Seal Team Six

by Howard E. Wasdin

  The nurse had her back to me as the colonel turned and gave me a wink. Then he walked out of the room.

  * * *

  The next day I noticed my scalp itching terribly. I scratched it. Black stuff accumulated under my fingernails. During the battle, a Ranger I had carried back to the Humvee had bled on me. The black stuff on my scalp was his dried blood.

  Uncle Earl, from my wife’s family, happened to be in Germany visiting one of his companies. He heard where I was and came to visit.

  When he saw me, he just stared for a moment. Then he walked out and went high-order detonation on the staff. “Wasdin is lying in his own urine!” I hadn’t realized it at the time, but after my epidural, I lost bladder control. “His body is filthy!”

  The hospital staff tried to calm him.

  He wouldn’t calm down. “I want him cleaned up right now! I want some fresh clothes on him, and I want some fresh linen on that bed! Wash the blood out of his hair! Get in there and brush his teeth! You better take care of him immediately, or I’m calling somebody in Washington right now, and I’m going to rain down hell on this hospital!”

  Maybe the hospital staff had been too busy due to the sudden flood of us coming in to perform the regular patient care. Whatever the reason, within minutes, an attendant washed my hair. I felt like I was in heaven. The assistant gave me a toothbrush, and I brushed my teeth. Also, the assistant took the linen off my bed and, even though the mattress had a plastic cover on it, flipped it over. They gave me a fresh gown. I felt so much better.

  Uncle Earl brought in a wheelchair. “Anything I can do for you?”

  “Yes, get me out of this hospital gown.”

  He helped me into the wheelchair and rolled me to the gift shop, where he bought me a pair of sweatpants, a sweatshirt, a ball cap, and a teddy bear. Uncle Earl asked the cashier, “Could you cut these sweatpants off at the knee for us?”

  She looked at him, puzzled, for a moment, then looked at me. “Sure,” she said sweetly. The cashier pulled out a pair of scissors and cut the sweatpants. She handed them to Earl.

  “Thank you.” Earl wheeled me into the gift shop restroom and put the sweatpants on over my external fixator. The surgeon had drilled holes into the uninjured part of my bone near the fracture. Then he screwed pins into the bone. Outside my leg, a metal rod attached to the pins to hold them in place. The pins and rod made up the external fixator. Then Earl put the sweatshirt and cap on me.

  He wheeled me out of the restroom and over to the cafeteria and picked up some Hefeweizen beers, traditional German unfiltered wheat beers that have less bitterness and more carbonation than the filtered variety. “What do you want to do?” he asked.

  “Can you roll me out in the courtyard for some sunshine?”

  He pushed me out there, and we had our drinks. Cleaned up with fresh clothes and drinking beer in the sunshine, I thought, This is pretty good. I drank half my beer and fell asleep. Later, I would give the teddy bear to my three-year-old sweetheart, Rachel.

  * * *

  The next day, a Delta guy from across the hall who had an injured shoulder came and visited me. We talked about the battle. He said, “I didn’t have a good appreciation for you guys since you weren’t actually part of our team, but you guys kicked ass. We had no idea SEALs could throw down like that! You especially. I saw you two or three times during that firefight. Wish I had more to do with you before the firefight.”

  “It’s cool,” I said.

  “Hey, Brad is down the hall. Want to go see him?”

  “Sure.”

  He wheeled me over to see Brad, one of the Delta snipers. I saw Brad’s amputated leg—sheared off when an RPG hit his helo. He shook my hand. “Want a dip?” he said as if everything were normal. He extended his hand and held out a fiberboard can of moist dipping tobacco—Copenhagen.

  “Hell, yeah.” I pinched some and put it in my mouth.

  The three of us sat talking and spitting.

  “Hey, they were able to save your leg,” Brad said.

  “I was told that if it had been a quarter of an inch more, they would’ve had to amputate.” Brad is taking this way better than I am, and his leg is cut off. Here I am feeling sorry for myself. Angry at the world and God. Here he is with no leg and a positive attitude.

