Unbreakable: A Navy SEAL’s Way of Life

by Thom Shea

  1. Use every asset at my disposal to bring each man back alive;

  2. Overwhelm the enemy and win every battle;

  3. Support each other so that rules one and two come true.

  Each of my men deals with pre-deployment stress in his own way. Two hours into the first leg of the flight, some are sleeping. Others are talking about what we will see once we hit the ground. I can never sleep on these flights. (A doctor might diagnose an affliction preventing me from further combat.) Yet on any given day, even at home, I only get four hours of sleep. No one in his or her right mind would do what I do, anyway, so I guess all SEALs fit right in.

  The stream of thought before a combat deployment can be overwhelming. Each SEAL’s control over his thinking is what separates us from everyone else I have met. From the first day of training, we learn to be aware of our own thoughts—to see the effect they have on our physical performance and how they affect the performance of others. For us, in the deadly moment of battle, it is the control of Internal Dialogue that shifts the chaos of battle to the calm of victory.

  These men have come a long way since we formed up eighteen months ago. We started out as the “bastard” platoon. Many of the men had suffered through poor leadership on a previous deployment to Iraq. Leaders have such an effect on men, good and bad. I inherited an angry, bitter, dysfunctional bunch of guys. And still we had been selected out of six other platoons to change deployment within a month of leaving to take the battle to the Taliban.

  I trained all but four of the men as an instructor in third phase of Basic Underwater Demolitions/SEAL (BUD/S) training. One great thing about SEALs is we all come from the same mold of man and training. Something is familiar about each other, something unique, creating a unity among us all. I hope as you grow up you will feel this way about your family, your team, or your business associates. The greatest gift you can receive is oneness, through countless hours of pain and mutual suffering and success, through a common sharing of goals and life, and, most importantly, a common Internal Dialogue pushing out everything except the moment at hand … the NOW.

  My point man and lead sniper, Nike, is the most detail-oriented man I have ever known. He is inexhaustible. He was an Olympic-level rower before becoming a SEAL. Typical of our platoon, he doesn’t deal well with being told what to do. Nor do I, for that matter. The key to Nike is to give him free rein and make sure he feels like he can win—not always easy in the military—and not always doable in combat.

  Next to Nike is Mister All Around—breacher, sniper, my lead assaulter. He smiles often and never has a negative thing to say in any situation. No words are necessary here, and I hope someday you kids have a powerful, positive friend like him, who is always there to help.

  Stretched out across from me is KM, our primary assault breacher and primary heavy gunner. He epitomizes everyone’s image of a SEAL: built like a fireplug, fitness personified, works out daily. He smiles no matter the climate or condition, and as long as we don’t drink and shoot guns, he is the man.

  My lieutenant is the only officer I have known whom I admire and see eye to eye with. Paradoxically, after twenty years in the military, I fight my leaders daily. When he and I joined up, we both agreed the primary platoon relationship was the one between the boss (him) and the chief (me). Since then, we have worked toward giving each other room to do our different jobs while always looking out for each other. As the men saw us work toward doing things for each other and the platoon, they, too, worked toward the same simple vision: we win or lose together and live to fight another day together. Everyone makes mistakes, but we grow stronger together.

  Each platoon has a man who is comic relief. Ours wears two hats. He is my secondary communications expert and air controller … I call him Lawyer. After four years of working with him, I cannot recall a single instance where he has failed to make me laugh so hard I had to wipe the tears from my eyes. I have no idea how he keeps the intricate details of communications and controlling birds (attack aircraft) under control, but he has a knack for making good communications (comms) when no one else can. I just wish he would stop giving me broken radios and laughing when I lose my mind trying to make them work. If I hear him ask me again, “Have you turned the radio on yet?” I will take my radio off and make him carry it.

  Next to Lawyer sits Jake, the angriest sniper and corpsman in the Teams—probably why he works so well for this platoon. I think we are all gifted in the “I-hate-everyone” arena, and Jake is Olympic level in the category. But his stability transcends his anger. I laugh as I write this—I think he actually loves the platoon and hates everyone else, but this attitude works for me.

  My heavy weapons expert, Carnie—amazing. Early on, when I was with SEAL Team Two, I was invited to a civilian sniper course. Two of us showed up, and lo and behold, here was a fifteen-year-old boy. I thought I was a good shot, but this quiet youngster out-shot me every time. Years passed before I heard from him again. He called me with a simple request: “I want to be a SEAL. What must I do?” At the time, I was racing professionally on the adventure racing circuit, and my answer to him was simple, “Run with me. If you can do it and like the pain, you will be a good SEAL.”

  As fate would have it, he made it through BUD/S and was assigned, with no help from me, to my platoon at SEAL Team Seven. He is the most reliable man in the platoon. I just hope I don’t make a decision that gets him killed. I love this man so much I made him and his wife your godparents.

  Then, my leading corpsman and lead breacher, Ground Launch, headphones on, is watching some extreme parachuting video … dreaming of ground launching off some mountain in hell with a knife between his teeth, I am sure. To Ground Launch the world is not enough. I think he would shoot a Taliban just to see if he could then keep him alive.

