Inside SEAL Team Six (3 page)

The Somali leader considered this, then pointed emphatically to our rubber boat and said, “Go!”

The local merchant elaborated. “He wants you to get in your boat and go back to America.”

“Sure thing.” That was a long way to travel with a 55-horsepower motor, but it sounded good.

“Go…now!” the leader repeated.

“Yeah. Right away.”

We thanked the merchant and the leader, who turned and left with his armed men and the merchant, to our great relief.

Our LT had been right not to resist them. If we’d done anything differently, all four of us would most likely have been shot and left to die on the beach in Somalia.

We were physically and mentally exhausted. “LT,” Bobby O. said. “We just cheated death. What do you say we go home?” None of us felt like diving into shark-infested waters.

LT wasn’t having any of it. Like I said before, he was a gung ho type. He growled, “Guys, get your gear on. Our mission won’t be a success unless we complete it. Let’s go!”

“Has he lost his friggin’ mind?” Bobby O. asked under his breath.

Still wearing our skin suits, we donned masks, fins, white belts, and rebreathers. Then dove into the warm, pitch-black bay, which stank and was covered with a layer of oily gunk. Our route took us right past the camel-meat processing plant. All I could think of was the sharks. When something brushed past me, my heart almost stopped.

We were going on pure adrenaline and couldn’t see a thing other than the luminescent dials of our depth gauges, compasses, and Tudor dive watches. The German diving Drägers strapped to our chests were feeding us 100 percent oxygen so that no bubbles could be seen on the surface.

We had four hours max before that high a concentration of oxygen became toxic. We traveled in two-man teams. I was paired with Bobby. He was the navigator and focused on his dive compass, while I timed each leg of the dive with my watch. After we swam an allotted amount of time on a particular bearing, I’d squeeze his arm, which was the signal for him to stop and set the next direction on the compass.

We doglegged through the harbor for three hours underwater until we located the right ship. Then we extracted the
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We set the timer and checked our watches: we were running out of time.

Now we had to swim back to where we had anchored our Zodiac CRRC. But when we got close we realized we had a problem. We’d left the boat when the tide was high. Hours later, in the low tide, our Zodiac rubber boat was beached and a couple of hundred meters from the water. High and dry.

First light was less than an hour away. Even though we were completely spent from the ordeal with the Somali and then the four-hour dive, we had to sprint over to the boat, carry it to the water, sprint back to pick up the gas tanks, motor, and all our gear, and then carry it back to the boat. This took multiple trips, all of which we had to do while carrying our personal gear and weapons.

By the time we had all our gear in the Zodiac and the 55-horsepower motor cranked up to max, the sun was starting to rise over the horizon.

That meant that we’d missed our primary pickup time; now we had to wait another twenty-four hours and try again.

Instead, our LT decided that we should trek ten kilometers through the desert and then radio headquarters to initiate plan B, which involved meeting a local guide who would take us to a nearby airstrip. This meant that we had to be on alert all day in case the armed Somali tribesmen returned.

Shortly after nightfall we met our guide, a smelly little Ethiopian man who had never worked with Americans before. For some reason, he was constantly touching us and giggling. I was designated the guide handler, meaning it was my job to take the guide out if he should do anything to put us in jeopardy.

The eager Ethiopian led us through some low desert terrain to the far end of an airstrip. As the sun started to rise, we paid our guide, cut through the barbed-wire fence, crawled through on our bellies, then radioed the extraction aircraft.

Then the four of us hid in the low shrubs and waited. No one had slept more than an hour or two in the past four days.

LT, lying beside me, asked, “How are you doing, Doc?”

“Okay, LT. How about you?” We were shivering and sweating simultaneously. Sick, dirty, hungry, thirsty, and exhausted. The sun burned into our backs.

“You still having fun, Doc?”

“Hoo-ya,” I answered, with a little less enthusiasm than before. The truth is I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there.

All of us kept glancing up at the cloud cover over the landing strip, hoping for some sign of a friendly aircraft.

As the minutes dragged by, our desperation grew.

Finally, after about an hour, we heard this low rumble that quickly turned into a roar. Sounded as though the sky were exploding. Bobby O. covered his ears.

