What do you feel guilty about?”
BY 1996 I WAS twice divorced, and I felt like damaged goods. A woman I knew told me that I should have come with a warning label.
I was set up for a blind date, a dinner in Omaha, Nebraska. I was researching a film script that involved an attempt on the life of the first lady, and I had decided to set it in the Midwest. I somehow convinced the studio to send me there. My friend Lee Shepard had an even harder time convincing my date to go out with me. I had little to recommend me: I was divorced, divorcing again, and worked in Hollywood. That doesn’t play too well in Omaha. But my date relented, and I was given her office number at a law firm downtown. She told me that she had to prepare for trial all afternoon, but I could come up to her office at six. I stepped off the elevator precisely on time. I was met in the lobby by the most beautiful woman I have ever laid eyes on. Stacey looked like Catherine Deneuve. I was flummoxed and stammered a hello. She had me wait in her office for an hour while her meeting went into overtime.
When she came back, I was still in awe. Stacey suggested that we go for a drink at the Omaha Press Club, on the top floor of her building. I learned later that she had prearranged a fake “back to the office” phone message so she could bail if our drinks went badly.
They almost did. I’d run into a formidable woman. Stacey had been a debutante, a valedictorian, and was a fine horsewoman. She also knew how to buck hay, fix a cattle fence, and drive a backhoe. Before returning home to Omaha, she’d practiced law in Virginia, D.C., and Maryland. Nothing about the SEALs or Hollywood impressed her at all. She had a gravelly laugh and a nose that was perfect.
“I got the nose in New Orleans,” she said. “You should have seen my old one.”
I laughed. She was scaring me like a sky dive scares me. I quickly downed a pair of martinis. Stacey sipped a glass of wine, then ordered another.
“Why don’t you look at me?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you don’t look at me when you speak to me. That’s considered rude around here.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t trying to be evasive.” I looked into her huge green eyes. Then I looked away.
“There, you’re doing it again. Why don’t you look at me when we talk?” she asked.
I said, “Because you’re too beautiful.”
Stacey took a long drag on her cigarette. She let the smoke out slowly. She said, “Nice line. Does it work in L.A.?”
Stacey and I were married in Omaha eighteen months later. In December 1998 she bore us a son, Paddy. In the three days of her labor, she did not complain, cry, or curse me once.
I learned a lot about valor from her.
* * *
FAREWELL TO ARMS
THE DOCTOR SNAPPED the curtain open, then fluffed it closed behind him. It gave an illusion of privacy. The recovery room was full, and there were patients behind curtains to the right and left of me.
“How are you doing?” He smiled. He was handsome and nattily dressed, like the doctors on TV.
“You tell me,” I said. There was drool crusted on my chin, and I was still groggy from being put under. I had just undergone a colonoscopy.
The doctor placed the clipboard on my bed and opened it briefly before he spoke.
“You have cancer,” he said.
I felt like the world had stopped and I had been thrown off.
“Colon cancer,” he continued. “We found a malignancy about the size of a golf ball. We’re admitting you into the hospital immediately. I’ve scheduled surgery for tonight.”
“How bad is this?” I stammered.
“I’m going to be honest with you. A tumor this size has been growing for a while. Maybe for as long as five or six years. The problem is that it puts out cancer cells. Metastasizes them. There’s a good possibility it has spread.”
I closed my eyes. The first thing I thought was that this news would make Stacey cry.
“I’ve already told your wife,” the doctor said.
Just like the doctors on TV.
I CAN’T SAY that cancer struck me without warning. Hindsight is brilliant, but I had ignored a mound of important signals: nagging fatigue, a cough that wouldn’t go away, and an endless series of aches and pains that I chalked up to approaching middle age. There was also colon cancer in my family, and it fell upon the men. I should have had warning enough.
Stacey took the news gallantly and was at my side throughout. I underwent surgery that evening. Following the removal of the tumor, lymph nodes, and twelve inches of my large intestine, I suffered a secondary infection of the surgical wound and spent the next three weeks in the hospital with a tube down my nose.
The official verdict was Stage Three colorectal cancer. Although the surgeons had removed the tumor, they had not lessened the threat. By the time I was diagnosed, the tumor had spread cancer into my lymphatic system. Millions of cancer cells had metastasized throughout my body.
