Damn Few: Making the Modern SEAL Warrior

by Rorke Denver

  I nodded as he spoke. Then I told him what I’d told him before.

  “No.”

  And I meant it.

  “We don’t do that,” I told Mouse and Scott before they left. “Nobody’s gonna do that.”

  Over the next few weeks, though, I started thinking about what the directors had been saying and the kind of movie they wanted to make. I reflected on our responsibility as America’s preeminent special operators, our power to inspire and our need for public understanding and support. I considered the reality that in this super-saturated media world of ours, if you don’t tell your own story, someone else will tell it—and not necessarily the way you’d like.

  We’d been shrouded in secrecy so long and for good reason. But maybe there were also some benefits to a little more openness. The Navy leadership, the SEAL command, my teammates—everyone would have to be behind it. But the world really could use a truer understanding of this brotherhood of ours—what motivated us and what we were capable of. And I had a good feeling about Mouse and Scott and their integrity.

  Tracy and I discussed it. She had my back either way. “Your experience in the SEAL teams and what you want to reveal is more important to you than to me,” she said. “What I do know is you can represent the brotherhood in ways few SEAL leaders could.”

  Dave and I met for coffee. We discussed the pros and cons. He and I were working at First Phase together, where he was one of my chiefs. We had run a shift of Hell Week together for five or six classes. We trusted each other fully.

  It occurred to both of us that eventually somebody was going to say yes. We didn’t want it to be the wrong guys—self-promoting “lethal killers” who’d never earned the respect of the SEAL community.

  “Well,” Dave finally said, “if you’re doing it, I’m interested.”

  I said, “I’ll do it if you’re interested.”

  At that point, it just felt right. We knew we could have input into the story. We knew we could protect the secrets. We knew we could have some influence over who the other guys in the film would be.

  The final group selected for the film was absolutely first-rate: Sonny, Weimy, Ray, Ajay, Mike, and interrogator Van O, along with the captain, Dave, and me. We were placed on official Navy orders to support the project. Our leadership was on board.

  Word spread quickly through the community. There was going to be a no-kidding movie—not a documentary—featuring active-duty Navy SEALs. I wouldn’t say everyone was instantly supportive. But the overwhelming reaction was very positive. “If somebody’s gonna do it,” people said, “I’m glad it’s you guys, some of the real meat-eaters.”

  The screenwriter was Kurt Johnstad, who’d written the screenplay for 300, about King Leonidas and the force of three hundred men who fought the Persians at Thermopylae in 480 BC. Working from interviews with all of us, Kurt wove together a plot from our community’s recent history. The guidance he got from Scott and Mouse was, “We want you to write a script that has a geopolitically current-threat scenario, woven around five ‘acts of valor.’” Relying heavily on real stories, that’s exactly what the writer did.

  Several of the plot points involved battlefield moments from our era of warfare plus a couple of scenes ripped right from my life. A SEAL with his eye shot out keeps on fighting. Another SEAL jumps on a grenade to save his teammates’ lives. An operator is shot twenty-five times and still walks to a helicopter that takes him to the hospital.

  Act of Valor, the movie would be called.

  It took almost four years to get the film made. Much of the principal photography occurred during preplanned SEAL training exercises—with live ammunition and real explosives going off. No one has ever made a war movie that was any more real than this. The weapons were real. The aircraft and boats were real. What looks in the movie like an armed nuclear-powered submarine really was an armed nuclear-powered submarine, the first time the Navy ever made one of those available for a movie shoot. “You’ve got forty-five minutes” to be at a certain lat-long, the filmmakers were told. “The boat is going to surface there. Then we’re going back under. You’ll get your footage, and you can leave when the boat surfaces again.”

  This could only have happened with the full support of Big Navy and the Department of Defense.

