by Rorke Denver
There was nothing Face Man didn’t seem to be good at. He was a talented shooter. He was extremely fit. He was bright tactically. He could land his parachute closer to the X than you could every time. And he never looked like he was trying that hard. Face Man probably should have been an officer. As an officer, I loved him and wanted to kill him, too. I was constantly saying, “Face Man, you’re right. But can you please shut up so we can move forward here.” He was one of my favorites.
Jersey is still one of my closest friends. He was a total free spirit. He wore sandals in the middle of the winter. He played guitar. He loved to surf. He would sometimes go to an Indian sweat lodge on a vision quest. He was one of the few who could find a way around the Navy regs to grow a beard and long hair. He had a wild, infectious laugh. He was brilliant. If you were a friend of Jersey’s, there was nothing he would ever fail to do for you.
Jersey faked some paperwork to get into the advanced civilian driver course, which was supposed to be limited to candidates with professional driving experience. One student had six courses in tactical driving. Another had driven on the NASCAR circuit. When the teacher asked about Jersey’s driving credentials, he was prepared.
“I’m from Jersey,” he answered.
When the teacher did a double take, Jersey added, “Exit 7A.”
We did almost everything together. All sixteen members of BRAVO Platoon drove to Kentucky for a six-week land-warfare course at Fort Knox. One night, a group of us went out together to a bar in Louisville called Have a Nice Day, me drinking my usual bottled water, Eddie dancing with every young woman in the place. His dance partners included a tall, stunning, wholesome college student and one of her roommates.
Eddie could see me looking over—and not at him. He gave a big wave.
“I’ll have my boy D come over here,” he told the young woman, whose name was Tracy. “I’d like you to meet him.”
She knew that drill. Okay, she thought to herself—she told me later—this is when the not-so-good-looking-out-of-shape-wallflower friend comes up. I’m sure this D will be a real prize.
Truly, I had no agenda, and I learned that neither did she. I was coming off the worst relationship in my life. She was still in a terrible relationship, and out for a Friday night of dancing with her friends.
I came over and joined her on the dance floor. From that moment forward, I didn’t see anyone else in the place. “You’ve been dancing all night,” I told her. “Sometimes it’s nice to have a bottle of water.”
As we stood at the bar, one of her friends walked up. I’m not sure if the friend was drunk or jealous or what. But she said, “You know, she has a boyfriend.”
I didn’t care. He wasn’t there.
At the end of the night, seven other BRAVO Platoon members and I drove the young women back to their dorm. Tracy and I got out of the van with all my buddies looking on. I have zero idea what possessed me, but standing right outside the van, I lifted her hand and kissed it like a gentleman from a hundred years ago. I’d never done that before and never have since. Something in the way she looked at me, I could tell it made an impact. I think the impromptu gesture in front of my friends got me a first date.
We took it slowly. We phoned back and forth. I visited Tracy in Kentucky. For spring break, she agreed to come out and see me in Virginia Beach. I thought that was a good sign.
But the day she was set to arrive, BRAVO Platoon was put on a last-minute alert for a training exercise. An exercise like that could take a day, an evening, or a week. Even before her first visit, Tracy was learning about life with a SEAL.
I had to give quick instructions to a buddy of mine. He went and picked her up at the airport. “Hi, I’m Rorke’s roommate. I’m sorry to tell you this but his team’s working in the field. He won’t be back any earlier than Wednesday. Let me set you up at our apartment, unless you’d rather go back home.”
Tracy stayed, and I’ve considered myself lucky every day since.
8
PEACETIME WARRIOR
The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.
—LEO TOLSTOY
* * *
I don’t think the police officer liked my attitude.
“Pasaporte,” he said in Spanish.
I handed him a Xerox copy through the two inches I’d opened the window. I made sure the door was locked.
“Get out of the van,” the officer demanded, glaring at me.
“No.”
Whap! He smacked the door with his nightstick.
“Absolutely not,” I said.
