Unbreakable: A Navy SEAL’s Way of Life (19 page)
Read Unbreakable: A Navy SEAL’s Way of Life Online
Authors: Thom Shea
I think what I do with the men actually reinforces not only that what we are doing is what we need to do, but also demonstrates the respect I have for each of the men for being here. During the Helmand mission, they showed me, and themselves, they were capable of doing quite well here in hell.
Email to Stacy:
Stacy, a week has passed since our last email and video chat. I have so missed my family. Before I tell you what we went through during the last two missions, know we are all here, healthy and unbroken. I so long for your touches.
The first mission we embarked on was very straightforward. We loaded up our SEAL force and flew to a remote base to link up with our SF brothers. We had an hour on the ground to talk through some of the last details and allow our communications experts to get their final checks with all the assets and other players during the mission.
We have become used to, and relaxed at, the thought of flying into unknown areas, into bad guy backyards, searching through the mazes of buildings we inevitably find. This target area was a maze, too, but the men handled it very well.
The main compound was surrounded by a ten-foot wall, spread out over a 100-yard by 100-yard area. The inside compound was a literal maze of interconnected buildings, with crawl spaces linking some of the buildings to each other.
I found the first crawl hole and could not fit my big ass through, so I backward scooted, then pulled the smallest guy I had over. We call him the Mad Hatter.
He looked at me and said, “Are you fucking serious? Right now?”
“No, I am joking. You are welcome to sit with your back against the wall for the rest of the day, with your thumb in your mouth. The choice is yours,” I snickered.
He pulled out his pistol and crawled in. After the light and sound of him scooting disappeared, I looked up and saw LT staring down at me from the roof. I shrugged my shoulders and said, “I bet he is pissing himself
about now, don’t you?”
“Sometimes being small doesn’t pay,” said LT as he laughed and walked away.
After two minutes, I could see a flashlight coming back through the space. When he fully birthed himself from the canal, he sat down, and I saw he was soaked head to toe. I didn’t say a word, since I knew he’d report when he got his composure back.
Finally, he looked up and said, “Holy fuck, Chief; I about drowned in there. It all of a sudden dropped off. I was head down and couldn’t turn around. I dropped my pistol, too. Once I pushed myself up out of the water, I turned and could see my pistol at the bottom of the little elbow. I put my feet in, slid underwater, squeezed my pistol between my feet, and pulled my body back up. I suppose now I know why we do drown proofing in BUD/S.”
“Well, get your guns back up, this clearance isn’t close to being over. Shake it off,” I replied.
I moved back outside to see where all the men were. As we pushed the clearance south along the wall, I grabbed one of my new heavy weapons guys who had missed the first part of deployment and placed him on the right flank security.
I have not mentioned much about these guys. I suppose now is a good time. One guy, Salty, is the toughest and most loyal man I have ever met. When we were forming up the platoon eighteen months ago, we needed one more man. I had a list of potential guys still in SEAL Qualification Training from my master chief. I went to the training building and interviewed some from the list. This guy was at the bottom. He had gotten in a fight with “real” team guys at a local bar and had suffered a detached retina. He had been recovering for three months, becoming disillusioned and pissing off everyone around him. My kinda guy.
As I talked with him, I began to like this dude. The willingness to fight, the lack of fear, and the hatred for administrative leadership reminded me of myself. I offered him an option—only one option.
“Salty, here is the deal. If I take you on, we will have no drinking of any kind from here on out. Unless we are at a platoon family function and I say you can, I better never hear of you being drunk. I expect you to be the hardest, strongest man in the platoon, and I am going to give you the
machine gun to carry. If you are ever late, you are out of the platoon. If I ever hear you bad mouth anyone in the platoon, you are out. Can you live by those rules?”
He looked at me and replied, “Chief, I will live by those rules.”
“Good. Pack your bags and check into Team Seven Bravo platoon tomorrow morning at 0700 hours,” I advised.
Since then, he has done every single thing asked of him. He has become dependable as a teammate, reliable in all weather, and I call him friend. So I set him on flank security and said, “You are the only one out here. Don’t let any enemy get in on us. Don’t ask for permission to shoot; this isn’t a game. Don’t drop this position for any reason. I will come get you when the target is secured. OK?”
He nodded, and I walked away.
The clearance went on for another hour of twists and turns, but no shots were fired, and nothing big was found. As we set up for the long day of sitting and waiting, LT and I joked about the tunnels and looked at the really old weapons we had found on target. Flintlock, black powder rifles, and some Russian shotguns from the early 1900s. They may have been old, but they can still do damage.
The sun was coming up as I walked around getting the final head count and ensuring we had 360-degree coverage. Suddenly, I realized I had not gone back to relieve Salty on the flank. “Jesus, Salty, two hours flew by. Next time I won’t tell you to stay in position until I get back. Shit, if I had died, would you have stayed here forever?” I asked when I returned.
Laughing, he replied, “No, if you had died, I would have killed the ones who had shot you, or died trying.” He stood up and turned to pee. I thought to myself,
Wow, this dude did exactly what he was told to … in an age of defiance. Impressive.
On the short walk back, he grabbed my arm, and we stopped. “Chief, I am here because of you. I will never forget your support. I owe you.” I patted him on the back and said, “Go get some rest and sleep. Tomorrow is going to be a long day.”
The remainder of the operation was completely hilarious. On the final building, we needed to breach the main gate. My original Leading Petty Officer (LPO), who had been sent to Iraq during the first part of the deployment, had taken the lead to conduct the explosive breach. I think he
put in too much charge, poor guy. We blew the entire metal door into the compound. It flew, spinning like a saw, about two feet above the ground, across the inner courtyard, then buried into a wall. The craziest part is the entire family sleeping in the courtyard didn’t even wake up.
On the second floor, our snipers needed to breach some small holes in one of the west-facing walls to get eyes on that direction. Again, LPO aided in the explosive breach. I was on the first floor with him, All Around, and Salty. Boom!
“Damn, that seemed a bit loud for a porthole breach,” I said with a frown.
All Around turned to LPO and said, “Fuck, how much did you use?”
LPO said, “Just two quarter-blocks.”
All Around, who was also a breacher, mused, “Um, that is a half a pound of C4!”
So up we all crawled, back through the 2,000-year-old, hand-molded, mud staircase. I was the last one to climb up. Everyone stood silently. The explosion had lifted the mud roof and twisted it forty-five degrees. The south-facing wall of the room was no longer there. Most interesting—the holes produced were only six inches wide.
I laughed and said, “Good luck,” before crawling back down the ancient staircase.
ADAMANTINE LESSON EIGHT
Mentors and masters
Mentorship is a great thing. I am beginning to see, in a small way, my effect on my men, and find myself thinking of Jerry’s offer to mentor and affect both me and the platoon. I think great men show up when we are at a place where we’re ready to be mentored.
Look for and seek advice and guidance from people who are experts at the things you, too, want to be great doing. Be ready to receive their coaching, their mentorship. I know you kids will all want to go it alone. For a variety of reasons, humans have a natural tendency to do things alone. You have learned to use your own Internal Dialogue to shape your actions. I think this same Internal Dialogue works against us sometimes if we are not careful. Yet, in the case of being open to mentorship, you will have to quiet your Internal Dialogue, as it will most assuredly tell you this person is not going to help, or this person will steal your dreams, or some other self-sabotaging directive.
Don’t listen to these sharp words, but also choose wisely who you let into your world. Doing so is not easy. Ultimately, a great mentor will show his or her worth in your actions. Your actions will be far greater with a mentor than they would have been alone.
When we arrived back at camp from this operation, we were immediately brought into the Task Force operations center. The army intel gents were all in a tizzy because some Army soldier named Bo Bergdahl had
been captured, and we were to go after him right away, that night. We received the whole intelligence brief and immediately set to finding his location and planning what we needed to do to get there.
This is what we SEALs call a Time Sensitive Target (TST), which, to us, means everything evolves as we go, especially once on the ground. After breakfast, we all went to work planning, cleaning our weapons and gear, and coordinating with the helos retasked with supporting this high-priority mission. After five hours, the information we had compiled led us to a huge village between where he was last sighted and the Pakistani border.
These missions are fun, in that you have to decide if you want to hit the target hard, meaning land right on top, using speed to secure the main objective, or if you want to land really fucking far off and move in slowly, so as not to give the enemy reason to feel scared. We were not 100 percent sure that ol’ Bo was there, so we decided to land really fucking far out in the middle of the desert and sneak our way over to the big-ass village. Briefing the men on the mission, I could see their body posture change from “Yeah, this is cool,” to “Oh shit, this is going to hurt.” The plan called for an eleven-kilometer hike once inserted. Then we had to secure five of the buildings on the east side of the village to block any egress toward Pakistan. They would have to escape six kilometers across open ground to get away, if they were there at all.
After dinner, we calmed down a bit, and I spent my time reviewing the overhead images we had of the village and compounds. Four well-maintained roads led into the area, and one big one led east to a neighboring state. We counted at least 100 villagers moving in and around the main compounds. “God, I hate noncombatants,” I muttered to myself. You never know if they are hiding shit, and you also never know how strung out the assault will be in an attempt to manage that many people.
I grabbed Nike and said, “Bro, let’s not go fast once we begin the assault. We are not sure where, or even if, Bo is there. They will not be able to run away with him. So. let’s just take it one building at a time.”
Nike said, “Yeah, he ain’t there. This intel is spotty, at best. At least we will get our hike on.”
Waiting at the airfield for the MH47s to pick us up, I realized we all truly wanted this life. This life of constantly doing things most people
couldn’t do on their best day. We all happily wanted to get picked up to fly deeper into hell to rescue some stupid ass. We weren’t really into this to rescue him—it was more about rescuing us from the boredom of a mundane life.
The flight was to be seventy minutes long. I knew I was going to get a good hour’s worth of combat sleep. I suppose if the helo crashed, I wouldn’t recall. I’d just wake up in some spirit world. (Sorry: relaying this thought makes me chuckle.)
All joking stopped when I was jabbed awake at the one-minute-out call from Nike. When my senses popped to life, I was struck by the immediate rush of sound, though I had been on the helo for a long time. Then, I noticed the pervasive green light of the night when my night vision flipped on. And, finally, I acknowledged the numbness of my legs, because they were under me while I slept. These sensations were now the norm of my pre-combat experience.
At the thirty second mark, I drank down my travel Gatorade and tossed the bottle onto the deck of the helo. Once on my knees, the time warp began, and everything slowed down. Mostly, during these time warps, I can hear my heartbeat in my ears, and see the movements and various postures of my men. Still, each experience is weird.
Now on the ground, we all waited for the dust to settle and the world to return to normal after the helos lifted off. All elements checked in on the radios, and I signaled Nike to take the force out on the eleven-kilometer hike. At least this was the flattest land we had seen in months. The first five kilometers were simply in a straight line, keeping the big mountain to our left. The second part was, again: simply turn left and walk the next leg, keeping the mountain on our left. We were in a four-mile wide valley and walking right in the very center between two big mountains. We had several air assets with eyes on us and the target. In reserve, we had two Apaches lying down, with engines turned off, in the middle of the desert just waiting for something to happen. At this stage in the deployment, we were all linked to the tactical mindset of, “Just put us in a hornet’s nest and wait to see what happens.”