No Hero: The Evolution of a Navy SEAL (6 page)

There were three rooms on the second floor of the house. A balcony was at the far end of the hall. My teammates were right behind me. The SEAL beside me cleared into the first room on the right with some of the other guys. It was littered with sleeping mats. I continued slowly making my way down the hallway through the thick smoke.

As we approached the second door on the right side of the
hallway, I stepped past it as my teammates behind me entered the room. As we got to the last door along the hallway on the left, my teammates smashed it open and flooded inside. I could hear yelling from the guys in the second room on the right side of the hallway. They found an AK-47, but there was no sign of the gunman.

Directly in front of me at the end of the hallway was the door to the balcony. I reached out and tried the handle. It was locked. My teammates had found an AK-47, but no one knew where the gunman had gone. I had an idea.

I thought through the risks. Did he have a suicide vest on? Was there more than one shooter? There was still no sign of him inside. I was starting to get nervous. How had the motherfucker gotten away already?

He couldn’t go down the steps. I took a knee and quickly unjammed my M-4. I unlocked the balcony door and slowly opened it up. Maybe he was hiding outside. It hadn’t dawned on me that there was no way he could have escaped outside and locked the door from the inside. It had all happened so quickly, and there was so much stuff going on around me it was hard to focus on the little things, like the balcony door being locked from the inside. I was obviously a bit overwhelmed. The whole fight was like being in a car accident.

—

When
you’re in a car accident, you probably remember the last two to three seconds leading up to the crash. If you were
in another car accident, and then another and another, you would begin to remember more and more details about what happened to cause each crash, as you got more familiar with the sights, smells, sounds, rhythms, and speed of a crash.

Gunfights are like car crashes to some degree. They are things you try to avoid, they always surprise you when they happen, and because of the rush of adrenaline, it can become hard to focus and make good decisions. This was one of my first firefights, and I was having trouble staying focused.

With my M-4 jam cleared and the rifle back in action, I opened the door and cleared out onto the balcony.

No one was there. Where the fuck had he gone? I walked down to the end of the balcony, searching the courtyard below and the roof above. I could see our idling trucks in front of the house. There was no way he could have jumped down and escaped. The gunman had vanished.

At the end of the balcony I peered into the window of the room where they’d found the AK-47. I could see my teammates standing in the room. It looked like they’d searched under the beds and in the wooden armoire at the far end of the room.

I was about to walk back into the house when I spotted an adult male through the window, inside the room with my teammates. He was tucked in the windowsill, hidden by a piece of furniture. The male was in his early twenties, wearing a wife-beater T-shirt and shorts. His hair was a mess and he had a few wisps of a beard on his cheeks. His knees were pressed into his chest and I could tell he was trying to be as
still as possible. He had his eyes closed and he had no idea I could see him.

I leveled my M-4, but I couldn’t shoot. He was unarmed, and besides, my teammates were standing behind him and a stray bullet could hit them. Thick black metal bars covered the window. I slid the barrel of my rifle between the bars and smashed the glass. The breaking glass startled the gunman and he turned to face me.

I reared back and drove the muzzle of my rifle into his face. His head snapped back and his lip split open, sending blood cascading down his chin and onto his dirty wife-beater T-shirt. He groaned and fell out of the windowsill onto the bedroom floor. Some of my teammates grabbed him, flipped him over on his face, and cuffed him with a plastic zip tie. We found out afterward he was the Iraqi officer’s son. He’d ditched his AK-47 before hiding in the windowsill.

It was impossible for me to focus once we got back to base that night. I kept going over the mission in my head. The guys who found the AK-47 should have found the son, but none of us managed the stress of the situation very well.

It wasn’t until a couple years later, and the hooded box test, that I started to really think about how to manage stress. I learned there that the key was to first prioritize all the individual stressors and then act. I break it all down into the little things I can manage. The stressors that I can’t affect, I don’t worry about. The ones I can affect, I simply deal with one at a time. In a lot of ways, it goes back to BUD/S and the elephant.

You know, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

The hooded box test is meant to overwhelm. It is meant to force you to make very difficult decisions, right or wrong, good or bad, life or death, all in seconds. We face the same challenge in combat. I always tried to keep things as simple as possible. We don’t want guys to freeze when faced with multiple threats. But we also don’t want guys to immediately start shooting without assessing the situation. Take what’s there, assess the situation, prioritize, and break it down into small tasks you know you can accomplish or eliminate or fix immediately. Through constant practice, repetition, and experience, most SEALs can prioritize stressors fast enough that it feels more like an instinct than a process.

