Inside SEAL Team Six (18 page)

He said, “On three, we’ll rush them!”

“No, Chito,” I said. “Let them come to us. We have cover. We’re undetected.”

He said, “No, let’s go get them.”

“No. Listen to me, Chito.”

The noise grew louder, and the object crept closer. Our hearts were pounding. Our weapons were pointed at the noise. We were ready to fire when a big black bull emerged from the grass and stared at us.

We laughed our asses off.

A few minutes later we started moving through the high grass toward the Pacific coast again, Chito pushing the wheelbarrow.

We stopped after a bit because Chito was out of breath. I felt something at my foot and scratched it. Then I said, “Chito, let me push the wheelbarrow.”

Now I was pushing the weapons-and-ammo-loaded wheelbarrow. Even though it was past midnight, the air was hot and sticky. Both of us were sweating.

I felt something on my leg under the faded old Levi’s I was wearing.

Chito was talking, telling me about how he loved this one girl even though she had been with a lot of men. He said when he last saw her in the hospital her jaw was all wired up and she’d said, “Chito, I can’t suck your dick, but you can rub it on my lips if you’d like.”

Then I felt something near my knee and stopped to scratch it. A few minutes later, whatever it was moved to my groin.

I stopped and said, “Chito, shine the flashlight on the front of my pants.”

“Why?”

“Just do it, okay?”

I opened my pants and saw a small black snake. I stared at it; it looked back at me. Then I grabbed the damn thing and flung it as far away as I could.

Chito loved that.

An hour later, we arrived at the coast, where we met another SEAL, named Johnny. We were supposed to rendezvous with an SF medic also, but he hadn’t arrived.

So the three of us—me, Chito, and Johnny—sat on a bluff overlooking the shore waiting for the asset we were scheduled to meet. Suddenly, round things started rolling down on us from the land above. We couldn’t tell what they were or where exactly they were coming from.

Johnny and I climbed up the bluff to look.

He whispered, “Come here! Come here!” And pointed to a camouflaged hatch door in the ground.

We both drew our weapons as Johnny lifted it up.

Hiding in the little hole in the ground was the SF medic, surrounded by coconuts.

Johnny asked, “What the hell are you doing down there?”

“I thought you guys were the enemy,” he answered. “I was trying to scare you off.”

We once again laughed our asses off. It was that kind of night.

We finally met our asset and delivered the wheelbarrow filled with weapons and ammo. Later, we set our demo at a choke point in the river and waited for the rebel boat to arrive. It was a twenty-foot wooden boat with a small cabin.

We waited as the boat puttered down river. Then we saw a huge flash, followed a split second later by the sound of a big explosion.

Mission success!

When I returned to Panama, I learned that I’d been selected for promotion to chief warrant officer (CWO)—an officer grade above senior enlisted rank but below the grade of commissioned officer. If I’d chosen to stay enlisted, I could have gone directly back to ST-6 after my tour in Panama was complete.

But since I’d decided to go the warrant route, I had to serve with another team as a freshman warrant before I could return to ST-6. I accepted the position as the SEAL Team Two training officer at Little Creek, Virginia.

My wife, Shannon, however, wasn’t ready to go. She loved living in Panama and wanted to complete the language course she was teaching. So she, Chonie, and Dawnie stayed in Panama for another ten months. I checked into ST-2 and missed them a lot.

Because of the experience I gained in the Central and South American waterways, I taught VBSS to all the platoons. I was also the director of weapons training, winter-warfare training, the MOUT (military operations in urban terrain) course, and ST-2’s PT program.

ST-2 was known for having the toughest PT of all the teams, partially because of the difficult winter-warfare training they’d been through and the counterterrorism ops they ran in Europe.

But when I saw what they were actually doing—some flutter kicks, push-ups, and sit-ups on the grinder, then one run through the obstacle course, a two-mile ocean swim in good weather, and a six-mile run once a week—I was disappointed and made it my mission to step up the PT.

Instead of their running the obstacle course once, I bumped it up to three times, followed by a three-mile run. And after that, I made them complete the cycle twice more, for a total of nine times through the obstacle course and three three-mile runs.

One morning, the CO, Captain Joe Kernan (who is now an admiral), asked to join us. We were doing lunges across a football field when he said, “Doc, this is pretty hard. I guess you’ve been picking up the PT pace.”

I said, “Yes, sir, and I’m going to pick it up even more.”

I didn’t know it at the time, but the older guys on the team were starting to complain about the PTs becoming too difficult. The young guys, meanwhile, were eating them up.

After the lunges, each guy lifted a buddy on his back and sprinted across the field, then did more lunges. I worked the team up to nine times through the obstacle course, twelve-mile runs, and two-mile swims, even in frigid cold and pouring rain.