Looking up, I saw a C-130 cut through the clouds nose-first, like an arrow headed straight for the ground. As the four of us held our breath, the C-130 straightened out at the last second, touched down on the runway, and immediately slammed on its brakes.

Smoke billowed from the landing gear as though the plane were on fire. The smell of burning rubber was intense.

Through the drifting smoke, we watched the rear ramp open. Then the LT said, “Let’s go!”

We ran like hell with all our gear. As soon as we boarded, the crew closed the ramp and then the plane took off. Talk about an amazing short-field landing. I’d seen several, but none as dramatic as that.

The C-130 ferried us back safely to the base in Cairo. The mission had been a success, but we were all sick as dogs; at the base, we lay in a stifling fly-filled tent—pasty white, throwing up constantly, running high fevers. I was in the worst shape of the four of us. I couldn’t keep fluids down and it was impossible to get an IV in my arm because my veins had collapsed. My fever was up to 104 and rising.

My alarmed teammates summoned an Egyptian doctor. Half awake, I saw him approach me with a nasty-looking syringe that had no cover on it. His hands looked dirty and he was covered with flies.

“Egyptian medicine,” he announced with a big smile. “I’ll take care of you, sir. I’ll fix you.”

I said, “No way you’re putting the needle and whatever is in it in me.”

He backed off. After half a dozen more tries, Bobby O. finally got an IV in my arm. We forced in about 3,000 ccs of Ringer’s lactate, and I started to revive.

That night the four of us were invited to go to dinner with some Egyptian military VIPs. We were still weak and exhausted, but we were expected to attend. At around six, a little guy named Mohammed showed up to escort us to the restaurant.

On the way, he took us through a section of town that was crowded with tourist shops peddling jewelry, cosmetics, scarves, and rugs. He stopped in practically every shop we passed to point out the array of perfumes.

He’d say, “Look, Mr. Don. Your wife, your girlfriend will like this.”

“No, thanks, Mohammed.”

None of us showed the least bit of interest. We just wanted to get the dinner over with, return to the base, and crash.

But Mohammed wouldn’t leave us alone. He was constantly at my elbow, saying, “Look, Mr. Don. Fine perfume. Very nice. I get you the very best price.”

“No, thanks.”

I tried arguing with him, I tried ignoring him, but he wouldn’t let up.

After half an hour we arrived at an upscale restaurant where four or five Egyptian military officers were waiting. They escorted us to a round table. My three SEAL buddies sat across from me. The Egyptian officers found places next to them. Mohammed settled to my right.

The waiters placed before us plates of fried falafel, kushari, baba ghanoush, lamb kebobs, and more. All the local delicacies. None of us four SEALs had any appetite. We just wanted to get through the dinner politely and then go back to our tent in west Cairo. It had been a difficult week.

But Mohammed to my right kept bugging me. He kept saying, “Please, Mr. Don. You can’t leave without buying some fine perfume. I’ll take you later.”

“No, thanks.”

He wouldn’t let up. “Please, Mr. Don. I insist. I’ll show you. I’ll personally guarantee the very best price.”

“I said no.”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Don. You’ll see. These are the finest perfumes in all the world.”

I’d held myself together through the heat and diarrhea, the night of captivity and exhaustion, the collapsed veins, even the sharks. But with this little Egyptian handler refusing to leave me alone, I snapped. I lifted a sharp knife from the table and held it to his throat.

Mohammed’s eyes bugged out and his face turned white.

In an even tone—without raising my voice—I said, “Shut the fuck up, Mohammed.”

He nodded and I put down the knife.

Nobody at the table said anything about the incident. We finished our dinner as though nothing had happened.

As we neared the base, LT walked beside me and flashed his sinister smile. “You still having fun, Doc?” he asked.

“Sure.” But inside, I was saying,
I just want to get out of here alive and in one piece.

“Teams and shit, huh, Doc?” LT asked. It was a SEAL saying that in a few words described all the training and hardship we had to go through to accomplish what we did. I’d just completed my first real-world SEAL mission.

“Teams and shit. Yeah,” I responded, now appreciating what the words meant.

