Inside SEAL Team Six (12 page)

My buddy Foster frequently lost his oxygen mask and passed out under canopy. He’d wake up after his automatic opening deployed his main chute.

After dozens of jumps, we were ready to try for thirty thousand feet, but I was worried. The rear ramp lowered. A
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support para-rigger stood behind me on the ramp as I tightened my straps. I cinched down my mask and did a couple practice wave-offs.

My heart pounding, I was ready to go.

But just as the red light turned to yellow, I heard a loud crash. When I looked behind me I saw the
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on the deck convulsing. His arms, legs, and neck were thrashing uncontrollably. The jumpmaster immediately radioed the cockpit. The ramp was closed and we flew back to the base.

The doctors discovered that the
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para-rigger had cocaine in his system. He was kicked off the team, and we were pissed that he’d ruined our world-record attempt.

A legendary badass from New Jersey named Al Morrel taught us defensive tactics (DT)—commonly known as hand-to-hand combat. Al was a heavy man who wore thick glasses and had huge bear-paw-like hands. He’d served as General Westmoreland’s personal bodyguard during Vietnam and had worked as bodyguard for Elvis Presley.

He stood before ten of us and said, “I can’t prove everything I’m going to tell you, but I can tell you this: The ten of you can’t take me down. There’s no one on this planet who can take me down. But all I can prove right now is that the ten of you can’t.”

The ten of us looked at him, thinking,
Is this old man crazy?

Al said, “Give me about a second apiece and come at me one by one. Try gouging my eyes out, putting me in a choke hold, whatever you want to do.”

We charged, one after the other. Being one of the smaller guys in the group, I figured I’d jump up at his neck and put him in a choke hold. But when I ran up to him, that mountain of a man threw me, and I landed flat against a wall. He smeared all ten of us good.

Al had an amazing ability to use the assailant’s own energy against him. If the guy came at Al with a knife or a baseball bat, Al would use the weapon against the attacker.

Al loved knives. He said to us once, “If I really get to know my knife, I can cut a person without the blade even touching them.”

What?

He made incredible statements, and proved many of them to be true.

One day Al walked up to the biggest guy in our class—Mack. Mack stood out not just for his size and his big mustache but also for the big, ugly scars on his face, which he’d gotten from his wife. He explained that he’d been in the shower with his wife and she’d pissed on his leg because she thought it was sexy. Mack didn’t agree and slapped her face. She reached up and gouged his face with her long fingernails, which resulted in the scars.

Al said to Mack, “Kick me between my legs as hard as you can.”

Mack didn’t want to do it.

“Go ahead and kick me!”

Mack kicked Al in the balls. Al didn’t even twitch.

The rest of us guys couldn’t believe what we had just seen.

Al said, “If I wanted a freakin’ girl to kick me, I would have asked one. Go ahead and kick me like a man.”

Mack reared his leg back and kicked him so hard it was painful to watch. Al’s body rose a couple of inches off the ground, but his face didn’t register even an iota of discomfort.

Holy shit!

He straightened his shoulders, walked past us, and said, “Men, I never want you to show how much pain you’re in. Under any circumstances.”

He never explained how he did it, but we couldn’t have been more impressed.

Unfortunately, Al’s tolerance for pain knew no bounds. Al had developed a triple hernia years before we met him, which protruded quite a bit. One day before class, he accidentally sliced open his protruding belly, causing his large and small intestines to spill out of the wound. One of the guys in our class found him bleeding on the floor and called an ambulance. Al died from complications in the hospital. We couldn’t believe it, and we’d never forget what he taught us.

The diving at
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was much more complex and dangerous than anything we had attempted at ST-1. Now, we dove as a boat crew of six rather than in pairs. And the six of us swam while holding on to a five-foot-long telescopic pole with a caving ladder secured to the end.

Try to imagine swimming with five other guys for four hours underwater at night. All of you are holding on to this pole, all trying to swim at the same depth, in and around pilings and piers. It is fairly difficult maintaining buoyancy as a single diver in the darkness, and trying to maintain the buoyancy of yourself and five others while diving in and around pier pilings is extremely difficult.

