SEAL Team Six: Memoirs of an Elite Navy SEAL Sniper (5 page)

The police arrived shortly before the ambulance. As I listened to the cops question Ralph, I found out that he had offered to give the two thugs his money, but not his wallet. That’s when Ralph got shot.

While Ralph went into surgery in the hospital, the police took me to the Dania police station. The detectives questioned me, took me back to the scene, and had me talk through the incident. They had a suspect but realized I was too young and too shocked by what happened to be a credible witness.

It was the first time I had been around such professional men. They took time with me, told me what it was like to be a police officer, and told me what they had to do to become police officers. I was amazed. A narcotics detective showed me all the different kinds of drugs they had taken off the street. They gave me a tour of the police station, and the paramedics next door gave me a tour of their facility.
Man, this is so cool.
The paramedics even let me slide down the pole. I would never forget them.

That night, they still couldn’t find my dad, so a detective drove me to his home to spend the night. His wife asked, “Have you had anything to eat yet?”

I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. “No, ma’am.”

“Are you hungry?”

“A little bit.”

“OK, let me fix you something to eat.”

The detective said, “We brought him to the station this afternoon, but none of us thought about feeding him.”

“Don’t you know he’s a growing boy?” She gave me a plate of food.

I ate ravenously.
Maybe I could just live with these people forever
 … After my meal, I fell asleep. I was awakened at five o’clock the next morning. The detective took me to the police station, where Dad and his brother, my uncle Carroll, were waiting for me.

The two of them owned a watermelon field where I started working after school and during the summer. Those two were all about work. When they weren’t working their farm, they were driving trucks. As I started contributing to the family, my relationship with Dad, who had stopped drinking, improved.

In South Georgia, where the heat exceeded 100 degrees and the humidity neared 100 percent, I would walk through the field cutting 30-pound watermelons off the vine, place them in a line to throw them over to the road, and then toss them up onto the pickup truck. One of the older guys would back the truck up to the trailer of an 18-wheeler, where I helped pack the watermelons onto the rig. After loading thousands of watermelons, I’d ride on the truck up to Columbia, South Carolina, in the early hours of the next morning to unload and sell the watermelons. I’d get about two hours of sleep before riding back.

When there was an hour or two to spare, my family would sometimes go for a picnic. On one of these picnics, I taught myself how to swim in the slow-moving waters of the Little Satilla River. I had no swimming technique whatsoever, but I felt at home in the water. We went there on a number of weekends: swimming and fishing for largemouth bass, crappie, redbreast, and bluegill.

Occasionally, after working in the watermelon patch, the crew and I went blackwater swimming in Lake Grace. Because of all the tannic acid from the pine trees and other vegetation, both the Little Satilla River and Lake Grace are so black on a good day that you can’t see your feet in the water. In the summer, dragonflies hunt down mosquitoes. From the surrounding woods, squirrels chirp, ducks quack, and wild turkeys squawk. Those dark waters hold a mysterious beauty.

By the time I was thirteen or fourteen, I was running the field crew. I’d leave the side of town where the whites lived and cross the tracks to the Quarters, where the blacks lived. I’d pick up the fifteen to twenty people who were going to work in the field that day and drive them out to the field, organize them, and then work beside them, even though they were almost twice my size.

After work one day, my watermelon crew and I had a contest to see who could swim the farthest from the pier underwater at Lake Grace. The occasional family picnic had offered me the time to improve my swimming. As I swam beneath the surface of the dark brown water, I swallowed with my mouth closed and let a little air out. When I came up, someone said, “You had to be farting. There’s no way you had that much air in your lungs.” Times like this were very rare for me. They were the few times I could truly relax and enjoy myself. Occasionally, we built campfires and talked at night.

Dad didn’t mind if we spent a few hours swimming or fishing, but we never went hunting. My dad let me shoot his gun once in a while, but hunting was an all-day event. That would take too much time away from work. Work was his focus. If I made a mistake or didn’t work hard enough, he beat me.

