Lone survivor: the eyewitness account of Operation Redwing and the lost heroes of SEAL team 10 (10 page)

It’s a higher form of consciousness, and I do not mean that to be pretentious. It’s been said that only the very rich understand the difference between themselves and the poor, and only the truly brilliant understand the difference between themselves and the relatively dumb.

Well, only men who have gone through what we went through can understand the difference between us and the rest. In the military, even the rest understand what it takes to scale the heights of combat excellence. And in my case, it started inauspiciously. Way down on the ranch, with Mom in tears, refusing to leave the house to see me go. March 7, 1999. I was twenty-three.

To say that I was not making amazing headway in my hometown would be an understatement. The reputation Morgan and I had was not assisting either of us. There were always guys showing up wondering how tough we really were. I guess my dad considered it a matter of time before one of us was faced with a low-flying pugilist and either hurt someone badly or got badly hurt himself. And so I decided to get out of town and join the U.S. Navy SEALs. Morgan thought it was a great idea, and he introduced me to a recruiting officer in a nearby town, Petty Officer First Class Beau Walsh. He steered me down to the military enlistment processing station in Houston; that’s navy recruitment.

Naturally, I told them immediately there was no need for me to attend boot camp. I was already way too advanced for that. Yessir, I’ll go straight to Coronado, where the big dogs eat. That’s what I’m all about, I’m a half-trained SEAL already.

They sent me directly to boot camp. I signed the papers and prepared to report for duty in a few days. As I left the ranch, it was not a real ceremony of departure, but everyone was there, including Beau Walsh and Billy Shelton. As previously stated, Mom caved in and retreated to the house, unable to witness the departure of her baby. That was me.

My destination was more than a thousand miles to the north, Navy Recruit Training Command (RTC) in Great Lakes, Illinois. And I can truthfully say, it was where I spent the most miserable eight weeks of my entire life. I had never even seen snow, and I arrived in the middle of the worst blizzard that boot camp had seen in eleven years. It was like sending a Zulu to the North Pole.

That wind and snow came howling in across Lake Michigan, blasting its way onto the western shore where we were situated, thirty-five miles north of Chicago. Right on the water. I could not believe the sheer misery of that freezing weather. The camp was a gigantic place, with hundreds of recruits trying to make that miraculous transformation from civilian to U.S. Navy sailor. It was a drastic metamorphosis, both mental and physical, and it would have been difficult enough in fine weather. But in that ice, snow, and wind, Jesus. Words fail me.

I’d never needed winter clothes, and I had none. I remember being extremely pleased when the navy issued everyone the right gear — thick socks, boots, dark blue trousers, shirts, sweaters, and coats. They told us how to fold and store everything, showed us how to make our bunks every morning. Without missing a beat, they put us straight into physical training, running, working out, marching, drilling, and many classes.

I didn’t have much trouble, and I excelled in the swimming pool. The requirements were to enter the water feetfirst from a minimum height of five feet, remain afloat for five minutes, and then swim fifty yards using any stroke. I could have done that in my sleep, especially without having to worry about the occasional alligator or water moccasin.

The running would not have been that bad in decent weather, but the campus was absolutely frigid, and the wind off the lake was cutting. A penguin would have had trouble out there. We ran through snow, marched through snow, and made our way to classes through snow.

In that first week, while we were trying to avoid freezing to death, they instilled in us three words which have been with me ever since.
Honor, Courage, Commitment,
the motto of the United States Navy, the core values that immediately became the ideals we all lived by. I can remember to this day an instructor telling us, “What you make of this experience here at Great Lakes is what will make you as a person.” He was right. I hope.

In the second week, they put us through the Confidence Course. This is designed to simulate emergency conditions in a U.S. Navy warship. They taught us to be sharp, self-reliant, and, above all, to make key decisions on which our lives and those of our shipmates might depend. That word:
teamwork.
It dominates and infiltrates every single aspect of life in the navy. In boot camp, they don’t just tell you, they indoctrinate you. Teamwork. It was the new driving force in all of our lives.