We’d dive into a harbor with maybe forty ships in it and have to locate the target vessel from underwater in the dark. The only lights we used were the luminescent green lights on our watches, depth gauges, and compass boards.

We did vertical de-rigs, which they don’t do anymore because of the danger. Six of us would swim up under a ship and rig a vertical line from its hull. The line had loops attached to it so each diver could secure his dive gear as he de-rigged underwater. We’d secure our weight belts, fins, and Dräger rebreathers.

On the signal—
toot, toot, toot
—we’d silently surface.

As lead climber, I would climb the ladder and attach it for the rest of the team. This was always an adventure because I never knew how securely the ladder was hooked, or what it was hooked on to. We climbed in order and we each had specific duties once we boarded the vessel.

Weapons training and CQB were also a lot more intense. In fact, we did more CQB training than any other unit in the U.S. military, and probably in the world. And we
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We learned how to take down a house room by room and how to infiltrate an aircraft or a bus. We could secure a vessel compartment by compartment after boarding by sea or air. And we were surgical shooters trained in various breaching and explosive-entry methods.
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One of our sniper instructors was the famous Carlos Hathcock, known as the Marine Corps sniper, who had recorded ninety-three confirmed sniper kills in Vietnam. He held the record for distance: a twenty-five-hundred-yard confirmed kill with a .50-caliber rifle during a five-day standoff with the Vietcong.

We also had four incredible lead-climbing instructors, including the amazing Jay Smith and Danny Osmond.

On ops in the jungle, desert, or wooded areas, we’d often extract from a target with
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helicopters shooting right behind us to ensure that we weren’t followed by anyone who might have survived the initial assault. They’d fire so close, hard, and hot that you could literally feel the ground shaking. We trusted those
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pilots with our lives—over and over again. They became famous with the book and movie
Black Hawk Down
.

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ST-6,
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Rich, one of my teammates and a guy who had distinguished himself in Grenada, was doing live CQB training with his boat crew. The shooting house, or as we called it in the ’80s, the kill house, was dark. There were paper funny-face targets placed in different locations. Upon entering with his weapon, Rich spotted a darkened hallway that extended between two rooms. He went down it to make sure it was clear. But the guys who had set up the shooting house and placed the targets didn’t plan for anyone to go all the way down the hall. Rich did.

Meanwhile, a second team entered the shooting house through the other entrance, spotted a threat target set up on the other side of the hallway wall, and opened fire. Two rounds hit the paper target at the center of mass, passed through the wall, and hit Rich between the one-inch gap in his body armor. They damaged his lungs, liver, and spleen. Rich died a couple of days after.

He wasn’t the only brave warrior we lost in training. We trained like we fought and said that our SOPs were written in blood, so none of our teammates who died in training died in vain.

Training-based scenarios helped us identify our individual strengths, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities. The goal was for each of us to learn how to stay in control and remain confident when faced with life-threatening situations.

Through BUD/S and SEAL training we developed a combat mind-set, and that strengthened even further during
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We understood that all human beings responded to threat with a fight-or-flight response. Typical reactions included muscle tension; headache; upset stomach; tunnel vision; increased heartbeat; shallow breathing; anxiety; poor concentration; feelings of hopelessness, frustration, anger, sadness, and fear; and auditory occlusion.

Visualization (picturing ourselves in dangerous scenarios), anticipation mind-set, and contingency training were some of the techniques we learned and practiced.
If such-and-such happens, what’s the best way for me to respond?
The idea was to develop well-thought-out, sound actions in advance of possible threats. We always said, “Plan your dive and dive your plan.”

We all learned the importance of developing situational awareness. According to Colonel Boyd’s OODA loop, this involves observation, orientation, decision, and action. In other words, always find the threat before it finds you, orient yourself to your surroundings, trust that your conscious mind will offer the action with the highest probability of success based on your previous training and experience, and act on your plan. Because a poor plan poorly executed is better than no plan at all.

