Damn Few

by Rorke Denver

  There wasn’t a SEAL anywhere on the planet not thinking exactly the same thing: Let’s take the fight to the people who did this—right now.

  And then, nothing.

  No call. No plane. No gunning engines. No counterterror mission to Pakistan, Afghanistan, or anywhere else. Not for us.

  Hours became days. Days became weeks. And once we got to weeks, we had a pretty good idea the members of SEAL Team Four, BRAVO Platoon, weren’t going anywhere anytime soon. We’d likely be cooling our jets at Roosey Roads, covering our usual turf in Latin America, while all the real action was occurring first in Afghanistan, eight thousand miles away, where the president had just sent troops to attack the al Qaeda terror network and topple the fundamentalist Taliban government. The higher SEAL command had decided to send units that weren’t already deployed somewhere else like we were.

  I lay in my rack at night in the Roosey Roads bachelor-officer quarters, torturing myself.

  What a waste, I kept thinking. This is wrong. We have to change this somehow.

  But the Navy had other ideas.

  Puerto Rico was perfect until America was at war. Then all of a sudden it felt like a prison with swaying palm trees and SPF 30. We’d done our log PT. I’d read my warrior books. You can’t be a peacetime warrior when your nation is drawn into war, not a happy one.

  Every twelve minutes, it seemed, another team member was walking into the command.

  “Anything new?” they would ask. “When do you think we’re gonna fly?” I had no answers for any of them. I had the same questions they did.

  “This sucks,” said Frog, one of our snipers.

  “Don’t get me started, I want to kill bad guys,” said Ron.

  “I can’t believe this,” said Chud, another sniper.

  I couldn’t say they were wrong.

  We got an extra slap in the face when one of our Air Force combat controllers, a radioman we’d been working with and loved, and an Air Force parajumper who was one of our medics both got called to Afghanistan.

  Unbelievable.

  They were going to Afghanistan with Army Special Forces while we were working on our suntans at Roosey Roads. I was certain the war would be over before BRAVO Platoon could ever cycle in.

  We did what we could.

  We practiced ship-boarding maneuvers in the open sea, imagining we were searching for terror suspects. We ran maritime-blocking exercises with fast-attack boats, gaming the counterterror challenges of commercial-port security. This was an excruciating time to be leading a SEAL platoon so far from the battlefield. As the weeks turned into months, all we could do was deliver empty pep-talks to the team—then repeat them to ourselves.

  “Let’s not expend all our energy in anticipation,” B, BRAVO’s platoon commander, said. “We’ll keep PT’ing. We’ll go to the range. We’ll make ourselves the warriors we know we can be. When the bubble goes up, when the pager goes off, we’ll be ready.”

  That was one speech. I had others. “We can’t control history,” I said. “We can’t control what leadership is going to do. All we can be is prepared.”

  And maybe if I said that stuff often enough, I would eventually start to feel it.

  It never happened. The war on terror revved up with BRAVO Platoon shoved over on the sidelines. SEALs, Green Berets, and other special operators were making an impact in Afghanistan. The Bush administration was hinting strongly about a war in Iraq. We stayed in Roosey Roads until our deployment was over in 2002. Then we returned to the SEALs’ East Coast headquarters at Little Creek. My journey of frustration still had a couple of stops left.

  About that time, the top SEAL leadership was creating two new teams, Team Seven on the West Coast, Team Ten on the East. Like an NBA expansion draft, other teams contributed platoons to fill out the new rosters. My boys in BRAVO Platoon were shifted to the new Team Ten, while as a junior officer with low seniority, I remained at Team Four.

  I hated to split up with those guys—Jersey, Toro, Irish, Face Man, Sonny, and the others. They’d have been a sterling crew to go into battle with. To this day, I truly regret that we never had the chance. I suppose all leaders have a soft spot for their first platoon, but these were world-class warriors, and I’ve stayed close with many of them.

  “What a missed opportunity,” we still tell each other when we connect.

