KBL (11 page)

Troy Roberts loved to work the shoot houses. Which was a good thing, because now that he was back from Purgatory, he was spending a lot of time in them. He knew it was a cliché, but he still loved the smell of gunpowder, the adrenaline rush of shooting on the move, the unit integrity that came from knowing—really
knowing
—where every member of your team was every millisecond of the scenario, and the satisfaction of putting his rounds exactly, precisely where he wanted them to go.

Another reason he loved working in shoot houses was that they gave him—and the rest of his six-man assault element from Charlie Troop—the chance to practice over and over and over again the intricate, complex, sometimes problematical choreography of snatch and grab and capture/kill executed at close quarters, under high stress, and always contrapuntally against unforeseen events and the omnipresent Mr. Murphy of Murphy’s Law.

Because despite all the hours of rehearsals, all the force-on-force scenarios, all the endless repetitions that every man in DEVGRU was responsible for doing, Troy and his shipmates understood—because they’d been there—that no matter how well prepared you were, no matter how many times you’d rehearsed the scenario, no matter how much you honed your body and your mind and prepped your gear, in the real world Murphy’s Laws of Combat always apply. Troy’s favorite was Murphy’s original law:
What can go wrong, will go wrong.
But he was also a firm believer in a few of the others. He understood that no op-plan ever survives initial contact, that five-second fuses always burn just three seconds, and that if your attack is going perfectly, it’s an ambush.

And there was the one Murphy’s Law of Combat that, at least to Troy, summarized much of the thinking behind special operations:
If it’s stupid but it works, it’s not stupid
.

The shoot houses at Dam Neck, much like the one at top-drawer training facilities like the old Blackwater complex in Moyock, North Carolina, are multilevel structures with moveable walls and adjustable stairwells. They can be rigged to resemble an intricate warren of narrow hallways connecting small rooms, like the ones you’d find in Beirut’s southern suburbs or
droguista
hideaways in Bogota, Colombia, or the multilevel Iraqi villas common to the Triangle of Death, where Sunni Jihadis still lived, or walled Taliban compounds like the ones in Helmand Province, or even a couple of floors of the Taj Mahal Hotel and Tower in Mumbai. All you needed was a floor plan and the shoot house crews would build it for you.

Within twenty-four hours you could practice assaulting a Yemeni hovel or a Saudi prince’s palace; rehearse multiple simultaneous entries; blow doors with shaped charges or rake-and-break windows. You could work force-on-force using Simunitions—flesh-seeking, red- or blue-dye primer-powered rounds that stung like hell when you got hit—with one of the other assault elements playing the bad guys.

And then there was the occasional dog-and-pony show, when some VIP—the speaker of the house, the secretary of state, Prince Charles and Camilla—would visit the compound, and they’d sit inside one of the shoot house rooms and an assault element would show off all its bells and whistles and stage a live-fire hostage rescue using mannequin terrorists and the VIPs as the hostages.

The shoot house instructors loved to make life difficult. They would add nasty elements—invisible tripwires attached to flash-bang grenades, for example—to keep DEVGRU shooters alert. They’d start a scenario in total darkness and then turn the lights on, watching how the suddenly blinded shooters adjusted to their new situation. They would do their best to introduce Murphy’s Laws into every stage of every exercise, so that every single DEVGRU SEAL would be able to think on his feet and realize that rigidity ain’t no good and blindly following an op-plan just because it’s there can get you killed.

Lieutenant Colonel Pete Blaber, one of Delta’s better squadron commanders in the 1990s, had put it this way: “If you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail.”

DEVGRU’s shoot house instructors phrased it a little more starkly. A stenciled sign nailed above the entrance of Shoot House No. 1 at Dam Neck said it all:

DARWIN SUN TZU MUSASHI
ADAPT, OVERCOME, OR DIE!