  With their stunt backgrounds and quick-action minds, Scott and Mouse knew how to safely choreograph violent action scenes the Hollywood way. But they had some things to learn about the SEAL way. More than once as they were blocking out a raid or rescue, we stopped the action prematurely. “No, no, no,” one of us said. “If we did it like you’re suggesting, we’d all get killed.”

  We were filming a jungle scene at the John C. Stennis Space Center in southern Mississippi, where the SEALs often conduct immediate-action drills. The filmmakers had preplanned how they would shoot us rushing a waterside compound.

  “Wait,” Chief Dave said halfway into the walk-through. “If this were a real mission, that isn’t how we would do it. That’s not the door we’d use. That’s not the order we would go in.”

  Scott and Mouse and their cameramen clearly were not used to having actors choreograph their own scenes. But the crew listened to everything we said. I think that turned out to be a real aha moment for them.

  “Why don’t we sketch it out for you,” I said.

  Thirty seconds later, half a dozen SEALs were crouched on the ground with a large piece of butcher paper and a black Sharpie pen, diagramming a complex raid. It didn’t look so different from a football coach’s X’s, O’s, lines, and arrows. We’d done this hundreds of times in training and in war. In less than ten minutes, we had a basic mission brief.

  The camera operators shifted their position and we did the raid the real SEAL way.

  Things really started humming at that point. We wore helmet-cams. We gave the directors a fast-paced inside view. We showed them how to stand just an inch or two outside the live fire. And they were fearless. They climbed into the water with us. They stomped around with us in the muck and the mud with the snakes and the alligators. They weren’t even spooked by the tracer fire.

  The directors told us that no one had shot a movie like that since the 1930s, when blanks replaced live bullets in Hollywood. But the Bandito crew loved the live-fire sound, even if they did end up sacrificing a couple of cameras. The experience gave one or two cameramen nightmares, but we didn’t kill anyone.

  You could have a few tiny quibbles with what ended up on the screen. Some things were inserted for the sake of storytelling or drama. On a real op, SEALs might not dog-paddle across a bayou in full combat gear—not before searching for a nearby bridge. There’s a scene aboard a C-130 transport plane. After the ramp has been lowered for a free-fall rescue mission, Chief Dave and I are talking without our oxygen masks. The dialogue is easier to hear that way, but we’d have had real trouble breathing.

  In my years as a SEAL assault team member, I’ve found myself in more than my share of dangerous situations, encounters I thought I might never get out of alive. But none of those was quite the equal of kissing a beautiful actress while my wife watched my every move on a live video feed, my wife who had just delivered our first baby four days before.

  The directors of Act of Valor had asked Tracy to play a character based largely on her, the wife of a SEAL lieutenant whose husband keeps rushing off to war.

  No way.

  Tracy always looks gorgeous. And I’m probably not the only husband who found his wife especially beautiful immediately after childbirth. And Tracy, I’ll bet, isn’t the only woman who, when asked to appear on film for worldwide release just after delivering a baby, would respond with something to the effect of “Are you totally nuts?”

  The actress who was cast, Ailsa Marshall, was a pro. She and Tracy had a great conversation before we shot the good-bye make-out scene. Tracy explained how she reacted when I was leaving on a deployment.

  A few minutes before the cameras rolled, Ailsa and I finally had a chance to tal
k. She was nice and businesslike. She didn’t seem at all uncomfortable about kissing me—or, to be honest, especially excited at the chance.

  “Are these the kind of roles you usually get, the wife and mother?” I asked her.

  “No,” she laughed. “I’m usually cast as the slut or the bitch.”

  She played the scene perfectly, I thought, holding her bubbling emotion right below the surface as our characters hugged and kissed and said good-bye, then erupting in tears and collapsing on the floor as soon as I shut the door behind me.

  We probably shot that scene forty times. Ten takes from one angle. Ten takes from another. Twenty takes from a third. My lips were almost chapped by the time we were done. And for every last take, Tracy was watching the live feed. I was kissing this beautiful young woman, who is theoretically her but isn’t her. In the world of dicey operations, this one definitely merited at least an “Oh, boy!”

