Our skipper didn’t always attend training op debriefings, but with Papa Garrison at the dinner table, the skipper wanted to make sure that his bastard navy children looked good—and, more importantly, got their slice of the pie.
Our Red Team chief was Denny Chalker, nicknamed Snake, a former Army 82nd Airborne paratrooper who became a SEAL in Team One’s counterterrorist unit, Echo Platoon, before becoming one of the original members of SEAL Team Six—a plankowner.
We reported: the briefing on the plane, the parachute jump, the whole op. The lane graders had been secretly watching our designated landing zone. They saw two of us hold security while the other two secured their parachutes. Fortunately, we practiced like we operated.
General Garrison said, “The good news is that your sniper craft skills were remarkable—stalking, navigating, blending with the environment, getting into position, observation—and you got off your shots. But it doesn’t mean crap when all four of you miss the target! You told the lane grader that the target was at a distance of six hundred yards, but it was at a distance of seven hundred and forty-two yards. One of you shot so far off target that you hit the windowsill. Your only hope was that the enemy might die of a heart attack from being shot at.”
We snipers looked at each other. Our faces sagged like we’d been kicked in the gut.
Our skipper’s face looked about to split.
General Garrison kept two secrets from us, though. The first was that the Gold Team snipers had also botched their mission. Their jumpmaster failed to put them in the landing zone. Gold Team’s snipers had to hump 8 miles through the woods. By the time they made it to the target, they were too late: Their ten-minute window of opportunity had closed. They didn’t even get off a shot.
The second secret: The general’s own Delta Force had failed, too.
An even larger problem existed: SEAL Team Six and Delta Force had been run as two separate entities. Why should SEAL Team Six take down an aircraft on a runway when Delta does it better? Why should Delta take down a ship under way when SEAL Team Six does it better?
The most glaring example of this larger problem arose when Delta had one of several mishaps with explosives. A Delta operator put an explosive charge on a locked door to blow it open. He was using an Australian mouse—one slap initiates the five-second timer, which, after five seconds, detonates the blasting cap. The blasting cap makes a small explosion that detonates the larger explosion of the door charge. Unfortunately, the small explosion blew straight through the timer and immediately detonated the larger charge, blowing off the Delta operator’s fingers.
Even though nobody does explosives better than SEAL Team Six—the most high-tech, state-of-the-art, you-only-thought-you-knew-about-explosives type of team there is (we even have our own special Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit that does only explosives)—SEAL Team Six trained and operated separately from Delta.
General Garrison also understood that SEAL Team Six and Delta were going to have to get realistic about our capabilities. He spoke with a Texas drawl. “I don’t care what you can do some of the time. I want to know what you can do every time anywhere in the world under any conditions.” That’s what you had to love about Garrison.
SEAL Team Six and Delta would need to learn to play together and face a reality check. Especially if we were going to survive one of the bloodiest battles since Vietnam—and that battle lay just around the corner.
3.
Hell Is for Children
As a child, I learned to endure forces beyond my control. My mother had me when she was sixteen years old—a child having a child—on November 8, 1961, in Weems Free Clinic, Boynton Beach, Florida. She couldn’t afford a regular hospital. Born two months prematurely, with hazel eyes and black hair, I only weighed 3 pounds 2 ounces. The clinic was so poor that it didn’t have the incubator a little one like me needed. I was so small, and a baby carrier would’ve been so big, that my mother literally carried me home in a shoe box. The bassinet at home was too large, so they pulled out a drawer from one of the dressers, put blankets in it, and that’s where I slept.
My mother, Millie Kirkman, came from Scottish ancestry and was hardheaded as bricks in a wall. She didn’t show emotion and didn’t show flexibility toward life, working hard every day in a sewing factory to help support my sisters and me. I probably inherited my hardheaded, refusing-to-quit-if-you-think-you’re-right attitude from her—to a fault.
