by Brandon Webb
We continued south and west through a week’s stay in Australia, three days of a humanitarian assistance operation off East Timor, brief stops at Singapore and Phuket, Thailand, and eventually north through the Indian Ocean into the Persian Gulf, where we put in at the little island country of Bahrain, which had a fairly liberal culture as Muslim countries went. By now we were into October.
We were there in Bahrain to conduct some training exercises with the neighboring Saudis. As an unofficial rule, we don’t train these guys in the Middle East too thoroughly. I mean, we’re there to help—but at the same time, when the sun comes up tomorrow in that part of the world, you never know for sure who’s going to be arrayed against you. After a few days we got back out onto the Duluth and into the Gulf, where we planned to spend a few days engaged in ship-boarding training exercises.
That’s when we got the call about the attack on the USS Cole.
* * *
To much of the world, September 11, 2001, was and still is “the day everything changed,” and it’s easy to understand why. In the summer of 2001 the public’s attention in the United States was focused largely on the debate over stem cell research and the latest political scandal about whichever congressman had been most recently caught with his zipper down. (In case you’re wondering, it was California Democrat Gary Condit.) The reality of war was mostly a fading memory, the topic of nostalgia. Stephen Spielberg’s made-for-TV World War II epic Band of Brothers had just premiered on HBO, on Sunday, September 9.
It had been a decade since the fall of the Soviet Union. The Cold War was over, a new century had begun, and it was easy to be lulled into a sense that the kinds of global conflicts that had convulsed the twentieth century were already archaic relics of a distant past. We had left behind a world defined by the opposition of two vast global forces, Western capitalism and Eastern communism. But we hadn’t yet come to grips with what came next. For most of the world, what came next was suddenly, starkly defined that sunny, clear-sky New York morning in the fall of 2001.
Not for me. For me, it came eleven months earlier, on October 12, 2000.
Going into that fall, there was no significant conflict for our military forces to focus on. Still, the whole Mideast region was a political and military tinderbox that always loomed in the background. At the time, SEAL Team Three was involved in reinforcing United Nations sanctions against Iraq, and Saddam was smuggling out an awful lot of oil. We were expecting to participate in policing the area, which would mean doing a significant number of ship boardings on noncompliant vessels. The Iraqis would send these tankers out onto the Gulf to make a run for Iranian waters, where American and other NATO personnel could not legally pursue. Our job would be to catch up with them and intercept them while they ran that brief gauntlet through the narrow international shipping lanes.
This was a mission we were hoping to rotate in on. We had just gotten back on the Duluth and were mobilizing to get our equipment and go participate in that ship-boarding detail when we suddenly got word that an American destroyer, the USS Cole, had been hit in the nearby Gulf of Aden just off the coast of Yemen, and hit bad.
That morning, the Cole had put in at about 9:30 local time for a routine refueling stop. By 10:30 refueling had commenced. At 11:18 a small craft loaded with about a quarter ton of homemade explosives and manned by two individuals approached the ship’s port side and made contact. The explosion killed seventeen sailors and injured thirty-nine others, putting a 40' × 40' hole in the hull in the process.
Wait—what? Two guys in a speedboat? How the hell had that happened?
We took off and were on-site within shooting distance of the Yemeni coast within eight hours, putting our fast boats over the side. The marines had an outfit in Bahrain they called the Fast Company, and they earned their nickname: they were on the scene a few hours ahead of us and had already established a security command post on the injured Cole by the time we arrived. We immediately set up a 500-meter perimeter incorporating both the pier and the surrounding water. We were also directed to set up a sniper team on the bridge of the ship itself to monitor the situation, glassing the entire perimeter constantly to ensure that no other bad actors got into the mix.
This was where Glen and I came in. We set up two teams to rotate on round-the-clock sniper watch, twelve hours on and twelve off. We had a .50 caliber sniper rifle and four LAW rockets on the bridge. Our task was to protect both the ship and the rest of the crew while repair and containment efforts were under way.
It was a tense situation. Our relationship with Yemen was not great, and there was a powerful current of anti-American sentiment in the little country. Standing there on the bridge of the crippled destroyer, we were acutely aware of all the nearby Yemeni weapons that were trained on us. It had the anxious, volatile feeling of a standoff. Our orders were simple: Anything or anyone who breaches our perimeter, take them out.
Although no outright hostilities broke out, the perimeter was in fact tested a few times. Each time we saw a vessel encroaching on our perimeter we radioed the guys in the boats: “Hey, I’ve got someone coming in close at ten o’clock. It doesn’t look serious, but they’re on the fence.”
Meanwhile, crews were furiously at work pumping bilge out of that gaping hole in the Cole’s flank. It was a constant battle just to keep the vessel afloat, and for a while there it was touch and go. We nearly watched that destroyer sink.