*   *   *

In junior high school, I hurt my leg playing football in gym class. One of the coaches said, “Let me check your hip out.” He pulled my pants down so he could examine my right hip. He saw the hell that covered me from my lower back down to my upper legs where my dad had recently beaten me. The coach gasped. “Oh, my…” After checking my hip, he pulled my pants up and never said another word. In those days, whatever happened in the home stayed in the home. I remember feeling so embarrassed that someone had discovered my secret.

Despite everything, I loved my parents. It wasn’t entirely their fault they were uneducated and didn’t know how to nurture children. It was all they could do to put food on the table and keep four kids clothed. In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we never got up to self-actualization because we were still on the bottom of the pyramid—trying to feed and clothe ourselves. For the most part, my parents never used bad language. They were God-fearing people. Mom took my sisters and me to church every Sunday. They saw nothing wrong with their child-rearing skills.

Because I was the older brother, Dad expected me to take care of my sisters, Rebecca, Tammy, and Sue Anne. Tammy was always the bigmouthed, crap-stirring troublemaker. From the time she started elementary school, I lost track of how many times she ran her mouth and I had to stick up for her. When I was in the fifth grade, she mouthed off to a guy in the eighth grade. The eighth grader cleaned my clock, giving me two black eyes, a broken nose, and a chipped tooth. When I got home, my dad was the proudest man there was. Never mind that Tammy had done something senseless and provoked a fight. I looked like road kill. No matter how badly that kid beat me, though, if I hadn’t stood up to him, my dad would’ve beaten me worse.

*   *   *

At the age of seventeen, the summer of my junior year in high school, I returned home one afternoon from working all day in the watermelon field, took a shower, and sat in the living room wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. A little while later, Tammy came in the door crying.

My hair was still wet from the shower. “What is it?”

“My head hurts.”

“What do you mean your head hurts, baby?”

“Feel right here.”

I felt her head. She had a knot on top of it.

“We were playing volleyball at the church. When I spiked the volleyball, Timmy picked it up and threw it at me. So I threw it back. He grabbed me and put me in a headlock. Then he punched me on top of the head.”

I went through the roof. Now I was a bull seeing red. Possessed. I ran out of the house, off the porch, vaulted the chain link, and ran down the road one block to the First Baptist Church. Kids and parents were coming out of church from summer Bible school. Deacons stood out front. I spotted Timmy, a boy my age—the boy who’d hurt my little sister.

He turned around just in time to see me coming. “Howard, we need to talk.”

“Oh, no we don’t, you son of a bitch.” I nailed him right in the face, plowing him. I got on top of the boy, straddled his upper body, and pummeled him half to death, cussing up a storm. All I could see in my mind was my baby sister crying with a knot on her head.

A deacon tried to pull me off, but I was seventeen years old and had worked like a dog every day of my life. It took several more deacons to separate me from the boy.

Brother Ron appeared. “Howard, stop.” I believed in Brother Ron and looked up to him. He was like the town celebrity.

I stopped. Brother Ron had exorcised the demon.

Unfortunately, the incident started a feud. The guy’s dad was kind of a psycho, and my dad was a hothead who wouldn’t back down from anybody.

Psycho drove to my house.

Dad met him outside.

“If I see that bastard son of yours somewhere, he may not be making it back home,” Psycho said.

Dad walked into the house and grabbed a shotgun. As he exited the front door, my grandfather met him outside. With my grandfather stood Brother Ron. Dad was about to put a load of double-aught buck in Psycho’s ass. Grandfather and Brother Ron calmed Dad down.

The next weeks were tense for me, looking over my shoulder for a grown man everywhere I went. Timmy had two brothers, too. I rounded up my posse to protect me and didn’t go anywhere alone.

