Inside SEAL Team Six (13 page)

Then I got back on the radio and said, “Guys, I had a cutaway.”

I landed approximately a thousand feet away from the target, grabbed my chute, and jogged over to catch up with the rest of the team.

Another time, on a deployment in Key West, I came very close to drowning during a night static-ship takedown. We were doing a four-hour oxygen dive on Dräger with a six-man boat crew, navigating in a crowded harbor through pilings, with all sorts of ship noises overhead.

Once we arrived at the target ship, we set a vertical de-rigging line from the hull of the ship, with loops in it for each diver. We attached the pole and ladder to the line as we all removed our Drägers, fins, and weight belts and attached them to the de-rigging line, continuing to breathe through the mouthpiece attached to the inhalation hose.

As I was waiting for the verbal signal to surface in the pitch-black water, I suddenly realized that I couldn’t breathe. My first thought was that the inhalation hose had gotten twisted with the constant moving up and down around the de-rigging line.

So I felt along the hoses, but I found no kinks or twists. I also rechecked to make sure that the open/close valve on my mouthpiece was open. It was.

Next, I reached for the O
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bottle, thinking it had somehow been shut, but it was open too. I repeated these procedures three times.

Meanwhile, my head started to hurt. So I reached up to my swim buddy and shook his fin. I motioned to him that I was out of air. But neither of us could see anything.

I put my hand on his mouthpiece, indicating that I wanted to buddy breathe with him, but he didn’t understand my signal and backed off.

All I could think to do was repeat my emergency procedures again. So I checked my hoses, mouthpiece, and O
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bottle. My head felt like it was about to explode. Now my only option was to swim up to the bottom of the ship with my hand over my head in case I hit the hull headfirst. I desperately wanted to take a mouthful of seawater and end the agonizing pain that I was in. It was a horrible thought, and one that still shames me.

Using the hull as a guide, I made my way to the side of the ship and approached the surface. But the ship was close to a large structure and I couldn’t squeeze through.

By this time it felt like someone had thrust an ice pick in my brain. Every nerve in my head was screaming.

With no idea how much time had elapsed or how many seconds I had left, I kicked on a steady course, hoping to find an opening to the surface. My body started to sink. I was running out of steam.

During the last moments underwater, I saw a light and followed it. I swam from midship to bow and surfaced! Then quickly uttered a prayer of thanks.

I swam to the portside of the ship, where my teammates were going up the ladder, and joined the stack. The light I saw was actually a moonbeam.

After the op, during the hot wash, where we discussed all phases of the op in detail, I told the team what had happened. It turned out to have been a very unusual malfunction in which the inhalation butterfly valve in my mouthpiece had sealed in the shut position.

I was lucky to be alive.

Despite the constant training activity, guys on the team complained that we weren’t getting enough real-world ops. Some felt that ST-6 had become a political show horse, something the military trotted out to impress the big money folks in DC.

Since I was the only corpsman on my assault team, I rarely got time off. Anything we did as a team that involved danger—which was everything—required my presence. Even if a small group of guys was sent off to do breaching or ordnance disposal, I had to go with them.

My family life was completely on hold, which made my wife, Kim, unhappy, since I was never home. We were actually deployed about three hundred days a year.

When I asked for leave to attend my sister’s wedding, I was told that I couldn’t go. I got the same answer when my second sister was married. I still regret missing their weddings.

I wasn’t allowed to visit my uncles when they were dying. Nor was I given permission to attend their funerals.

During this time, I got a call from my parents, who were living in Westerly, Rhode Island. Because they knew I was very busy, they never asked me for anything. But this time my mom and dad said that my younger brother, Rick, was in real trouble and needed my help. He was drinking heavily and doing drugs; he had even attacked his wife and daughter with a Buck knife I’d given him for Christmas.

That night I sat down and wrote Rick an eleven-page letter. I spoke from my heart. I wrote:

I went to my assault team officer and asked him if I could go to Rhode Island for the weekend. I told him that my brother was in a lot of trouble and I needed to help him.

The officer said. “Sorry, Doc, but we can’t afford for you to be away now.”

I decided to go anyway. The only person I told was my swim partner, Clell.

I said, “Clell, if we get recalled, you know where I am.”

“Okay.”

“Maybe I’ll lose my job, but it’s my only brother and I have to do this.”

The next day, I flew to Providence. My brother, Rick, picked me up on his Harley. He had long hair, a beard, and a black leather jacket—the same motorcycle-gang regalia I wore before I joined the Navy.

Rick had been a tough, well-built guy, but now he looked sickly and skinny. We rode directly to a biker bar. By the time we sat down, it was around eleven in the morning.

I turned to my brother and asked, “Rick, is this all you do, just hang out and party?”

He answered, “No, I stay here until nine or ten at night, then I go out partying.”

“Did you come here to reprimand me?” he asked.

“No,” I answered. “I came here at the risk of losing the best job I ever will have to hopefully save your life.”

The two of us sat next to each other at the bar. To my right stood a gray-bearded biker with patches all over his leather vest.

He turned to me and said, “Your brother is a wild man. He comes in here every night and does eight balls [an eighth of an ounce of cocaine] with all the coke whores. They crawl all over him. He’s crazy.”

I said, “That’s why I’m here.”