It was a nasty scene. The suicide bombers had rammed the ship right where the galley is located, and just at the time of day when a large numbers of sailors were lining up for lunch. The carnage was awful. It was now nearly twelve hours since the explosion, and in the insufferable humid Middle Eastern heat we had both dead bodies and all the food in the ship’s hold decomposing rapidly. The stench was unbearable, and the trauma among the living compounded the nightmarish quality of the whole scene. When we first arrived, the guys who greeted us all sported the famous thousand-yard stare that reflects an intimacy with the horrors of combat casualties. Now night had fallen, and much of the crew had set up to sleep in cots out on the deck in what looked like a shantytown of shell-shocked catastrophe survivors—which was exactly what it was.
I talked with a few of the survivors to try to find out exactly what had happened, and how this absurdly low-tech assault had penetrated the Cole’s security in the first place. The answer, in essence, was “Security? What security?”
When they described their security posture, I was appalled. The lack of preparedness was ludicrous. Here we were, docked just off the coast of a hostile nation with an openly anti-American sentiment that included a history of kidnappings and sponsorship of terrorism—and as protection they’d set up a few guys to stand on the ship’s rail with M-14s. These soldiers had had no training on the M-14 and, in fact, did not even know what kind of rifle it was they were holding. And to top it off, there were no bullets in their magazines. I need to repeat that last point. They were protecting a billion-dollar vessel by standing on its deck brandishing weapons they were not familiar with—and that were not loaded. Really? What, as if the sheer appearance of force would be sufficient deterrent to any potential aggression?
As I soon learned, this was not an exceptional situation; it was widespread. For all intents and purposes, it was standard. At least it had been up until now. After the Cole was hit, things changed fast. Soon the military was making it mandatory for at least 30 percent of every ship’s crew to be actually trained in force protection, as opposed to the previous requirement, which was 0 percent.
It’s easy (and, frankly, justified) to jump all over the Clinton administration for this lax condition, but at the same time it’s also important to see the bigger picture. In a sense, this was part of a cycle that had gone on for decades—hell, for centuries. We had our forces in a high-security posture right after World War II, and then again after Korea, and then again after Vietnam. In the years in between, our sense of urgency would fade every time, and as a nation we would gradually
be lulled into a false sense of security. Then all of a sudden something would go bam! and military readiness would once again become relevant.
Incredibly, earlier that year there had been a failed attempt on another U.S. vessel in the very same port. The would-be attackers had even used a similar crappy little boat and made a similar run up to one of our ships as it pulled into port, but in that instance their explosive-laden boat had sunk before they could consummate their deadly rendezvous. We had been lucky—but we had also been warned. So what happened? The incident was treated like so much background noise in the larger picture of global intelligence and sloughed off. Now we had paid for our complacency with seventeen American lives, thirty-nine more injured, and hundreds of million dollars’ worth of damage.
I’ve mentioned a number of times how fanatical about training we are in the teams. It’s not really fanaticism, though, it’s realism. If you want to become not just competent, not just good, but outstanding, you have to train like a maniac at whatever it is you’re intending to excel at—and then train some more. In his 2008 bestseller Outliers, journalist Malcolm Gladwell does a great job documenting the secret behind the accomplishments of such outstanding achievers as Bill Gates, Mozart, and the Beatles. Turns out, surprise of surprises, they all worked their asses off training. Gladwell coins what he calls the 10,000-Hour Rule, which says that outstanding (outlying) success in any field is largely the result of a shitload of practice, like twenty hours a week for ten years, which translates into 10,000 hours. Amp that pace up to eighty hours a week and you’ll get it done in two and a half years—and that right there is one reason SEALs can do what they do.
I may have had a crazy childhood, wild and undisciplined in many ways, but one thing I’d always known was the rush that comes with pushing yourself hard, the thrill of seeing endless practice gradually producing a capacity for excellence. Whether it was wrestling or skiing as a kid, becoming a rescue diver on the Peace under the watchful eyes of Captain Mike and Captain Bill, or suffering through BUD/S with Shoulin, O’Reilly, and the rest of those crazy slave drivers, I’d always known what it means to train hard. If I could do anything significant to serve my country, it would probably be through sharing that capacity to train. Though I didn’t know it yet, even beyond my own service in Afghanistan and the Gulf, my contribution to training a new generation of twenty-first-century warriors would become the crowning achievement of my career. All I knew at this point was that this tragic fiasco was a failure of training, and specifically of the people in charge of the training.
When Glen took position on the bridge and I rotated off-watch, I went down a few floors to look around. I found a used coffee mug, washed it out, and brought it back up on deck to the temporary food station they’d set up at the back of the boat, where I used it to get a cup of hot coffee. I was just starting to get some of that hot java lift into me when I noticed one of the sailors staring at me.
“What?” I said.
He pointed wordlessly at my coffee mug. I turned it around and looked on its reverse side. I hadn’t noticed, but the guy whose mug it was had written his name on there.
It was one of the guys who’d been blown up in the attack.
Maybe some would have been spooked and set that thing down in haste. For me it was just the opposite. This sailor had been one of the first to give his life in a war we didn’t even know what to call yet. It was an honor to drink from that man’s cup. I kept that mug and used it for the rest of our tour.
We were there on the Cole for about seven days. The ship was eventually boarded onto a huge Norwegian craft designed to carry offshore oil-drilling equipment and hauled back stateside, where after fourteen months of repair work it was returned into service.
