Damn Few

by Rorke Denver

  But the real control and precision comes with free fall. Every SEAL must learn to run his own jump. You pack your own chute. You check your own rig. One, two, three, the light goes green. You’re one foot away from a twelve-thousand-foot drop. It’s one of the great leaps of faith humans have ever invented. On the jumpmaster’s call, you hurl yourself out of a plane and believe you will live. Turning in the air. Checking your altitude. Doing a couple of hand drills. Pulling the rip cord to open the chute, hoping you packed it right, and then—wham, the shock of the chute slowing you down. Seeing a bunch of silk over your head. You’re at terminal velocity until you’re not anymore. It’s an amazing feeling, being in the sky with such control.

  There are so many ways to jump out of a plane. You can fly as a group—six, eight, ten SEALs, in a diamond or a wedge so everyone can see each other. You open your chutes as a group, and you don’t get fouled with another jumper. For combat purposes, it’s always at night. You’re flying in a stack, heavier men at the bottom. You already know each other’s drop rate. Like a big accordion in the sky, you’re following each other, all ending up in the same preplanned place. It takes a lot of practice, but it’s a beautiful thing.

  And it goes on from there. To HALOs, High Altitude–Low Opening jump. You’re jumping out at 25,000 feet or higher but pulling the rip cord at plus or minus 2,000 feet. Not much room for error there. And you’re less detectible by sound or radar. You can very quickly hit the ground and be up and running. On HAHO jumps, High Altitude–High Opening, you’re pulling the cord as soon as you’re out of the bird—and the wind carries you from there. Fifteen guys under parachutes, floating in at night. They could travel forty miles across Afghanistan, propelled only by the wind, undetectable to anyone on the ground.

  Underwater diving is at the core of SEAL training. It’s where we began. It’s still the toughest environment on earth. These days, SEAL combat diving is almost never done with regular scuba gear. We rely on the LAR V Dräger Rebreather, a closed-loop system that doesn’t use hissing compressed-air tanks and, most important of all, sends no bubbles to the surface. That’s crucial for anyone on a clandestine dive. Nothing gets you caught like bubbles.

  The Dräger is ingenious. It scrubs the carbon dioxide out of your breath. Instead of regular air, it returns pure oxygen. But it takes some getting used to. Once you get the rhythm going, the rebreather becomes almost like a second set of lungs. Even the air that’s in your dive mask is pure oxygen. With a Dräger, you can stay discreetly underwater for hours. The members of SEAL Team Four who blew up General Manuel Noriega’s personal gunship swam undetected into Balboa Harbor on Drägers. They could never have done that with regular scuba gear.

  After a couple of weeks in the training tank, it’s time to take the training to open water. Using a compass. Plotting a route. Learning to control depth and buoyancy.

  It’s surprisingly easy to fall off course. At the start of Dräger training, everyone keeps screwing up. Getting turned around. Becoming lost. Crashing into pilings and other swim pairs. It takes a lot of practice before anyone begins to look like a Navy SEAL.

  Communicating underwater is never easy. Radios and cell phones don’t work down there. Two swim buddies must speak the language of nods, waves, and gentle shoves, everything this side of Vulcan mind melds. But even on the best-planned trips, you can always count on surprises. One time, a buddy and I were diving in San Diego Bay when, all of a sudden, the water started shaking. Twenty feet down, it felt like an earthquake. The rumbles got louder and more violent. The water was swirling all around. I had no idea what it could possibly be. My ears were filled with what sounded like a giant growl. It was as if some huge horror-movie sea monster was coming straight at us.

  That’s what it feels like to be diving when a tugboat passes overhead.

  Tugs don’t look so threatening. They don’t move fast for their size. But their massive diesel engines and huge propellers are strong enough to push an aircraft carrier or a barge piled high with steel. As this one came roaring our way, we didn’t know what to do. We dove right to the bottom of the bay, into the mud and muck, and stayed down there until the sea-monster tug had chugged along. But sometimes, there is no place underwater to hide.

  There are other unexpected dangers underwater.