  I went out to sea in March 2003, just as the Iraq War was getting started, as a SEAL liaison officer on one of the Navy’s big Amphibious Ready Groups. Led by a new 844-foot, 41,000-ton Wasp-class assault ship, the group included two other warships and a landing force of 1,900 Marines, plus everything they would need to prosecute a sizable invasion: thirty helicopters, half a dozen Harrier ground-attack aircraft, Humvees, troop carriers, light-armored maritime-capable assault craft, 25 mm Mk 38 cannons, and a Sea Sparrow missile system.

  I’m an officer in the Navy. I appreciate the power and the majesty of a well-run ship, and this one was epecially awesome, barreling at 22 knots across the Mediterranean with its geared steam turbines running at full blast. I pray we never give up our dominance of the sea. But a long ship deployment really wasn’t what I was cut out for. I found shipboard life confining. I wanted to be out hunting bad guys in a more face-to-face way.

  Here we go again, I said to myself as I settled into my SEAL-liaison duties with my chief and communications expert. “One war is raging in the mountains of Afghanistan. Another is starting in mostly landlocked Iraq. And I’m stuck on a ship at sea.” I didn’t even have a SEAL platoon along. There’d be nothing for them to do all day. Their gear was on board, but the men would come from Rota, Spain, only when they were called. This was starting to make Roosey Roads look like Action Central. None of it felt to me like a quick route to war.

  A classic gung-ho, Semper Fi Marine commanded the expeditionary unit on the ships. Colonel Franklin was a short but amazingly fit 300-PFTer. Every year he got a perfect score on the Marine Physical Fitness Test. That’s a challenge for a young man let alone a colonel. He was a focused, driven commander. I liked the fact that he seemed to be itching for a way into Iraq. But I don’t believe he much enjoyed having a young SEAL officer in and around his staff. He seemed to think of SEALs as unruly cowboys and not quite deferential enough. He and I butted heads immediately. Him being a colonel and me a lieutenant, he was always right.

  I could have been a valuable asset to the colonel. Through my SEAL team network of brothers, teammates, and friends, I had strong connections to the special-operations forces on the ground in Iraq. I knew things that could have been useful to him and his staff: Where the action was heating up, where nothing much was going on, where the insurgents were gathering strength. I could also have provided a SEAL element to join his Marine contingent. Hitting the ground together would only have boosted everyone’s combat effectiveness. But the colonel wanted nothing to do with SEALs or with me or any of my ideas. He had his own theories about how to go to war in Iraq.

  Colonel Franklin was a helicopter man. Which was fine. But he didn’t want to approach Iraq from the south, the route the Army’s 4th Infantry Division was taking along with other mechanized units. Instead, he decided to fly his Marine contingent in from the far eastern Mediterranean, over Turkey, into northern Iraq, landing near Mosul.

  The plan bothered me. The northern region wasn’t Saddam’s real stronghold or al Qaeda’s. I tried to offer my advice. “I’m talking directly to special-operations forces on the ground,” I told the colonel. “Can I share with you what I’m hearing?”

  “Nope,” he said.

  I offered to connect him with special-operations forces in the north, if he was dead set on going in that way. I told him I would go in with his Marines if he’d like to help coordinate. “Maybe you can gin up something with our spec-op guys,” I said. “They know the region.”

  “Nope,” he said. “We’ll be fine, and you’re staying here.”

  “Roger, sir.”

  The colonel grabbed all the aircraft he c
ould and roared his Marines into northern Iraq. It did not go well.

  I wasn’t there. I heard some colorful descriptions from my friends in the sandbox and from some of the colonel’s boys about their adventures in the north. All I can say for certain is that, eighteen days later, the colonel and his Marines left Iraq unceremoniously and returned abruptly to their ships. I had missed another chance to go to war. Literally and figuratively, I was still at sea.

  Then a phone call came that no one was expecting. We might be needed in Liberia. The West African nation was spinning out of control.