  Seeing Brad was good therapy for me. Brad was a sniper on Black Hawk Super Six Two. Along with him were Delta snipers Gary Gordon and Randy Shughart. They flew over the second downed helo and saw the pilot, Mike Durant, moving. Somali crowds closed in. With no friendlies on the ground to help, Mike was all alone. The three snipers and their door gunners fired at the mob.

  Brad, Gordon, and Shughart looked at each other. They nodded.

  Gordon told the pilot, “Insert the three of us to assist Super Six Four.”

  The pilot radioed headquarters, “Three operators request permission to secure Super Six Four. Over.”

  “Negative. There are too many unfriendlies down there. Can’t risk another bird.”

  When one door gunner got shot, Brad took over the minigun. Everyone needed the big gun in the fight to keep the enemy from shooting them down.

  The crowd on the ground grew, moving closer to Mike’s crashed helo.

  “Two of us are going in,” Gordon said. “Put us down.”

  The pilot radioed again, “Two operators request to secure crash site until rescue arrives.”

  “Negative.”

  Gordon insisted.

  The pilot lowered the helo to the crash site. Brad stayed on the minigun in the Black Hawk and covered Gordon and Shughart as they fast-roped down.

  On the ground the two snipers calmly moved Mike and other crew members to a more secure location with good fields of fire. Then Gordon and Shughart took up defensive positions on opposite sides of the helo, coolly shooting the enemy in the upper torso one by one—Gordon with his CAR-15 and Shughart with his M-14.

  Suddenly, Gordon said matter-of-factly, like he’d bumped his knee into a table, “Damn, I’m hit.” Then he stopped shooting.

  Shughart retrieved Gordon’s CAR-15 and gave it to Mike. Shughart resumed fighting. When Shughart’s rifle ran out of ammo, he returned to the downed helo and made a radio call. He walked around the front of the helicopter and charged at the crowd, firing point blank with his pistol, pushing them back until he ran out of ammo. The mob fought back, killing Shughart.

  Enemy corpses lay scattered on the ground surrounding the fallen snipers. Shughart and Gordon were bad in the best sense of the word. The crowd got their revenge by dragging the dead soldiers’ bodies through the streets and cutting them up. They captured Mike and held him hostage, hoping to use him for a prisoner exchange. He was released later.

  The military’s highest award, the Medal of Honor, would go to the two Delta snipers: Gary Gordon and Randy Shughart.

  * * *

  One day, General Henry Hugh Shelton, commander in chief of U.S. Special Operations Command, visited my hospital room. He presented me with my Purple Heart and gave me his commander’s coin. His sincerity, caring, and encouragement lifted my spirits.

  “Is the hospital taking good care of you?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  General Shelton asked how well the Rangers fought during the Battle of Mogadishu.

  “They fought bravely, sir.” I thought for a moment. “We’re not going to leave this unfinished, are we?”

  “No, we’re going to get the tanks and go in and do the job right.”

  Although I’m sure he meant it, the White House never allowed that to happen.

  * * *

  I stayed in Landstuhl Regional Medical Center for a week before they flew me and others to Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland. As they wheeled me off the plane on a gurney, Laura and the kids met me. Eight-year-old Blake ran to my side and put his arms around my chest. Laura was pregnant. She held three-year-old Rachel, who was too young to understand much about what was going on.

  After staying overnight in Maryland,
I was taken to the Team compound in Dam Neck. I told them I wanted to rehab down at Fort Stewart Army Hospital in Georgia, the same place Blake was born, thirty minutes away from my home. The Team gave me a special lightweight wheelchair made of composite metal that I heard cost thousands of dollars. My two children, my wife, and I lived with her parents in Odum, Georgia, during my rehabilitation.

  When I heard that Delta would be having a memorial service, I wanted to go. The military flew down a C-12, a small passenger plane, to pick me up at Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah. I flew up to the memorial ceremony at the Delta compound in Fort Bragg. Greeting me at the airport in SUVs were Tim Wilkinson and Scotty, the PJs, and Dan Schilling, the CCT. It felt good to see old friends from that hangar in Somalia. Even though they were air force, we had fought in Mogadishu together, which made me closer to them than to my SEAL Team Six Teammates who hadn’t been with me in combat. The air force would award Tim the military’s second-highest honor, the Air Force Cross (equal to the Navy Cross for Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard; Distinguished Service Cross for Army). Scotty would receive the Silver Star, the military’s third-highest honor. Dan received its next-highest honor, the Bronze Star.