Once that happens, everything starts slowing down.

Take the hooded box drill from S&T. I shot the hostage taker with two paint rounds seconds after the instructors pulled off the hood. He was the first box on my checklist. The second box was the men behind me. I swung around and yelled at the two men behind me.

“Show me your hands,” I barked, keeping my rifle up and at the ready. “Get the fuck back!”

The men were dressed like the gunman in cargo pants and team shirts. But the men were unarmed and held up their hands right away. Both men slowly backed up, taking very small, deliberate steps. Once they were a few feet away, I told them to get down on the ground.

“Put your face on the floor,” I said. “Spread your arms out.”

They did what I ordered, and I turned to face the blonde again, but she had a pistol out and stuck it in my face.

“What the fuck are you doing?” an instructor yelled from the catwalk above me.

The instructors all started yelling at me for not acting quickly enough. I was too deliberate. I didn’t move from threat to threat quickly enough and it cost me. Luckily, just about everyone failed the first time. Car crash number one complete, and it wasn’t pretty.

I cursed myself for being so slow. I spent too much time on the men and forgot about the woman. I didn’t see her as a threat, but overseas plenty of women, in Iraq specifically, would hide cell phones and weapons. On my first deployment with SEAL Team Five, we searched a woman after we arrested her husband, and found several phones and guns. During that same deployment, four women were arrested in Baghdad wearing suicide-bombing belts. A few months after the Baghdad arrests, a female suicide bomber—dressed like a man—detonated a suicide bomb outside of Tall Afar in northern Iraq. The insurgents knew we didn’t search women. After that, we made a point of searching everyone on target.

I’d failed my first hooded box test at S&T, but the lesson learned wasn’t one I’d forget. Assess, prioritize, and act. I’d get in that “car crash” of combat hundreds of more times throughout my career, facing new stresses faster than I could have imagined back during the hooded box training, firing real rounds instead of nonlethal paint, my life and the lives of others on the line. I learned something vital every single
time.

Safe Return Doubtful

Mind-
set

I slid
my rifle behind me and started to climb up the metal ladder. I could hear it scrape against the side of the building as I reached for the next rung.

Ahead of me, my teammate had already reached the roof and slid over the small parapet wall. I reached the roof seconds later and climbed over, dragging more than sixty pounds of body armor and gear with me. Below, I could see my teammates slowly moving into position at the front door of the target.

We were the “roof team,” which meant we provided overwatch from the high ground. We were about to hit an insurgent safe house, and it was my team’s job to get to the roof to cover the assault. If we were able to enter the building from the roof, we assaulted down the stairs while the ground element assaulted up the stairs. Theoretically, we would capture the bad guys in the middle and hopefully before they had time to resist.

It was 2006 and Iraq was the big priority. The Army unit assigned had taken some heavy casualties and needed replacements. I was only about a month into my first deployment
with my own unit when my six-man team was sent from Afghanistan over to Iraq to help. At first, we thought our entire team would be attached as a unit, but when we arrived we got separated and sent individually to different teams.

We flew into the military side of Baghdad International Airport and drove to the Green Zone, a walled-off area of the Iraqi capital occupied by Coalition forces. I’d been to Iraq with SEAL Team Five, so everything looked familiar. Toward the end of that deployment, I’d operated in Baghdad. At that time, we were all new, with little to no combat experience. But landing in Baghdad this time, it felt different. There was energy in the air, a confidence that pervaded the entire military because of our collective combat experience.

I was still pretty new to my team, and I’d never worked with the Army but had heard rumblings about how the two services did not get along. There was always this competition between the two, probably driven by our shared quest to be the best. There were shooting competitions and other drills that always seemed to pit the two units against each other. In my mind, I expected to see or experience this tension, but it never came. All the old-school drama over which unit was better had faded since the war started. We were one team. The team opened up, pulled me in, and made me one of their own. No one cared about which unit shot better when we were all working together fighting a common enemy.

When I landed, Jon, my new team leader, met me at the operations center and took me to my room. He also showed me the chow hall and gym and introduced me to my other
teammates. My new team seemed to be made up of guys very much like the SEALs on my old team. We used all the same gear, tactics, and command structure. They were Army, and I was Navy, and there were some cultural differences, but the basic makeup of the guys was very familiar.

Jon welcomed me and included me in all the planning. There was never a moment when I didn’t feel like I was part of the team, but more importantly I felt like Jon and the others were open to hearing my opinion.