  Looking around, I see the youngest man in the platoon, Texas. He is a true short Texan in every sense of the word—happy being angry. I didn’t have time to do enough for this man in training with just one specialty skill: breacher. Texas will have to learn fast if he is to survive.

  Lying next to Texas is the most gifted communications and tactical air controller in SEAL Team Seven, Snowman. He has a way of acquiring the best and latest communications gear without spending a dime. I have no idea how he does it. Actually, I need to inspect Snowman’s gear when we get off this plane to see if he has a nuclear detonator tucked away somewhere.

  Finally, since we are going to the fight of the century, we seem to have acquired the best dog handler and dog in the Teams, as well as the highest-ranking explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) warrant officer expert in the Navy. You couldn’t pay me to cut wire or manage a dog in the middle of a gunfight. But I am thankful such hombres wanna get some with us.

  For some political reason, only half my platoon is authorized to come into hell with us on the first half of the deployment. But as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said early in the war on terror, you go to war with the troops and gear you have, and make it work. Nevertheless, our sister platoon is at full strength, and thirty SEALs can do serious damage to the enemy.

  The first leg of the journey is ending. If the history of C-5 travel holds true, once this big beast lands, it will be three days before it takes off. I love flying in these things, but the landing must surely beat the systems up every time.

  Since we had a one-day delay, we have been put up in a military hotel here in Dover. We are all eager to get to the fight. I want to take this time to tell you more about what I think is important for you to know about my life and about your own. You all have so much to do in your lives. I may not be there to help and show you. So I want to tell you the key things you must learn to lead a full life and be able to face the good and bad times.

  The first important discovery you must make in accessing, and thus mastering, your bodies is the discovery of your own Internal Dialogue as the core of your physical performance. Since the world in general puts little emphasis on the body and health—only how it looks and
feels—physical performance may not seem terribly important for kids. Overweight kids should be a sign that, without any understanding of our own Internal Dialogue and how it impacts our body and health, youth are left to satiate and act on what their Internal Dialogue is saying. I will go into more detail, but for now suffice to realize our actions are directed by our own Internal Dialogue. Yet, you kids have been born with incredible genetic gifts passed down through the Shea bloodlines.

  I know of no other way to teach you about your bodies then to tell you about what I have gone through, and show you how you can access your marvelous physical potential. Fathers are supposed to demonstrate and be present to help their kids learn. In light of the situation we face, please take this as the only way left for me to impart to you … me. Me as athlete.

  I have been an athlete all my life. From my earliest memories, I couldn’t get enough of being physical. I have always been amazed watching men and women do seemingly impossible things with their bodies. From the age of five until this moment, my thoughts and mind have been filled with dreams of physically doing the impossible. Even now, my thoughts are of running through a hail of bullets while shooting the impossibly long shot to save a trapped or dying teammate.

  When I was five, living in Texas, I was the youngest boy on the street. In summertime, the older boys would play street tackle football. I watched them from the safety of my house and begged my father to let me play. He would say, “No way, son. Those boys are too big for you to play—fourteen-year-old boys are too old to play with.” I can still recall saying to myself, “When you leave for work I am going out to play. I want to show them I can run faster and harder than any of them.”

  Of course, he would leave for work, and I would run out and play with the big boys all day long. I hated the fact so many of them were faster and stronger. I still hate it. When dad returned from work, I was bruised, and my lip was cut and still bleeding. He was furious I had disobeyed him. True to form, I was punished and grounded from playing street football. This went on for weeks. Finally, dad sat me down and said, “Son, why do you disobey me and risk getting hurt?”

  I can recall, as if it were yesterday, what I yelled back at him: “Dad, they need me to play with them ‘cause I love it, and I am fast and strong like you.”

  This desire has followed me into my adult life. I won’t go into detail here, but I couldn’t get enough physical tests throughout high school and college. The need to be physical, to be forever fighting my way through something or back to something, like now, is always in me. I know the Internal Dialogue of need to be and need to be needed is inside everyone. In some, it gets killed off for some reason; it gets put in a box and hidden.

  In high school, I lettered in track, wrestling, and football. I set school records in the 200-meter dash and the long jump. In college, I enjoyed football, track, and judo, though my academic performance lacked, well, everything resembling good grades. I became rooted in the physical.

  Now, to the point of Unbreakable and what you are to do after reading this introduction. You are to discover your physical bodies by learning about and listening to your own language in the form of your Internal Dialogue, while pushing beyond what you think you can do. I hope by sharing how I overcame impossible things, and what my own Internal Dialogue was at various times, will provide you the points a good father should deliver to his children. Your bodies are amazing already. Your minds are malleable and will, used properly, help you to greatness.

  My greatest physical achievement is the years I spent adventure racing. While I was a third-phase instructor, I had three years to prepare myself to go back to a SEAL platoon to be the man in charge, platoon Chief.