  The bay is home to the Navy’s Marine Mammal Program, where dolphins are trained to help with port security. With their intelligence and size, they have a special knack for running interference against a hostile swimmer. But every once in a while, a SEAL swim pair is physically assaulted by one of these dolphins. The closest thing I can compare it to is being sniffed by a frisky neighborhood dog—if the dog weighed six hundred pounds and was dead set on getting cozy.

  No SEAL has ever been nuzzled to death by a runaway bottlenose, and we’ve never had to use deadly force to defend a teammate from one. But there is nothing fun about one of the most athletic and headstrong animals in the water making an aggressive pass at you. It’s funny, but only if it’s happening to someone else.

  Off the Virginia coast in Little Creek, someone sank one of those giant shipping containers like you’d see on the back of a semitrailer or a train. That one box has produced countless hours of panic and amusement. The sunken box is open at one end, and it’s easy to swim in there by mistake. More than a few trainees have. The box is all metal, which makes your compass start doing crazy things. If you swim into that box not knowing it’s there, it feels like you have flown into a coffin. That’s not hard to do when you’re training at night and the only thing you can see is the tiny glow of the chem-light that is illuminating your attack board. Down there, it’s darker than the dark side of the moon. And all of a sudden, you’re surrounded by metal, and your compass is jumping all over the place. You’re wondering, What the hell is going on here? It’s like you’re in some vortex somewhere.

  People laugh about it later. “Yeah, I hit the box one time,” one team member told me. “I was in there for half an hour trying to figure out what the hell was going on.”

  All this training is exhilarating and fun. But it is also vital to our survival. Lesson by lesson, day by day, SEALs work hard to be the best at every imaginable battlefield skill. We train. We practice. We make mistakes and correct them. We push ourselves some more. Eventually, the raw SEAL recruit becomes something other men can only dream of—a warrior in every sense of the word.

  5

  YOUNG WARRIOR

  As long as you brothers support one another and render assistance to one another, your enemies can never gain victory over you. But if you fall away from one another, you can be broken like a frail arrow, one at a time.

  —GENGHIS KHAN

  * * *

  If I had a fresh platoon of poorly trained recruits, I’d have given them a gung-ho speech. Standing around a bonfire the night before we deployed, I would have quoted Roman or Spartan mythology. Plutarch said, “The Spartans don’t ask how many are the enemy but where they are.” I would have done everything I could to pump them up, mentally and physically, for the fierce battle ahead.

  But there is zero need to do that with a bunch of SEALs.

  Standing on the beach in a tight, quiet circle with Ro, Big D, Cams, Lope, and the others, I talked about balance instead. “Before we step on that bird tomorrow and begin this campaign,” I said, “we need to be sure everything at home is taken care of. Your finances are in order. Your families have what they need. Nothing back here is left unsaid or undone. Where we’re going, we all need to take care of each other. So if anyone has something that requires attention at home—bills, house repairs, kid stuff, whatever—I can help take care of it now. Or Chief can. Let us know. From here on out, we can’t be looking backwards. We have to be present every single second we are over there.”

  There is never an issue of getting SEALs motivated. They can’t wait to see for themselves where the enemy is and then confront him. Some people are born for this. It is such a part of their being, they are incomp
lete without it. They are warriors.

  * * *

  I was born a warrior. It just took a couple of decades to make the designation official. I grew up in the 1970s and ’80s in northern California, thirty-five miles south of San Francisco, in a place called Los Altos. That’s Spanish for “the heights” or “the foothills.” When I came along, Los Altos still had a few apricot and peach orchards where the old Spanish land-grant ranches used to be. But the gently rolling terrain was being transformed into sprawling suburbs. The Silicon Valley, people were calling the area, for all the computer companies that were popping up. Apple, Adobe, Intuit, Hewlett-Packard—they all had facilities nearby. There were lots of smart kids in Los Altos and, as time went on, some very rich adults.