We were in Ecuador teaching combat techniques to the local military, part of our duties as the on-call platoon for the U.S. Southern Command, or SOUTHCOM, helping to build the South American nation’s counterterror force. It was Irish and I and nine other SEAL teammates. No one was even supposed to know we were in Guayaquil. We’d been warned by our partner force, the Ecuadoran marines, that the local policía had been extorting hefty bribes from visiting gringos. Any problems, the Marine capitán said, call right away.
Irish and I had just left his headquarters and were driving back to our hotel.
“If you do not get out of the van, we will shoot,” the grim-faced officer threatened, pulling his gun out. I moved my hand slowly toward the SIG Sauer P226 in my concealed belt holster, as the officer’s partner radioed for backup and pointed a shotgun at us. Very slowly, Irish reached for his cell phone and dialed the Ecuadoran cavalry. Sitting on his lap was a backpack holding a compact Heckler & Koch MP5-SD submachine gun. In two seconds flat, that thing could be in Irish’s hands and cleaning the whole neighborhood.
“No,” I told the cop again, as two more police cars pulled up and I fingered the cold butt of the SIG.
I had always wondered what it must feel like being on the other end of a SEAL rescue. To be a U.S. citizen sprung dramatically from a squalid foreign lockup or a desperate hostage when one of our assault teams came rushing through the door. That night in Ecuador wasn’t quite the equivalent. But I sure did like what I saw in the rearview barreling our way.
It was a large, open troop truck, squealing around a corner with thirty-five Ecuadoran marines. They were jammed in the back, shoulder to shoulder in helmets and flak jackets. Half a dozen others, some holding machine guns, some gripping machetes, were hanging off each side.
The truck slammed to a stop right up against the first police cruiser.
The marines leaped off their truck and came charging at the five local cops, kicking them, punching them, slamming them with gun butts, shoving the outnumbered officers brutally to the ground. It was like something out of an old biker movie, a combat-boot ass-kicking that left the surprised policía a bloody heap on the ground. It was hard to imagine any of them just walking away.
“You picked the wrong gringos to bother,” I heard the capitán say.
As he walked to the van, I finally lowered the window and eased my hand off the SIG.
“I don’t believe this will happen again,” he said in near-perfect English. “Please have a safe ride home.”
* * *
Our first overseas deployment, to Roosevelt Roads Naval Station in Ceiba, Puerto Rico, made us the on-call SEAL platoon for all of SOUTHCOM. We covered the nineteen countries of Central and South America and the Caribbe an, fully one-sixth of the landmass of the world. The SEAL piece of anything that happened south of Mexico and north of Tierra del Fuego—that was ours.
We pitched in on America’s drug war, teaching the locals how to conduct ship searches and other antismuggling operations. We trained their military units, including those big-hearted Ecuadoran marines, in modern counterinsurgency techniques. We kept a constant eye on FARC guerrillas in Colombia, Shining Path revolutionaries in Peru, and international drug smugglers everywhere. And we kept up our own training like maniacs.
The United States wasn’t at war with anyone in the region. We didn’t know it yet, but this was our last big chance to be special-ops warriors in peacetime
. That didn’t mean the neighborhood was quiet. Quite a few bad actors were out wandering around. They just weren’t organized enough for a legitimate war. From Roosey Roads, as everyone called our base, we worked with the militaries of Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, Trinidad, and other nations, sharing our combat expertise and always trying to stay below the local radar.
We taught the local special-operations forces to rig explosives, plan raids, and shoot more accurately. Their skills varied widely. The Colombians were knowledgeable and experienced. The Ecuadorans were appreciative but raw. The Chileans were good on land but not so good on water.
Wherever we went, we wore civilian clothes. We tried not to flash our weapons in public. We invented elaborate cover stories to explain why a dozen athletic-looking American males in their twenties and thirties might be staying for weeks at a business hotel in Santiago, Quito, or Bogotá. In the coastal Colombian city of Cartagena—a fun-loving place—we put out word that we were a group of soccer coaches from North America polishing our skills. My guess is that no one believed us.