At
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we were evaluated constantly—during work and on liberty. We were graded on whether or not we went drinking at night with the guys, how early we got up for PT, how effectively we cleaned our weapons, how neatly we packed our parachutes, and how well we got along with the others.

During the last week of my training, without any warning, an officer and two enlisted men were pulled from
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and told, Pack your bags and go, you’re not going to an ST-6 assault team.

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ST-6
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after the team extracted. And the coxswains spent most of their time in the water, traveling in cigarette boats at seventy miles an hour, in all types of weather—rain, snow, hailstorms, lightning—training and chasing down ships.

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It’s where I belonged.

W
hen I got to SEAL Team Six,
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was still under investigation. As a result, all of us were audited. Navy officials sat me down and went through all my hotel receipts, taxi receipts, receipts for the cold-weather gear I had purchased for winter-warfare training. Everything.

I was squeaky clean. But a few guys got in trouble and had to leave the command.

Overall, I found the commitment and professionalism of the team members to be off the charts. They were the very best of the best—serious, smart, tough, dedicated, professional, mission driven—and I was extremely proud to be among them.

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During standby, we all met early in the kill house or on the range and fired weapons. We shot a lot—before, during, and after work!

Every morning we’d have something called the head shed meeting, which included officers and boat-crew leaders. During the head shed meeting, we’d discuss the plan of the day—who was going where, and what activities would be taking place. For example, boat crews one and two will conduct over-the-beach training in a.m., boat crews three and four will be at long-gun range in the a.m., the entire assault team will execute a night water jump from a C5 in the p.m. We worked with outstanding air assets, including
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ST-6
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Most mornings, the head shed meeting lasted forty-five minutes. Then we’d have individual PT—one to two hours of running, swimming, obstacle course, or circuit work in the weight room.

In the other SEAL teams, the PT was much more structured and mandatory. Running one day, weight training the next, and so on. If you missed PT, you generally had to answer to someone. But at ST-6, PT was the responsibility of each individual operator. All of our operators were always ready physically for battle. We did not train to get big, ripped, or cut—we PTed so we could do our jobs.

During standby, in addition to shooting every day and staging competitions with long guns, MP5s, M4s, shotguns, and handguns,
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rehearsals, and discuss tactics—and that we did all the time.

We also rehearsed recalls. Only the command head shed team would know the time of recall beforehand. Once the signal went out, all members of the team would assemble, listen to the warning order, and then run a full mission profile, in full gear—NVGs, gas masks, live rounds. We changed scenarios constantly, juggling the variables, such as the number of hostages and threats.

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We had to be ready with all bags packed—one bag loaded with jump and air-ops gear, another with dive gear, a third with counterterrorist gear, a fourth with winter-warfare gear, a fifth with desert gear, and a sixth with jungle gear. We were constantly tweaking, trying to make the recall lighter, quieter, and easier to assess.

Recalls occurred at least once a cycle and we never knew when they were coming. More than once, we were all at a party at a team member’s house when our beepers went off. Each time, all the operators straightened up, hurried to their cars, and drove to work as fast as possible.

Once there, we had four hours to get dressed, pack our gear, have our intel briefing, and go to our cage to get our weapons and ammo. We always kept our wartime ammo separate from the training ammo.

If you were a demolitions guy, you packed all of the demolition. If it was a jump op, the riggers would pack all of the chutes and related gear; if it was a dive op, the men in the dive locker would pack all dive-related gear.

Typically, a recall involved the entire assault team with coxswain and sniper support. We were the only maritime counterterrorism team in the world that could be wheels-up in fewer than four hours!

Once we were recalled the day before a team member named Conrad was going to be married. It was a big wedding, and all of us were invited. But Conrad was the only one who got permission to attend. Later, when we saw the pictures, we noticed that he was just one guy in the company of all our wives and girlfriends. The joke around the base was that it had been a lesbian wedding.

