Among Heroes: A U.S. Navy SEAL's True Story of Friendship, Heroism, and the Ultimate Sacrifice (5 page)

So as far as smarts go, the Naval Special Warfare bar is already fairly high. But Dave wasn’t just smart. He was scary smart. For example, his savvy with electronics: He could make any gadget work, no matter how complicated it was or whether he’d ever seen it before. He would bring radio scanners with him in his car at the Burger King drive-through line and insert extra food items into other people’s orders just to mess with them. Once when we were doing a night exercise, Dave figured out a way to rig a night-vision camera onto his helmet to record what everyone was doing, so we could later review everything that happened and learn how to improve. He also had a remarkable memory. We could pick up pretty much any piece of equipment we had on board—radio, night vision, a weapons system, intelligence system
equipment,
anything
—and hand it to Dave, and no matter what it was, he could quote whole paragraphs verbatim from the manual.

He was also brilliant academically. Just weeks before joining our platoon he had finished up a course of study at the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, where he had taken a graduate-level course on political violence and terrorism taught by the renowned international terrorism expert Dr. Jerrold Post. Post, who would later author the pioneering text
The Mind of the Terrorist
, had become widely known for his psychological profile of Saddam Hussein after the invasion of Kuwait. Dave was big into the kind of nonstate actors that were still largely off the radar in those pre-9/11 days. Although the Soviet Union had been dead and buried for a decade, most still tended to think about major threats to national security in terms of hostile national forces, whether Saddam’s Iraq, Khamenei’s Iran, or Kim Jong-Il’s North Korea. Not Dave. He was convinced that a far graver danger lay in more fuzzily defined and less clearly centralized terrorist groups.

Dave was more than a little prescient. It was as if he lived with one foot in the future. For his term paper in Dr. Post’s class he chose what seemed like a fairly obscure topic at the time: He wrote a psychological profile of a shadowy Saudi dissident whom few outside the intelligence community had heard of. We didn’t know this at the time, but the man Dave had written about just a few months before joining our platoon would turn out to be the mastermind behind the USS
Cole
bombing whose horrifying aftermath we were now witnessing.

The guy’s name: Osama bin Laden.

•   •   •

For Dave, the worst thing about the nightmare of the
Cole
attack was that the whole damn thing seemed so fucking unnecessary. According to Dave, if any of our guys in this region had been paying attention, it would never have happened in the first place. Earlier that year, a group of terrorists had attempted to sink a nearly identical U.S. warship, the USS
The Sullivans
, in the same area, by identical tactics. In fact, they even used the same goddamn craft. Yes, you read that right: Although the earlier attack was foiled, the bad guys salvaged and repurposed that same crappy little speedboat, complete with its same homemade explosive charge, for a repeat performance later that year. Yemen was an openly anti-American nation, and the
Cole
was clearly in a dangerous and vulnerable position. The setup was obvious. But nobody was watching the store.

Dave had a good point. The level of security on the
Cole
before the bombing was ludicrous. A few guys had been placed to stand guard on the ship’s rail with unloaded M-14s.

I have to repeat that:
unloaded
M-14s, as in, no ammo in the guns.

We were all in disbelief at the lack of preparation—except Dave, who was just disgusted. He was not at all surprised that the attack had happened. He had felt for years that the Navy and the military in general—the
country
in general—were far too lax in their approach to security. Nobody was talking much about identity theft or cyberattacks back in 2000—but Dave was. He was always extremely careful about personal information. Before coming on our deployment he had given his girlfriend, Kat, a list of phone numbers so she could reach the other guys in the platoon in case of an
emergency. Reasonable enough, right? Only for Dave, just writing down the numbers wouldn’t do. The numbers were all in code, and he gave her a mathematical formula she’d have to apply to the list to derive the actual phone numbers. He wasn’t paranoid. He was just ten steps ahead of everyone else.

Dave was sitting with a few friends at a restaurant one day, talking about his Pennsylvania hometown. He grabbed a napkin and started drawing them a diagram: Over on the right was Philadelphia, the Main Line running northwest, and his town way over to the west—and then he stopped for a moment, looked at his friends, then bent over the napkin again and added a big lake, another major highway, and some mountains. “These aren’t really there, okay?” he explained. “I’m just adding them in to confuse the bad guys, in case this napkin falls into the wrong hands.”