“I’ll hold your pistol for you until you finish dancing with that beautiful Colombian woman,” I had to say to more than one of my teammates in the bars at night. “I don’t want her patting your waist and feeling metal. And who’s the guy who keeps eyeing you from the far corner of the room?”
That’s how it was all across the region. Fun and friendly on the surface but with an overlay of danger in the air.
Cartagena was a deceptively beautiful seaside resort, home to drug lords, guerrilla leaders, and international business operators, legitimate and not. They all mixed easily on the beaches and in the restaurants. There was a lot of money floating around. And once in a while, with no specific warning, real trouble broke out.
The ATM across from our hotel blew up in a huge explosion. Several of the SEALs had just withdrawn cash from there. From then on, we did all our banking inside the bank.
One afternoon, Sonny, Irish, and I were in a taxi when we thought that maybe we were being followed.
“Turn left at the next corner,” I told the driver in my basic Spanish. But a black Mercedes stayed right with us.
“Turn right and another right—now speed up,” I said.
The taxi driver did everything I asked. But the Mercedes was still right there, even though by now our route was totally senseless. By that point, our driver looked truly alarmed.
We stopped at a light, and in a flash, Sonny leaped out of the taxi and raced for our driver’s door. He yanked it open and shoved the startled man across the seat. With the driver shouting frantically, “No, no, no!” Sonny took the wheel—and went charging through the crowded streets of Cartagena, safety be damned.
A few fast blocks and a few sharp turns later, the Mercedes was nowhere in sight. We got out of the taxi, paid the driver triple his fare, and disappeared swiftly into the pedestrian crowd.
All across the region, we needed little tricks for everything.
How to keep prying desk clerks guessing. Move hotels. How to find our way through unfamiliar neighborhoods. Bring a trusted local along. We also needed a way to speak discreetly among ourselves.
All of us struggled with basic Spanish. We reached a point where we could communicate fairly well with the locals as long as the people spoke slowly. But when they took off with rapid-fire words, suddenly we were lost again.
“What if we try the reverse?” Sonny suggested.
It was a brilliant idea. When we didn’t want to be understood, we didn’t bother with secret phrases or complex codes. We just spoke English really, really fast.
“Look-at-the-guy-standing-on-the-corner-in-the-yellow-shirt-I-think-he-has-his-hand-on-a-gun.” I’m not sure if the code-cracking linguists at the Pentagon would be impressed by our ingenuity. But we reached the point where we could get those words out in half-a-fast-breath, and only a super-fluent English speaker could possibly follow along.
Two days before we left Chile, the special-operations unit of the Chilean navy threw a good-bye barbecue for us, their way of saying gracias for the tactical and explosives training we’d given them.
But during the barbecue, Frog and Duke got into a heated discussion with one of their senior commanders. The commandante was complaining bitterly about the United States. To hear him tell it, Washington had caused every single ill in the region over the past two hundred years—and a few big ones still to come.
Frog and Duke were not too charmed by the man’s critique. In fact, it took almost the whole team to hold them back and keep the encounter from turning physical.
But the boys ultimately made their point. The next night, the SEALs and the Chilean special-ops team were putting on a final, joint demonstration for the higher-ups. Still irritated at the America-bashing the night before, our guys packed up a mammoth load of C4, detonation cord, smokes, and extra rounds, a rat’s nest of explosives. Then Duke invited one of the top Chilean admirals to set off the underwater charge.
“Would you like the honor of pushing the button, sir?” Duke asked.
The instant the charge detonated, a plume of water shot up from the ocean 150 feet into the air. The vibrations were strong enough to break half a dozen store windows. The boom was momentarily deafening. I swear, five hundred stunned fish came floating up to the surface.
“We were going to leave all our extra explosives behind for you,” Duke said with great satisfaction. “But after last night, we decided we’d blow them up instead.”
