Unbreakable: A Navy SEAL’s Way of Life (22 page)

As we completed our planning and wrapped up the operations brief, I really felt a shift in the men. I doubt if outsiders would understand or appreciate the way SEALs are before a combat mission. The whole atmosphere is chaos. Fifty different men, with thousands of bombs, bullets, and anger you could cut with a knife, overshadowed by laughter and
jokes I wouldn’t dare to even write on paper. Suffice it to say that hell is no place for the faint of heart, and a place where SEALs are planning a mission is no place for hell.

We all knew this mission was going to be different. Since I had planned the damned thing, I had a feeling of doom I had not felt before. Impending doom. Enemy outposts were spread throughout the entire route, from insert to the target area. Fighting was inevitable.

I sat in my room preparing my gear, checking my weapons, ammo, and radios. I even took out my grenades. At the time, this seemed odd to me. My grenades sat on the table, and I picked each one up and turned it over in my hands. I felt the weight and imagined the damage they would do on this mission. I had never used a grenade in combat, yet somehow knew this would be an interesting mission, where I might.

Replacing the grenades in my gear, the photo I had on the wall behind my desk caught my eye. Stacy took this picture of the kids and me on our couch the night before I left for hell. What I saw now was the sadness in the kids’ eyes, the distance in my eyes, and the physical clinging to each other.

My own Internal Dialogue began screaming, “Don’t go on the mission. It isn’t worth dying for. All this exhaustion, all this time away from family, all this for a nation that doesn’t even care you are here.”

I sat for an hour, getting completely drawn into what I was saying to myself. I even cried uncontrollably. While hard to admit, it is true: the sadness overwhelmed me.

Somehow I crawled into my bed, totally depressed, and succumbed. My arms felt heavy; my legs were rubber. Damn the sadness. Fuck it: I am going to sleep. So I closed my eyes and left hell once again.

In my dream, I was immediately at the falls up in Lake Louisa. My canoe was adrift in the middle of the lake. The roar of the falls and the spray were ominous. Somehow, I had decided in my dream to be wearing a pair of UDT shorts, and had a BUD/S issue knife on my belt. I was also wearing the mountain biking helmet I had used in adventure racing. In my left hand, I carried the pipe carved with an Indian head over a perfect carving of
my
head forming the bowl. The pipe stem, leading out of the bowl, was the hollowed-out antler of the biggest buck I had ever killed as a young boy. In my right hand, I had the SCAR rifle I had used to kill so
many of the enemy. By the way, I was barefoot.

I could feel the draw of the carved-out bathtub in the center of the falls. I walked over and sat down to look at it. I looked at it for two days. Even in my dream, I recall thinking I had been sitting, looking, and not moving for a long time. In the evening, just before darkness fell, Captain Pat walked out of the mist behind me, and stood looking down.

I looked up and he said, “Why the fuck are you so sad? This is the life you chose, yet you are not choosing it now. Not choosing it now makes you weak. Choose it again, and jump in and live. Staying on the sidelines, fearing to jump in, will cause your death.” With that, he walked away.

I stood up immediately, moving forward to jump in, but Carnie was shaking me awake saying, “Jesus, Chief. We are ten minutes out to leaving on the bus for the airfield. You look like shit. Get your clothes on, and I won’t mention this to anyone. Oh, and by the way, I cried for three days after that first mission. I get it. Now get up; we need your ass on this op.”

I sat up, not saying a word, and Carnie never mentioned it again. We just loaded the bus and headed to meet the devil.

I vividly recall the wait for the three MH-47s. The temperature was hot, and the smell from nightly burning of trash and shit lingered from the lack of wind. The smell of hot jet fuel from the turbines will always be a war smell to me. The feel of the extra eighty pounds of body armor, bullets, and bombs I always carried will also provoke a Pavlovian reaction in me. To this day, when I touch my gun, my mind and body go into a programmed response mode.

After loading the bird and getting the thumbs up from my point man that all of us were, in fact, sitting on the bird, I recall looking out across the lights of Kandahar Airfield and saying to myself,
Let everything go: the only thing that matters is right here, right now. There is no tomorrow. There is no meaning to anything. There is simply facing whatever comes and making due.
I was not making a statement of defeat. To the contrary, I was making a statement of true strength and power. And, I would venture to say all of you would agree that being in the moment is the hardest thing to do in this world. You never truly master it. The moment you think you have mastered the unforgiving moment is the exact moment when you are holding on, and something bad always happens. I was jumping back into the pool in the falls of Lake Louisa.

I laugh as I recall the flight. For God’s sake, I can’t stay awake during flights. While falling asleep on a flight to hell or into combat doesn’t make any sense, I didn’t make it five minutes before I closed my eyes. After about an hour or so, I was rudely snapped awake by my point man yelling at me that we had one minute left before landing. So I opened my eyes and said, “Wow, I needed that sleep. I was tired.” He didn’t smile back; I think he was angry. I could never tell if he was angry with me or just angry in general. He was always angry.

Everything seemed normal. The MH-47 slowed, flared, and landed. I got off, and recall my legs were asleep from being tucked up underneath me for an hour. When I knelt down I could feel the pins and needles sensation of the nerves in my legs trying desperately to fire. The helo took off, and for the unforgiving second, I was covered in dust. I couldn’t see anything, losing track of where everyone was. At that moment, all hell broke loose.