Brother Ron got Dad and Psycho together and had a peaceful “Come to Jesus” meeting. It turned out that things didn’t happen quite the way my smart-mouthed sister had said. Tammy had done something to Timmy. After that, he’d only given her a playful noogie—rubbing his knuckles on her head. I had imagined a bigger bump on her head than there actually was. Our fathers agreed to put everything aside.

Now, I knew I was going to be in big trouble.

Instead, Dad said, “You know, I’d have done the same exact thing, though I might not have cussed as much as you did in the churchyard.”

I wore that like a badge of honor. In spite of my dad’s faults, protecting his family was important to him, and I respected his desire to protect me.

Brother Ron was the glue that held the community together, and the community helped shape who I was.

Besides Brother Ron, another man who influenced me was Uncle Carroll, Dad’s older brother. Uncle Carroll didn’t have a hot temper. He may not have been well educated, but he was intelligent—especially in his dealings with people. Uncle Carroll had friends everywhere. He taught me how to drive a truck because Leon didn’t have the patience. Leon would be angry at the first mistake I made picking watermelons, driving, or anything—it didn’t matter. Uncle Carroll took the time to explain things. When I was learning how to drive an 18-wheeler, Uncle Carroll said, “Well, Howard, no, you shouldn’t have flipped the split axle right then. You should get your RPMs up a little bit more. Now gear back down and go back up…” Being around Uncle Carroll, I learned people skills. Leon and I would be in a truck driving from West Palm Beach, Florida, to Screven, Georgia—eight hours—and hardly speak. We didn’t have conversations. He might say something like, “Do you need to go to the bathroom?” Unless it concerned bodily functions or getting something to eat, we didn’t talk. Both Mom and Dad told us, “Children are supposed to be seen, not heard.” They weren’t BSing, either. If we were ever out in public and said something without someone asking us a question, when we got home, we knew what we were in for. Uncle Carroll was the only one who ever showed me any affection. On occasion, he’d put his arm around my shoulders if he knew Leon had been on my tail unrelentingly the way he usually was. He gave moral support, even a kind word on occasion. Through everything, Uncle Carroll’s support was priceless. If he and I were in the truck, we would stop, go into a restaurant, and eat: breakfast and lunch. With Leon, we would go into a grocery store and get some salami and cheese and make a sandwich in the truck while driving—Leon couldn’t be slowed down. The best thing was that Uncle Carroll gave me words of encouragement. His influence was as critical as Brother Ron’s, maybe even more. Without them, I would’ve harbored some dark thoughts. Probably suicide.

*   *   *

I spent my high school years as an Air Force Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) geek. I loved JROTC, with its discipline, structure, and nice uniform. I was always the outstanding cadet: ranking officer, color guard commander—it gave me something to do and excel at. The light came on, and I learned that I could lead pretty easily.

When it came to girls, though, I was a late bloomer. In October, a month away from being eighteen years old, I asked a buddy, “How does this whole French kissing thing work? What do you do?”

“Howard, you just reach over, put your mouth on hers, stick your tongue in, and go to town.”

I needed a date for the JROTC military ball. My JROTC buddy had a sister named Dianne; everyone called her Dee Dee. I hadn’t really thought about her, but now I figured maybe she would go with me to the ball. Scared and embarrassed, I asked her, “Will you go to the military ball with me?”

“Yes,” she said.

After the dance, Dee Dee said, “Let’s go to the Ghost Light.” I took her to the old make-out spot—where legend said that the ghost of an old decapitated railroad worker walked the railroad tracks searching with his lantern.

When we parked the car, I was petrified.
When do I put my lips on hers? What the hell does “stick your tongue in and go to town” mean? Do I go around in circles? What am I supposed to do?
So I pretty much talked myself out of it. I turned to tell Dee Dee,
You know, we better get back home.
She had already moved in for the kill. Her face was right on mine. She gave me my first French kiss. Needless to say, I figured out,
This is not quantum physics, and this is OK.
We dated the rest of the school year until spring.