My XO called me in his office one morning and said, “Look, I can’t move my arms.” I thought he was joking at first, but he wasn’t.

All the department heads were complaining that their men were exhausted from the PTs and were falling asleep during the day. But I didn’t let up. I considered my tough PTs a badge of honor. Like they had taught us in BUD/S, “The more sweat and tears you put into training, the less blood you shed in war.”

One time one of the SEALs’ elbows, wrists, and shoulders locked up on him during PT. He was cramping so bad it looked liked he was experiencing rigor mortis.

The CO heard about it and said to me, “Doc, that was a rough PT.”

Then the master chief said, “Doc, I keep hearing these PTs are too tough. Everyone is so tired they can’t do their work. You’ve got to ease up.”

The SEALs on ST-2 started calling me Warrant Officer Manslaughter. Even all these years later, people are still talking about the brutal PTs I ran at ST-2.

I always pushed myself just as hard as I pushed the people I trained. Probably harder. Years before this, when I was at ST-1, I came very close to dying from overtraining. In addition to all the work required of a SEAL and the PT I was doing with the team—which included two hours of PT each morning—I’d ride my bike to the Coronado pool every day before work and swim two to four miles with the masters swim team. During lunch I’d run 13.1 miles (in under ninety minutes), and after work I’d ride forty to sixty miles or go to Nautilus.

Weekends there were even more grueling. Saturdays, I’d swim 4 miles and bike 156 miles. Sundays, I’d bike 120 miles and run 20 miles. I was working out a minimum of sixty hours a week.

With all the training I was doing, I barely had time to replace all the calories I was burning. I was so lean that when I took a breath, you could see all the veins in my chest and abs. My commanding officer looked at me one day and asked, “Doc, where is the other half of your body?”

One day when I walked up to the pool, my coach noticed that my skin had turned a greenish hue and that my ankles were badly swollen and had red spots all over them, as though I’d been bitten by some kind of insect.

He told me I needed to take a break. But I couldn’t—I was training for the longest triathlon in the world: 3.1-mile swim, 156-mile bike ride, and a 32-mile run. I felt I could win it.

After the four-mile swim workout, the coach and I went for a twenty-mile run at a sub-seven-minute pace. He said, “You’re sweating, and you never sweat. You’d better take a break.”

When I got home, my wife at the time, Kim, was alarmed by my appearance. I looked in the mirror and saw that my skin had turned green.

I asked Kim to run me a hot bath. After that, I figured, I’d rest.

But I was in so much pain that I couldn’t walk from the bedroom to the bathroom. So I crawled on my hands and knees and passed out in the hallway.

I woke up in the Balboa hospital in San Diego. The doctors informed me that I had a torn rotator cuff, a compressed spine, plantar fasciitis in both feet, and a torn quadriceps muscle in my left leg. My skin had turned green because my liver and kidneys were shutting down. And my weight, which was normally around 185, had dipped below 140.

The doctors called it the worst case of overtraining that they’d ever seen.

I had to stop doing PT, forgo the ultra-distance triathlon, and spend time in the hospital. I hated backing down. And it wasn’t the only time injury forced me to do so.

During a sniper-training mission with ST-2 at Fort Pickett, Virginia, I went out to check the hides the snipers were constructing. Sometimes the snipers’ hides were so good, I’d walk to within three feet of them and still not see them.

So instead of walking through the woods like I usually did, I decided to ride my new Trek Y22 mountain bike, figuring that afterward I’d pedal through the nearby hills and forest, despite not having a helmet.

After checking the hides, I went for a ride and crossed a long wooden bridge. The roadway was made of long six-inch-wide planks of wood that had inch-and-a-half gaps between them. When I saw the gaps, I braked to slow down, but then I immediately started scolding myself, saying,
What kind of pussy am I? I’ve ridden and raced all kinds of bicycles and motorcycles and I’m worried that I can’t keep the wheel of my bike on a six-inch-wide board?

I swore to myself I wouldn’t slow down when I crossed it on the way back. An hour or so later, I looked at the bridge and hit it at about twenty-five miles an hour without even thinking of braking.

Lights out!

I woke up on the side of the bridge feeling sunshine on my face and wondering why I was sleeping outside. Then I noticed a sharp pain in my right leg. Stuck in it was a ten-inch-long splinter, and another six-inch splinter was sticking in my forearm.

All the water had trickled out of my water bottle, and I’d suffered a head injury and been unconscious for some time.

I pushed myself hard and often paid the price.