Yes, we had some work to do. But the Caribbe an beaches were perfect. The water was crystal clear and a whole lot warmer than in San Diego or even Virginia Beach. We’d “go bugging,” we called it, fishing for lobsters with our hands. From Roosey Roads, the San Juan nightlife was a short drive away. With memories of BUD/S not so far in the past, we built our own SEAL-worthy obstacle course on an abandoned dry dock that remained a military legend years after we left.
Our superiors in Virginia seemed a million miles away.
As a junior officer, I was starting to assume some command authority. “Hey, Diesel, run this mission,” B, the platoon commander, told me frequently. “It’s yours.”
“Thanks, brother,” I’d say. “I’m on it.”
It might have been something minor—a training evolution in the jungle or a ship-boarding to search for drugs. But I was in charge of it, and I liked how that felt. As the months ticked by, I was being folded seamlessly into the team leadership. Chief Hall was constantly watching my back, in the usual veteran-chief, young-officer way. Instead of taking orders from the latest whiz kid, it was more like he was raising me, another junior officer gradually learning to lead and train men. The trust between us was something money, rank, and college could never buy.
Up until then, if I screwed up, I could always give the “ensign shrug.”
“I’m a new ensign—what do I know?”
But as a deployed officer and a member of SEAL Team Four—and with Chief Hall watching and judging me—I was slowly expected to know what I was doing out there. I was representing my country, my platoon, and my team. I was becoming a leader. I’d better not screw up.
“Look,” Chief Hall said as he pulled the van off a dirt road and into a bushy spot on the far side of the bay. “I know you guys are green, and I don’t want to put any extra pressure on you. But that backpack isn’t the only thing you’re swimming with tonight. You’re also carrying the reputation of BRAVO Platoon.”
No pressure? Thanks, Chief.
The van was a piece-of-junk ’85 Toyota with tinted windows, a cracked left taillight, and local plates. A plastic Blessed Virgin dangled from the rearview, and some kind of Latin music—merengue, I think—was playing on the AM radio. The whole point of the van was to blend into the neighborhood, getting us to the water’s edge without calling attention to the fact that two scary-looking men in wetsuits would soon be crawling into the tranquil bay in the dead of night.
“Combat-swimmer missions are our heritage,�
�� the chief said solemnly, his voice still as scratchy as North Jersey asphalt even after two decades away. “They go all the way back to the naked warriors who cleared Omaha Beach. That was in World War II.”
“Yes, Chief,” Toro said.
“Those guys didn’t even wear wetsuits,” the chief went on. “They slathered grease on their bodies, slapped masks on their faces and knives in their belts. They had no idea what a Dräger was. They took whatever demolition equipment they needed to clear the beaches and get the landing force ashore.”
“We know the story,” I said.
Chief Hall was a powerful man, right at the twenty-year mark in his career. We were his sixth platoon. Physically, he was all banged up. He busted out a knee in a free-fall mishap. He broke one ankle in five places. He had a way of holding his back. It was hard for him to run-and-gun with the boys like he loved to. He’d paid the price of so many years going so hard. But even now, nothing got his juices flowing like a mission as bold as the one he was hoping—praying—young Toro and I could somehow pull off.
We were FNGs, Fuckin’ New Guys, which I eventually figured out was half an insult and half a term of grudging endearment. We had only recently earned our Tridents. This was the very first deployment for either of us—anywhere, ever. I was SEAL Team Four’s most junior officer. And Toro, not so long out of high school, looked like he might need a note from his mom just to be here. If you ran a bar, you would definitely card him.
But kitted out like we were—black wetsuits, blackened faces, black dive masks, and black fins—we did look pretty fierce as we stepped out of the van that night. I checked the limpet mine I had in my backpack. All snug. It was secured with ingenious little magnets designed to hold it there until we were ready to slide it out of the pack and ease it delicately onto the steel skin of a giant ship that was docked on the other side of the bay.
“You’re both strong in the water,” the chief said just before we stepped in. “You’re aggressive guys. So get out there and be aggressive. You have to execute.”