by Brandon Webb
That was about to change.
From East Timor we sailed westward through a series of stepping-stone stops—Singapore and Phuket, Thailand—until we finally arrived in mid-October at the Persian Gulf, where we planned to spend a few days engaged in ship-boarding exercises. It was October 12, a quiet Thursday morning right about lunchtime, when Jim McNary, our officer in charge (OIC), suddenly showed up in our berthing area with some unexpected and sobering news. One of our destroyers, the USS Cole, had been hit and was in danger of sinking.
Holy shit, we all thought.
Shortly after eleven o’clock that morning, a small powerboat just off the coast of nearby Yemen, loaded with a quarter ton of homemade explosives and manned by a total of two as-yet-unidentified assailants, had sidled up to the ship on its port side and detonated, blowing a forty-by-forty-foot hole in the Cole’s hull.
Two guys in a little speedboat did this?
Yes, two guys. Seventeen American sailors had died, thirty-nine others were wounded, and a gigantic U.S. warship was dangerously close to sinking. Immediate support was needed. Other naval personnel would labor to save the vessel from sinking, and still others would play an investigative role and work to nail down exactly who it was who did this thing. As SEALs, our job was to button the place down and provide impenetrable security.
Within eight hours we had made the clockwise loop through the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman, the Arabian Sea, and the Gulf of Aden, and were in the Port of Yemen boarding the crippled hulk of the Cole.
An acrid smell from the explosion still hung in the air, but as we climbed aboard the Cole that odor was quickly overtaken by another, far worse smell. The carnage was awful, with rotting food and decomposing bodies under the hot Middle Eastern sun.
I’ll never forget that smell.
Command had serious concerns that there might still be unexploded ordnance, so some of our guys went to work searching the vessel while others circled out on the water and maintained a defensive perimeter around the harbor. Meanwhile Glen and I, fresh from our sniper school training, joined the platoon’s two more experienced snipers up on the Cole’s bridge and began round-the-clock overwatch rotations with a full complement of weapons at the ready. Our orders were unambiguous: If anyone came within a hundred yards of that ship, we were cleared to use deadly force.
Our reaction when we heard those orders was raised eyebrows, followed by fist pumps. These were unusually aggressive ground rules. Ask any Spec Op warrior about ROEs (rules of engagement) and he will tell you they are seldom our friends. As SEALs we are trained to operate independently in any situation, which means we’re expected to use our own judgment and make snap life-and-death, mission-critical decisions. In essence, every SEAL is a fully operational army of one. The last thing we want is to be second-guessed on the battlefield by shortsighted restrictions motivated by political considerations parsed from comfy armchairs thousands of miles from the realities of war. Unfortunately the typical ROEs in situations of armed conflict more often reflect the conditions on Capitol Hill than those on the battlefield. In years to come, such timid and impractical ROEs would routinely drive us nuts. But not here on the bridge of the Cole. Right now our orders were simple: “Anyone approaches without permission, shoot to kill.”
As snipers it was our job to maintain constant, 100 percent, 360-degree situational awareness and threat assessment. What were the strengths and weaknesses of our position? Where were threats most likely to come from? At any given moment, what should we be most focused on—and what was happening everywhere else? Glen and I and the other two snipers spent hours at a stretch on the spotting scope or binos, surveilling every inch of the harbor, Win Mag at the ready, different sectors arranged in our heads and accurate ranges dialed in on our scopes so that if at any second we had to take a shot, we’d be prepared and not have to scramble to set our parameters.
Meanwhile the Cole was slowly sinking under our feet. Our team of naval engineers brought in special equipment to keep the bilges pumping and the ship afloat. If someone farted in the wrong direction, that boat was going down. It almost sank a few times right there in port.
As we watched the shore, the shore was watching us.
Yemen was not exactly the most U.S.-friendly nation in the Middle East. The Yemeni military forces had their weapons trained on us, which meant that the guys we were staring at through our binos were peering at us through their binos. It felt like a high-tech Mexican standoff. Technically speaking, they were our hosts; after all, we were tied up to their pier. But what did we really know about them? Were they in sympathy with the guys who’d just blown up our ship? Had they sent those guys? We had no way of knowing. It was eerie. And it went on like that for days, while our naval engineering crews furiously pumped out the putrid bilgewater and struggled to keep the ship from giving up the ghost and sloughing off to rest at the bottom of the Port of Aden.
Within twelve hours after we first arrived, a team of FBI agents was on the scene, soon followed by a Naval Criminal Investigative Service detail and a crew from the CIA. This was some serious shit. Most of the world didn’t yet fully grasp what had happened, and few would understand its implications until eleven months later, when the World Trade Center would lie in blood-soaked ruins.
We hadn’t just been attacked by a few rogue terrorists. We had entered a new age of warfare.
In the Civil War, long lines of soldiers armed with bayonet-clad rifles massed into great walls of firepower, facing off in leaden hailstorms of Minié balls and black powder, just as Xerxes and the Spartans had faced off with spears and shields. In World War II, Patton’s and Rommel’s tank battalions pummeled one another in the African desert. In Desert Storm, fleets of warplanes wreaked such rapid and complete devastation on Saddam’s offensive line that ground troops were practically an afterthought. As the tools of war evolved, the form of battle changed, but it was all fundamentally the same tactic: Line up the biggest mass of weaponry you can and hurl it at the enemy with all the force you’ve got.
But not with the Cole. Here the old rules of engagement no longer applied. A crappy little speedboat manned by two guys had just crippled and nearly sunk a billion-dollar, ten-thousand-ton warship, killed and wounded dozens of sailors, and inflicted some $250 million in damages on the mightiest military force on earth. This wasn’t conventional warfare, and it wasn’t even guerrilla warfare. This was asymmetrical warfare—a brand-new kind of war where mass meant nothing and intelligence meant everything.
And there was one guy on our team who understood this better than anyone else there: our assistant officer in charge, Dave Scott.
• • •
Dave was new to the platoon. In fact, he had joined us as third officer (number three in the platoon’s officer command chain, what we call third O) just a few weeks before we deployed.
Dave was a substantial guy, just over six feet, broad-shouldered and solid, an imposing presence. Whereas Mike Bearden stood like a Greek god, Dave was built like a tank and walked like a gorilla king, legs bowed slightly inward, yet spine always erect. His soft green eyes and lady-killer grin gave him a boyish charm that perfectly disguised the dangerous wit sizzling just below the surface. He clicked immediately with our platoon’s chemistry and added a whole new layer of color to this already extremely crazy bunch. We all loved him right off the bat.
One thing we especially liked about Dave was that he was not one to toe the party line. His was the voice at the back of the room you could always count on to interrupt the speaker at the front of the room with a single “Bullshit!” His normally silky voice could be penetrating and commanding when he wanted it to be. He could easily silence an entire roomful of people, yet I never saw him yell or lose control. His sense of humor was pervasive and ruthless. He would not let a single opportunity pass to bust anyone’s balls; nothing was sacred, no joke too obscene, no stunt too outrageous.
Dave was
with a few buddies in line at an ATM one day (this was back in the States, a year or so before we met him) when a security guard started loading money into the machine. Dave noticed that the guy had a pistol strapped on but no magazine loaded in the well. The next thing his friends knew, Dave was sidling up to the guy from behind, one hand cradling a bunch of drinking straws he’d cribbed from a nearby juice stand. Thirty seconds later Dave was back in line and laughing his ass off, the poor security guard oblivious to the fact that his gun was now loaded with soda straws. If the place got robbed by the Cookie Monster this guy would have been all set; otherwise, he was in deep shit.
Who would have the balls to sneak up behind a security guard and mess with his gun? Only Dave. As I said, no boundaries. Dave’s friends had a saying about him: “There are the rules that apply to everyone else—and then there are the rules that apply to Dave.”