In fact, I can’t count how many times I’ve pushed myself to unconsciousness. We have a saying in the teams that I never liked: Too much can-do can do you in.

I like to think that the only thing that should ever be done in moderation is moderation itself.

In Fort Pickett, as I mentioned, I ran the military operations in urban terrain course. We had a setup that looked just like a village, with cars we could set on fire and all kinds of buildings. I often worked with a British SAS (Special Air Service) soldier who had conducted numerous ops in Northern Ireland.

One afternoon, we took a break so the guys from ST-2 could do their helo-rappel requalifications. The SAS sergeant and I sat on the ground watching them rappel about seventy feet from a helicopter and onto the ground behind a building. A big 230-pound SEAL named Steve was the one first out. He went to brake by putting his hand behind his back, and his Ka-Bar knife came out of its scabbard enough to cut the rope, causing him to fall fifty feet.

The ground shook when he hit it.

Steve broke both his hands, both ankles, his back in two places, and had an open femur fracture in his leg.

I treated Steve with the help of a SEAL corpsman. Although Steve was in tremendous pain, he never lost consciousness. After he was splinted and bandaged, Steve was medevaced out by the same helo he’d fallen from.

Meanwhile, Mike, whom I’d worked with in Panama and who was the LT in the platoon, happened to be videotaping the whole thing. The Navy later used the tape to show new corpsmen how to treat traumatic injuries.

Shannon, Chonie, and our baby daughter, Dawnie, finally arrived in Virginia Beach from Panama. I found a home that Shannon liked, and I thought it was a perfect place to raise a family. But work required me to spend a lot of time away.

Sometime in 1994 I returned to Virginia Beach after a month in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where I was running a weapons and CQB course, to find the grass on the lawn high, the light bulbs and toilet paper gone, and our house completely empty. Shannon had packed up and moved across country. She hadn’t even left a letter.

Even though I had sensed that the breakup was coming, I was devastated. Physical pain I could take, but emotional distress was harder to handle.

M
y second wife had left me and taken everything, including my nine-year-old stepdaughter and our four-year-old daughter, leaving me down in the dumps and living alone in our empty house in Virginia Beach. No furniture. No TV. Not even a toaster. I bought a cheap futon and slept on that.

Weekdays I spent training the guys at ST-2. Weekends, even though I stayed busy running, cycling, paddling, and lifting, were tough.

One Saturday afternoon, a SEAL buddy of mine named Bruce called me and invited me to a barbecue. I didn’t feel like going out, so I said, “Thanks, Bruce. But I think I’ll stay home.”

When he mentioned food and beverages, my ear perked up.

Bruce said, “Come on, Don. It’s a great sunny day; ride your bike over. I’ll meet you halfway.”

I got on my Harley and rode from my home in Virginia Beach about five miles to the local 7-Eleven, where Bruce was waiting on his chopper. His Harley was more radical than mine, with ape hangers and very loud upswept fishtails.

I eased off the throttle and heard the loud
bup-bup-bup
of my motor—a sound that some people find annoying but that always fills me with excitement and expectation.

“Follow me,” Bruce said with a wild smirk on his face.

What’s going on?
I wondered.

He led the way to a nice neighborhood just two miles outside of the SEAL Team Six compound. One of our SEAL buddies opened the wooden gates when he heard us approaching. Wafting through the air was the welcome smell of barbecue.

I saw about a dozen guys I knew from the teams, all of them holding beers and grinning like cats that had just eaten canaries. Beyond them were six young women lying on lounge chairs, either topless or entirely naked.

Immediately, I was like,
Wow! This is cool.

One of the girls said, “We were just playing a joke. Bruce told us you needed some cheering up.”

“Thanks. Hey, before you get dressed, would you mind posing with the bikes?”

I borrowed Bruce’s wife’s camera and figured, Why waste a great opportunity?

They complied. It was my introduction to a group that we called Frogs on Hogs—which now includes over two hundred SEALs who own Harleys and who often get together to ride on weekends and to hang out.

Even though I was still feeling down because of my second failed marriage, riding with the guys helped me clear my head. On Memorial Day weekend 1994 we rode to the Rolling Thunder motorcycle rally in Washington, DC, to raise awareness of the plight of prisoners of war and soldiers missing in action. Something like fifty thousand bikers from all over the country assembled in the Pentagon’s north parking lot then rode together up and over the Memorial Bridge, past the Capitol, and then down Constitution Avenue to the Vietnam veterans memorial wall, near the Lincoln Memorial’s reflecting pool.

As waves of bikes carrying Vietnam vets and their supporters rumbled past the rear of the White House, we passed a relatively small group of gay marchers on their way to Capitol Hill. Talk about a contrast in lifestyles.

