No Hero: The Evolution of a Navy SEAL (16 page)

The mission doesn’t always wait for sunny, seventy-two-degree days. Whether the objective is in waist-deep snow, the middle of the shark-infested Indian Ocean, or up a goat trail in the highest peaks of Afghanistan, we are trained to stay focused and complete the mission. We don’t need comfort to be effective.

BUD/S seems sadistic to outsiders, but it is where we start
to condition ourselves to not only get comfortable with discomfort, but also embrace it. On Friday evenings the instructors lined us up on the sand at the edge of the water.

“Everyone wants to be a SEAL on Friday,” the instructor would yell. “It’s Friday and you’re all going to have the weekend off. You’re going to hit the bars and relax. The question is, which one of you wants to be a SEAL when the conditions are shitty? Which one wants it when you’re wet, tired, cold, and miserable and you still have to complete your mission?”

No one spoke. No one smiled. We just wanted to go for the weekend.

“Look to your left and right,” the instructors would say. “Will they be there when the going gets tough?”

The whole time the instructors kept walking the line.

“The only easy day was yesterday, gentlemen. You think about that this weekend, and when you start training again on Monday, just know that it’s going to suck much worse than it did today.” I can honestly say, I’ve been colder and more miserable than any situation they put us in during BUDs. The saying holds true: “The only easy day was
yesterday.”

Watch the Shoes

Evolution

I got
the page early in the morning.

Team leaders in the squadron always carry small black pagers on deployment so planners can alert us of a possible mission. I rolled out of my lumpy bed, which was built into the wooden walls of my room, and headed over to the operations center.

We were on vampire hours, so while to us it was early morning, really it was a late winter afternoon in Afghanistan. We slept all day and ran missions at night. Things were slow. We’d been at a base south of Kabul for months, with few missions. The bitter cold made the winter fighting season slow. The Taliban were across the border in Pakistan or lying low in Afghanistan. Neither side really wanted to fight.

I stuffed my hands into my jacket as I walked over to the operations center. I had no idea what was going on, and I didn’t wake my team. We’d been conducting missions like this for years now, and I knew things could spin down as quickly as they had spun up. Many times we would wake everyone up to start planning and the target would disappear. It was better that they get as much sleep as possible.

I walked into the operations center. It was a squat, prefab building. The floors were muddy from all the dirt tracked in by our boots. There was a worn path from the door to the coffee maker. I followed the track and got a hot cup. I took two quick sips and let the caffeine shake me from my funk.

There was a subdued energy in the room as the planners and intelligence analysts pored over data, trying to tee up that night’s mission. Black-and-white Predator feeds trained on a compound were displayed on the screen. Standing near the back next to a long desk were the troop chief and troop commander. They saw me come in and nodded. I dropped three packets of sugar into my coffee and joined them.

“What’s up?” I said.

“ISR has been tracking some fighters,” the troop chief said.

The drones patrolling overhead caught a group of five to seven fighters going from compound to compound, looking for a warm bed and meal. They’d been moving most of the day but had just stopped. The planners figured the group was going to stop moving and bed down at the compound for the night. It was starting to get dark and they’d been traveling most of the day.

“From what we can see from the ISR, it looks like they were just walking through town and decided to hide out at this random house for the night,” the troop chief said. “We saw them knock on the door and when the people inside answered they pushed through the door. They even moved their vehicles inside the compound’s wall.”

I was one of three team leaders. I looked over at Steve as the troop chief gave us details on the compound’s location. Steve was nodding as the troop chief told us about the mission.

After the first briefing, the recce team leader started working up routes to the house. I started looking at the house with Steve.

“Looks pretty cut-and-dry to me,” I said.

“I agree. You going to wake up your crew?” Steve said.

“Yep, I’ll wake them up now so they can grab some food before we start spinning too hard,” I said.

I followed the muddy path to the door and made a beeline to where the guys were sleeping. The tent was pitch-black. Only a small strip of white rope lighting ran down the hallway toward our makeshift lounge area. The plywood walls separated the tent into little mini-rooms, each with a bed and desk. Each room had one SEAL. It was tight quarters, but at least you had some privacy.

The far end of the tent was the lounge. It was spacious, with stadium seating in front of a fifty-inch flat screen. We’d been coming to Shank for years, and each squadron worked hard to make the living conditions a little better each time. A previous squadron built a fire pit and outdoor lounge. Another fixed up the gym. If we had to do time in Afghanistan, the goal was to make it as nice as possible.

I turned on the light in the lounge and turned the TV on. We could watch the American Forces Network, which broadcast American shows, movies, and sports. But we’d also rigged
it to show the same ISR feed that the planners saw in the operations center. I turned on the feed. All around me, I could hear the boys stirring. Guys were getting out of their bunks.

I put on a pot of coffee. One by one, with a fresh cup in their hands, the guys gathered around the TV. There was nothing to see other than the compound walls and buildings. There was no movement inside the walls or near the compound because the fighters had already moved inside the buildings.

“Sweet,” Walt said. “Same shit, different day.”