  They wheeled me past a wall where the names of the fallen Delta Force guys were written. I saw six pairs of desert combat boots, six M-16 rifles with bayonets stuck downward in the base of the display, six bayonets on the rifle butts, and a picture for each of the six men: Dan Busch, Earl Fillmore, Randy Shughart, Gary Gordon, Tim “Griz” Martin, and Matt Rierson.

  I remembered Griz, who had a big birthmark on his face. A prankster who came up with new and exotic ways to blow stuff up.

  During the memorial service in the auditorium, the chaplain led everyone in prayer for the fallen men. Wives wept. Dan Busch’s parents looked devastated. Dan was only twenty-five years old—incredibly young to be a Delta sniper—from Portage, Wisconsin. Squared away. A devout Christian. I never heard him say a cuss word—rare in the special operations community. I remember one day after lunch, we oiled up with suntan lotion and basked in the sun on top of a CONEX box outside of the hangar at Mogadishu. Of the little free time we had, I spent much of it with Dan Busch.

  A sergeant read the Last Roll Call. Each man in the unit answered, “Here.” Except for the fallen men. The honor guard fired three volleys. A bugler played taps.

  In our profession we knew it was a possibility when we took the job. Still, looking at their parents, wives, and kids really hit me hard. These guys are really gone. Dan is gone. How come I get to live and they don’t? Dan Busch was a much better person and Christian than I was. Why is he dead, and I’m still here? I felt guilty that I had survived.

  After the memorial, when Scotty, Tim, and I were hanging out, a Delta guy asked who I was. They didn’t recognize me in my beard. I had been too weak to shave.

  Scotty and Tim told him who I was.

  “Aw, hell.” The Delta operator went to the other Delta guys and said, “Hey, Wasdin is here!”

  They swarmed me, took me to Delta’s Charlie Squadron ready room, and gave me beers in both hands. We hung out, and they laughed when I told them about giving my medication to the Ranger at Landstuhl. Afterward Delta had a party, but I had a fever and didn’t have enough power in my engine to join them. I went back to my hotel room early.

  Only Defense Secretary Les Aspin attended the memorial service. For the most part, the Clinton administration seemed to hope the Battle of Mogadishu would just conveniently disappear and America would forget.

  * * *

  After flying out the next morning to Georgia, I showed up at the hospital for my regular visit. I had diarrhea. My fever had worsened—my whole body ached like it was on fire. I felt disoriented. I was literally dying. A medical team descended on me and rushed me into the back, gave me a shot in each butt cheek, and put an IV in each arm. They removed the bandages from my leg and started working on it. The doctor, who had gone home, returned in his civilian clothes. “Where have you been?” he asked. “We’ve been trying to contact your house, but you weren’t there. The blood test results from your previous visit showed that you have a staph infection.” The deadly staph infection had crawled deep inside me via the pins in my leg. This partly explains why I didn’t feel up to attending the party with Delta after the memorial.

  On the hospital bed, I floated up and looked down at myself lying there. I’m dying. This staph infection sucks a lot worse than combat.

  The next day, the doctor was visibly upset with me. “If you’re going to stay under my care, you’ve got to give us a way to stay in contact with you. If not, you need to go back to Virginia and let those navy doctors take care of you.” He was scared. The doctor had done me a favor by letting me rehab in his army hospital—and I repaid him by almost dying on him.

  “Yes, sir.”

  They kept me in the hospital a couple of days until I recovered.

  Sitting at home in my wheelchair, I committed one of the Team’s gravest sins—feeling sorry for myself. I slipped deep into depression. After waking in the morning, I had to perform my pin care, cleaning the skin around the four big pins sticking out of my leg. If I didn’t, the infection would crawl down the pins and into my bone—causing another staph infection like the one that almost killed me. Then I’d bandage everything back up. The whole process took fifteen to twenty minutes. Twice a day. Doing the pin care by myself was tough. I asked my wife and brother-in-law to help, but they didn’t have the stomach. It looked terrible—there’s nothing normal about four pins screwed into a bone. My skin graft looked nasty, the meat visible.