  Liberia has a unique history. An active participant in the African slave trade, the region was colonized beginning in 1820 by free blacks from the United States, most of them former slaves. They believed they’d find greater freedom and equality in Africa. Even the name they chose for their new country echoed that hope. Liberia’s government was modeled on the ideas of James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, and the capital city, Monrovia, was named for James Monroe, the fifth American president and a prominent supporter of their cause. Many of today’s Liberians are the descendants of those former American slaves.

  By 2003, Liberia had spiraled into anarchy. Murderous rebel factions, feuding diamond thieves, armed drug thugs—the country was the shame of West Africa. Two hundred thousand Liberians had been killed in a civil war. Millions of others had fled to refugee camps. Monrovia was a homicidal playpen for crazed and thuggish gangsters. The soccer stadium was a Red Cross medical center. Bodies were piled in the streets. The country’s despotic president, Charles Taylor, an international pariah, had fled not long before.

  It wasn’t the war zone I’d been expecting. The catastrophe unfolding in Liberia wasn’t even officially a war. Most Americans were glued to Iraq and Afghanistan. But I found myself steaming across the Med to help save a proud nation from self-destruction, and I couldn’t have asked for a more eye-opening experience. This was too big a mission to leave to a Marine colonel or a Navy captain. This was a major military operation. The Liberia mission was handed to a much larger Joint Task Force, run by Army Major General Thomas Turner. The general and his staff came on board.

  As our three ships neared the Liberian coast, the U.S. embassy in Monrovia was a last-ditch holdout of sanity and stability. The Americans had already been evacuated in a helicopter rescue by members of SEAL Team Four, who’d flown in a week earlier. But the streets were still in chaos. It would clearly take a much larger U.S. force to calm the unrest.

  I knew we’d be landing a full contingent of Marines in Liberia, the perfect force for this kind of mission. And I knew from SEAL history and personal experience that getting them ashore was something the SEALs were uniquely qualified for.

  I was excited. I called up the SEAL chain of command.

  “At a minimum,” I said, “I’ll be generating a request for a legitimate, real-world hydrographic reconnaissance of pointed locations on the Liberian coast. I might be able to also get an actual request in for a boat drop,” parachuting rigid-hulled inflatable boats and operators into the sea from an aircraft. The SEALs had been training for that, as had the Special Warfare Combatant Craft crewmen who operate high-speed assault boats better than anyone in the world. But we’d never actually done a live drop in theater.

  There was silence on the line.

  “We’re actually doing an exercise drop here in the Med,” the senior SEAL said. “There’s a bunch of bigwigs here. I can’t cancel that.”

  “We’re saying no to a real-world mission for the sake of an exercise?” I couldn’t believe it.

  “That’s correct,” he said. “Do your hydro. We’ll fly the platoon to the boat. You’re not getting the airdrop.”

  Now, that was bureaucracy.

  The drop wasn’t mission critical. It was mission enhancing. And chances like this one rarely come along. But still, there were many firsts in Liberia.

  The Liberian coast was piled with thousands of smooth, flat rocks, the discarded ballast from long-ago slave ships. The water in Monrovia Harbor was teeming with reef sharks and hammerheads. But twenty SEALs working together would have to find a way to get those U.S. Marines ashore without getting wrecked, shot, bombed, or eaten alive.

  The plan came straight out of SEAL history. We’d be doing something not too different from what the Underwater Demolition Teams had done before the Normandy invasion in World War II: a full, jump-in-water hydrographic survey of Monrovia Harbor and two beaches nearby, hammerheads be damned.

  I was finally beginning to feel like a SEAL.

  “You crazy bastards are going in that water?” a Navy master chief asked, shaking his head as we prepared to slide two rigid-hull inflatable boats off the side of one of the group’s warships. From the launch platform, he could see the sharks circling in the water. To be honest, so could we, and we were the ones about to climb in.

  “That’s how it’s done, Master Chief,” I said. “We take the RHIBs in to the surf line. Then the beach party—the platoon commander and three other SEALs—swim up to shore for an initial recon. When they’re satisfied, they signal the RHIBs and the rest of us swim in. It takes about sixteen of us to get the hydro done.”

