Among Heroes: A U.S. Navy SEAL's True Story of Friendship, Heroism, and the Ultimate Sacrifice (3 page)

From our six weeks of marksmanship training up in Central Valley we caravanned back downstate to the scorching Martian landscape at Niland to see who would make it through the next portion of the course. Of the original twenty-six, there were now about eighteen of us left. By the end of the course only a dozen would graduate.

Shooting is one thing. Being able to get close enough to take the shot—and with such complete stealth that you can extract again without being captured, blown up, or shot yourself—is a whole other aspect of the sniper’s craft.

In fact, while most people equate
sniper
with marksmanship, the truth is that the art of stalking—the ability to move about undetected while observing every aspect and detail of an environment—comes into play far more than the ability to place a well-directed kill shot. Make no mistake: When it’s time to take that shot, it has to be perfect. (If you want to know just how crucial that is, just ask Captain Phillips of the
Maersk Alabama
.) But practically speaking, in the field we spend a lot more time in stalking and reconnaissance than we do shooting.

Picture a sniper stalking, and chances are good the
images that come to mind have to do with a guy snaking along stealthily on his belly, or lying motionless for hours. Yes, those things happen. But that’s not really what it’s about. The lion’s share of the skill of stalking, like that of shooting, is mental. The key is the ability to scan an entire environment and identify
dead space
, the three-dimensional area defined by a visual obstruction that can effectively shield you from an observer’s view. In a way, the art of stalking comes down to the ability to make yourself invisible—not exactly a Jedi mind trick, but pretty close. And for some reason, getting the knack of this stalking mind-set was something that seemed to click for me and one other guy before it did for the rest of our classmates. By the last week of the course, I was far ahead enough in points that graduating was in the bag, and I stopped wearing my ghillie suit (a special stalking outfit we would customize with twigs and bits of vegetation) and began going out onto the course in my regular desert cammies just to confound and piss off the instructors.

Especially Slattery. (And yes, it
did
piss him off.)

Now, I am not a tall guy, and you might think being shorter was a major advantage in stalking. But it turned out size has nothing to do with it, and my proof for that assertion is Mike Bearden—who was the other guy in our class who clicked into the art of stalking right away.

It was an amazing thing to watch: this monster of a guy, and he could just make himself invisible. I’d be a few hundred yards into a stalk and pause to look around, and there’d be Mike, slipping along nearby like a wraith. And then there were all the other guys back near the start line, inching along frantically on their stomachs.

In our Navy training before BUD/S we all went through a school called SERE, an acronym for survival, evasion, resistance, and escape. Until I got to BUD/S, this school was the toughest damn training I’d ever had. At SERE they wanted to make sure you knew how to survive, whether on your own out in the wilderness or under conditions of hostile captivity, and they didn’t pull any punches in the process.

I heard a story about Mike’s time in SERE school. When it came to the evasion exercise, where students role-play escaped prisoners and try to avoid recapture, they couldn’t find him. They’d rounded up all the other escapee-students, but even after scouring the entire area they couldn’t find Bearden.

He had vanished.

Even after the evasion exercise was over, they
still
couldn’t find him. The Bear, as the expression goes, was out in the woods. Finally they started combing the region in trucks, calling him in through loudspeakers. It turned out they couldn’t find him because he had stayed hidden underwater, breathing through a reed. The Commander wasn’t coming in till he was ready to come in.

•   •   •

On June 12, 2000, Mike, Glen, and I stood together with nine other classmates to receive our NSW Sniper School certificates. It was my twenty-sixth birthday; Mike was exactly twenty-seven years and three months old. His wife, Derenda, was there, along with their son, Holden, who was one day shy of nine months old. It was a proud time for all of us.

For most of us, deployment would be coming soon. First, though, Glen and I had a thirty-day leave coming, and we both took full advantage of it immediately after graduation.
For the Bear’s part, he was moving right on to another school, this one involving one of his favorite activities: jumping from tall places. Mike was using this time to go through military freefall training right there in California.

Each of us had already been through rigger school, where you learn the basics of parachuting. There we had practiced a form of jumping called “static line,” a whole row of us jumping together with our chutes automatically pulled for us, what we call “dope on a rope,” and we’d also been through the exercise we call “hop-and-pops,” where you jump out over water at a few thousand feet and pull immediately, World War II–style, like the American airborne landings in Normandy. A funny story from Mike’s rigger-school days: While partying at someone’s second-floor apartment after hours, Mike was sitting out on the balcony when he looked out and glimpsed a guy snatching a purse from a woman on the street below. He leaped off the balcony, landing on his feet, and went after the guy. Seeing this giant appearing out of the air and plowing toward him, the terrified thief took off down the street as fast as he could run, but he didn’t have a chance. Just as he’d done on that high school choir trip in Scotland, Mike caught up with the perp and took him down with a flying tackle, then held him in a lock until the police showed up. That was Mike’s version of basic jump training.

But this school Mike was going through now would take jumping to a whole different level. In military freefall he’d be jumping out of aircraft at ten to twelve thousand feet with full combat equipment. On an earlier visit to Coronado, his parents had seen some guys jumping out of a helicopter, and later that day Michael Senior had asked Mike, “How do you
do
that? I mean, you just throw yourself out of that thing. You don’t hesitate.”

Mike shrugged. “Hey, somebody’s got to do it.”

“But seriously,” his dad persisted, “have you thought about how dangerous this all is?”

Mike said, “You know, Dad, I don’t think about that. You
can’t
think about that. This is our job. This is what we do. There are people out there who can’t help themselves. Somebody’s got to help them.”

One day shortly after graduating from sniper school, Mike passed by the SEAL quarterdeck in Coronado on his way to get himself set up for jump school. A BUD/S instructor was finishing up with a group of fresh recruits, taking them through their punishing paces on the broiling-hot asphalt grinder. The instructor glanced up and spotted Mike walking by, recognizing him instantly. Reputation is everything in the SEAL teams, and everyone on the teams knew how well the new guys had done at sniper school, especially Mike.

“Hey, Bearden,” the instructor called out. “Now that you’ve finished sniper school, what’s next?”

Mike reached a fist up behind his neck and yanked, miming the action of opening a parachute. He grinned.

“I’m gonna be a sky god,” he said.

A few weeks later, nearing the end of jump school, Mike drove himself, Derenda, and their infant son, Holden, the fifteen hundred miles home to eastern Texas to attend a cousin’s wedding. The day after the wedding, he saddled the family up to head straight back out west so he could rejoin the class.

“Man,” his dad said as Mike packed their bags, “I sure wish you could stay through the weekend. We could spend some time together.”

“I can’t, Daddy,” said Mike. “We’ve got a jump coming up.”

His dad nodded, said so long, and saw them off.

A few days later, on Tuesday evening, Mike called home to check in with his folks, as he was in the habit of doing. He told his dad he’d made a jump that day, and said his back was really sore. When you watch SEALs go through their paces in documentaries, it’s easy to get the impression that we’re invulnerable and nothing fazes us. The truth is, all that training takes its toll. Mike’s knees had been dicey ever since high school, and while he never said a word about it to the other guys, they would hurt after jumping.

“Well,” said his dad, “maybe you can skip tomorrow.”

“Dad, you don’t
skip
,” Mike explained. “Besides, we’re just about finished up here.”

There was a pause in the conversation; then his dad said, “So, what are you going to do next, Mike?”

“What do you mean, what am I going to do next?” said Mike.

“Your four years are fixing to be up. Have you thought about what comes after this?”

Mike was silent for a moment before answering.

“Dad,” he said, “I’ve found something worthwhile here. Yeah, I’ve had offers to go work for a few companies. And I’ve thought about working for the U.S. Marshals at some point. But for right now, I’m doing something I’m really good at.”

Michael Senior digested that, then said, “So, what are you saying?”

“I’m going to re-up, Dad,” Mike replied. “What we’re doing here makes a
difference
. People need us.”

“Okay,” his dad said, and they said their good-byes.

It was the last time the two men spoke.

Michael Senior was at school teaching the next day, Wednesday, the twelfth of July, when someone came into the classroom and said he was needed at home right away. When he arrived home the news was waiting for him. That day the Bear had run smack into any military trainer’s worst nightmare: His main chute had a rare malfunction and got tangled up in his secondary or backup chute, preventing the secondary from deploying.

He fought to the last second to get that canopy open—fought it all the way to the ground.

•   •   •

They held a funeral service for Mike Bearden on Wednesday, July 19, exactly one week after the freefall accident, at the First Baptist Church in Justin, Texas, the town where his wife’s family lived. About twenty of Mike’s teammates were there, flown out from the coast so they could be present for the service.

After the formal part of the service was over, little Holden looked over at my buddy Ed, who was a member of our sniper class, and pointed at his chest. Ed looked down. The boy’s finger was pointing at the gold SEAL Trident pinned to his lapel. Holden recognized it, because his dad had one just like it. He looked up at Ed and said, “Hey, mister. Do you know where my dad is?”

Barely keeping his composure, Ed bent down and said, “He’s in a better place, son.” And then immediately felt like an ass. But what else could he say?

There were a lot of tears shed by some very tough SEALs
that day. Ed later told me it was the hardest thing he’d ever done, standing there in his dress blues as Mike’s little boy kept asking the SEALs in uniform where his daddy was. “It was a fucking tear factory,” is how he put it.

I wasn’t there. In fact, I didn’t even know Mike had died. I was fifteen hundred miles away, surfing off the California coast, oblivious to all of this. Immediately after graduating sniper school, I had gone on my thirty days’ leave and had no idea what had happened. To tell the truth, though, even if I had known, I don’t think I would have gone. I couldn’t. It was too much.

Over the years to come, a lot of my teammates would die, but I wouldn’t go to their funerals. It would be more than a decade before I would finally break down and attend a memorial service myself.

•   •   •

Mike’s death shook us all up, and I took it hard. It was the first time I’d come face-to-face with the fact that death is an unavoidable part of what we do.

From the vantage point of today, so many years after 9/11, it’s hard to remember what the world was like in July of 2000. In many ways, we in the United States were living in our own bubble. The Cold War had been over for a decade, and in terms of combat, there wasn’t that much going on in the world. We’d lost four guys in Panama in ’89, and had seen more than a dozen of our Spec Ops brothers slain in Mogadishu in ’93, but those tragedies were brief and singular events that already seemed far removed in time. There was a sense of, if not exactly safety, at least relative calm, a sort of age of innocence. Yes, there were occasionally fatal accidents in training, but they were rare. We knew the life of a
SEAL was dangerous—at least, we knew it with our heads. But we didn’t really expect to have to deal with the death of a comrade.

I’d been wrong. I’d seen Mike as indestructible. But he wasn’t. None of us were.

When my friends and I were going through BUD/S a few years earlier, one of our instructors sat us down and told us, “Look around, gentlemen. Look at the guys on your left. Now look at the guys on your right. These are your teammates, your friends. And some of them are going to die. You’re going to lose them. That’s the way it is.”
Yeah, yeah
, I remember thinking,
save the lecture and just let us get our four hours of sleep!
At the time his little speech had seemed melodramatic. Now it hit me that what he’d said was the simple truth.
They’re your friends. And you’re going to lose them.

What made Mike’s death all the more surreal was that it wasn’t as if he had been killed on the battlefield. It would be easy to decry his loss as senseless. But that wasn’t the truth. Tragic, yes. Wrenching, awful—absolutely. But not senseless.

The training we go through to become the most effective warriors possible is serious. It’s not safe. Mistakes happen, because we’re constantly stretching our limits. If we made the conditions of our training so safe that nobody could get hurt, the training would fail in its purpose. We have an expression in the teams: “The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat.” But it isn’t just sweat. We bleed in training, too. We get pneumonia, break bones, and sometimes worse. The mortal dangers our Spec Ops guys face don’t occur only in the cauldron of political hot spots around the world, but
at every step along the way. Special Operations is a dangerous path, and those who tread it are putting everything on the line from day one. Mike died in the service of our country’s safety and security—in other words, he died keeping
you and your family
safe—every bit as much as our friends who would die a few years later in the streets of Ramadi or the mountains of Afghanistan.