SEAL Team Six: Memoirs of an Elite Navy SEAL Sniper
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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.
Dad didn’t mind if we spent a few hours swimming or fishing, but we never went hunting. My dad let me shoot his gun once in a while, but hunting was an all-day event. That would take too much time away from work. Work was his focus. If I made a mistake or didn’t work hard enough, he beat me.
* * *
In junior high school, I hurt my leg playing football in gym class. One of the coaches said, “Let me check your hip out.” He pulled my pants down so he could examine my right hip. He saw the hell that covered me from my lower back down to my upper legs where my dad had recently beaten me. The coach gasped. “Oh, my…” After checking my hip, he pulled my pants up and never said another word. In those days, whatever happened in the home stayed in the home. I remember feeling so embarrassed that someone had discovered my secret.
Despite everything, I loved my parents. It wasn’t entirely their fault they were uneducated and didn’t know how to nurture children. It was all they could do to put food on the table and keep four kids clothed. In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we never got up to self-actualization because we were still on the bottom of the pyramid—trying to feed and clothe ourselves. For the most part, my parents never used bad language. They were God-fearing people. Mom took my sisters and me to church every Sunday. They saw nothing wrong with their child-rearing skills.
Because I was the older brother, Dad expected me to take care of my sisters, Rebecca, Tammy, and Sue Anne. Tammy was always the bigmouthed, crap-stirring troublemaker. From the time she started elementary school, I lost track of how many times she ran her mouth and I had to stick up for her. When I was in the fifth grade, she mouthed off to a guy in the eighth grade. The eighth grader cleaned my clock, giving me two black eyes, a broken nose, and a chipped tooth. When I got home, my dad was the proudest man there was. Never mind that Tammy had done something senseless and provoked a fight. I looked like road kill. No matter how badly that kid beat me, though, if I hadn’t stood up to him, my dad would’ve beaten me worse.
* * *
At the age of seventeen, the summer of my junior year in high school, I returned home one afternoon from working all day in the watermelon field, took a shower, and sat in the living room wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. A little while later, Tammy came in the door crying.
My hair was still wet from the shower. “What is it?”
“My head hurts.”
“What do you mean your head hurts, baby?”
“Feel right here.”
I felt her head. She had a knot on top of it.
“We were playing volleyball at the church. When I spiked the volleyball, Timmy picked it up and threw it at me. So I threw it back. He grabbed me and put me in a headlock. Then he punched me on top of the head.”
I went through the roof. Now I was a bull seeing red. Possessed. I ran out of the house, off the porch, vaulted the chain link, and ran down the road one block to the First Baptist Church. Kids and parents were coming out of church from summer Bible school. Deacons stood out front. I spotted Timmy, a boy my age—the boy who’d hurt my little sister.
He turned around just in time to see me coming. “Howard, we need to talk.”
“Oh, no we don’t, you son of a bitch.” I nailed him right in the face, plowing him. I got on top of the boy, straddled his upper body, and pummeled him half to death, cussing up a storm. All I could see in my mind was my baby sister crying with a knot on her head.
A deacon tried to pull me off, but I was seventeen years old and had worked like a dog every day of my life. It took several more deacons to separate me from the boy.
Brother Ron appeared. “Howard, stop.” I believed in Brother Ron and looked up to him. He was like the town celebrity.
I stopped. Brother Ron had exorcised the demon.
Unfortunately, the incident started a feud. The guy’s dad was kind of a psycho, and my dad was a hothead who wouldn’t back down from anybody.
Psycho drove to my house.
Dad met him outside.
“If I see that bastard son of yours somewhere, he may not be making it back home,” Psycho said.
Dad walked into the house and grabbed a shotgun. As he exited the front door, my grandfather met him outside. With my grandfather stood Brother Ron. Dad was about to put a load of double-aught buck in Psycho’s ass. Grandfather and Brother Ron calmed Dad down.
The next weeks were tense for me, looking over my shoulder for a grown man everywhere I went. Timmy had two brothers, too. I rounded up my posse to protect me and didn’t go anywhere alone.
Brother Ron got Dad and Psycho together and had a peaceful “Come to Jesus” meeting. It turned out that things didn’t happen quite the way my smart-mouthed sister had said. Tammy had done something to Timmy. After that, he’d only given her a playful noogie—rubbing his knuckles on her head. I had imagined a bigger bump on her head than there actually was. Our fathers agreed to put everything aside.
Now, I knew I was going to be in big trouble.
Instead, Dad said, “You know, I’d have done the same exact thing, though I might not have cussed as much as you did in the churchyard.”
I wore that like a badge of honor. In spite of my dad’s faults, protecting his family was important to him, and I respected his desire to protect me.
Brother Ron was the glue that held the community together, and the community helped shape who I was.