  My dad, Tom Denver, was a partner at a busy law firm, a very disciplined and focused man. He rowed crew in college and still runs every day. He loves marathons and off-road races and is old-school in a lot of ways, hard and just—and brilliant. I don’t confer that on many people, but brilliant definitely applies to him. Yet he’s always been down-to-earth and accessible to anyone. At night when we were kids, he would read books to my younger brother and me: Jason and the Argonauts, Hannibal and the Elephants, Alexander and the Macedonians, The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings. They were stories of struggle and war and cavalry, tales of individual hardship and adventure. In those stories, the protagonist was often a leader whose fortitude and character were being tested in some deep and profound way. Looking back, I know those stories planted ideas in my head, ideas that would have a huge impact on my future. I learned a lot from my father, including the importance of working hard, being strong, and trusting yourself.

  I definitely owe the stork who delivered me to Deanna Denver. My mom has always been a dreamer. She’s had every job on earth. She’s been a dental hygienist, a PE teacher, a wedding photographer, an inventor, a family counselor—you name it. She is a talented artist—painting, woodworking, producing beautiful stained glass, creating amazing craft gifts every Christmas. She’s an excellent tennis player, an aggressive downhill skier, and a constant free spirit, very much her own person, always up for an adventure. Her brothers Dick and Dave convinced Grandma to name their sister after the spunky girl-next-door star Deanna Durbin. She instilled in my brother and me the idea that anything is possible in life.

  My brother, Nate, is three years younger. He and I were close when we were little, and we’ve never drifted apart. He’s a musician, a songwriter, a carpenter, a champion stair-climber, a world traveler, a sponsored snowboarder, a bike racer, a poet, an author, an artist—as much a Renaissance man as anyone I’ve ever met. He has shockingly perfect posture and always carries himself like a gentleman. Nate was a much more natural student than I was. But we shared an intense love for sports and for hanging around with each other. We had endless fun together. My brother has always been my closest friend.

  Our closeness growing up is a big part of the reason that years later I felt immediately comfortable in the tight-knit SEAL brotherhood. Teammates, swim buddies, boat crews, never leaving a fallen SEAL behind—because of Nate, I understood all of that instinctively. If I ever needed Nate but the labors of Hercules were placed in front of him, he would knock them out in a day and then be standing at my side, fresh and ready to rumble on my behalf. He’s my forever swim buddy. Whatever might happen, I always knew my brother had my back.

  When we were five and eight years old, we had adjoining rooms on the lower level of our house. One day, I decided I’d give my little brother a haircut. Trusting as he was, Nate sat quietly while I snipped away—until I almost cut off his left ear. He yelped so loudly, my mom came running. Her footsteps on the stairs sounded like serious trouble to me. Without even thinking, I hopped out a window and bolted down the street. She saw Nate’s ear. But Mom being Mom, she kept her cool and grabbed some bandages from the bathroom. She managed to stop the bleeding in a minute or two. When she asked what had happened, all Nate would say was that he accidentally cut himself. He wouldn’t rat me out. I confessed later, but I got it. The little dude was looking out for me, and I had to be sure I looked out for him.

  I struggled academically, especially in the younger grades. I was plenty bright, my teachers said. But my mind was bouncing everywhere. Kids like me they used to call hyperactive. It’s what people now label ADHD. I had trouble focusing well when it came to academics, and that left me vulnerable to ridicule from other kids. I always liked to read. But I was clueless with math. Still am, actually. The only time I thought I might be in trouble in SEAL training was on the physics and math part of my diving qualification. I had to take a makeup test and got through only with my roommate coaching me all night.

  But there was one area where I always excelled. Sports. Even as a little kid, the field was my natural habitat. Sports focused my undirected energy. It’s where I was finally one of the cool kids, where I knew what I was doing, where I wasn’t on the outs anymore. Put a ball in my hand, and I was in control. I had basic, raw talent. I was strong and fast for my age. And I was constantly competing, absolutely driven to win. I’m not sure if I loved winning so much or I just really hated to lose. Whatever the combination, my mom still tells stories about the horrible temper I had as a child. I was inconsolable if I lost at anything. Shooting baskets, kicking a soccer ball, playing a board game, whatever it was—I could ruin the day for everyone if somebody else came in first. My free-spirit mom didn’t feel like she instilled that in me. My dad didn’t, either. He focused on discipline and working hard—but never pushed the idea that winning was everything. That supercompetitiveness, I’m convinced, was just me, buried somewhere deep in my genetic code.