* * *
The attack on the USS Cole opened my eyes to how ill prepared we were for the threat that existed everywhere around us. An Arleigh Burke–class guided missile destroyer, crewed by nearly 300 sailors, weighing close to 10,000 tons, and costing more than $1 billion to put in the water, was crippled and nearly sunk by two guys in the kind of motorboat you might see out behind a New England summer lake house. When it was all over, the destroyer would require about $250 million in repairs. This was not just a catastrophe, and it wasn’t just about whether we were adequately prepared for surprise attacks. There was a fundamental shift happening here, a shift in the very nature of military conflict, and this attack off the coast of Yemen was arguably its clarion call.
At the time we were still thinking in terms of the Cold War massing of NATO versus Soviet forces, which was a logical extension of how we had viewed warfare for centuries and longer. War had always been a matter of hurling masses of men and matériel against one another, from the phalanxes of Xerxes and legions of Rome to the endless troop lines of the Blue and the Gray lowering bayonets to charge after exhausting their weapons’ single shots. That kind of pitched battle of the masses reached its apotheosis in the midtwentieth century with the tank battalions of Patton and Rommel pounding each other in the North African desert.
This passage from Lee Child’s 2004 Jack Reacher thriller The Enemy beautifully captures that core sense of twentieth-century warfare:
What is the twentieth century’s signature sound? You could have a debate about it. Some might say the slow drone of an aero engine. Maybe from a lone fighter crawling across an azure 1940s sky. Or the scream of a fast jet passing low overhead, shaking the ground. Or the whup whup whup of a helicopter. Or the roar of a laden 747 lifting off. Or the crump of bombs falling on a city. All of those would qualify. They’re all uniquely twentieth-century noises. They were never heard before. Never, in all of history. Some crazy optimists might lobby for a Beatles song. A yeah, yeah, yeah chorus fading under the screams of their audience. I would have sympathy for that choice. But a song and screaming would never qualify. Music and desire have been around since the dawn of time. They weren’t invented after 1900.
No, the twentieth century’s signature sound is the squeal and clatter of tank tracks on a paved street. That sound was heard in Warsaw, and Rotterdam, and Stalingrad, and Berlin. Then it was heard again in Budapest and Prague, and Seoul and Saigon. It’s a brutal sound. It’s the sound of fear. It speaks of overwhelming advantage in power. And it speaks of remote, impersonal indifference. Tank treads squeal and clatter and the very noise they make tells you they can’t be stopped. It tells you you’re weak and powerless against the machine. Then one track stops and the other keeps on going and the tank wheels around and lurches straight toward you, roaring and squealing. That’s the real twentieth-century sound.
But that “overwhelming advantage in power” Child describes, that arraying of massive forces that had been so effective even as recently as Desert Storm, was no longer the trump card in the warfare of the new century. As weapons of war go, it doesn’t get much more massive than a billion-dollar destroyer—and one of those had just been nearly sunk by two guys in a dinky little speedboat.
We had entered the age of asymmetrical warfare.
We were no longer dealing fundamentally with huge ground forces rolling across the desert. We were up against tiny terrorist cells, a decentralized kind of guerrilla warfare on a scale we had never seen before. There’s a certain convenience to calling it al Qaeda, as if it is one centralized, organized entity run by a single central command, like Moscow’s Soviet Union or Hitler’s Third Reich. The truth is probably a lot messier and more complicated, and therefore more difficult to deal with. There are a lot of other nonaffiliated terrorist groups that have sought to jump on the al Qaeda bandwagon, perhaps for the perceived clout that gives them. Whether you call them al Qaeda or Taliban or disaffected extremists in the West or Somali pirates, what it boils down to is that you have armed and fanatically dedicated combatants pursuing an entirely different sort of combat than we used to fight in the days of trench warfare or tank battles.
It was a new kind of war, and over the next few years it would prompt a radical shift in the makeup of o
ur Department of Defense—especially in relation to Special Operations.
In the long story of war, Special Operations forces—the British and Australian SAS, the American Green Berets and Army Rangers, the Navy SEALs—were exactly that: special, something you don’t use every day. Spec Ops forces were kept on the shelf and brought out for deployment only in certain circumstances. In modern warfare, those of us in Spec Ops were the icing on the cake of massive destruction, the period at the end of a sentence of overwhelming forces. Special Operations were the bastard child of conventional forces, there mainly to support the larger mission.
Now that equation has changed. Today the relationship has been turned virtually on its head. Over the first decade of the twenty-first century, the entire strategy of American military organization has shifted toward one in which our massive assets, such as destroyers, aircraft carriers, and nuclear submarines, are reconfigured to support small field teams and tiny units. The Spec Ops warrior of the twentieth century was fundamentally an outsider who worked on the periphery of military strategy. Today he stands at its core.
Shortly after that experience in the Gulf of Aden I was talking about it with a friend, Thomas. “We really don’t understand the world we’re living in,” I said. “It’s totally different than we think it is—and a lot more dangerous.”
Thomas nodded.