Week three, they put us on board a landbound training ship. Everything was hands-on training. We learned the name of nearly every working part of that ship. They taught us first aid techniques, signaling ship to ship with flags (semaphore). We spent a lot of time in the classroom, where we focused on navy customs and courtesies, the laws of armed conflict, shipboard communication, ship and aircraft identification, and basic seamanship.

All this was interspersed with physical training tests, sit-ups, sit-reaches, and push-ups. I was fine with all of those, but the one-and-a-half-mile run in that weather would have tested the stamina of a polar bear. They told us anyone who failed could come back and take it again. I decided I would rather run barefoot across the Arctic than take it again. Gave it my all. Passed, thank God.

During week four, we got our hands on some weaponry for the first time — the M16 rifle. I was pretty quick with that part of the course, especially on the live-fire range. After that, the navy concentrated on which path through the service everyone wanted to take. That was also easy for me. Navy SEALs. No bullshit, right?

The firefighting and shipboard damage-control course came next. And we all learned how to extinguish fires, escape smoke-filled compartments, open and close watertight doors, operate the oxygen breathing apparatus, and move fire hoses around. The last part was the worst — the Confidence Chamber. You get in there with your class and put on a gas mask. Then someone unleashes a tear-gas tablet, and you have to take off your mask, throw it in a trash can, and recite your full name and Social Security number.

Every single recruit who joins the navy has to endure that exercise. At the end, the instructors make it clear: you have what it takes. There’s a place in the navy for you.

The final task is called battle stations. Teams are presented with twelve situations, all of which have been addressed during the previous weeks. This is where they grade the recruits, individually and as teams. When you’ve completed this, the trainers present you with a U.S. Navy ball cap, and that tells the world you are now a sailor. You have proved you belong, proved you have the right stuff.

The following week, I graduated, in my brand-new dress uniform. I remember passing the mirror and hardly recognizing myself. Standing tall, right there. There’s something about graduating from boot camp; I guess it’s mostly pride in yourself. But you also know a lot of people couldn’t have done it. Makes you feel pretty good. Especially someone like me, whose major accomplishment thus far had involved hurling some half-drunk cowboy out of an East Texas bar and into the street on his ear.

After I graduated, I flew immediately to San Diego, headed to Coronado Island and the navy amphibious base. I made my way there alone, a couple of weeks early, and spent my time organizing my uniforms, gear, and rooms, and trying to get into some sort of shape.

Most of us had lost a lot of condition at boot camp because the weather was so bad. You couldn’t just jog outside and go for a run because of the blizzards and the deep snow. Perhaps you remember that very brave guy who made the journey to the South Pole with the Royal Navy officer, Robert Falcon Scott, in 1912. He believed he was hindering the entire team because of his frostbite. Captain Oates was his name, and he crawled out into a raging blizzard one night with the immortal words, “I am going outside now. I may be gone for some time.”

They never found his body, and I have never forgotten reading his words. Guts-ball, right? Well, going outside at Great Lakes would have been a bit like that, and almost as brave. Unlike the gallant captain, we stayed by the heater.

And now we were going for runs along the beach, trying to get in shape for the first week of Indoctrination. That’s the two-week course known as Indoc, where the SEALs prepare you for the fabled BUD/S course (Basic Underwater Demolition/-SEALs). That one lasts for seven months and is a lot harder than Indoc. But if you can’t get through the initial pretraining endurance test, then you ought not to be in Coronado, and they don’t want you anyway.

The official navy literature about the reason for Indoc reads: “To physically, mentally and environmentally prepare qualified SEAL candidates to begin BUD/S training.” Generally speaking, the instructors do not turn on the pressure during Indoc. You’re only revving up for the upcoming trial by fire.

But they still make it very tough for everyone, officers and enlisted men alike. The SEAL programs make no distinction between commissioned officers coming in from the fleet and the rest of us. We’re all in it together, and the first thing they instill in you at Indoc is that you will live and train as a class, as a team. Sorry. Did I say
instill in you?
I meant,
ram home with a jack-hammer.
Teamwork. They slam that word at you every other minute.
Teamwork. Teamwork. Teamwork.