Four weeks after I came home from the hospital, I started chemotherapy, six weeks on, two weeks off, for six months. The chemo drug, 5-Fluorouracil, had some nasty side effects: skin lesions, chronic nausea, mental confusion, fatigue, and ulcerating mouth sores. The treatment was every bit as virulent as the disease it was supposed to cure. It even caused leukemia in some patients, a by-product far beyond what I would consider collateral damage.
I took my chemotherapy on the eighth floor of the Saint Vincent’s Medical Center in Jacksonville, Florida. The oncology unit looks out over the Saint John’s River, and patients are seated in Naugahyde recliners facing the river. Every Thursday afternoon I would have lab work done, then I would kick back and get stuck by needles. I’d lay motionless while an IV machine pumped me full of Leucovorin, steroids, and 5-FU. Sometimes the treatments took two hours, sometimes four. Orderlies brought trays with orange juice and ice chips—the ice for the painful hard-edged sores that bloomed under my tongue. Sipping an iced drink, I looked over the beautiful stretch of river alongside thirty or forty other patients. All of us either bloated, emaciated, hairless, or all three. Ours was a very exclusive resort.
I began to call the chemo unit Club Dead.
The steroids made me blow up like a toad, and the 5-FU made me confused and forgetful, a phenomenon, the nurses told me, called “chemo brain.” One morning I couldn’t remember my own phone number. I thought I might be losing my mind. The skin on my hands and feet blistered and peeled off in sheets. My sense of smell became extremely acute, and I swore I could detect the chemo drugs on my skin, a sharp, piercing tang like the odor of steel. The smell nauseated me. I doused myself with cologne and stank of it, perfume and cancer and drugs. My abdomen swelled, and my eyes became puffy slits. People I knew well passed me on the street without recognizing me. I was always exhausted, and I whined like a child.
Weeks passed, spring became summer. In the afternoons I would sleep curled in a ball on the couch with a bucket beside me. There were times I felt that the chemo was killing me at only a slightly slower rate than it killed the cancer. I had dreams in which I thought my soul had slipped out of my body. In those dreams, my soul-self stood for hours and watched a bloated, red-faced man snore loudly under a comforter.
The steroids did not help my temper; the smallest frustrations would throw me into a rage. As soon as my anger had blown itself out, I would become tearful and contrite. Through it all, madness, fear, and regret, Stacey kept me in line. As I mentioned, she is a formidable woman.
Six months passed, and I finished chemo. I was the graduate of another hard school.
In the SEAL Teams, we say a survivor is a victim with an attitude. I am well now, and getting better. I refused to believe, and still refuse to believe,
after all I have been through, that cancer is the thing that will kill me.
I will not be a victim of anything. I am a fighter.
I have a bit of advice to offer. Hold on to the people you are close to, and love them fiercely. Get up every morning and live like there is no tomorrow. Because one day you’ll find it’s true.
* * *
GLOSSARY OF SEAL TERMS
1-MC The public-address system aboard a naval vessel.
1130 A naval special warfare officer. 1130 is the career designator assigned by the Bureau of Naval Personnel to qualified SEAL officers.
1180 U.S. Navy officer designator for a probationary special warfare officer.
5326 Naval education code (NEC) for a combat swimmer, the Bureau of Naval Personnel’s designation for an enlisted SEAL operator.
5.56 The caliber of an M-16 rifle in millimeters. NATO ammunition for the M-16 and M-4 carbine.
7.62 The caliber of an M-60 machine gun in millimeters. NATO ammunition for the M-60, G-3, and M-14 rifles. These weapons fire the NATO standard 7.62 × 51 cartridge. Russian-made weapons, like the AK-47, fire the same caliber bullet using a shorter cartridge, 7.62 × 39. Russian ammunition is referred to as “7.62 Intermediate.”
A2 Barret .50-caliber long-range sniper rifle. Used by SEAL Teams against high-value targets and as a countersniper weapon.
AAA Antiaircraft artillery.
Across the Beach A SEAL operation originating from sea. SEALs may insert or extract using a combination of swimming, boat, submarine, parachute, and helicopter.
Alice Pack Sometimes called a “jungle ruck.” A small backpack used for combat operations.
Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL Page 40