Among Heroes

by Brandon Webb

  We looked at each other and laughed. Glen said, “Hey, at least we’ve got each other. If we’re gonna go, we go together.”

  At about seven thousand feet, the cloud cover broke. IFR (instrument flight rules) are when you fly east you fly at odd altitudes, and when you fly west you fly at even altitudes, for clean traffic separation. At VFR (visual flight rules) it’s even plus five hundred, but this was an IFR plane. We flew at eight thousand feet all the way to Oklahoma, the whole way trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with our radio. We happened to have a little Garmin aviation GPS with us. That damn thing probably saved our lives.

  As we flew into Tulsa we settled into our precision-instrument approach, when we made another fun discovery: Our glide scope didn’t work. Oh, cool. Now we were executing a precision-instrument landing without precision instruments, and no radio. And it was still cloudy. I pulled out a little handheld radio I’d happened to bring along. That would have to serve.

  Nothing to do but just fly the damn thing in.

  We broke out of the clouds in the center of the runway, midfield, right smack over the tower. A voice came over the radio: “Hey, you’ve only got about two hundred feet of runway left; you want to circle around and then land?”

  I looked at Glen with a question on my face. He looked back and said, “Dude, I am so stressed, I’m puttin’ this fucking thing down right now.”

  And we did: just planted it on the deck like an aircraft-carrier landing, which is to say, like a dog taking a dump. Thump! there it is. Stopped short with less than fifty feet of runway in front of us—and taxied in with just enough reserve gas to make it.

  Once we were on the ground the radio worked perfectly. It wasn’t till we eventually got back to San Diego that we figured out what had happened: The antennae weren’t grounded properly, so as long as we were on the ground everything worked fine, but once we were in the air, no dice. Good to know. Would have been even better to have known before flying halfway across the country.

  We refueled and took off again. After a total of sixteen and a half hours in the air we stayed overnight in New Mexico, then made the final leg home.

  Glen and I did a lot of flying over the years, but what we really wanted to do was fly a single-engine plane clear around the world. The speed record for that particular feat was still quite breakable, and we knew we could crush it. But we never got the chance. I’d still love to do it. I just don’t know whether there’s anyone I’d trust enough as a flying partner—anyone other than Glen.

  • • •

  In 2006, a year after our cross-country adventure in the little Cessna, I left the service, and the first thing I did was follow Glen’s footsteps (and John Zinn’s) into the world of private security contracting. Glen, as usual, knew the right people, and he helped me get my application fast-tracked so that by the time I left the service, I already had a deployment date set in the shadowy world of private-contract security work, or Global Response Staff (GRS).

  This is a realm most people don’t know much about, but private-contract security work is a noble calling that gave people like John Zinn, Glen, and me the opportunity to keep serving our country and making the world a safer place even after taking off the uniform.

  In the Special Operations community, we have a belief that there are three types of people in the world. The wolves are what most would call “evil people.” They are the rapists and murderers, the psychopaths and extremists who prey on the weak and use violence and others’ fear to achieve their goals. In the twentieth century they stood on stages and commanded armies, if they were lucky. In the twenty-first, they hide in the shadows, guide planes into skyscrapers, and delude their recruits into blowing themselves up in public places.

  Then there are the sheep—good people, everyday people who go about their lives, able to do so in safety only because they are protected from the wolves. For the most part, they are not aware of the wolves, or that they are being protected from them. They may not even really believe that there are wolves out there, ready to cause them harm. But there are.

  And sheepdogs are acutely aware of it.

  Sheepdogs can look like wolves, and may at times even be mistaken for them, but they serve the opposite cause. They exist not to prey on sheep but to preserve them, to protect those who cannot protect themselves, as Mike Bearden explained it to his dad. They are here for one purpose: to look after the safety of the flock.

  Here’s an easy way to understand the difference between sheepdogs and everyone else. Most people, when they hear about a terrorist event or violent attack, think, “Thank God I wasn’t in that movie theater or on that plane.” A sheepdog hears about the same event and says, “Damn—I wish I’d been there!” Why? Because maybe he could have done something to stop it from happening.

  As Heath Robinson’s sig line said, most of us are able to go about our lives in relative safety only because there are “rough men standing ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.” Sheepdogs are those rough men. That was who Glen was, whether or not he happened to be an active-duty Navy SEAL at the time.

  For my part, I did some of this work in Iraq, where I ran all sorts of missions, from the insanely dangerous to the dangerously insane—missions I can’t talk about but which, if I could, would make for some pretty colorful, edge-of-your-seat action flicks.

  I did that routine twice, for a stretch of a few months each. Glen had by then been doing it for a few years, and he kept doing it long after I stopped, traveling to work in the world’s hottest hot spots and most explosive situations. The most dangerous scene he ever encountered, he told me, was not in the Middle East or Africa but in Mexico City, where he worked with a man who didn’t seem to fully grasp the over-the-top risks he was taking.

  Glen was furious with the guy’s carelessness. Because of his arrogant refusal to listen to the advice of experience, he was endangering a lot of other lives.