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Through all the action, the physical and mental challenges, and the brushes with death, my enthusiasm for SEAL life hasn’t dimmed. Call me a maniac, which many people have. Call me crazy. But I’ve never wanted it any other way.

D
uring my career I’ve been called Dr. Death, Don Maniac, Warrant Officer Manslaughter, and Sweet Satan. Over the past three decades I’ve served as a Navy SEAL lead petty officer, assault team member, boat-crew leader, department head, training officer, advanced-training officer, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) officer, and, more recently, program director preparing civilians for BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/ SEAL) training. I was asked by the U.S. Navy in 1997 to assist with the Navy recruiting command and created the SEAL Adventure Challenge and the SEAL Training Academy, where we taught skydiving, combat scuba diving, small-unit tactics, marksmanship, and land navigation. Up until August of 1998, I was on active duty with SEAL Team Six.

Owing to my long years in service and my career in extreme adventure sports—which has included seventy-five thousand miles of running and three hundred thousand miles of biking—I’m also known on the teams as the high-mileage SEAL.

Over the years I developed a reputation for being one of the ST-6 commandos who liked to push the envelope. Rip it apart if I could.

Like the time I decided to beat the biannual SEAL physical-readiness test record in Panama on a black-flag day.
Black flag
means “dangerously high heat.” According to base policy, military and civilian personnel weren’t allowed to exercise or work outside on a black-flag day. I said, The hell with that, and set out to beat the course record.

In the hundred-degree, high-humidity heat, I performed 120 push-ups and 120 sit-ups, swam a half a mile, and followed that with a three-mile run. During the run, less than three hundred meters from the finish line, my vision started to blur to the point that I couldn’t tell the people from the trees. I kept pushing harder. Woke up on my back looking up at the timekeeper—a senior chief petty officer in a khaki uniform.

“Did I break seventeen thirty?” I asked him, referring to the course record of seventeen minutes and thirty seconds.

“Seventeen twenty-eight, you maniac,” he answered.

“Then I’m okay.”

Most people have no idea of what their full potential is. One of my mottos is Blood from Any Orifice. Because I figure that if you don’t push beyond what you think your limits are, you’ll never know your true abilities.

I’ve always tested limits. People who know me say that despite my intensity, I appear to be soft-spoken and relaxed. Truth is, over the years I’ve learned to manage the almost uncontrollable fire burning inside me.

But I put my parents through living hell growing up.

I was a bad kid, and I’m not proud of the fact that I was a lousy role model to my younger brother, sisters, and friends. My parents were good, kind, loving people who deserved better than what I gave them.

My dad loved his country so much that the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor he quit high school to join the Navy. He became a distinguished stunt pilot. On the last day of World War II, an officer ordered him and fifteen of his fellow sailors to stand on the platform of an aircraft carrier so that they could be ceremoniously lowered down to the dock.

But the platform mechanism broke and they fell sixty feet. My dad broke his back. One sailor died. Since then he had a soft spot for disabled vets—volunteering long hours at the local VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) and serving as the state commander of the VFW in South Carolina. He ended up working as an executive in large insurance companies, and he still liked nothing more than to make other people laugh and have a good time.

My mom was a Limestone, Maine, homecoming queen, the valedictorian of her class, and the salt of the earth—totally dedicated to her family in every way. She was born premature, weighing three pounds, in an early February blizzard. Her parents didn’t think she would survive, but they put her in the kitchen oven to keep her warm until the storm eased up enough for them to get her to a hospital.

She had a quick, sarcastic wit that made all of us laugh. She and my dad were like a comedy team at parties—the local Stiller and Meara.

And I was their first son—a bat-out-of-hell, shit-kicker motorcycle punk. I popped out of my mother’s womb with a wild, crazy energy that has never let up.

We lived in various spots throughout New England—Limestone, Maine; Orange, Connecticut; Nashua, New Hampshire—but I consider Methuen, Massachusetts, to be my childhood home (it’s also where my dad was born). It’s situated in the northeast part of the state, right across the border from Rockingham County, New Hampshire. Back in the 1970s, Methuen and nearby Orange were considered Mafia towns. Methuen was rough but bucolic, with ponds, streams, the Merrimack and Spicket Rivers, a bird sanctuary, and lots of forested land.