When I was nine years old, she would tell me that Ben Wilbanks, my biological father, had run off and abandoned us. I hated him for that.
The earliest memory I have of my childhood is in West Palm Beach, Florida, when I was four years old—awakened in the middle of the night by a huge man reeking of liquor. His name was Leon, and my mother was dating him. She first met Leon while working as a waitress at a truck stop.
They had just come back from a date. Leon snatched me out of the top bunk, questioning me about why I’d done something wrong that day. Then he slapped me around, hitting me in the face, to the point where I could taste my own blood. That was Leon’s way of helping my mother keep her male child on the straight and narrow.
This was only the beginning. It didn’t always happen at night. Whenever Leon came to the house, he took it upon himself to discipline me. I was terrified, dreading Mom’s next date—literally shaking. My heart felt as though it would beat out of my chest. How bad is it going to be this time? A beating could happen when Leon arrived at the house while my mother got ready or when they came home. Leon wasn’t picky about when he let me have it.
One day after kindergarten, I ran away. On purpose, I got on the wrong school bus. This guy isn’t going to beat me anymore. I’m outta here. The bus took me out in the country somewhere. I had no idea where I was. There were only a few kids left on the bus. It stopped. A kid stood up. I followed him off the bus. The kid walked down the dirt road to his house. I didn’t know what to do at that point—at five years old, I hadn’t put a lot of thought into it. I walked down the dirt road until I got to the house at the end. Then I hung around outside not knowing what to do except stay away from the main road.
After a couple of hours, a man and a woman came home to find me sitting on the back porch, staying out of sight from the main road. The woman asked, “What’s your name?”
“Howard.”
“You must be hungry.” They took me in and fed me.
Later, the woman said, “You know, we got to get hold of your parents. Get you back home.”
“No, no,” I said. “Please, please don’t call my mom. Is there any way I could just live here with y’all?”
They laughed.
I didn’t know what was so funny, but I didn’t tell them the situation. “No, don’t call my mom. Can I just live here with y’all?”
“No, honey. You don’t understand. Your mama’s probably worried sick. What’s your phone number?”
I honestly didn’t know.
“Where do you live?”
I tried to tell them how to get to my house in Lake Worth, Florida, but the bus had taken so many winding roads and turns that I couldn’t remember. Finally, they took me back to my school. There they found my aunt looking for me.
My escape plan had failed. I lied to my mom, telling her I got on the wrong bus by accident.
Within a year or two, my mom married Leon.
Soon afterward, we moved to Screven, Georgia, and we went to see the judge there. In the car, my mother said, “When we see the judge, he’s going to ask you if you want Mr. Leon to be your daddy. You’re supposed to tell him yes.” Leon was the last thing in the world I wanted in my life, but I knew damn well I better say yes, because if I didn’t, I’d probably be killed when we got home. So I did my duty.
The next day, before I went to school, my parents told me, “You tell them at school you’re not a Wilbanks anymore—you’re a Wasdin.” So I did.
Now I was the adopted child and had to see Leon every day. When a lion acquires a lioness with
cubs, he kills them. Leon didn’t kill me, but anything that was not done exactly right, I paid for. Sometimes even when things were done right, I paid.
We had pecan trees in the yard. It was my job to pick up the pecans. Leon was a truck driver, and when he came home, if he heard any pecans pop under his wheels, that was my ass. Didn’t matter if any had fallen since I had picked them all up. It was my fault for not showing due diligence. When I got home from school, I’d have to go straight to the bedroom and lie down on the bed, and Leon would mercilessly beat me with a belt.
The next day at school, whenever I used the toilet, I would have to peel my underwear away from the blood and scabs on my butt to sit down. I never got mad at God, but sometimes I asked Him for help: “God, please kill Leon.”
After so much, it got to the point that when the 250-pound man’s belt cut across my lower back, butt, and legs, I wasn’t afraid anymore. Calm down. Stop shaking. It isn’t going to make it any better or any worse. Just take it. I could literally lie there on the bed, close down, and block out the pain. That zombielike state only pissed Leon off more.
* * *
My first sniper op came after Christmas when I was seven years old. A ten-year-old boy named Gary, who was the school bully, was big for his age and had beaten up one of my friends. That afternoon, I gathered four of my buddies together. We knew Gary was too big for us to fight using conventional means, but most of us got BB guns for Christmas. “Tomorrow morning, bring your guns to school,” I said. “We’ll wait in the tree at the edge of the playground and get him when he walks to school.” Gary would have to walk down a narrow pathway that served as a natural choke point. The next day, we waited. We had the tactical advantage in numbers, firepower, and high ground. When Gary entered the kill zone, we let him have it. You’d think he’d start running after the first shot—but he didn’t. He just stood there screaming like he’d been attacked by a swarm of bees, grabbing his shoulders, back, and head. We kept shooting. Ms. Waters, one of the teachers, ran toward us screaming bloody murder. Another teacher shouted for us to get down from the tree. Gary had curled up on the ground and hyperventilated as he cried. I felt bad for him because blood was streaming down his head, where most of the BBs had hit him, but I also felt he deserved it for beating up my buddy the previous day. Gary’s shirt was stuck to his back. A teacher took out his handkerchief and wiped Gary’s face.
We had to go to the principal’s office. Our local law enforcement officer sat in, trying not to laugh. I explained, “This kid’s bigger than all of us, and he beat up Chris yesterday.” In my mind, I didn’t understand what we’d done wrong. They confiscated our guns and called our parents. Of course, my dad let me have it big-time when I got home.
Years later, prior to becoming a SEAL, I came home on leave from the navy and sat in a truck with Gary as he drove for my dad. Gary asked me, “You remember shooting me with the BB gun?”
I felt embarrassed. “Yeah, I remember. You know, we were kids.”
“No, no, it’s OK.” He pointed to his left shoulder. “Feel right here.”
I touched his left shoulder—and felt a BB beneath his skin.
“Every once in a while, one of those will work its way out,” he said matter-of-factly. “Sometimes they come out of my scalp. Sometimes they come out of my shoulder.”
“Oh, man. I’m so sorry.”
Later we had a couple of beers and laughed about it.
* * *
When I was eight years old, I returned to Florida with Leon and some others to do some peddling, riding around selling produce out of the back of a pickup truck. I handled the sales from the back of the truck while an alcoholic redneck named Ralph Miller drove us around. He would often stop at a liquor store. “I’m stopping here to get some tomato juice. Don’t you like tomato juice?”
“I guess I like tomato juice.”
He would buy a can of tomato juice for me. Later, he started buying a light, zesty tomato juice mixed with onions, celery, spices, and a dash of clam juice: Mott’s Clamato. Ralph drank the same himself.
One time, from the back of the pickup truck, I snuck a peek into the cab. Ralph unzipped his pants and pulled out a bottle of vodka, mixing it in his own Clamato drink. What’s the fun in that? He’s just messing up some good Clamato.
We drove through some of the most dangerous parts of town, selling watermelons and cantaloupes. Once when we stopped in a town called Dania, two guys came up to the back of the truck asking for the price of our produce. One took a watermelon, put it in his car, and then walked to the cab as if to pay Ralph.
Pow!
I turned around and saw the man pointing a .38 revolver at Ralph. Ralph’s leg was bleeding. Shaking, Ralph handed the man his wallet.
The man with the gun asked Ralph, “You didn’t think I’d shoot you, did you?”
I moved to get off the truck.
The gunman’s accomplice told me, “Just stay there.”
Then the gunman pointed his pistol at me.
I jumped off the passenger side of the truck tailgate and hauled butt, expecting to get hit by a bullet any second. I ran so fast that my favorite red straw cowboy hat, which I got from Grandma Beulah’s dime store, flew off my head. For a split second I thought about running back to get my hat, but I decided, That man is going to shoot me if I go back.