  “Look, dude,” Glen told the man, “if you keep going like this you’re going to get whacked. It’s not a matter of if. It’s only a question of when.”

  • • •

  In the summer of 2010, Glen turned forty, and his siblings and friends pulled a “surprise” birthday party for him, the word in quotes because of course he knew about it ahead of time. I don’t think there was a party anywhere on planet Earth since 1970 that Glen didn’t know about ahead of time. Still, he did a great job of acting surprised.

  He did a less than perfect job of acting happy. His marriage had fallen apart not long before this, and it was eating at him. On the one hand, he relished the freedom (which was more or less why it didn’t work out in the first place). He and Sonja had a little sign on their Encinitas house that said, THE DOHERTYS. The first time I visited there after the divorce went through, I saw that Glen had crossed out the S so that it now read simply, THE DOHERTY. He got the biggest kick out of that.

  At the same time, he was completely torn up about it. I think it was less the fact that that they weren’t together anymore and more that he’d failed. Glen hated failure. As tolerant as he was—and he was one of the most tolerant people I’ve ever known—he had no tolerance for failure. Especially this failure. This was what his dad had done.

  By this time he had been doing this private-contract security work for years, and everyone who knew him and loved him could see that it was wearing on him. It was wearing on the whole country. We’d been at war for nearly a decade, the longest stretch of continuous warfare in our nation’s young history. And it was sapping us—financially, emotionally, some would argue (and I would not disagree) even morally. Glen was showing the signs of that wear.

  I cannot honestly say he was looking seriously at alternatives, at least not yet. But his friends were certainly looking for him, me included. I was working hard on the Wind Zero project and brought Glen in as a minority partner. He became intensely involved for a while,
not only helping with the fund-raising effort but also managing training and consulting contracts. When a large contract came in I could hand it over to Glen and sleep like a baby at night, knowing he’d take impeccable care of the customers. When I started work on my first book, 21st Century Sniper (later rereleased as Navy SEAL Sniper), Glen was my coauthor. When I took a cherry executive position for a major defense firm after Wind Zero collapsed to make ends meet, I tried my best to get Glen to look at taking one as well.

  And these were not his only career options. On a surfing trip to Mexico in 2009, a buddy of ours got smashed into some rocks and had his spine pierced. He needed emergency surgery. There was no one around to do that but us. As it happened, one of our party was Sohaib Kureshi, a brilliant Pakistani brain surgeon. (Note to self: When surfing off-country, always bring along a brilliant surfer brain surgeon.) We tossed our friend onto a picnic table at the place where we were staying, after stopping off at the only nearby store for beer and painkillers, and turned to Glen—who had his medic kit on hand, as always. Glen loaded our buddy with morphine, irrigated the puncture site, and proceeded to help Sohaib do the delicate surgery. “If he’s interested in doing it,” Sohaib told us after it was all over, “Glen’s got a brilliant medical career ahead of him.” (For two weeks every year Glen ran a medical clinic on Tavarua Island, a destination surf resort off the coast of Fiji.)

  Glen had looked at all these options, and there was something attractive in every one of them. He was always up for new experiences and challenges. “Glen is the master of moving goalposts,” a friend observed. “His problem isn’t that he doesn’t have goals. His problem is that he has a hundred goals.”

  Still, he hadn’t made any serious moves or given any real indication that a career change was in the offing.

  At that surprise party, I got to meet Glen’s siblings, Greg and Kate, for the first time. Glen had always talked about them so fondly that it felt as if I already knew them. Greg had written a speech for the event, which he and Kate delivered. They described a line in that magnificent Robert Redford film A River Runs Through It, where the older brother is recalling his father’s struggle to find more memories of his younger son, Paul, the Brad Pitt character:

  As time passed, my father struggled for more to hold on to, asking me again and again: had I told him everything. And finally I said to him, “Maybe all I know about Paul is that he was a fine fisherman.”

  “You know more than that,” my father said. “He was beautiful.” And that was the last time we spoke of my brother’s death.

  Greg likened Glen to the Brad Pitt character and said, “So we will tell you now, while you are still here, that you are beautiful.”

  During the party Greg pulled me aside and said, “Hey, Glen’s doing some pretty heavy shit out there. I’m worried about him. Tell me he’s going to be okay.”

  “He’s solid,” I assured him. “Glen has his act together, and it’s a good outfit he’s with. I don’t think you have anything to worry about.” Now I wish I could bury those words in the deepest mineshaft.

  Arab Spring was five months away.

  • • •

  On June 19, 2012, not long after returning from Africa, Glen was hit by a car while riding his road bike—a nearly exact replay, strangely enough, of an accident that had injured Sonja five years earlier while they were going through their divorce.

  The event seemed almost designed to put Glen out of commission. Not kill him or injure him badly, just take him out of circulation. The impact broke one arm, and the resulting fall badly injured his back, one knee, one wrist, and both elbows. Any normal person would have been laid up for a few months. But this was not any normal person. This was Glen. It barely slowed him down.

  The next day he reported on e-mail:

  Got hit by a car riding my bicycle yesterday. Loopy on pain meds and typing with one hand so will be off the grid for a day or two. Could have been way worse. Only broken arm, jacked back/knee/elbows/wrist.