  The war on terror had just started, and I knew war was on my horizon. I had to do something to make myself a better leader. I needed to be superior physically and mentally. War is truly one of the only experiences where things either work or do not, and the measure is in bodies. Don’t let the press and politicians distort that truth. Success in war is not measured in nation-building or people manipulated to your side. Success in war is measured in who won and who lost, who killed whom, and who survived … period. The wars since WWII have been left unresolved by uncommitted politicians. The war I am going to will never be resolved for the same uncommitted reasons, but my victory will be to survive, or kill as many as I can, so I live to see my family again.

  I further understood the men would need me to be more than just a guy trying to make rank. I needed to go beyond what other SEALs could do physically, and I needed to learn “real” leadership—leadership not driven by having to follow orders. The men had to want to follow me, and I had to want to follow them. For me, wanting to follow was what made up a great team.

  Here is the first point: I knew as long as I could control my own Internal Dialogue, I could achieve any physical goal. I did not know this key point until after my racing career. I learned it through hundreds of failures, pain and mistakes, and by continually transforming my Internal Dialogue, and thus, my physical performance. Please read this chapter and understand my failures; assimilate fully what my own Internal Dialogue did to me and my team.

  ADVENTURE RACING: WINNING … AND LOSING

  Initially, I faced daunting obstacles that would have stopped most people. I had never run over fourteen miles. I had never mountain biked. I had never climbed a wall over twenty feet, nor paddled a kayak over ten miles. When I looked at what an adventure race consisted of, my mind nearly stopped thinking. What I said to myself (my Internal Dialogue) was trying to destroy my efforts and tell me I could not do it. Always … until I learned to control that Internal Dialogue.

  Adventure racing is everything to the extreme. Teams consist of four, one being the opposite sex. The first race I signed up for was 700 miles … yes, 700 miles, not 70. Those 700 miles were broken down to 350 miles on a mountain bike, 250 miles on foot, and 100 miles paddling. As I studied, I noticed they had thrown in a 1,100-foot climb and a 300-foot rappel for good measure. After reading the details, I closed my laptop, walked to my bed, and fell asleep—at noon on Saturday. When I finally awoke, it was Sunday noon. My mind was racing out of control with thoughts of I have never done something like this, and, Jeez, Thom, you don’t even own a mountain bike. Eventually, reality overwhelmed me when I realized I didn’t have a team or the money to pay for it. The cost of entrance—$8,500—is a lot for a man with, at that time, two kids. Needless to say, the cost in gear and training, after an initial calculation, would be much more—around $30,000.

  All I could think of that Sunday night was how stupid I was, what a fool I was to even think about it, and how impossible a task it would be. I think this is what most people go through when they attempt something difficult; maybe it is what we all go through, even on the smallest things. We subconsciously talk ourselves out of everything new, and never realize we actually talked ourselves out of it in the first place. We become resigned and cynical and go to bed each night untransformed and unmoved by how great we all truly are.

  Monday I went back to work, exhausted and angry at myself for dreaming big when the reality I lived in screamed so loudly. Yet, as I prepared to lead my class in an eight-mile rucksack run, my courage returned. I looked at those future SEALs and saw in their eyes one unmistakable thing: possibility. To be better than others, not to let obstacles obstruct their dreams and desires. My own Internal Dialogue shifted. What had seemed impossible was becoming possible. When my Internal Dialogue shifted, so did my attitude and the possibility of a new future.

  Maybe the endorphins coursing through my veins in the middle of long runs or the hard physical events were affecting me, but I said to myself, “Thom, you need to do this adventure race.” When I got back home that night, I opened my computer, went to the website, and paid half the fees to secure my spot. Nothing transforms you more than laying down money toward your goal. A funny thing happened about a millisecond after I closed the computer. My hands started shaking; my own Internal Dialogue
went from, You need this, to, You are nuts! Maybe that is what courage is: staking yourself out in the face of your enemy, as the Sioux Indians would do. They staked themselves in the ground because the urge of the Internal Dialogue to run in the face of the enemy is so powerful.

  The first step is the hardest: to act, to commit, to sign on the line so all you have and all you need is engaged—at least that is what I have found in all great efforts in the history of man. A fully engaged Internal Dialogue, controlled by you, screaming into the void of the life you want but has no evidence to support it, serves to put the emotionally-uncommitted rollercoaster to rest for a time.

  The next big step was to get a team together on short notice. Only three months remained until the beginning of the race. I had no team, no money, and no gear, yet every single day I said to myself, “I must get all of us through this race, no matter what.” Within a week, I manipulated and cajoled three other SEALs to join me. I got a waiver from the race director to allow an all-male team to participate. But none of us had extra money to spend on this harebrained plan to push for ten days—the race duration—and endure unforeseeable mental and physical challenges.

  Another great resource you will have to learn is the gift of gab—how to fearlessly engage everyone with your dream and passion. Learn how to ask for what you want and how to hear rejection as only a momentary setback. I must have sent out 200 Internet requests for money and gear, and received 205 no answers, if that is even possible. Hearing no as anything other than a momentary no breaks down your health, your drive, your ambition, everything. The problem is not with being told no, but your belief that the answer will always be no. I began to play with no as if it were a dance. Instead of blindly asking for what I wanted, I danced in the various conversations I had with people and engaged every potential sponsor as if they were already friends who wanted to be a part of the effort.