Once, we were planning a mission a few weeks after I arrived. My team was slated to land on the roof of the target on an MH-6 Little Bird and clear down from the roof. Jon was working on the manifest, the list of guys going on the mission.

“Space is tight on this one, boys,” Jon said.

He was crunching the numbers to make sure we stayed under the weight limit. I was sure I’d be cut from the mission. I was the new guy and the SEAL. The planning was over and the rest of my team left the operations center. I got my notebook and headed back to the room.

“Hey,” Jon said as I started to leave. “You’re on tonight.”

Later, I saw Jon talking to the other new guy on the team. He was staying behind. The next time we exceeded the weight limit, I stayed behind. Jon always made it a point to swap me out with his other new guy, ensuring I got as much love as the rest of his team. Yes, I was still considered a new guy both at my unit and the Army team, but it was nice to know that Jon thought of me as part of his team.

After the first few missions, I folded myself into the team,
and soon I was no longer looked at as the token SEAL replacement. I was just a teammate, one of two new guys on the team.

I’d just met these guys, but I already trusted them with my life and they did the same. I knew that they would risk their lives to save mine and I’d do the same for them. I credit Jon with making the transition seamless. He was one of the best leaders I’ve ever worked for in the military. He didn’t have the respect of his team and others just because he was the boss. He earned everyone’s respect because of his character, his leadership, and his calm demeanor in combat. It seemed like nothing fazed him. I immediately looked up to him as someone I wanted to emulate.

I realized over the course of my career that every special operations unit shared a common mind-set. We were all wired the same way. We all started with a shared sense of purpose. In the past, and in peacetime, there was a rivalry between the units. But once the shooting started, that rivalry was discarded in favor of teamwork, because if there was one thing we all agreed on, it was completing our mission and coming home safe.

If you think of a special operations team—SEALs, Special Forces, Rangers, and the Air Force Pararescuemen and combat controllers—like a boat, everybody rows. The officers down to the newest guy are trained to care about the team first and do what it takes to accomplish the mission. I saw the same mentality when I worked with the international special operations units.

Every single unit I’ve ever worked or trained with had that in common. Some of the gear and tactics might be a bit different. Some of the units had better toys, but in the end it didn’t matter if you had the most expensive rifle or had special training. We all volunteered for the hardest training we could find in our respective countries. We all learned to push ourselves to go well beyond our mental and physical limits.

Units like SEALs and other special operations units have been in existence since war was created. The Greeks had special units and George Washington’s army used sharpshooters during the American Revolution.

But only after World War II did officials start figuring out how best to screen and train special operations forces. And the first step was always finding guys with the right mind-set to achieve the group’s common goal. Mind-set is the common denominator.

Charlie Beckwith, after arriving in Vietnam in 1965, was given command of Project Delta—Detachment B-52. The reconnaissance unit was created to collect intelligence along the Ho Chi Minh Trail and in South Vietnam. Beckwith fired most of the soldiers in the unit when he took command and started to recruit replacements using a flyer.

WANTED: Volunteers for project Delta. Will guarantee you a medal, a body bag, or both. Requirements: have to be a volunteer. Had to be in country for at least six months. Had to have a CIB (Combat Infantry Badge). Had to be at least
the rank of Sergeant—otherwise don’t even come and talk to me.

He wanted to find guys like my teammates, who possessed a never-quit attitude and a single-minded drive to accomplish the mission. Starting with the mentality from the flyer, Beckwith later created
.................
based on what he learned from the British SAS.

But the military is not the only example. Ernest Shackleton, who led three British expeditions to the Antarctic in the 1900s, reportedly placed an ad in a London newspaper looking for the same type of man:

Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in event of success.

I would have signed up for Beckwith’s Project Delta and Shackleton’s expedition.

I never wanted to do anything normal. I can’t be average. No one involved in special operations can be average because our missions are never easy or routine. Both Shackleton and Beckwith were looking for a shared sense of purpose and a common mind-set among all their people. If anybody on their crews wasn’t there for the right reasons and for the team’s needs, there was a higher chance of failure. And failure in the special operations community is never tolerated.

Most nights in Iraq, I was perched on the landing skid of a Little Bird—an MH-6 helicopter flown by the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment—racing over the rooftops. I’d fast rope to the roof of a building and clear the top floors while my teammates in the trucks on the street cleared the lower levels. The missions were exactly what I signed up to do, but I was doing them with the Army instead of my SEAL teammates. We were waging a massive campaign to dismantle al Qaeda in Iraq.