Besides Brother Ron, another man who influenced me was Uncle Carroll, Dad’s older brother. Uncle Carroll didn’t have a hot temper. He may not have been well educated, but he was intelligent—especially in his dealings with people. Uncle Carroll had friends everywhere. He taught me how to drive a truck because Leon didn’t have the patience. Leon would be angry at the first mistake I made picking watermelons, driving, or anything—it didn’t matter. Uncle Carroll took the time to explain things. When I was learning how to drive an 18-wheeler, Uncle Carroll said, “Well, Howard, no, you shouldn’t have flipped the split axle right then. You should get your RPMs up a little bit more. Now gear back down and go back up…” Being around Uncle Carroll, I learned people skills. Leon and I would be in a truck driving from West Palm Beach, Florida, to Screven, Georgia—eight hours—and hardly speak. We didn’t have conversations. He might say something like, “Do you need to go to the bathroom?” Unless it concerned bodily functions or getting something to eat, we didn’t talk. Both Mom and Dad told us, “Children are supposed to be seen, not heard.” They weren’t BSing, either. If we were ever out in public and said something without someone asking us a question, when we got home, we knew what we were in for. Uncle Carroll was the only one who ever showed me any affection. On occasion, he’d put his arm around my shoulders if he knew Leon had been on my tail unrelentingly the way he usually was. He gave moral support, even a kind word on occasion. Through everything, Uncle Carroll’s support was priceless. If he and I were in the truck, we would stop, go into a restaurant, and eat: breakfast and lunch. With Leon, we would go into a grocery store and get some salami and cheese and make a sandwich in the truck while driving—Leon couldn’t be slowed down. The bes
t thing was that Uncle Carroll gave me words of encouragement. His influence was as critical as Brother Ron’s, maybe even more. Without them, I would’ve harbored some dark thoughts. Probably suicide.
* * *
I spent my high school years as an Air Force Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) geek. I loved JROTC, with its discipline, structure, and nice uniform. I was always the outstanding cadet: ranking officer, color guard commander—it gave me something to do and excel at. The light came on, and I learned that I could lead pretty easily.
When it came to girls, though, I was a late bloomer. In October, a month away from being eighteen years old, I asked a buddy, “How does this whole French kissing thing work? What do you do?”
“Howard, you just reach over, put your mouth on hers, stick your tongue in, and go to town.”
I needed a date for the JROTC military ball. My JROTC buddy had a sister named Dianne; everyone called her Dee Dee. I hadn’t really thought about her, but now I figured maybe she would go with me to the ball. Scared and embarrassed, I asked her, “Will you go to the military ball with me?”
“Yes,” she said.
After the dance, Dee Dee said, “Let’s go to the Ghost Light.” I took her to the old make-out spot—where legend said that the ghost of an old decapitated railroad worker walked the railroad tracks searching with his lantern.
When we parked the car, I was petrified. When do I put my lips on hers? What the hell does “stick your tongue in and go to town” mean? Do I go around in circles? What am I supposed to do? So I pretty much talked myself out of it. I turned to tell Dee Dee, You know, we better get back home. She had already moved in for the kill. Her face was right on mine. She gave me my first French kiss. Needless to say, I figured out, This is not quantum physics, and this is OK. We dated the rest of the school year until spring.
The prom was coming, but someone had already asked Dee Dee to it. During home economics class, I asked her friend Laura to the prom—our first date. Laura had a nice body and big breasts. After the prom, in the car, we kissed for the first time. Well, she kissed me and I didn’t resist. Because I grew up in a family that didn’t show affection, her interest in me meant a lot.
* * *
Thinking back on my teenage years, I can remember my first surveillance op. There’s not a lot to do in Screven, Georgia, so sometimes we had to create our own fun. One Friday night, Greg, Phil, Dan, and I drove down to the river. We found an old suitcase that had fallen off somebody’s car. We opened it. Inside were some clothes. We threw it in the back of Greg’s truck and thought nothing else about it. As we camped near the river, sitting around a campfire drinking beer and roasting wieners, a malnourished, mangy cat approached us. It looked too wild to come near us, but it must’ve been desperate for food. We threw it a piece of wiener, and the cat gulped it down. One of us tried to pick up the feline, and it went berserk—claws and teeth everywhere. That cat was bad. We used the suitcase to set a trap for it, propping the lid open and putting a wiener inside. When the cat went inside to eat, we dropped the top and zipped up the suitcase. We laughed. Hearing the cat go crazy in the suitcase made us laugh harder. The cat kept going until it was exhausted.
I got an idea. “You know how we wanted to open the suitcase? If we put this on the road, someone will stop and open it.” So we took the suitcase to the road and stood it up on the shoulder near a bridge. Then we concealed ourselves nearby, lying flat on a slope that descended from the street. We waited awhile before the first car drove by. It wasn’t a well-traveled road.
Another car came by, and the brake lights flashed. Then it proceeded forward, did a U-turn, and came back. It passed us and did another U-turn, finally stopping next to the suitcase. An overweight black woman stepped out of the car and picked up the suitcase. After she returned to the car and closed the door, we heard excited talk, as if they had dug up a treasure chest. The car moved forward. Suddenly, the brake lights came back on and the car screeched to a halt. Three of the four doors popped open, and three people ran out of the car cussing at the top of their lungs.