He was just as happy skewering himself and the SEALs as much as anyone else. Sometimes when he walked into a room he would glare at you and say in a bad Schwarzenegger voice, “We are here to get you out.” Among his many tattoos, he had a line drawing of the Shadow, the old pulp-fiction vigilante crime fighter, inked in the middle of his back. “That’s my shadow,” he would say whenever someone pointed it out. “He watches my back.”
One of Dave’s favorite T-shirts was one he had printed with a quote from Jack Handey, the guy who wrote the “Deep Thoughts” segments on Saturday Night Live during the nineties:
If you’re in a war, instead of throwing a hand grenade at the enemy, throw one of those small pumpkins. Maybe it’ll make everyone think how stupid war is—and while they’re thinking, you can throw a real grenade at them.
Dave was a wild man, a sort of mad genius. Over time we would learn just how wild he really was. But one thing we could see right away was that he was over-the-top brilliant.
With rare exceptions, Hollywood typically casts Spec Ops guys—Rangers, Green Berets, SEALs, and the rest—as macho, swaggering strongmen who converse in grunted monosyllables and chauvinistic clichés. As usual, Hollywood’s got it wrong. If I had to identify the one skill set shared most by the men who become part of the SEAL teams, it would not be athletic ability, physical strength, or pugnacious attitude; it would be sheer brainpower. Yes, it takes a certain amount of physical grit to get through BUD/S and the rest of the training involved in becoming a full-fledged SEAL. But far more than that, it takes the ability to maintain laser-sharp mental focus under any conditions and to think your way out of insanely tight spots.
So as far as smarts go, the Naval Special Warfare bar is already fairly high. But Dave wasn’t just smart. He was scary smart. For example, his savvy with electronics: He could make any gadget work, no matter how complicated it was or whether he’d ever seen it before. He would bring radio scanners with him in his car at the Burger King drive-through line and insert extra food items into other people’s orders just to mess with them. Once when we were doing a night exercise, Dave figured out a way to rig a night-vision camera onto his helmet to record what everyone was doing, so we could later review everything that happened and learn how to improve. He also had a remarkable memory. We could pick up pretty much any piece of equipment we had on board—radio, night vision, a weapons system, intelligence system equipment, anything—and hand it to Dave, and no matter what it was, he could quote whole paragraphs verbatim from the manual.
He was also brilliant academically. Just weeks before joining our platoon he had finished up a course of study at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, where he had taken a graduate-level course on political violence and terrorism taught by the renowned international terrorism expert Dr. Jerrold Post. Post, who would later author the pioneering text The Mind of the Terrorist, had become widely known for his psychological profile of Saddam Hussein after the invasion of Kuwait. Dave was big into the kind of nonstate actors that were still largely off the radar in those pre-9/11 days. Although the Soviet Union had been dead and buried for a decade, most still tended to think about major threats to national security in terms of hostile national forces, whether Saddam’s Iraq, Khamenei’s Iran, or Kim Jong-Il’s North Korea. Not Dave. He was convinced that a far graver danger lay in more fuzzily defined and less clearly centralized terrorist groups.
Dave was more than a little prescient. It was as if he lived with one foot in the future. For his term paper in Dr. Post’s class he chose what seemed like a fairly obscure topic at the time: He wrote a psychological profile of a shadowy Saudi dissident whom few outside the intelligence community had heard of. We didn’t know this at the time, but the man Dave had written about just a few months before joining our platoon would turn out to be the mastermind behind the USS Cole bombing whose horrifying aftermath we were now witnessing.
The guy’s name: Osama bin Laden.
• • •
For Dave, the worst thing about the nightmare of the Cole attack was that the whole damn thing seemed so fucking unnecessary. According to Dave, if any of our guys in this region had been paying attention, it would never have happened in the first place. Earlier that year, a group of terrorists had attempted to sink a nearly identical U.S. warship, the USS The Sullivans, in the same area, by identical tactics. In fact, they even used the same goddamn craft. Yes, you read that right: Although the earlier attack was foiled, the bad guys salvaged and repurposed that same crappy little speedboat, complete with its same homemade explosive charge, for a repeat performance later that year. Yemen was an openly anti-American nation, and the Cole was clearly in a dangerous and vulnerable position. The setup was obvious. But nobody was watching the store.