For a minute after the helos leave, all is quiet. No one moves while you wait for the dust to settle and allow your senses to come screaming back. But right in that second before the senses rushed back, two RPGs were fired right at the position where the last MH-47 had dropped off the other group of SEALs who were with us. You could hear the whining and rush of air as the rockets cut through the dust, see the bright light, and then hear the delayed explosion of the grenade. My point man was lying right next to me, and we looked at each other and said, “Damn, this is going to be a long night.”

Often in movies, and with inexperienced fighters, the immediate response is either shooting back, panicking, or getting up and running. The problem with reality is, unless you have something to actually shoot and kill or know where the enemy is, all that panic and shooting back causes more problems. I was proud of this group; no one said a fucking thing. No one shot back. We all merely slithered away from those nasty grenade explosions, located all the friendly SEALs, and patrolled the hell out of there. Snowman calmly talked to two Apache helos we had ordered to linger miles away. After calmly telling the pilots (and I might add, whoever the female pilot was, she sure sounded sexy) where we were and where the shots came from, the sky lit up with missile trails from the love she was sending us by way of the booms on the hillside where the enemy
were trying to hide.

The problem now was how the hell were we going to patrol through these mountains—bypassing enemy fighters, into a target area where they now know we are coming, without getting killed? Patrolling is hard enough with eighty pounds of combat gear through the mountains of hell at 8,000 feet, but now we had to set up a small force to look into and cover the movement of the next force, by climbing up and down the mountains in succession. After about two hours of setting up and tearing down fighting positions, while the Apache helos were shooting and launching rockets along the hilltops paralleling our direction, I was exhausted.

Still, it’s remarkable how funny things occur, even in hell. My platoon had a new SEAL dog and handler assigned, and this was their first mission. That poor dog’s paws were not ready for the rocks and climbing up and down the mountains. The dog was exhausted, and every time I tried to take a step, I stepped right on his paw, making him yelp. I finally stopped, knelt down, and touched him, putting my hands on his bleeding, cracked paws. Don’t know if that helped, but he stayed away from my feet for the rest of the patrol in.

At this point, I have to take a pause. Many things had to happen in the development of my platoon and me, as a man, leading to our ability to function in this environment known as hell, or combat. No brief synopsis of our training would give you access to our level of performance. And no mere lecture series could possibly give you clarity about who we were as men and fighters.

Yet, to SEALs, all is clear, ingrained over years and years of working through problems together in harsh environments. Every single aspect of our days together fosters this identity and is finally embraced by our families in a way unparalleled in our society today. The single most critical aspect of what makes a man able and capable of withstanding the constant pressure from outside forces is the mastering of his own Internal Dialogue. I want my kids to understand this in their bones. To actually perform in this constant hell, we all have learned to say simple things to ourselves that most people don’t say at all, and don’t think are important. My personal saying is
“This is who I am. Times may suck, but I am a SEAL.”
These simple, factual Internal Dialogues are actually the biggest miracle in human performance. Because the opposite is what quitters
and non-performers say, such as,
“This sucks. I wish this was over. I hate this place.”
Or even
“I can’t wait to go home.”
A solid Internal Dialogue makes you
need
to be doing what you are doing. A bullshit Internal Dialogue actually makes you need to do something else, or worse, nothing.

Few military leaders, and fewer business leaders, would use these terms. Honestly, even fewer SEALS would break their performance down to this plain level of speaking. The Internal Dialogue making you
need
to be there isn’t referenced in any leadership or performance-oriented doctrine. Often this simple fact is shrouded in other buzz words, such as “teamwork,” and “practice,” or even, “well–designed plans and assets lead to peak performance.” But these statements are sales pitches. Human performance is based on the mastery of Internal Dialogue.

The Internal Dialogue leading to the
need
to be
needed
, or the being connected idea, is the fundamental performance truth of mankind. The
need
to be
needed
answers and addresses
why
men achieve anything and everything. Group achievement is founded on this fundamental truth. Each man simply has to tell himself he is
needed
and has to be connected to what is going on around him. He has to identify himself with the thing he does. They must be one and the same … no separation, no way out, and absolutely not something he is
trying.
I hate the word “try.” Try, by its very meaning, shows the truth of Internal Dialogue, the
need
to be
needed
, and connection. Trying literally means I am not the thing I am doing; I am separate from it. The world is filled with people who tried. We were not that type of men; SEALs are not that breed of man.

For me, in particular, I had sixteen years of passing through the trials of performance. To be exact, I had 220 days per year, for sixteen years, of being away from my family to make crystal clear the importance of using Internal Dialogue for being connected as a measure of my own performance. I
needed
to be
needed
by my family in order to perform in hell. After a difficult marriage, where that was not the case, a woman who understood the value of connection liberated me from the mundane—a true Spartan Wife. The form of connection on her part was all in, no way out; she put every ounce of effort toward connecting with both family and me. Spartans knew the value of fully embracing a woman was equally important to the overall performance of the man and the nation. I wonder what caused the world to cringe and run 180 degrees away from that
solution to performance? Poor Islamic women are put in check, so the men never truly flourish.

We were
connected
, we
needed
each other, and we were performing in hell. What more could you ask from life?

At that point, our troop faced some silly odds; we were being shot at by thirty enemy fighters. Our interpreter, who was listening to their attempt to coordinate attacks, learned they were from Chechnya. I liked the fact that they had come all the way here to do what they thought was right for their religion. You have to admire that conviction.

We were exhausted from two hours of movement through the mountains, and we hadn’t even hit the target. The Apache pilot, with her sexy voice, told us she saw the enemy carrying blankets over their heads in order to evade her thermal optics, and they were also wearing night vision devices.