  He wasn’t offering to come for the ride.

  Once the RHIBs were in the water, we linked up with a couple of Marine Zodiacs and their reconnaissance operators. All four boats began motoring in. But as the boats were reaching the surf line, things started going badly.

  One RHIB lost engine power. It came close to getting swamped. The other RHIB did an amazing job towing the first one out of the impact zone. But as the four SEAL swimmers and two Marines dropped into the water for their swim to shore, one of the Marines lost a fin and almost drowned.

  He made it to shore, but the SEAL lieutenant didn’t like the way any of this was going. “This reconnaissance does not have to happen to night,” he said from the beach. “We’ll do it tomorrow. We’re swimming back out.”

  Two SEALs tried to swim the suffering Marine back through the surf to the boats. But he was having real trouble. They turned around and swam back in. Finally, the lieutenant called for a helicopter to carry the landing party back to the ship, while the RHIBs and Zodiacs retreated as well.

  The rocky start left General Turner reconsidering all this prelaunch secrecy. “We should be showing the flag,” the general said.

  He ordered the three enormous U.S. Navy ships to move closer to shore, within easy sight of Monrovia. “I’d like the people to see we’re here,” the general said. The next morning, he said, the SEALs would take their fast Zodiacs straight up to the beach.

  “I want the Liberians to understand the American operators are on the ground and able to handle anything that goes wrong,” the general said.

  In the light of day, thirteen other SEALs in three Zodiacs launched toward the coast near the U.S. embassy. As we came over the horizon into the surf, there were, I swear, six thousand Liberians on the berm above the beach. They were jumping up and down.

  We didn’t know if they were going to charge or hug us.

  Then men, women, and children came running excitedly into the water to greet us, smiling, splashing, and pulling us onto the shore. They were singing and waving.

  “Americans!” they shouted. “Please, help us. Get rid of these criminals who are destroying our country.”

  Seeing and hearing that, it was impossible not to be moved. “We’re here,” we told them. “The Americans are here to help. More of us are on the way.”

  We took a look around. We found a couple of promising locations for the Marine landing, pending the results of the hydrographic survey. We told the people we’d be returning. Then we got back on our Zodiacs and motored out to the ship.

  We got the survey done quickly the next day. It was something to behold, fourteen SEALs in the treacherous water off Liberia with grease pencils, whiteboards, and fishing lines. The fishing lines had weights on the end and depth markings every foot.

  The SEALs formed a straigh
t line, perpendicular to the shore, six feet apart from each other, standing, bobbing, or treading water. With his grease pen, each SEAL recorded careful measurements of water depth, bottom condition, and any obstacles he found. Then everyone stepped or swam six feet forward and took another round of measurements. They did it again and again. In a little more than two hours, they had produced three intricate survey charts.

  The sharks kept their distance.

  Based on those surveys and measurements, we chose the most promising landing spots for the Marines. They made their landing safely. They swept triumphantly into Monrovia. The drug runners, diamond thieves, and Charles Taylor loyalists stayed away, just like the sharks. Order was at least temporarily restored.

  The SEALs accompanied the Marines on shore, providing ground security. But they didn’t need too much of that. The vast majority of Liberians seemed thrilled to see us there, welcoming the Marines like arriving heroes.

  We didn’t fire a shot in Liberia. Our gun battles were still to come. But we stuck our toes into chaos in one of the most intense places on earth, and we did some good. We all returned safely to the ships.

  10

  MISSION IRAQ

  War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.

  —JOHN STUART MILL

  * * *

  The inside of the C-17 looked like a cross between a flying moving van and a flying flophouse. Boxes of ammo, piles of communication gear, all our weapons, half a dozen large shipping containers—anything we might need for a long deployment in an unpredictable war zone was packed inside this giant transport aircraft. There were seats and tiny windows along the sidewalls. But some of the guys had strung hammocks between the shipping containers or laid out bedrolls on the floor. Why not catch some rest on the way to Iraq?