  The walls were closing in on me. I wasn’t accustomed to being trapped indoors, and my depression was bearing down on me. I had to get out of the house, so I decided to do something simple and routine, but even something as mundane as grocery shopping turned out to be a bigger blow to my weakened self-esteem. One day, while slowly wheeling myself down the aisle in a Winn-Dixie supermarket in Jesup, Georgia, I started to realize how good it felt to be out of the house, contributing to the family by shopping. Some return to a normal life.

  An overweight woman with a chicken hairdo—short in the back and spiky on top, the Kate Gosselin haircut that is common in Wayne County—stared at my leg. Her face twisted like she’d eaten a lemon. I had cut the right leg of my sweatpants off above the knee to accommodate my external fixator. Although the skin-grafted area was bandaged, the pins were visible. “Why don’t you stay at home?” she said. “Don’t you realize how gross that is?”

  I got my leg shot off serving her country. Our country. Maybe this is how ordinary Americans see me. Are they fine with us going off to die for them but don’t want to see us wounded? I was feeling too sorry for myself to realize that she didn’t know who I was or how I was wounded. At the time, when my spirit lay in the dirt, her words kicked me in the teeth. I desperately needed to bounce back, but I couldn’t. Those words punted me deeper into depression.

  At home, I wheeled around the house in my chair, eating and killing time watching TV. I couldn’t take a shower or a bath because I couldn’t get my screws wet. I had to wash my hair in the sink and take a washcloth bath.

  Every other day I did rehabilitation at the hospital in Fort Stewart. They gave me hot whirlpool treatments for my left foot, to shake loose the dead flesh. It hurt like getting shot again. They gave me crutches. They put me on bars to help me walk. The pain was so intense that I couldn’t stop tears from coming out of my eyes—I’d been still for too long before the rehabilitation. Then I had to have another surgery. Later I would have three more.

  My internal clock hadn’t adjusted from Africa to Germany, then back to the United States. With time on my hands, it became easy to take a two- or three-hour nap, which kept me awake at night.

  Pain and depression didn’t help matters either. Bone pain. As long as those screws stayed in my leg, I’d have pain. It’s understandable how people can become addicted to pain pills, but I despised the pills—they just
made me numb. To some small degree, I wanted to feel pain, guilty that I had survived while a lot of good guys, special ones like Dan Busch, lay dead. I thought maybe I was strange for feeling this way. Suck it up, take the pain.

  Out of the SEAL Team Six loop and with no Team guys around, I suffered the withdrawal symptoms of being cut off from the camaraderie. I was in culture shock, too. People around town could talk to me about their lives, but I couldn’t talk to them about mine. I couldn’t joke with them about my Hell Week death leap to kill a rack of trays that I thought was a deer. Or laugh with them about the hospital in Germany where I gave the Ranger buddy my painkiller injections. People around town didn’t understand. I learned to shut up about those experiences. Now it occurred to me how different I had become from most people. Away from my Teammates, I felt forgotten, too. With no real-world missions, I had gone cold turkey from adrenaline. Now I couldn’t even walk. In the SEAL culture, where it pays to be a winner, I was the biggest loser. I was angry at the world in general and at God in particular. Why did this have to happen to me?

  In retrospect, I see that God was letting me know I was only human, and that being a SEAL was just a job. Howard, you were too hardheaded to listen to Me after you were shot once. You didn’t listen to Me after the second shot. Here, big boy, let Me give you your third bullet hole. Now, do I have your attention? You are not Superman. You are God’s gift to special operations only for as long as I allow it to be. You are where you are because of Me. Not because of you. This is My way of getting your attention. Now that I’ve got it, let Me mold you further. You are not the finished product. He humbled me and brought me back down to earth. Made me become a father to my children. At the time, no one could’ve convinced me of all that, but looking back, getting shot in the leg was the best thing that ever happened to me.

  * * *

  One day, a buddy of mine called me. On his ranch, he had a special hybrid of deer that he bred with American whitetail deer.