The bartender set some beers in front of us.

I turned to my brother again and said, “Rick, I wrote you a long letter last night. It will be easier for me to give you the letter than for me to tell you all that it says.”

I handed him the letter, and he started reading. I could tell he was moved. When he finished reading it, he folded up the letter and stuffed it in his pocket.

A minute or so later, the bartender came over and asked Rick if he wanted another drink.

Rick said, “No, I’m on the wagon.”

That’s all he said. He’s been on the wagon ever since. Today, almost thirty years later, he’s a successful businessman, with a wife and two wonderful children. And I’m so proud of him.

He still rides with motorcycle clubs and attends big bike rallies but is completely against drinking and doing drugs, and he has helped hundreds of people who are trying to end their addictions.

When I returned to the team the following Monday, the officer hadn’t even noticed that I’d left. And I decided that if I wanted a life, I needed to train some of the other guys on the assault team to be medics.

So I started planning a mini goat lab and recruited four guys, one from each of the four boat crews, to attend.

Just before I started to train them, I received word that the new CO, Captain Murphy, wanted to see me. (Captain Thomas E. Murphy replaced Captain Gormly in early 1986.)

Captain Murphy said, “Sorry, Doc. But that goat lab you had planned—we’re going to have to cancel it.”

“Why, sir?”

“The team is under such close scrutiny, I don’t need the press to find out that we’re chopping up goats. I was shot in the leg in Vietnam. I didn’t need somebody who chopped up goats to save me.”

I said, “I understand, sir. But you can’t cancel this.”

The officer in charge of my team, who was sitting beside me, said, “Don, he’s the CO. Let it go.”

“I know, but this is important. We’re going to have an accident one day, and we don’t have enough medics in my team to cover everything we do.”

Captain Murphy eventually got tired of hearing me talk and relented. He said, “Okay. Your medics can go to goat lab. But no one else.”

My point was that we didn’t have enough medics. In fact, we had only one, and that was me.

But I had received permission to conduct the goat lab. So I typed up forms for eight people, now two from each boat crew, and made them all “medics.” I had no authority to do so, but I did it anyway.

Then I ran a week-long goat lab and taught the eight medics how to perform cricothyrotomies and cut-downs, how to insert chest tubes and make splints, and so on. All the ABCs of combat medicine. And I made all of them advanced trauma medical kits, which they wore.

Less than two months later, my boat crew was called to do a demonstration at Fort Bragg in North Carolina for a group of VIPs.

First, we rehearsed. Each four-man team flew in on separate Black Hawk helicopters. The helos flared and hovered about thirty feet over the tarmac as we fast-roped down, two men from each helo at a time, wearing gas masks, camo, and all our
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Once we all got on the ground, we lined up and faced the reviewing stand, which was going to be packed with senators, congressmen, admirals, generals, and other VIPs. The rehearsal was rough, because one of our Black Hawks came in on a hard landing. Then a platoon of Rangers rappelled down from ropes after us, and a few of them broke ankles.

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The Black Hawks approached the tarmac and flared. My partner and I fast-roped down, but when the second two started descending, one of them—a SEAL named Mark—got hung up. The strap from his M5 got stuck on something in the helo.

I shouted up at him from the tarmac, “Mark, come on down.”

His weapon sling had dislocated his shoulder, and he was hanging from it and in a lot of pain.

He shouted back, “I hurt my shoulder.”

I said, “I’ll look at it when you get down here.”

He cut the sling and came down, and our eight-man assault team ran up past the side of the reviewing stand. I saw that Mark’s right shoulder was dipping way down, obviously dislocated.

As I was examining Mark, I saw the CH-53 carrying the Rangers approach. It hit its back rotor on the tarmac and bounced about seventy feet into the air. The rear ramp was open, and, as I watched, a soldier came out the back door just as the tail of the helicopter swung left. Then I saw a large pink burst, and the soldier flew through the air and landed in the dirt.

I was standing about a hundred meters away with my mask, body armor, and
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gear still on. I threw down my MP5 and ran as fast as I could to the downed man.

He was lying facedown in a pool of blood with his helmet still on. I turned him over and saw that his entire face and most of his head had been sliced off.

I took a deep breath.

Then I looked to my left and realized that there were six other bodies lying on the ground.

I hadn’t even noticed that the helicopter had thrown those bodies out as well. People in the reviewing stand had ducked down and were screaming. They thought the helicopter was going to explode.

I had been so focused on the first soldier who had fallen out that I had experienced ocular exclusion (aka tunnel vision).

But as luck would have it, all eight guys that I had put through goat lab were there with their advanced emergency medical packs. They did what they had just been taught to do and went to work on the six soldiers who were torn up and had broken bones.

One guy was having trouble breathing, so I tried sweeping his mouth for broken teeth or bones. When I saw that the airway obstruction was down in his windpipe, I made a one-inch incision below the larynx and heard a loud whoosh as all the blocked air came out.

Then I inserted an airway tube that I had in my kit and started breathing into it. Mouth-to-cric.

After the medevac helicopters came to take the injured soldiers to the hospital,
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So the VIPs returned to their seats and we continued on with the shooting and climbing demonstrations. We did double taps, but guys weren’t hitting the targets as tightly as usual. I also noticed that people were looking at me funny.