  I’d say I got off easy.

  “Rough day at work, huh?” was all Tracy said when we were finally finished.

  “Doing what I gotta do for God and country,” I said with a smile.

  I love Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan, and HBO’s Band of Brothers series. But to me, Act of Valor stands alone, blending professional moviemaking with real-life operators who actually know what they’re doing out there. And when it was done, the Banditos ended up with a $13 million film that looked like $200 million on the screen, an amazingly true-to-life military-adventure film made for not much more than Tom Cruise’s catering bill.

  Not everyone appreciated this greater openness. Some of the old-timers especially had trouble getting used to it. Just as Act of Valor was coming out, retired Lieutenant General James Vaught personally assailed Admiral William McRaven, commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command, for drawing too much attention to the bin Laden raid, the rescue of aid workers in Somalia, and other recent SEAL successes.

  “Back when my special operators extracted Saddam from the hole, we didn’t say one damn word about it,” the retired general said. “We turned him over to the local commander and told him to claim that his forces drug him out of the hole, and he did so. And we just faded away and kept our mouth shut.”

  With all the recent attention SEALs have been getting, the general said, “the other guy’s going to be there ready for you, and you’re going to fly in and he’s going to shoot down every damn helicopter and kill every one of your SEALs. Now, watch it happen. Mark my words. Get the hell out of the media. Your comment?”

  McRaven didn’t get personal or say anything rude. In fact, the admiral started out quite warmly.

  “I’m not sure how I follow that up,” said McRaven, who’d risen through the SEAL officer ranks before assuming command of all U.S. special forces.

  “One of the reasons I became a Navy SEAL,” he said, “was my sister was dating a Green Beret. It’s a little-known secret. And the Green Beret actually convinced me to become a Navy SEAL. But the reason I was so infatuated was I had seen this movie starring John Wayne called The Green Berets.”

  I’d never heard that story from the admiral before, and I don’t think too many other people had.

  “So the fact of the matter is, there have always been portrayals of SOF out in the mainstream media,” Admiral McRaven said. “We are in an environment today where we can’t get away from it. It is not something that we actively pursue, as I think a number of the journalists here in the audience will confirm. But the fact of the matter is, with the social media being what it is today, with the press and the twenty-four-hour news cycle, it’s very difficult to get away from it.”

  McRaven wasn’t done.

  “But not only does the media focus on our successes,” he noted. “We have had a few failures. And I think having those failures exposed in the media also kind of helps focus our attention, helps us do a better job. So sometimes the criticism, the critique, the spotlight on us actually makes us better.”

  After that exchange, some of the sniping about the movie seemed to die down. Partly, I think, that was because a handful of early screenings were held for military officials. Some of the early critics got to see what was actually in the film. They realized their apprehension was wildly overblown. We were extolling the heroism of SEALs and our sister services, shining a light on the brotherhood, sharing SEAL values with the broader world—but never once compromising any operational secrets.

  To bring attention to the film, most of the SEALs in the movie flew to three red-carpet Act of Valor premieres. We didn’t go in the usual Hollywood luxury. We flew coach, had government-rate rooms at modest hotels, and got no red-carpet swag. We were on government orders, the same as on any official trip. But it seemed like everyone wanted to meet the “real SEALs who were in the movie.” Weimy couldn’t make it. He was deployed in Afghanistan. We wore our dress uniforms, not something we got to do very often. Lots of people came up and said, “Thank you”—more for our service, I think, than our screen time. We answered questions from the media about being SEALs and playing SEALs. “The hardest part was saying the lines,” Ajay told one reporter. “Running around and shooting guns and moving and communicating—that’s commonplace. That’s nothing.”