President Bill Clinton, who had recently been sworn into office, was scheduled to speak to the bikers. When he took the stage, over half of the people in attendance turned their backs on the commander in chief who had dodged the draft instead of fighting for his country in Vietnam.

Frogs on Hogs continued. Though the group was made up exclusively of men, we did decide to admit one woman, named Debbie, a former Navy LT who had recently retired.

She was full of life and rode a Sportster that her dad had willed to her. Debbie had been dating an ST-6 guy named Tom, and they got engaged. One rainy Saturday afternoon, Deb called Tom and asked him to meet her at Harpoon Larry’s bar on the beach.

Tom said no but told her to come home afterward and he’d make her dinner.

But as soon as he hung up the phone, he changed his mind about the bar. So while Deb was on her way, Tom got on his bike and rode past my house to meet her at Harpoon Larry’s.

Deb’s bike hit a slick patch on the wet road and flew over the sidewalk and up four steps that led to a hotel lobby. The front wheel of the bike climbed up the wall, then the bike flipped over and landed on top of Debbie.

As Tommy rode past the hotel, he saw an overturned bike with a rider trapped underneath. He ran up to help the biker and, seeing that it was his fiancée, fell to pieces. Tommy called me immediately. I was there in a flash.

But there was nothing I could do to help Debbie.

The accident had ruptured her aorta, and she quickly bled out. I watched as she took her last breath.

Thrills and danger ride together. That’s the way it works.

While I was still the training officer at ST-2, I accompanied a Delta platoon to winter-warfare training in Alaska. The forty-five-day course started with the basics of survival in a frigid landscape around the Buskin River—we set up snow caves and slept in them, worked with avalanche beacons, did cross-country and downhill skiing, pulled sleds, made fires, fished, procured food and water, and conducted small-boat drills in Seward Bay, which, because it’s salt water, doesn’t freeze in the winter.

The last forty-eight hours of the course was a tough final training exercise (FTX), which included a two-thousand-meter cold-water ocean swim, a river crossing via high line, and long-range navigation through the mountain wilderness to infiltrate and establish covert surveillance of a target site. We had to accomplish all this while carrying seventy-five to ninety pounds of operational gear each, including weapons and ammo.

Accompanying the platoon during the winter training were two SEAL LT reservists. As we made igloos and snow caves, skied, and trekked through the mountains, they kept asking me about my background as a multisport athlete.

One day, the two of them pulled me aside and told me about something called the Raid Gauloises. They said that it was the world’s premier long-distance multisport endurance race and that it had been created in 1989 by a man named Gerald Fusil. The five-hundred-mile race included mountain biking, kayaking, white-water rafting, running, rock climbing, and swimming, and it required each competitor to be part of a five-person coed team. It was named after its original sponsor, which in an ironic twist was the Gauloises cigarette company.

The Navy reservists asked if I would be interested in coaching, training, and leading a team.

I said, “I don’t know if I’ll be able to, since I have a lot of responsibilities as the training officer at ST-Two.”

“We already checked with your commanding officer, Joe Kernan, and your executive officer,” the LT reservist responded, “and they said that as long as Don can still do his job, it’s his call.”

“In that case, absolutely!”

They explained that they wanted to build a team around two men, Mike Sawyer and Mark Davis, who had already raised a lot of money from an organization in Chicago that included NBA superstar Michael Jordan and heavyweight boxing champ Mike Tyson.

Mike Sawyer (who was a world-class sprinter) and Mark Davis (a weight lifter and former WNBA coach) planned to be the first African Americans to compete in the Raid Gauloises, which was known as the world’s most difficult endurance competition.

The first thing I had to do was select two more athletes to complete the team, which was named Team Odyssey. At least one of them had to be a woman, so I chose one of the toughest people I’ve ever trained with, Juli Lynch—an exceptional athlete, a world-class ultra-distance marathoner and cross-country skier. She stands five feet tall, weighs about a hundred and five pounds, and is tough as nails.

Rounding out the team was another SEAL, Erik Liebermann, who was not only one of the best athletes in the teams but also an exceptional navigator.

The next Raid Gauloises would be held in the Patagonia region of Argentina in late 1995. Which meant that we had a little more than a year to prepare.

Mike and Mark were cousins and incredible athletes, but neither of them was really a trained outdoorsman. In fact, they both hated the water and didn’t like being out in the woods at night.

So a large part of the fifty thousand dollars that they raised from various sponsors was spent on sending them to climbing, kayaking, and mountaineering courses. The five of us also met once a month for three-day nonstop workout sessions, usually in the White Mountains.