This morning’s exercise would be a variation of the standard capture/kill template that had been in existence since 1983. It had been refined since then, of course, and DEVGRU’s equipment was a lot more sophisticated and its weapons a lot more efficient and reliable. Sure, now mission briefs were done on PowerPoints instead of using chalk on a blackboard, and you had drone and satellite imagery instead of drawings. But the core of capture/kill hadn’t changed in decades. In fact, it hadn’t changed in more than half a century.

Capture/kill, just like the heart of all special operations, relies on the theory of relative superiority, which was first formalized in 1995 in Bill McRaven’s seminal book
Spec Ops
. Briefly stated, relative superiority occurs when a small group of assaulters gains a pivotal tactical advantage over a larger adversary. They do this through the use of six basic principles listed by McRaven: speed, surprise, simplicity, security, repetition, and purpose.

Think Entebbe, July 4, 1976, or Skorzeny’s September 1943 rescue of Benito Mussolini, missions conducted by small units that, because of speed, surprise, and violence of action, overcame much larger opposing forces and achieved their objectives successfully. What had worked for the Nazi captain Otto Skorzeny were the same dynamics that allowed Yonatan Netanyahu’s Israeli shooters to rescue a hundred hostages from their terrorist captors: the six basic principles of relative superiority.

It was those basic principles that T-Rob and his Red Squadron assault element would hone in their shoot houses at Dam Neck, up north at Fort A. P. Hill, where they practiced fast-roping and assaulting compounds from modified Black Hawk 60-J special operations helicopters, or the one hundred square miles of desert near Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, where they dropped out of perfectly good aircraft six miles above the ground and free-fell almost four miles before popping their chutes at eighteen thousand feet and parasailing two miles to their drop zone.

Today T-Rob’s Charlie Troop and his DEVGRU mentor Danny Walker’s Alpha Troop were working a scenario that had been dropped on them at 0630. It was a live ammo drill, their tenth since Red Squadron had been reactivated eight days previously. They’d started with walk-throughs, then progressed to empty weapons. Then, three days ago, they’d commenced live fire exercises. It was all about bringing their shooting and moving skills—frangible skills—back online.

The problem: Stage a helicopter insertion of a twenty-four-member assault element to capture/kill an HVT living in a multilevel villa in an urban environment. It was the same basic scenario they’d worked for the past two days. Only the shape of the target had changed. On the tenth, it was a two-story townhouse; yesterday, a split-level house; today there were three floors.

They’d been supplied with a rough drawing of the villa’s exterior and the parcel on which it sat. There was one other structure, a square building that was marked out of bounds, which sat directly opposite the front door. There were no other entrances marked and no windows on the ground floor. They were not given any information about the interior design, but were informed they would be rehearsing a nighttime operation.

This was SOP so far as the SEALs were concerned. Most HVT missions took place at night. That was when the target was most vulnerable and SEALs were in their element, given the array of night-vision, infrared, and thermal equipment available to them.

Charlie’s 6-Team of six shooters was the entry team, which would breach the door, then follow 2-Team and work the starboard side of the ground floor. Charlie’s 2-Team, which comprised six assaulters, would clear the ground-floor rooms and hallways. One-Alpha’s shooters would take the second and third floors, and 3-Alpha’s SEALs would be exterior security.

The two dozen men met in Red Squadron’s workroom, a nondescript space that closely resembled a large, midwestern high school classroom. Two flags, the Red, White and Blue and the Navy’s Blue and Gold, stood on stanchions at the front. The walls bore pictures taken during missions and photographic portraits of Red Squadron’s previous commanding officers. There were individual desks for seventy-two on a spatter-patterned linoleum tile floor, a reference library sporting IKEA shelves, an array of AV equipment whose cost probably went into the mid-six figures, a coffee dispenser, and half a dozen each secure and nonsecure computers.

The Red Squadron CO, Commander David Loeser, waited until the Sailors settled in. Then he rapped on one of the front row desks and said, “Okay, guys, listen up. We’ve got another scenario from JSOC to work.”

Loeser, a Marylander who’d grown up on the Eastern Shore near Cambridge, was thirty-nine and would probably make captain by the time he was forty-five. He was pretty happy with the squadron in general, and this particular group specifically. There was a good mix of youngsters and seasoned veterans. They had gelled, too, come together into a real team. They could work in pairs, quartets, half-dozens, or dozens. They were cross-trained and could handle one another’s assignments if necessary.