  I don’t have much experience with red-carpet movie premieres, but I’ll bet not too many of them have been like ours. In Nashville, the guests included country music stars Keith Urban, Wynonna Judd, Trace Adkins, and Jake Owen, all of whom had contributed songs to the Act of Valor soundtrack. In New York, we did a special screening at the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, a retired World War II aircraft carrier docked in the Hudson River off the west side of Manhattan. In the audience that night were hundreds of first responders, New York cops, firefighters, and paramedics, many of whom had rushed to the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. They stood and cheered as the credits rolled. Quite a few of them wept openly. It was an honor to meet those men and women.

  The Hollywood premiere got most of the flash. As Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tim Tebow, and other celebs mingled in front of the Arc-Light cinema on Sunset Boulevard, six Navy SEALs dropped from the California night sky, parachuting right onto the red carpet. It was quite a dramatic drop-in.

  Tracy, who’d been to about as many Hollywood premieres over the years as I had—zero—came to the event. She’d had some concern about what to wear. But Mouse said he could help with that. His wife, Carm, came down to San Diego, rented a hotel suite, had it filled with designer dresses and shoes, and let Tracy take her pick. Don’t ask me who designed the dress she wore. All I know is she looked fabulous.

  Amid all this, Act of Valor got excellent pre-opening buzz. As the trailers began to play in the theaters across the country and ads appeared on network TV—three in the Super Bowl between the New York Giants and the New England Patriots—people were saying the action scenes were amazingly true to life.

  I hadn’t told many of my college and back-home friends that I was in a movie. When those Super Bowl ads hit, my cell phone exploded with shocked calls.

  The story sounded uplifting. People were intrigued by the idea of Navy SEALs playing Navy SEALs. And when the film finally opened, it opened huge. That first week, Act of Valor was the number-one box-office draw in America, making back the film’s production costs in just a few days. I can only imagine the frantic backpedaling by those experts in Hollywood.

  I didn’t read the reviews, although my mom told me some of the critics, while praising the authentic action, complained that the SEALs were not trained, professional actors. Guilty as charged. To those who thought the SEALs didn’t come across the way that SEALs were supposed to, Mouse had the perfect comeback: “They are SEALs. What you see on the screen is exactly who SEALs are and what SEALs do. These guys are as real as moviemaking gets.”

  18

  GLOBAL PURSUIT

  Two qualities are indispensable: first, an intellect that even in the darkest hour retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth and second, the c
ourage to follow this faint light wherever it may lead.

  —CARL VON CLAUSEWITZ

  * * *

  I’d been back in San Diego a good while when a text came in saying twenty-three SEALs were killed in a helicopter crash coming to the aid of Army Rangers in Afghanistan. The names hadn’t been released yet, but I had a lot of good friends on that team.

  I was at Sea World with Tracy and the girls when I got the news. The dolphin show was getting ready to start. The music was coming up. The cast members were stepping out. And I was sitting there with my family.

  It hit me all at once. I was glad I was wearing sunglasses because I began to tear up. Tracy could tell. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  I’m not sure if it was the number—or the fact that the SEALs were rushing to help another unit in distress. I had known plenty of SEALs killed in action. But this one just seemed so close.

  I needed a minute or two. “Families just like ours,” I said to Tracy, “their kids won’t be able to go to Sea World with their dads anymore. I get to go with you three because buddies of mine are dying in a helicopter in Afghanistan.”

  Twenty-plus families were about to walk into a nightmare that every family prays they will never experience. And here I was, sitting in the stands, surrounded by hundreds of good people who were just living their lives, and none of them had any idea what had just occurred on the other side of the world.

  A bunch of absolute professionals who had committed their entire lives to chasing the nation’s enemies had just paid the ultimate price on behalf of all of us.

  * * *

  As the war in Afghanistan trudged on and on, I found myself increasingly wondering: What are we still doing there? I think a lot of people were wondering the same thing, even some of the SEALs who’d been fighting so valiantly in what had become America’s longest-running military conflict.