I was into giving myself impossible challenges from the start. Beginning in second grade, one of my favorite activities was to go into the woods and walk for hours in a random direction, then try to find my way home.

By fourth grade, I was sneaking smokes on the school playground and building go-carts out of shopping-cart wheels and scraps of wood. My buddies and I would slip out at night and meet at the cemetery, which had this wicked long hill. We’d fly down it in the dark, screaming and often crashing into headstones. Part of me knew what we were doing was wrong, but I was young and filled with wild, anarchic energy, and it was so much damn fun.

By fifth grade, I’d graduated to minibikes, which led to dirt bikes and motorcycles. Then I was really gone.

I loved the smell, the roar, the power, the promise of the track, open trail, and road. For me, nothing matched the excitement of riding fast and hitting the jumps hard so I sailed high in the air. The suspense that occurred during flight was incredible.

My dad, bless his heart, tried his best to keep me under some kind of control. Because I was too young to get a license, he told me to stick to riding on the track or on the trails in the woods behind our house. But I couldn’t resist the lure of the streets—where the big kids rode their choppers.

I craved danger, action, and adventure, and it won’t surprise you that my hero growing up was Evel Knievel—a man who wasn’t afraid to look death in the face.

Imitating my idol, I’d roar down the streets on my Kawasaki 175 doing wheelies, scaring old ladies, and getting into fights.

I studied Evel’s life and knew he failed as many times as he succeeded. When he attempted to jump the fountains outside of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, his bike malfunctioned on takeoff, causing him to hit the safety ramp and skid across the parking lot, which resulted in a crushed pelvis and femur, fractures to his wrist and both ankles, and a concussion that kept him in a coma for twenty-nine days.

In ’68 he crashed while attempting to jump fifteen Ford Mustangs and broke his right leg and foot. Three years later, in California, while trying to jump thirteen Pepsi delivery trucks, he came down front-wheel-first on the base of the ramp and was thrown off his bike. He broke his collarbone and suffered compound fractures of his right arm and both legs.

He ended up in the Guinness book of world records for suffering the most broken bones in a lifetime—433. But through it all, he never backed down from a promise. I considered that important. Evel said, “When you give your word to somebody that you’re going to do something, you’ve gotta do it,” and when he promised an audience he would make a jump, he did it, even when he realized that it was impossible.

Years later, and with both of his arms in casts, Evel Knievel flew out to California and confronted a promoter named Shelly Saltman who alleged that Evel had abused his wife and kids and used drugs. Evel attacked Saltman outside Twentieth Century Fox studios with a baseball bat and shattered his wrist and arm.

He also told kids to stay in school and not do drugs.

I listened to him, even though drugs and failure were becoming more and more common all around me.

Another big influence was the Hells Angels, which was a paradox, since Evel regularly criticized them for dealing drugs.

Motorcycle gangs were big in our neck of New England. Besides the Angels, we had the Huns, Evil Spirits, Hole in the Wall—and given the environment I grew up in, it was probably inevitable that the guys I hung out with started stealing motorcycles and cars. They targeted kids who they thought didn’t deserve them. For example, if they heard that some rich kid’s father had bought his son a fancy new Honda motorcycle or a Camaro, one of them would say, “That douche bag doesn’t even know how to ride; let’s go rob the sucker.”

No wonder the area I grew up in eventually became one of the stolen-car capitals of the United States. In the early to middle 1970s, many of the stolen vehicles were driven to a place called the Pit, located in a heavily wooded part of Methuen, Massachusetts, where the cars and motorcycles were stripped for parts.

Even though I drew the line at stealing, I got a kick out of driving a stripped car up a steep hill, putting it in neutral, riding down, and jumping out before it crashed into the other cars and trees below. I also liked to fight, ride, and get crazy.

By the time I was in sixth grade, the kids around me were drinking and doing drugs. Our drink of choice was something we called a Tango—orange juice and lots of vodka. We also drank our share of Boone’s Farm wine, which to our unsophisticated palates tasted fantastic.