They were, Dave Loeser thought as he looked at them, exactly what Roy Boehm, the maverick Mustang lieutenant and godfather of all SEALs, had in mind when in 1961 he’d conceived the idea of a Navy special operations unit of rugged individualists who worked together like the proverbial well-oiled machine, who could do everything from picking locks, to falling out of the skies holding an atomic submunition, to rescuing hostages, to dropping behind enemy lines to break things and kill people. A team that could go anywhere, do anything, and come out the other side having prevailed against all odds.

Except for one factor. The Linda Norgrove disaster of November. Loeser thought of it as That Horrible Episode. The Norgrove debacle had, if not shattered their self-confidence, certainly dinged it badly. Red Squadron’s deployment had been curtailed. Until this past week, they’d been allowed to do nothing but administrative duties.

After Norgrove, the entire squadron—six troops totaling seventy-eight Sailors—had been stood down. Because they were a team, the innocent suffered along with the guilty. There’d been no training, no range time, none of the classes in everything from battlefield medicine to hand-to-hand combat to other skills that kept their unique capabilities in top form.

The day the inquiry ended, with one Sailor dismissed from DEVGRU and the others cleared, Loeser talked about his troop’s condition with Captain Tom Maurer, DEVGRU’s commanding officer. Maurer was sympathetic, but firm: either your people will get past this, or we’ll replace your people. The OPTEMPO, the pace of any operation, he reminded Loeser, was unforgiving. Either Red Squadron would pull its weight, or changes would be made.

Loeser knew he had first-class personnel. Indeed the squadron CO thought the newly redeemed T-Rob and his shipmates were making excellent progress. Their tactical skills were first-class; their problem-solving abilities were good. What they needed now was the self-confidence they’d had prior to Norgrove. That was the nut that had to be cracked. Yes, they’d screwed up. Terribly. But they had to learn to live with it, and they had to learn from it. Loeser understood that the guns, knives, and grenades they carried were only tools. The most dangerous weapon a SEAL possessed was his brain. Right now, that particular weapon wasn’t operating the way it should. And it was his responsibility to fix the problem. What these kids needed, Loeser understood, was a nudge, an ineffable and indefinable
something
that would give them back the super edge that the very, very best of DEVGRU SEALs had. When that happened, Loeser would have Red Squadron back again.

Loeser glanced appreciatively at the Alpha Troop master chief. Danny Walker had that edge. He was, in Loeser’s opinion, the best master chief in the Navy. Danny epitomized what Loeser considered Old Navy, the Navy of wooden ships and iron men. He was rough around the edges, but he demanded—and he received—110 percent from all who served under him. He achieved this, Loeser understood, because he led from the front. Led by example.

It was a paradigm that had not been lost on Dave Loeser, who learned as much from Danny Walker as any of the enlisteds. That was one reason Loeser loved his job so much, loved Naval Special Warfare so much. NSW was a small community, a tight community. As an ensign just out of the Naval Academy he had seen that, just because some officers made it through BUD/S and wore the trident, they weren’t necessarily Warriors.

But Loeser’s goal was to be a SEAL in the Roy Boehm mold, a lead-from-the-front Warrior. So even at the Academy, he had conscientiously sought out Warriors and tried to learn from them. He listened to chiefs as they talked about what they had done and how they had done it. He read Sun Tzu, Musashi, and Clausewitz; he devoured books on tactics, history, and warfare.

But even then he realized that he still had a lot to learn about both warfighting and leadership. That was why he applied to NSW and went to BUD/S, where he learned a lesson that all too many of his colleagues and Annapolis classmates failed to learn.

It was during BUD/S Class 198 that Dave Loeser came to understand that from-the-front leadership is a two-way street. The Navy of ship drivers and Airedales revolved around a caste system set in stone: it was all about the ward room and the chiefs’ goat locker.