We tried not to laugh.
One of the passengers threw the suitcase down the hill.
“Get it out from under the seat!” another yelled.
A third person grabbed a stick and started poking inside the car to get the cat out from under the seat. The cat finally escaped.
We hadn’t expected them to open the suitcase in the car while it was moving, and we hadn’t intended to harm anyone. Fortunately no one was hurt. The incident gave us a story to keep the laughter roaring at night. I’ll bet those people never picked up anything from the side of the road again. It also became my first covert observation operation.
* * *
When I graduated from high school, I stood 5'11" tall, and I’d saved up money for a car and Cumberland College in Williamsburg, Kentucky—a Christian school. All the work saving up for a car had been to no avail, because Tammy totaled my blue 1970 Ford LTD before I even left home, so I had to take the bus instead. Before I stepped on the bus, my mother told Dad, “Hug Howard.” Then she told me, “Go hug your daddy.” Leon put his arms out. We did an awkward hug. It was the first time we had ever hugged each other. Then I had a rare hug with my mother. I got on the bus glad to get the hell out of there.
4.
Russian Sub and Green Hero
At the age of twenty, after a year and a half of college, I used up the last of my hard-earned money and couldn’t afford to go back to school. There wasn’t a lot of financial aid available at the time, and I was tired of washing with leftover soap and was weary of searching for lost change on Thursdays so I could enjoy three-hot-dogs-for-a-dollar night at the nearby convenience store. I decided to visit the military recruiters at the shopping mall in Brunswick, Georgia, hoping to join, save enough money, and return to college. A poster of a Search and Rescue (SAR) swimmer in a wetsuit hung outside the navy recruiter’s office. Later, I signed up to do Search and Rescue for the navy.
Before shipping out, I decided to marry Laura.
My mom had one request. “Talk to Brother Ron first.”
I knew our preacher didn’t like Laura. I knew he didn’t agree with her Mormon religion. “No, Mom, I won’t do that. I’m not going to talk to Brother Ron. I love her, and I’m marrying her.”
Leon came into my room and with both hands pushed both of my shoulders, knocking me back a few steps. That was his big way of asserting dominance. If I looked at him or stepped forward, he would interpret that as a sign of aggression. I had learned to lower my head and stay back. “If you can’t listen to your mom about this one thing, you pack up and get the hell out of my house!”
I couldn’t believe my ears.
“Yeah, I saw you just look at me,” Dad said. “You want to try me? Go ahead and try me. I’ll go through you like a dose of salts.” Epsom salts were used for constipation, and that was the South Georgia way of saying, “I’ll go through you like crap through a goose.” He had just threatened me for the last time.
I packed everything I could fit into a small suitcase, walked out the door, and headed down the street to a pay phone. After I called Laura’s house, her parents sent her to pick me up.
Laura’s family acted much different from my family. The kids and the parents talked. They had conversations. The parents were nice to the kids. Her father even told them good morning. That blew me away. They were loving and affectionate. I loved what their family had as much as I loved Laura.
Her parents let me live with them until I could get a temporary construction job and a small apartment. Months after I left my home, Laura and I married in her church on April 16, 1983. My parents grudgingly attended the small wedding. We lived in a town where it would’ve reflected poorly on them if they hadn’t come. After Laura and I exchanged vows, my dad gave me a hundred-dollar bill and shook my hand without saying anything—no “Congratulations” or “Go to hell.” Needless to say, my parents didn’t stay for cake.
* * *
On November 6, 1983, I arrived at navy boot camp in Orlando, Florida. Two days later, we all had fresh buzz cuts and smelled like denim. At lights-out, I told the guy in the bunk below me, “Hey, today was my birthday.”
“Yeah, man. Happy birthday.” He didn’t give a crap. No one did. It was a bit of a reality check.
The lack of discipline and respect among the recruits amazed me. So many got in trouble for forgetting to say “Yes, sir” or “No, sir.” I was raised to never forget my manners and never forget attention to detail. The guys doing extra duty—push-ups, stripping and waxing the floor—looked like morons. Making your bed and folding your underwear isn’t rocket science. I was raised to make my bed and fold my underwear.
The company commander and I developed a bond—he’d had the same Search and Rescue job as an air crewman that I wanted. He put me in charge of half the barracks. After finishing almost four weeks of boot camp, a quarter of the recruits were still having problems. I couldn’t understand it.
Anyone who got in serious trouble had to go to Intensive Training (IT). I told my company commander, “I want to go to IT to get in shape for my Search and Rescue physical screening test, sir.” I don’t remember what the exact SAR requirements were then, but today’s candidates must swim 500 yards in 13 minutes, run 1.5 miles in 12.5 minutes, do 35 push-ups in 2 minutes, perform 50 sit-ups in 2 minutes, and do 2 pull-ups. If I failed the test, I would miss my big reason for joining the navy—Search and Rescue.