I became a ringleader. I was the only non-Italian in our group, the Flat Rats—so named because we lived in a suburban part of the town called the Flats. Many of my friends had dads and uncles who were members of the Mafia. We had long hair and wore black leather jackets, jeans, tight-fitting T-shirts, and black boots.

Total hell-raisers.

One summer afternoon I was out on the road riding motorcycles with my buddy Greg. I said, “Hey, Greg, if you see the cops, take off. Because if I get caught, my dad will kill me.” I was maybe fifteen years old. Too young to have a driver’s license. Trying to outrun the cops was always a good time.

We were cruising up a local two-way back-country road north of Methuen when we came to a stop at a four-way stop sign, and I spotted a cop car to my left. I yelled, “Greg. Cops. Take off!”

He pulled back on the throttle but flooded out and stalled.

I hung a right on my Kawasaki 175 and took off. WFO (wide fucking open), we called it. To my mind, WFO was the only way to go.

My bike could only get up to about seventy-two miles an hour max, so on the straight stretches of road, the cop car got right up on my tail. I braked, downshifted, and turned right onto somebody’s lawn. Because the grass was wet, I did a quick one-eighty, spitting up a rooster tail of mud and grass.

The cop surprised me and turned onto the lawn too.

This guy wasn’t going to be easy to shake.

I peeled off back in the direction I’d come from, thinking that maybe I’d catch up with Greg. My Kawasaki screamed, the cop’s siren blared, and adrenaline raced through my veins. Approaching the four-way stop sign, I saw another cop cruiser light up its flashers and join the chase.

Now I had two cop cars on my tail.

I tore through one town after another, running through my repertoire of tricks. My favorite was to stick my right arm out like I was pulling over, then, when the cruisers passed me, gun the bike and scream by, shooting the cops my see-ya smile.

But nothing seemed to work. After forty-five minutes of being chased, I began to worry. None of my previous escapades with the police had lasted this long. I was actually more worried about my father than the cops.

My long hair flying out of the back of my helmet, I tore down country roads with the cops on my tail. Approaching cars had to swerve off to the side to give us room to pass. I was a small kid—maybe five seven at fifteen years old—and the bike was too big for me, so I was bouncing up and down on the seat and gas tank, which hurt.

One police car inched up to my back wheel, and, determined not to get caught, I zoomed faster, past a large farm where some of my buddies and I had worked. Some of the Puerto Rican workers out in the fields picking corn recognized me and started cheering. They yelled words of encouragement.

Salem, New Hampshire, was just ahead. I saw the light at the five-way intersection turn red. To my right was a Dairy Queen parking lot crowded with pickups and station wagons filled with families and kids going out to get a summer afternoon sundae swirl or shake.

I made a split-second decision and turned into the crowded lot.

People panicked. Mothers screamed, “Watch out!” and grabbed their children. They wrapped them in protective hugs while their husbands cursed me: “Lunatic!” “Asshole!” “Hoodlum!” “Stupid punk!”

I wove my way through the maze of vehicles and people, braked when I absolutely had to, and skidded my way through.

The cops had to steer around it, which meant that I gained a little time, but they quickly caught up with me on a long, straight country road. My bike was screaming hot and I was running low on fuel.

One of the cop cars—the one that was aggressively staying near my back wheel—passed and cut in front of me. I braked hard, downshifted fast, and faced two options: One, slam into his car broadside. Two, cut left into unknown terrain.

I chose the second and was immediately confronted with a five-foot-high stone wall. Sudden death. At the last second I spotted a tiny opening and miraculously squeezed through.

Whew!

A second or so later I hit something that stopped me and almost caused me to fly off the bike and do an endo (end over end). A large root had lodged itself between the frame of my bike and the engine.

I tried pulling the root out. No luck.

Looking back, I saw the cops running toward me with their sticks and pistols ready.

I cut the engine and asked myself:
What do I do now?

Before I could think of an answer, one of the cops grabbed me by the hair sticking out of the back of my helmet and yanked me off seat and over the back fender. I hit the ground and immediately felt a nightstick crash into my ribs.