  We lived on a cul-de-sac. Our street, Mariposa Avenue, was rough asphalt laid out in the shape of a lima bean. At my fifth birthday party, we had a running race. Five or six kids, once around the cul-de-sac. I was in the lead most of the way, and then this other boy pulled in front of me. No! I had to win so badly, I dove across the finish line Superman-style, scraping my hands, knees, elbows, and chin against that ragged asphalt. Pain, blood—I didn’t care. The thought of losing was so much worse.

  My dad says he knew something was different about me as far back as my youth soccer team, the Silver Streaks. We were playing in a big game, which ended in a tie. The game had to be decided with an overtime shoot-out, three kicks for each side. The coach’s son was also on our team, and he took the first kick. It was way off to the left. The coach’s son took the second kick. That one bounced against the goalie’s chest. His son now 0 for 2, the coach called me in.

  Before I approached the ball, I glanced over at my father, who was standing on the sideline like he always was. My dad gave me a signal he’d given me before. He lifted both his hands and shook them as if to say: “Just stay loose. Nice and relaxed.”

  As my dad tells the story, I approached the ball cold as ice. The ref blew the whistle, and I sent the ball flying right into the goal. The Silver Streaks briefly had the lead, but it wasn’t enough to win the game. The other team scored, and the match ended in a tie. When I came off the field, I ran right over to my father. “If they’d let me take all three, we woulda won,” I said. My dad still marvels at that. “There was a confidence there,” he told me years later, “a level of self-assuredness you don’t see in many eight-year-olds.”

  That was around the time my parents divorced.

  I never doubted for a minute that my mom and dad loved Nate and me. My mother especially made sure we knew that. “This is an adult problem that has nothing to do with two perfect boys,” she told us. We lived with Mom, but Dad stayed close to us. Twice a week, he would pick us up at school and take us out to dinner. I don’t remember a single sporting event of my brother’s or mine that our dad didn’t attend. But with our parents’ divorce, we were very much on the lower end of the economic spectrum at Bullis-Purissima Elementary School in the booming Silicon Valley. We weren’t living in our car or eating out of Dumpsters or anything like that. Mom was
a genius at stretching a dollar and maxing a credit card. She managed to take us on regular ski trips and summer-cottage visits with the relatives back east. But we definitely didn’t have all the luxuries a lot of other kids had—the video games and designer sneakers and spring-break trips to Hawaii.

  You know how cruel some children can be, drilling mercilessly into other kids’ insecurities. They’ll always find something to exploit. Well, there was a group of boys in my school who really started giving me a hard time. To this day, I still appreciate two adults who stepped forward for me. Both of them happened to be Marines.

  In sixth grade, I was a Cub Scout. Once a week, I had to wear my Scout uniform to school. At my school, that was not considered too cool. None of the bullies were in the Cub Scouts, and they loved making fun of my uniform. I wasn’t going to take that passively. I started lashing out, getting into scrapes that kept getting me sent to the principal’s office. One day, Mr. Barry, the principal, called my dad at work.

  “Rorke’s been suspended for fighting,” he told my father. “But Rorke did the right thing. Those little rich kids were asking for it.” That was it. I was so sick of the teasing, I threw my Cub Scout shirt in the garbage and told Mr. Barry and my dad that I wasn’t wearing my uniform to school anymore.

  But Mr. Barry had one last move. “Wait a week before you give up on this,” he told me. “Would you be willing to wear your uniform one more time?”

  Okay, I told him, not too enthusiastically.

  That next week, we were standing at assembly for the flag-raising. I had on my Cub Scout uniform. I could tell the bullies were already eyeing me. Mr. Barry came in late, and he sure caused a stir. He was wearing the dress blues of the U.S. Marine Corps with full medals and a sword. It was insane. No one at school had ever seen him dressed like that before.