Dave had a good point. The level of security on the Cole before the bombing was ludicrous. A few guys had been placed to stand guard on the ship’s rail with unloaded M-14s.
I have to repeat that: unloaded M-14s, as in, no ammo in the guns.
We were all in disbelief at the lack of preparation—except Dave, who was just disgusted. He was not at all surprised that the attack had happened. He had felt for years that the Navy and the military in general—the country in general—were far too lax in their approach to security. Nobody was talking much about identity theft or cyberattacks back in 2000—but Dave was. He was always extremely careful about personal information. Before coming on our deployment he had given his girlfriend, Kat, a list of phone numbers so she could reach the other guys in the platoon in case of an emergency. Reasonable enough, right? Only for Dave, just writing down the numbers wouldn’t do. The numbers were all in code, and he gave her a mathematical formula she’d have to apply to the list to derive the actual phone numbers. He wasn’t paranoid. He was just ten steps ahead of everyone else.
Dave was sitting with a few friends at a restaurant one day, talking about his Pennsylvania hometown. He grabbed a napkin and started drawing them a diagram: Over on the right was Philadelphia, the Main Line running northwest, and his town way over to the west—and then he stopped for a moment, looked at his friends, then bent over the napkin again and added a big lake, another major highway, and some mountains. “These aren’t really there, okay?” he explained. “I’m just adding them in to confuse the bad guys, in case this napkin falls into the wrong hands.”
He was joking, of course . . . but then again, that was the way Dave thought. He had a Special Forces OPSEC (operations security) mind-set all the time, no matter where he was or what he was doing.
Dave was an excellent operator and had no patience for what he saw as stupidity or incompetence. Outside of work, he was a tolerant guy who was slow to judge others and seldom held a grudge. When it came to work it was a different story. If someone screwed up in something work-related, he took it personally. If you were not up to the task or the mission, as far as Dave was concerned you were gone; you didn’t exist. Despite his sarcasm and perpetual irreverence, he loved what he did and took it very seriously, and there was a rock-solid sense of patriot
ism hidden quiet at his core. He believed in this country and was mightily pissed off at how shoddy the general state of security and preparedness had become.
A day or two after we arrived at the Cole, we got word that someone had decided to provide cell phones to all the servicemen from the ship so they could call home to their families in the States. Most of us thought that was a pretty decent gesture. Dave was incensed.
“Those idiots,” he said. “With a thirty-nine-dollar scanner from Radio Shack I could listen to every one of those calls!” He didn’t stay quiet about it, either. He went straight to command and told them, “That’s a really nice gesture, guys—but do you realize none of those calls are secure?”
Later that day Dave was out patrolling the harbor when someone started motoring toward the Cole in a small speedboat. When ordered to stop, the unidentified pilot just mouthed off and kept coming. Probably a journalist, figured Dave—but he kept his weapon trained on the approaching figure. He called up to the bridge and said, “Hey, if this idiot breaks the hundred-meter line, I’m shooting him.” No reply came from the bridge, and Dave kept his sights glued to the guy, who kept drawing closer. He was two hundred meters away, then a hundred and fifty, then one twenty-five . . . and then the boat finally slowed, banked, and veered away. Definitely the healthier choice.
“Trust me,” said Dave later, “if that guy had breached the line, I would have put my first shot in the engine block—and if that didn’t stop him, the next shot would have been in him.” I didn’t doubt him for a moment. Dave was a graduate of the same NSW sniper course as Glen and me. He wouldn’t have missed—and he wouldn’t have hesitated, either. Dave had a pragmatic, old-school-warrior’s view of the world. He didn’t believe for a moment that “right” would necessarily triumph over “might” simply because the good guys were the good guys. The only way you triumphed over the bad guys was by being better at what you did than they were. And when it came to the prospect of killing them, he wasn’t the least bit squeamish.