He was joking, of course . . . but then again, that was the way Dave thought. He had a Special Forces OPSEC (operations security) mind-set all the time, no matter where he was or what he was doing.

Dave was an excellent operator and had no patience for what he saw as stupidity or incompetence. Outside of work, he was a tolerant guy who was slow to judge others and seldom held a grudge. When it came to work it was a different story. If someone screwed up in something work-related, he took it personally. If you were not up to the task or the mission, as far as Dave was concerned you were gone; you didn’t exist. Despite his sarcasm and perpetual irreverence, he loved what he did and took it very seriously, and there was a rock-solid sense of patriotism hidden quiet at his core. He believed in this country and was mightily pissed off at how
shoddy the general state of security and preparedness had become.

A day or two after we arrived at the
Cole
, we got word that someone had decided to provide cell phones to all the servicemen from the ship so they could call home to their families in the States. Most of us thought that was a pretty decent gesture. Dave was incensed.

“Those idiots,” he said. “With a thirty-nine-dollar scanner from Radio Shack I could listen to every one of those calls!” He didn’t stay quiet about it, either. He went straight to command and told them, “That’s a really nice gesture, guys—but do you realize none of those calls are secure?”

Later that day Dave was out patrolling the harbor when someone started motoring toward the
Cole
in a small speedboat. When ordered to stop, the unidentified pilot just mouthed off and kept coming.
Probably a journalist
, figured Dave—but he kept his weapon trained on the approaching figure. He called up to the bridge and said, “Hey, if this idiot breaks the hundred-meter line, I’m shooting him.” No reply came from the bridge, and Dave kept his sights glued to the guy, who kept drawing closer. He was two hundred meters away, then a hundred and fifty, then one twenty-five . . . and then the boat finally slowed, banked, and veered away. Definitely the healthier choice.

“Trust me,” said Dave later, “if that guy had breached the line, I would have put my first shot in the engine block—and if that didn’t stop him, the next shot would have been in
him
.” I didn’t doubt him for a moment. Dave was a graduate of the same NSW sniper course as Glen and me. He wouldn’t have missed—and he wouldn’t have hesitated, either. Dave
had a pragmatic, old-school-warrior’s view of the world. He didn’t believe for a moment that “right” would necessarily triumph over “might” simply because the good guys were the good guys. The only way you triumphed over the bad guys was by being better at what you did than they were. And when it came to the prospect of killing them, he wasn’t the least bit squeamish.

It took a few weeks to make the
Cole
ready for transport back to the States. Finally they loaded it onto a gigantic transport ship, the Norwegian MV
Blue Marlin
, and as the vessel pulled away and out toward open sea, the crew started playing some macho Kid Rock song on a set of loudspeakers.

“
Bullshit
,” Dave’s voice cut through. “I can’t believe you guys—that’s the
wrong
song to be playing right now!”

As far as Dave was concerned, we’d just lost. The other guys got the better of us and there was nothing to be proud of here. We fucked up, and they won; it was that simple. I’m sure the crew saw it differently. Theirs was a huge and difficult task: They had to keep the damn thing afloat, put out all the fires, ready it for transport and salvage, and do all that and more under the creepily hostile gaze of foreign nationals who seemed all too ready to shoot at them. So, hey, credit where credit was due. But to Dave there was nothing there to celebrate.

“We are in deep shit,” he mused as the
Blue
Marlin
and its crippled freight pulled away. We sure were. Dave just saw it before the rest of us did.

•   •   •

Dave’s radiant intelligence was just one facet of his outsize personality. The other was an unbridled wildness. These two sides of Dave contrasted so starkly that it was as if he were
two different people, each one pulling his life in opposite directions—a brainy technology nerd who required extreme physical risk the way the rest of us need oxygen. Apollo and Dionysus, god of rational thinking and god of chaos and the outrageous, wrapped into a single person.

To a degree, I related to that crazy risk-taker side of Dave. From the moment I could crawl I was a daredevil, constantly getting myself into trouble, courting danger, and pushing things to extremes. I made my poor mother’s life hell; she says it was a wonder I survived childhood, let alone adolescence. But Dave? He took recklessness to a whole new level. I could never be as extreme or outrageous as Dave, and wasn’t even sure I’d want to be. But I admired the hell out of his raw courage and sheer mental appetite.