We called it “Baghdad SWAT.”

But some nights, we didn’t have the Little Birds. If we were going to the roof, we had to climb.

As I crested the parapet wall, I looked back over my shoulder and saw that Jon had reached the roof. I turned and headed for the opposite corner, scanning for any targets. Tile covered the roof and a small two-foot-high parapet wall ran completely around the edge. A door sat in the middle of the roof and a myriad of satellite dishes of all makes and models were attached to the corners of the building. Bundles of thick black power lines ran from building to building, sagging over the road and alleyway.

I had a map of the area in my head and knew the target we were looking for was on the other side of the roof. Over the radio, I heard the ground team searching for the correct door. The enemy safe house was in a duplex, but from the radio traffic the ground team was unsure which door to breach and enter.

From my perch three stories up, I could see the ground
team’s trucks. I heard a muffled boom, and the Army operators on the ground started to move into the house. I kept watch on the house, waiting for any sign of movement.

Then word came over the radio. The boys hit the wrong side of the duplex. They were going into the other side of the duplex now. I heard a burst from an AK-47 and some yelling.

“We’ve got squirters,” I heard over the radio.

From our vantage point, I knew that the squirters had to be close, but they were out of sight. We couldn’t see into the alley located to the north of our location because of the building in front of us. We needed to cross over to the other building, but there was no time to go all the way down to the ground floor, move over to the next building, and then clear our way back up three floors to the roof of the other building.

Nearby on the roof, I noticed a ladder. It looked long enough to reach the parapet wall on the other building. From that roof, we’d have a perfect angle down on the alley the enemy fighters were using to escape.

I looked at Jon, but he was working the radio, which was jammed with reports of fighters on the run. The guys inside the building also found a cache of weapons and explosives.

I wanted to get into the action, so I ran over to the ladder. It was made of discarded pieces of wood nailed together. A single nail and some wire held some of the ladder’s rungs on. I grabbed the ladder and put it on my shoulder and ran over to the edge of the building where my teammate waited.

“Think this haji ladder will hold us?” my teammate asked.

We were three stories up. I stood on the lip of the parapet wall and looked across the open space between the buildings. It was about fifteen feet across.

“If we lay it flat and crawl across, I think it will,” I said, hoping more than believing it.

“Either way, we’re about to find out,” he said with a smirk.

We both wanted to get in the fight and stop the squirters from escaping, or worse, setting up an ambush. We gently slid the ladder across the alley. My teammate went first. Lying flat, he slid across the ladder while I held it and kept watch on the other building. When it was my turn, I slung my rifle around behind me so it rested on my back and started to crawl across.

My mind went back to thin ice in Alaska. The only way to get across thin ice is to spread your body weight out as wide as possible. If you stand up, all your body weight is in one spot, and the next thing you know you fall through into freezing-cold water. Like crossing thin ice, crawling across the ladder was very dangerous. We were three stories off the ground, enemy fighters were running around, and we were about to trust this piece-of-shit Iraqi ladder to keep us from falling.

At least in Alaska I hadn’t been wearing the additional sixty pounds of gear.

I took two deep breaths and tried to stay focused. This was one of the many times staying in my three-foot world kept me going, because I still hated heights.

Inch by inch I crawled across the alley. Below, I saw a massive pile of trash. Most of it looked like kitchen waste,
with rotting food and various food containers. Plastic bags were blown around the alley, and it looked like a car or truck had hit the waste pile, scattering trash into the middle of the alley.

I never stopped moving and finally made it to the other building. Back on my feet, I raced over to the corner, looking for the squirters. The enemy fighters would have easily gotten away had we hesitated or decided not to use the ladder. I picked up the squirters running at a dead sprint just as we got to the edge of the building and looked into the alley. Both men were carrying rifles.

I could see my teammate’s laser stop on the fighter on the left. I zeroed in on the fighter on the right. We both opened fire and cut the fighters down before they could get to the mouth of the alley. They had gotten lucky when the ground force hit the wrong side of the duplex, but that’s where their luck ran out.

On the other building, Jon heard the shots. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see him hustling over to where we’d left the ladder. I turned back to the alley and kept scanning. My teammates in the house were still clearing rooms and finding weapons, but it was unclear how many fighters were in the safe house.

Above me, I heard AH-6 Little Birds crisscrossing in the sky. They were armed with rockets and machine guns, ready to engage if we ran into trouble. After the first reports of squirters, they started flying in ever-widening circles from the target, looking for fighters who might have escaped.