We assembled in southern Argentina in late November of 1995. The area we would be racing through, Patagonia, was a million square miles featuring a harsh combination of ice, snow, glaciers, mountains, heat, and relentless Antarctic winds.

Race officials informed us that we would be required to ride horses using wooden saddles, like the native gauchos; don snowshoes and crampons; and risk altitude sickness and avalanches—all the time carrying all of our food and gear. They estimated it would take the fifty-five-person teams seven to ten days to complete the five-hundred-mile course. Most teams would average fewer than two hours of sleep per night.

The reward? Forty thousand dollars to the winning team, which would barely cover the fifteen-thousand-dollar entrance fee and the additional money we had already spent on travel, equipment, and training.

We weren’t in it for the money.

Despite all the time they’d spent on training, Mike and Mark began lagging behind from the start of the race. Erik and Juli were always way ahead of them. And I was running back and forth trying to keep the team together so we wouldn’t be penalized for being dispersed.

Mike and Mark were made up of fast-twitch muscles, which are better suited for sprinting and lifting than for long treks. Like Erik and Juli, I was born with mostly slow-twitch muscles.

Fast-twitch muscles contract and expand quickly, but get tired fast. Slow-twitch muscles are more efficient at using oxygen to generate fuel, and can fire for a long time before they fatigue.

Mike and Mark were great guys but constantly complaining. The white-water sections scared them. When we got to the smoother sections of the river, we had to pull their kayaks. They weren’t very good at the climbing or biking sections either.

Day three we’d climbed to about twelve thousand feet when a bad storm started blowing in. We now had to cross a rocky peak that was covered with snow and ice.

Juli and Erik went up the side of the cliff without a problem.

I noticed some loose rock and warned the two cousins that they shouldn’t climb one behind the other; the person ahead might dislodge a rock that would tumble down onto the guy below.

I ascended and waited with Juli and Erik. The three of us were sitting on the side of the mountain taking in the incredible scenery around us and wondering when the next storm was going to hit when we heard some rocks come loose, then the sound of rocks falling, and then a bloodcurdling scream.

Mark and Mike hadn’t wanted to be separated. So Mark had ascended the cliff with Mike right below him, just like I had warned them not to do. Mark had knocked a rock loose; that had caused a rock avalanche, and…
bam!

I climbed down to them and found Mike holding his right hand, which had been smashed by a boulder. He was in shock as he looked down at the bloody stump of flesh—all that I could see was a little piece of the palm.

I quickly wrapped his hand with the military OD green triangular bandage that I was wearing as a headband and yelled to Erik, “Set up a tent. Tell Juli to activate the emergency personal-locator beacon!”

Juli activated the beacon, and the race organizers in Argentina dispatched a medevac helicopter, which arrived forty minutes later. In the meantime, I bandaged and splinted Mike’s hand and stopped the bleeding.

We found a small ledge on the side of the mountain for the helo to land, and when it did we carried Mike aboard. Fortunately, the helicopter took off minutes before the storm hit, otherwise Mike would have had to wait until it blew over.

His cousin Mark was an emotional wreck, so I said to him, “Mark, you might as well leave the race. Take care of your cousin.”

But Mark was determined to finish.

Next, we had to descend twenty-five hundred feet down the side of a snowy mountain and climb over another range. The ride was a blast. You basically sat on your backpack, used your ice pick to steer, and glissaded all the way down.

Juli went first, then Erik.

Before I left, I asked Mark, “Are you sure you’re going to be okay?”

He answered, “I’ll be fine; I just need a minute. You go ahead.”

I went down like a shot.

At the bottom Erik and Juli asked me, “How do you think he’s going to do?”

As we watched, Mark stumbled, fell, and tumbled all the way down the mountain. Before he even reached the bottom, we started to set up the tent and radio for medevac. He was badly broken up.

After Mark was medevaced, all that remained of Team Odyssey was me, Erik, and Juli. We flew through the rest of the course, passing twenty-seven teams in the next two days. Late in the race, I sank into a patch of quicksand.

Also, during two days of continuous paddling, I saw a beautiful Chinese girl in a traditional costume emerge from the water just in front of my canoe, and I stopped paddling. Erik, who was sitting behind me, asked, “What’s the matter, Don? Are you okay?”

“I don’t want to hit the girl.” Of course, there was no girl.

The three of us made it to the finish along with about half of the teams that had entered, but our finish was unofficial because we didn’t have a full team.

That was my first adventure race and I loved it. I was getting tired of the triathlons, with just the three sports. Adventure racing was much more exciting. By this time I had competed in over a thousand endurance competitions and I was looking for something more—and I had found it. So I immediately started planning and training for the next Raid, which was going to take place in South Africa in 1996.