This is also where you first understand the concept of a swim buddy, which in SEAL ethos is an absolutely gigantic deal. You work with your buddy as a team. You never separate, not even to go to the john. In IBS (that stands for “inflatable boat, small”) training, if one of you falls over the side into the freezing ocean, the other joins him. Immediately. In the pool, you are never more than an arm’s length away. Later on, in the BUD/S course proper, you can be failed out of hand, thrown out, for not staying close enough to your swim buddy.

This all comes back to that ironclad SEAL folklore — we never leave a man behind on the battlefield, dead or alive. No man is ever alone. Whatever the risk to the living, however deadly the opposing fire, SEALs will fight through the jaws of death to recover the remains of a fallen comrade. It’s a maxim that has survived since the SEALs were first formed in 1962, and it still applies today.

It’s a strange thing really, but it’s not designed to help widows and parents of lost men. It’s designed for the SEALs who actually do the fighting. There’s something about coming home, and we all want to achieve that, preferably alive. But there is a certain private horror about being killed and then left behind in a foreign land, no grave at home, no loved ones to visit your final resting place.

I know that sounds kind of nuts, but nonetheless, it’s true. Every one of us treasures that knowledge: No matter what, I will not be left behind, I will be taken home. We are all prepared to give everything. And in the end it does not seem too much to ask in return, since we fight, almost without exception, on the enemy’s ground, not our own.

That World War I English poet and serving soldier Rupert Brooke understood the Brits do not traditionally bring home their war dead. And he expressed it right: “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England.” There’s not a Navy SEAL anywhere in the world who does not understand those lines and why Brooke wrote them.

It’s a sacred promise to us from our high command. That’s why it gets drummed into us from the very first day in Coro-nado — you are not going to be alone. Ever. And you’re not going to leave your swim buddy alone.

I suffered a minor setback in the early part of that summer when I was in Class 226. I managed to fall from about fifty feet up a climbing rope and really hurt my thigh. The instructor rushed up to me and demanded, “You want to quit?”

“Negative,
” I responded.

“Then get right back up there,” he said. I climbed again, fell again, but somehow I kept going. The leg hurt like hell, but I kept training for another couple of weeks before the medics diagnosed a cracked femur! I was immediately on crutches but still hobbling along the beach and into the surf with the rest of them. Battle conditions, right?

Eventually, when the leg healed, I was put back and then joined BUD/S Class 228 in December for phase two. We lived in a small barracks right behind the BUD/S grinder. That’s the blacktop square where a succession of SEAL instructors have laid waste to thousands of hopes and dreams and driven men to within an inch of their lives.

Those instructors have watched men drop, watched them fail, watched them quit, and watched them quietly, with ice-cold, expressionless faces. That’s not heartless; it’s because they were only interested in the others, the ones who did not crack or quit. The ones who would rather die than quit. The ones with no quit in them.

It was only the first day of Indoc, and my little room was positioned right next to the showers.
Showers,
by the way, is a word so polite it’s damn near a euphemism. They were showers, okay, but not in the accepted, civilized sense. They were a whole lot closer to a goddamn car wash and were known as the decontamination unit. Someone cranked ’em up at around 0400, and the howl of compressed air and freezing cold pressurized water forcing its way through those pipes sounded like someone was trying to strangle a steam engine.

Jesus. First time I heard it, I thought we were under attack.

But I knew the drill: get into my canvas UDT swim trunks and then get under those ice-cold water jets. The shock was unbelievable, and to a man we hated it, and we hated it for as long as we were forced through it. The damn thing was actually designed to power wash our sand-covered gear when we returned from the beach. The shock was reduced somewhat then because everyone had just been in the Pacific Ocean. But right out of bed at four o’clock in the morning! Wow! That was beyond reason, and I can still hear the sound of those screaming, hissing water pipes.