While still in grade school, Dave asked his parents if he could take computer lessons—and this was in the early eighties, when personal computers were not yet popular. (Dave was born in 1973, a month after Mike Bearden and a year before me.) He would sit for hours messing around with his Franklin, an early competitor of the Apple II. And it wasn’t about playing games; he would sit there and program the damn thing. He personified “computer geek” before anyone had invented the term.

At the same time, he lived for physical thrills. Even from his earliest days, Dave was an adrenaline junkie. He loved being outside on his bike and using it to do the riskiest tricks possible. His dad helped him build a half-pipe in the backyard, where he practiced his bike moves for hours. They attached a zip line to Dave’s tree fort so he could go shooting down it with a banshee cry, practicing his feats of aerial derring-do.

The Scotts had a vacation home on the nearby Jersey coast, and by age three Dave was addicted to plunging into the ocean, no matter the water temperature. He would thrash around in the freezing-cold surf, lips turning blue, teeth chattering, and if anyone suggested it was time to get out, he’d say, “I’m n-n-not c-c-c-cold!” The cold just didn’t seem to bother him. One day his dad, Jack, found him playing around in a mudflat by the beach, rolling around down in the mud, doing push-ups. “He was so completely covered in mud,” says Jack, “all you could see were his eyes.”

The dude hadn’t even started kindergarten yet and he was already putting himself through BUD/S.

A decade and a half later, on a simmering Friday evening in July of 1990, when Dave was about to enter his senior year of high school, a summer blockbuster came out.
Navy SEALs
, starring Charlie Sheen, did a few million at the box office that first weekend, no more than a modest splash for a summer action film. But it ignited a lot of young men’s souls, including Dave’s. He walked out of that suburban theater with the siren song of life as a SEAL pounding in his blood.

At the same time, the world of numbers and electrons held as powerful an attraction as ever. A National Merit scholar, Dave graduated high school with excellent SAT scores, then enrolled in Penn State to study computer engineering. It looked for a while like the academic brain might hold sway over the thrill-seeker gene. But Dave quickly grew bored with college and couldn’t bring himself to sit through his classes. Soon he wasn’t even showing up for them. He gave it a year before dropping out.

When he called his parents to break the news that he was joining the Navy, they were aghast. Maggie Scott, Dave’s
mother, burst into tears on the phone and did everything she could to persuade him to change his mind. As her husband, Jack, says, “I heard some words from her mouth I heard only then and during childbirth.” Maggie sums it up this way: “We were not happy.” But they both knew that nothing they could do would budge him.

In 1993, two years after finishing high school, Dave went through BUD/S Class 195. He then spent the next few years in deployments with his SEAL team in various parts of the world.

One Sunday morning during these years, the phone rang in the Scott home in the Philadelphia suburbs. When Maggie picked up she was surprised and delighted to hear Dave’s voice on the other end. “Dave!” she exclaimed, beckoning to Jack to pick up an extension. “How are you?”

“Better than I was,” said Dave. He was calling from a hospital bed in Quito, Ecuador. “I was in a little accident,” he explained.

As his parents listened, horrified, he related the sketchiest details of his “little” accident. It had happened about a week earlier, in the middle of the night, and it involved a car crash somewhere along the Ecuador-Colombia border. That was all they ever knew. The story we heard on the teams was that he and some buddies had gotten into it with some locals and were speeding away from the banditos when their car rolled. One Golf Platoon teammate says he heard Dave was on a motorcycle at the time. Whatever actually happened, Dave had been badly hurt, his colon perforated and his insides pretty much torn out.

Dave was taken to a clinic in the area, but when they saw a sonogram the clinicians on staff knew they were way out of
their depth. Dave was medevaced out to emergency surgery in Quito, where he lay wide-open on an operating table for an extended series of procedures, including the removal of a few inches of intestine that were not salvageable. (We could see the evidence whenever Dave took off his shirt: a huge, ugly scar ran some ten inches vertically from his lower gut up to his rib cage. “Hey, check it out,” he’d say. “You wanna see some cut abs?”)