He rubbed his eyes and watched the black-and-white picture for a few seconds.

“This better not be another dry hole. I don’t go out in these temperatures for less than twenty bad guys,” Walt said in his typical smartass tone.

Once all the guys got a cup of coffee or a drink, I started the brief. I gave them the rundown on the target and the fighters. There was nothing difficult about this hit. We’d rolled up fighters sleeping in compounds just like this hundreds of times before. In many ways this mission was just plug-and-play. Everyone knew what roles needed to be filled.

Our plans were always pretty simple, but I tried to give my guys a chance to shoot holes in it. I started with the basic questions.

What are we missing?

Does what the intelligence folks are saying match with what we are seeing?

What were everyone’s responsibilities for the night?

Which team would lead the assault?

Everyone on the team had input, even the newest guy. I knew I definitely wasn’t the smartest guy in the room, and I had learned a long time ago to ask for outside opinions.

It took about an hour to get everything in place. When we were done, Steve and I went back to the troop chief and briefed the plan. The troop chief and troop commander sat in the operations center listening carefully as we detailed the routes to and from the target and the assault plan.

Although our intelligence analysts were confident the fighters were not going to move again the rest of the night, we kept a watchful eye on the compound. The drones kept a constant vigil overhead.

We planned to land about five kilometers from the target and patrol to the compound. This allowed us to keep the element of surprise. Nothing gives away your position like a massive helicopter hovering above. With the high mountain peaks and long valleys, the helicopter noise would float for miles and everybody up and down the valley would know we were coming. Sometimes we’d land one valley over in order to keep the rotor noise down. The only problem with that idea was you had to walk your happy ass up and over a mountain.

I watched the troop chief and troop commander carefully as we briefed. They nodded their heads as we laid everything out. The plan was simple, so I didn’t anticipate any issues. The troop commander blessed off on the plan, and a couple hours later we were airborne, headed to the compound.

I was excited as I sat in the Chinook, trying to think
warm thoughts. In the back of my mind I wasn’t nervous about anything. I was confident, not arrogant, that I knew how to handle almost anything on target. By my thirteenth deployment, I was light-years ahead of my first missions. I’d come a long way from the kid in a T-shirt hoping to be a SEAL. I’d learned valuable lessons on the streets of Baghdad on my first combat deployment.

There was no stopping a lucky shot or well-placed roadside bomb, but after thirteen deployments there was little that surprised me. I’d been sent to a compound rigged to explode when I arrived. I’d walked into countless houses in Iraq and Afghanistan and faced fighters waiting to ambush me. The missions weren’t any easier, but I had a wealth of experience behind me.

—

Part
of the reason my teammates and I were so capable was we constantly tried our best to evolve. The enemy was always changing their tactics, and if we didn’t change ours as quickly, we would fall behind, putting ourselves at risk.

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At the start of the war in Afghanistan, few of us had seen any real combat. We were highly trained with no experience, but after a decade of war, almost ninety percent of the force had real-world combat experience and close to double-digit deployments under their belts.

During every deployment, we pushed to change tactics and techniques as quickly as our enemy did. We never rested on what worked in the past; instead we pushed to develop what would work in the future.

I closed my eyes and let the hum of the helicopter’s engines wash over me. Some of my teammates were already asleep. I rested my eyes and went over the mission in my head. I tucked my hands between my body armor and my stomach, trying to keep them as warm as possible for as long as possible. It wasn’t Alaska cold that night, but it was still cold enough that I could feel it through my gloves.

We were used to this routine. At this point in the war and our careers, we had become somewhat numb to the pain, suffering, and sacrifice of going on missions. I rationalized it all as “just part of the job.” Some people had chosen different professions, but this was ours and we were getting really fucking good at it.

I felt the helicopter dip down and heard the engine pitch change as it landed. A mix of dust and snow greeted us as we dashed off the back ramp. I got about fifty yards from the helicopter and started to piss into the dirt. I’d been holding it for the hour-long flight and I knew once we got moving I wouldn’t have a chance to go. All around me my teammates were doing the same thing. As the helicopter’s engines faded away, we got into patrol formation and started toward the compound.

No words had to be spoken. No order given. This was another day at work for us. Everyone knew what to do, where to go, and what was expected of him. Sure the bureaucracy and bullshit rules from senior officers were always there, but we always worked with them and around them and otherwise did our best to block it all out of our minds.

In the green hue of my night vision goggles, I could see my teammates spread out before me. We had been patrolling toward the target for about an hour when the radio crackled to life.

“We’ve got two MAMs [military-age males] coming out of a door on the west side of the compound,” I heard over the radio. “They just moved over to a door on the east side.”

Shit, the fighters were still awake. If people in the compound were awake, it meant we would have to use different tactics on the assault. We wouldn’t be able to silently pick the lock and slowly make our way into their bedroom and catch them by surprise.

As it stood, based off the latest report from ISR, we’d have
to call them out, giving up our element of surprise and allowing them time to arm themselves to make a stand. I’d been around long enough to know that folks who really had no clue what was happening on the ground made most of the rules we operated under.