  As the weeks wore on, he grew more and more frustrated at how long it was taking to recover. He wanted to get back into the action. In order to go back to Africa, he would have to take a fairly rigorous recertification process security agents are required to undergo every few years, which involved a physical test and a shooting test. He taped up his damaged arm, went in, and aced the test.

  At lunch one day with me and another friend from the teams, Glen told us he was headed to Africa, then added, “This is my last run.”

  He’d been saying that for years, but it was finally starting to sound like he meant it.

  We were working with two editor friends on a new edition of our book, and on August 17 Glen e-mailed us to cheer our progress:

  Very happy with the way all has been going. I don’t know how to say thank-you enough. Healing has been slow, probably cause I’m so fucking OLD! Frustrating. Really frustrating. BUT, could have been way worse, and I’m going to Africa in three weeks, injured or no. I’ll look forward to when we can all get together and toast the new opus.

  On September 5, Glen and I talked on the phone, figuring we wouldn’t get the chance again for a while, since he was heading over to Africa the next day. We talked about him coming to team up with me at SOFREP, which by this time was soaring.

  “You’re a damn good writer, Bub,” I said. “And there’s no one I trust more. You know how well you and I work together. I know this thing is a winner, and I really want you to be a part of it.”

  Shooter and spotter. We’d always made an unstoppable team, and we both knew it.

  “We’ll talk when I get back,” Glen said.

  Even with all the options he’d been looking at, especially over the past few months, I’m not convinced that letting go of his sheepdog duties and not going to Libya was ever really on the table.

  Tucking in hours when he could find them to work on edits on our book, he e-mailed again a few days later:

  I am fighting my way through the manuscript . . . finding stuff to fix, little things here and there. Should be done by the end of the weekend.

  Hope all is well.

  Best, Glen

  On September 11, while Ambassador Chris Stephens’s compound in Benghazi was being attacked, Glen was safe and sound in Tripoli, about six hundred miles to the west. When they got the news of what was going down, he and a fellow agent instantly knew they had to go help. Two Special Operations soldiers and a few case officers joined them. Told there were no flights available, they hit the airport anyway and managed to find a plane and a pilot who would get them over there immediately.

  By the time they arrived in Benghazi, Stephens and defense attaché Sean Smith had both died, and the hostilities had migrated to the CIA compound in Benghazi. Glen and the others arrived at the place and Glen ran straight up to the roof, where the firefight was at its most intense. Reaching the roof, he saw Ty Woods, an agent he knew who was already at the CIA compound there. The two friends high-fived, and Ty yelled to the others, “Hey, guys, this is Bub!”

  Everyone’s best friend.

  Within minutes mortar rockets had taken them both.

  • • •

  In an interview, Kate described her first moments after hearing the initial vague reports of trouble in Libya.

  I was home with my three children when my brother’s best friend [Sean] called me, concerned: Glen was in Libya, working as a security contractor, and he may have been at the U.S. consulate that had come under attack.

  My first instinct was not to panic: I was used to his being in dangerous corners of the world—in and out of Iraq, Afghanistan, Mexico City—and he had always come home. His friend and I told each other not to worry. We agreed to talk again as soon as we knew anything.

  I got on my computer and sent Glen an e-mail. “I’m worried,” I said. “You better e-mail me this very second.” I started pacing around the house. Then I called a friend and to
ld her, “What I need you to tell me right now is not to worry—it will all be fine.” And that’s what she did. I wanted to hear that and I believed it. Glen was so larger-than-life, so smart, so good. He would be fine.

  • • •

  When the news first broke that something bad had happened in Benghazi, a handful of us started shooting e-mails back and forth to see who knew what. There were still no details. I hit “reply all” and wrote, “He’s not on the state security detail, so don’t take this as gospel, but it’s probably not him.” Then I boarded a plane from New York to San Diego.

  The moment we landed in California I called one of my CIA buddies just to make sure. He didn’t pick up, but he texted me back immediately:

  Bad news.

  A minute later he called me. The family hadn’t been notified yet, he said. It was a short call.

  I took a breath and called Sean, Glen’s childhood friend. After all these years, they were still rooming together. I’d rather have him hear it from me. Got him on the first try. He didn’t want to believe me at first, but he could tell from my voice that this was for real.

  After we hung up, I sat in the parking lot of the San Diego airport and cried like a girl for fifteen minutes.

  • • •

  On September 20, I made the flight from the East Coast back to San Diego once again, this time on my way home from Glen’s memorial service.

  The night before the service they held a wake. Thousands of people showed up, and they finally had to turn people away as it poured rain. It felt like the whole state had turned out to mourn Glen, and even the clouds had joined in.

  When Mike Bearden fell from the sky in 2000, I’d been out of town and didn’t even find out until weeks after the service. When Dave Scott and Matt Axelson and John Zinn and all the other friends I lost over that decade perished, I still had not gone to a single memorial.

  This time I went. It was impossible not to.

  Now, twenty thousand feet over the heartland somewhere, I wrote the following words, my own memorial to Glen, which appeared the next day in full in the New York Times: