Among Heroes: A U.S. Navy SEAL's True Story of Friendship, Heroism, and the Ultimate Sacrifice (4 page)

Mike died a hero’s death. And we all were left to fight the survivor’s battle: the one with shock, then anger and grief, and finally foreboding, knowing there were more losses to come. Because we all knew that death hadn’t simply paid us a visit. It had come into our midst, staked its tent, taken up permanent residence. From this point on it would be our constant companion.

“You read war books, Clive Cussler and Richard Marcinko, things like that, and you get one kind of picture,” Mike’s dad told me years later. “But there’s a human side to these guys you don’t always read about. These are kids that mothers have brought into this world, and have raised and loved and held dear to their hearts, and you never dream that they’re going to just lay down their lives for somebody else. But it makes you proud, too. They just see it as their job and don’t think twice about it. Because if they didn’t do it, who else would?”

•   •   •

It wasn’t until several years after Mike’s death, long after I’d been through the caves of Afghanistan and back, that I finally had the chance to go through my own military freefall training. Because of a fluke in scheduling, this had been the one piece of standard SEAL schooling that I hadn’t managed
to make. I’d been through the basic dope-on-a-rope stuff, but this was different. This was the jump Mike had been doing.

As I sat in that little twin-engine plane, feeling it climb to twelve thousand feet (an altitude sufficient to cause hypoxia if you’re not wearing an oxygen mask) so we could throw ourselves out into the open sky, I felt a twinge of an emotion I wasn’t accustomed to feeling.

Fear.

Mike’s death had touched us all in a deep, dark place we don’t often show or talk about. SEALs don’t scare easily. Part of it is our training, and part of it is just who we are. To a degree every one of us on the teams shares that daredevil gene. But that doesn’t mean we don’t experience fear. We all have our own demons. Some guys have to conquer a fear of the water. In my case, Mike’s death triggered a fear of skydiving, and now that fear was rising up like a dragon.

I told myself this was crazy. I loved flying. Since I was a kid I’d always aspired to become a pilot. I’d trained for this, and never for a moment thought I would have any hesitation when the time came to do it. But there it was.

One classmate saw that plane’s rear ramp door open, sat himself right back down in his sideways-facing seat, and buckled himself in. “I’m done with this shit,” he said, and he refused to jump. I knew how he felt. An expression we have in jump school flitted through my mind:
Why would you want to throw yourself out of a perfectly good airplane?
Guys say it as a joke to take the edge off the tension of the moment. Right then I wasn’t seeing the humor in it. For a moment, I honestly didn’t know if I could go through with it.

Then I thought about Mike. “What we’re doing here makes a
difference
,” he’d told his dad. “People need us.” The fall may have killed his body, but I’d never forget that indestructible spirit.

I shook off the fear and
jumped.

DAREDEVIL

DAVE SCOTT

O
n August 14, 2000, less than a month after Mike Bearden’s funeral, my platoon took off westward across the Pacific on our first deployment, bound for the Indian Ocean as part of an amphibious readiness group (ARG) attached to the transport ship USS
Duluth
. Our days as new guys were finally coming to an end—and not one moment too soon. After years of training and preparation, we were so glad to be getting the hell out of Coronado, on our way to becoming seasoned operatives at last.

You’d think this would have been really exciting.

It wasn’t.

For one thing, being part of an ARG was at the top of exactly nobody’s list. As part of an ARG, we had weeks of being shipbound to look forward to. This was smart in an operational sense, but it sucked for us. Yes, SEALs are technically part of the Navy, but in practical fact we have nothing to do with the Navy per se, and the last thing we want to do is spend our time on a boat. Not only is it tedious as hell, but it’s also practically impossible to stay in decent shape on a boat. Still, we gave it our all, putting in as much time as we
could in the onboard gym lifting weights. On a ship, as they say, the acronym SEAL stands for Sleep, Eat, and Lift.

Even when we did get off the boat, there just wasn’t all that much going on in the world. Trade sanctions against Saddam had been in place for a decade since Desert Storm, and as part of the multinational enforcement effort, SEAL teams were routinely involved in interdictions to curb the constant oil-smuggling traffic out of Iraq. That was an interesting gig, and we figured we would eventually have some fun doing ship boardings in the Gulf. But there wasn’t any serious action happening anywhere.

We steamed southwest across the Pacific, with a few brief stops along the way at various exotic locations, until we reached the port town of Darwin, Australia, where we spent a week doing the things SEALs do to keep themselves occupied: joint training exercises with the Aussies, working out, and blowing off steam when we could. From there it was a quick hop north to war-torn East Timor, which had recently fought for its hard-won independence from Indonesia and was still in a shambles. A team of our guys went ashore for a few days to help in some humanitarian efforts there. And that was about as exciting as things got in those days. It was a time of unprecedented prosperity and stability, both in the States and in the world at large. To put it in SEAL terms, a pretty boring world.

That was about to change.

From East Timor we sailed westward through a series of stepping-stone stops—Singapore and Phuket, Thailand—until we finally arrived in mid-October at the Persian Gulf, where we planned to spend a few days engaged in ship-boarding exercises. It was October 12, a quiet Thursday morning
right about lunchtime, when Jim McNary, our officer in charge (OIC), suddenly showed up in our berthing area with some unexpected and sobering news. One of our destroyers, the USS
Cole
, had been hit and was in danger of sinking.

Holy shit,
we all thought.

Shortly after eleven o’clock that morning, a small powerboat just off the coast of nearby Yemen, loaded with a quarter ton of homemade explosives and manned by a total of two as-yet-unidentified assailants, had sidled up to the ship on its port side and detonated, blowing a forty-by-forty-foot hole in the
Cole
’s hull.

Two guys
in a little speedboat did this?

Yes, two guys. Seventeen American sailors had died, thirty-nine others were wounded, and a gigantic U.S. warship was dangerously close to sinking. Immediate support was needed. Other naval personnel would labor to save the vessel from sinking, and still others would play an investigative role and work to nail down exactly who it was who did this thing. As SEALs, our job was to button the place down and provide impenetrable security.

Within eight hours we had made the clockwise loop through the Persian Gulf, the Gulf of Oman, the Arabian Sea, and the Gulf of Aden, and were in the Port of Yemen boarding the crippled hulk of the
Cole
.

An acrid smell from the explosion still hung in the air, but as we climbed aboard the
Cole
that odor was quickly overtaken by another, far worse smell. The carnage was awful, with rotting food and decomposing bodies under the hot Middle Eastern sun.

I’ll never forget that smell.

Command had serious concerns that there might still be
unexploded ordnance, so some of our guys went to work searching the vessel while others circled out on the water and maintained a defensive perimeter around the harbor. Meanwhile Glen and I, fresh from our sniper school training, joined the platoon’s two more experienced snipers up on the
Cole
’s bridge and began round-the-clock overwatch rotations with a full complement of weapons at the ready. Our orders were unambiguous: If anyone came within a hundred yards of that ship, we were cleared to use deadly force.

Our reaction when we heard those orders was raised eyebrows, followed by fist pumps. These were unusually aggressive ground rules. Ask any Spec Op warrior about ROEs (rules of engagement) and he will tell you they are seldom our friends. As SEALs we are trained to operate independently in any situation, which means we’re expected to use our own judgment and make snap life-and-death, mission-critical decisions. In essence, every SEAL is a fully operational army of one. The last thing we want is to be second-guessed on the battlefield by shortsighted restrictions motivated by political considerations parsed from comfy armchairs thousands of miles from the realities of war. Unfortunately the typical ROEs in situations of armed conflict more often reflect the conditions on Capitol Hill than those on the battlefield. In years to come, such timid and impractical ROEs would routinely drive us nuts. But not here on the bridge of the
Cole
. Right now our orders were simple: “Anyone approaches without permission, shoot to kill.”

As snipers it was our job to maintain constant, 100 percent, 360-degree situational awareness and threat assessment. What were the strengths and weaknesses of our
position? Where were threats most likely to come from? At any given moment, what should we be most focused on—and what was happening everywhere else? Glen and I and the other two snipers spent hours at a stretch on the spotting scope or binos, surveilling every inch of the harbor, Win Mag at the ready, different sectors arranged in our heads and accurate ranges dialed in on our scopes so that if at any second we had to take a shot, we’d be prepared and not have to scramble to set our parameters.

Meanwhile the
Cole
was slowly sinking under our feet. Our team of naval engineers brought in special equipment to keep the bilges pumping and the ship afloat. If someone farted in the wrong direction, that boat was going down. It almost sank a few times right there in port.

As we watched the shore, the shore was watching us.

Yemen was not exactly the most U.S.-friendly nation in the Middle East. The Yemeni military forces had their weapons trained on us, which meant that the guys we were staring at through our binos were peering at us through
their
binos. It felt like a high-tech Mexican standoff. Technically speaking, they were our hosts; after all, we were tied up to their pier. But what did we really know about them? Were they in sympathy with the guys who’d just blown up our ship? Had they
sent
those guys? We had no way of knowing. It was eerie. And it went on like that for days, while our naval engineering crews furiously pumped out the putrid bilgewater and struggled to keep the ship from giving up the ghost and sloughing off to rest at the bottom of the Port of Aden.

Within twelve hours after we first arrived, a team of FBI agents was on the scene, soon followed by a Naval Criminal
Investigative Service detail and a crew from the CIA. This was some serious shit. Most of the world didn’t yet fully grasp what had happened, and few would understand its implications until eleven months later, when the World Trade Center would lie in blood-soaked ruins.

We hadn’t just been attacked by a few rogue terrorists. We had entered a new age of warfare.

In the Civil War, long lines of soldiers armed with bayonet-clad rifles massed into great walls of firepower, facing off in leaden hailstorms of Minié balls and black powder, just as Xerxes and the Spartans had faced off with spears and shields. In World War II, Patton’s and Rommel’s tank battalions pummeled one another in the African desert. In Desert Storm, fleets of warplanes wreaked such rapid and complete devastation on Saddam’s offensive line that ground troops were practically an afterthought. As the tools of war evolved, the form of battle changed, but it was all fundamentally the same tactic: Line up the biggest mass of weaponry you can and hurl it at the enemy with all the force you’ve got.

But not with the
Cole
. Here the old rules of engagement no longer applied. A crappy little speedboat manned by two guys had just crippled and nearly sunk a billion-dollar, ten-thousand-ton warship, killed and wounded dozens of sailors, and inflicted some $250 million in damages on the mightiest military force on earth. This wasn’t conventional warfare, and it wasn’t even guerrilla warfare. This was
asymmetrical
warfare—a brand-new kind of war where mass meant nothing and intelligence meant everything.

And there was one guy on our team who understood this better than anyone else there: our assistant officer in charge, Dave Scott.

•   •   •

Dave was new to the platoon. In fact, he had joined us as third officer (number three in the platoon’s officer command chain, what we call third O) just a few weeks before we deployed.

Dave was a substantial guy, just over six feet, broad-shouldered and solid, an imposing presence. Whereas Mike Bearden stood like a Greek god, Dave was built like a tank and walked like a gorilla king, legs bowed slightly inward, yet spine always erect. His soft green eyes and lady-killer grin gave him a boyish charm that perfectly disguised the dangerous wit sizzling just below the surface. He clicked immediately with our platoon’s chemistry and added a whole new layer of color to this already extremely crazy bunch. We all loved him right off the bat.

One thing we especially liked about Dave was that he was not one to toe the party line. His was the voice at the back of the room you could always count on to interrupt the speaker at the front of the room with a single “Bullshit!” His normally silky voice could be penetrating and commanding when he wanted it to be. He could easily silence an entire roomful of people, yet I never saw him yell or lose control. His sense of humor was pervasive and ruthless. He would not let a single opportunity pass to bust anyone’s balls; nothing was sacred, no joke too obscene, no stunt too outrageous.

Dave was with a few buddies in line at an ATM one day (this was back in the States, a year or so before we met him) when a security guard started loading money into the machine. Dave noticed that the guy had a pistol strapped on but no magazine loaded in the well. The next thing his friends
knew, Dave was sidling up to the guy from behind, one hand cradling a bunch of drinking straws he’d cribbed from a nearby juice stand. Thirty seconds later Dave was back in line and laughing his ass off, the poor security guard oblivious to the fact that his gun was now loaded with soda straws. If the place got robbed by the Cookie Monster this guy would have been all set; otherwise, he was in deep shit.

Who would have the balls to sneak up behind a security guard and mess with his gun? Only Dave. As I said, no boundaries. Dave’s friends had a saying about him: “There are the rules that apply to everyone else—and then there are the rules that apply to Dave.”

He was just as happy skewering himself and the SEALs as much as anyone else. Sometimes when he walked into a room he would glare at you and say in a bad Schwarzenegger voice, “We are here to get you out.” Among his many tattoos, he had a line drawing of the Shadow, the old pulp-fiction vigilante crime fighter, inked in the middle of his back. “That’s my shadow,” he would say whenever someone pointed it out. “He watches my back.”

One of Dave’s favorite T-shirts was one he had printed with a quote from Jack Handey, the guy who wrote the “Deep Thoughts” segments on
Saturday Night Live
during the nineties:

If you’re in a war, instead of throwing a hand grenade at the enemy, throw one of those small pumpkins. Maybe it’ll make everyone think how stupid war is—and while they’re thinking, you can throw a real grenade at them.

Dave was a wild man, a sort of mad genius. Over time we would learn just how wild he really was. But one thing we could see right away was that he was over-the-top brilliant.

With rare exceptions, Hollywood typically casts Spec Ops guys—Rangers, Green Berets, SEALs, and the rest—as macho, swaggering strongmen who converse in grunted monosyllables and chauvinistic clichés. As usual, Hollywood’s got it wrong. If I had to identify the one skill set shared most by the men who become part of the SEAL teams, it would not be athletic ability, physical strength, or pugnacious attitude; it would be sheer brainpower. Yes, it takes a certain amount of physical grit to get through BUD/S and the rest of the training involved in becoming a full-fledged SEAL. But far more than that, it takes the ability to maintain laser-sharp mental focus under any conditions and to think your way out of insanely tight spots.