I circled around a couple of blocks and found Ralph pulled up to the phone booth in front of a convenience store. I was so happy that he was still alive. Ralph called an ambulance.
The police arrived shortly before the ambulance. As I listened to the cops question Ralph, I found out that he had offered to give the two thugs his money, but not his wallet. That’s when Ralph got shot.
While Ralph went into surgery in the hospital, the police took me to the Dania police station. The detectives questioned me, took me back to the scene, and had me talk through the incident. They had a suspect but realized I was too young and too shocked by what happened to be a credible witness.
It was the first time I had been around such professional men. They took time with me, told me what it was like to be a police officer, and told me what they had to do to become police officers. I was amazed. A narcotics detective showed me all the different kinds of drugs they had taken off the street. They gave me a tour of the police station, and the paramedics next door gave me a tour of their facility. Man, this is so cool. The paramedics even let me slide down the pole. I would never forget them.
That night, they still couldn’t find my dad, so a detective drove me to his home to spend the night. His wife asked, “Have you had anything to eat yet?”
I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. “No, ma’am.”
“Are you hungry?”
“A little bit.”
“OK, let me fix you something to eat.”
The detective said, “We brought him to the station this afternoon, but none of us thought about feeding him.”
“Don’t you know he’s a growing boy?” She gave me a plate of food.
I ate ravenously. Maybe I could just live with these people forever … After my meal, I fell asleep. I was awakened at five o’clock the next morning. The detective took me to the police station, where Dad and his brother, my uncle Carroll, were waiting for me.
The two of them owned a watermelon field where I started working after school and during the summer. Those two were all about work. When they weren’t working their farm, they were driving trucks. As I started contributing to the family, my relationship with Dad, who had stopped drinking, improved.
In South Georgia, where the heat exceeded 100 degrees and the humidity neared 100 percent, I would walk through the field cutting 30-pound watermelons off the vine, place them in a line to throw them over to the road, and then toss them up onto the pickup truck. One of the older guys would back the truck up to the trailer of an 18-wheeler, where I helped pack the watermelons onto the rig. After loading thousands of watermelons, I’d ride on the truck up to Columbia, South Carolina,
in the early hours of the next morning to unload and sell the watermelons. I’d get about two hours of sleep before riding back.
When there was an hour or two to spare, my family would sometimes go for a picnic. On one of these picnics, I taught myself how to swim in the slow-moving waters of the Little Satilla River. I had no swimming technique whatsoever, but I felt at home in the water. We went there on a number of weekends: swimming and fishing for largemouth bass, crappie, redbreast, and bluegill.
Occasionally, after working in the watermelon patch, the crew and I went blackwater swimming in Lake Grace. Because of all the tannic acid from the pine trees and other vegetation, both the Little Satilla River and Lake Grace are so black on a good day that you can’t see your feet in the water. In the summer, dragonflies hunt down mosquitoes. From the surrounding woods, squirrels chirp, ducks quack, and wild turkeys squawk. Those dark waters hold a mysterious beauty.
By the time I was thirteen or fourteen, I was running the field crew. I’d leave the side of town where the whites lived and cross the tracks to the Quarters, where the blacks lived. I’d pick up the fifteen to twenty people who were going to work in the field that day and drive them out to the field, organize them, and then work beside them, even though they were almost twice my size.
After work one day, my watermelon crew and I had a contest to see who could swim the farthest from the pier underwater at Lake Grace. The occasional family picnic had offered me the time to improve my swimming. As I swam beneath the surface of the dark brown water, I swallowed with my mouth closed and let a little air out. When I came up, someone said, “You had to be farting. There’s no way you had that much air in your lungs.” Times like this were very rare for me. They were the few times I could truly relax and enjoy myself. Occasionally, we built campfires and talked at night.
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