All the operators on ST-6 were trained to be shooters, jumpers, divers, and so on. But each one of us had a specialty. For example, some were breachers, some were coxswains, some were snipers, some were communications reps. I was the medic, a dive supervisor, and a lead climber. So as a lead climber, I was the guy who went up the ladder first, whether we were climbing up the side of a ship, oil rig platform, or building.

During specialized training (SPECTRA, we called it), each of us would work on his specific skills. I climbed at Yosemite; Red Rock, Nevada; and Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, to train with some of the world’s top climbers. I also attended advanced para-rescue medical training courses with the USAF Pararescue (PJs) and advanced mini goat-lab courses with the Army Special Forces, and I worked at the Womack Army Medical Center at Fort Bragg as an “intern”—which meant that I was allowed to assist in all types of procedures in the emergency and operating rooms.

Then, during the team’s deployment cycle, all of us would pack up and deploy somewhere in CONUS (the contiguous United States) or OCONUS (outside the contiguous United States). We might travel as a team to Puerto Rico for a three-week dive trip, or to Arizona for two to three weeks of HAHO jumping. Sometimes we
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The person or persons who had that specific specialty planned the trip. So I designed the climbing, medical, and dive deployments.

We trained for land, air, water, and mountain, arctic, jungle, desert, and urban terrain. No other maritime unit in the world was better trained, more versatile, or could deploy to as many locations in the world.

Given the level of expertise of the individual operators, we had spectacular advanced-training runs. Instead of static ship boarding, we practiced complex under-ways, which required the split-second timing of numerous components.

During under-ways, we’d parachute into the ocean and drop up to four cigarette boats on pallets approximately five miles away from the moving target ship.

We’d hit the water as close as possible to the cigarette boats, jettison our chutes, swim to the boats, and cut the assault boats free from the pallets. A steer-and-throttle man would board each boat and start the engine.

Then each boat crew would load its respective boat. Once all boats were loaded, we’d take off at a high rate of speed toward the target, generally a cruise liner.

These ops were always conducted at night. Sometimes we’d drop an extra boat, because if one hit the water at the wrong angle, it would sink to the bottom like a lawn dart.

Once the target ship passed, the assault boats moved into position. Two would attack from the starboard side, and two from the portside, in tandem.

With the assault boats bobbing up and down and the target moving at a good speed, a pole man would stand on the bow of the boat, with two men holding him, then extend a telescopic pole with the cave-in ladder attached and try to hook it to something solid on the deck of the target vessel.

At the same time the pole went up on the starboard side, one was also going up on the portside. If one boat dropped its pole or couldn’t attach its ladder, the cigarette boat behind it would move into position. If the worst-case scenario happened, we needed only one ladder to go up, because everyone could climb up the same ladder.

Once the pole was hooked, the pole man would pull the pole, which released a small caving ladder attached to it that unrolled down into the assault craft.

The ladder extended as far as forty feet. For ships with higher decks, we’d use two ladders attached to each other and conduct a multi-pitch climb, which was basically a two-stage climb. You’d climb up a good portion of the ship to a landing, then hook again for another climb to the main deck.

Every part of an under-way is quite dangerous. I had a buddy who fell off the caving ladder near the deck of the ship and landed thirty feet down in the assault boat. He was beat up pretty badly and ruptured his spleen. Our team doctor, who was on the ship, saved his life that night. And I witnessed plenty of other lead climbers being flung off the caving ladder once it went taut from the ship going in one direction and the ladder being secured down.

We typically assaulted ships in thin (three-millimeter) wet suits or, in warm climates, black skin suits. We each wore a holster with an S&W 686 revolver and carried gear on a black web belt—Ka-Bar knife, hostage gear, tie-ties, commo, medical supplies, and so on.

As the lead climber, I went up the ladder first and secured it to something on the deck with a piece of one-inch tubular nylon and a carabiner. Attached to the right side of my belt was a carabiner with two to three nylon runners I could sling over something solid and then attach a safety line from the runner to the ladder.

With the ladder secured, I would take up a position of cover and signal the rest of the team to board the ship.

As we reached the deck, helicopters would swoop in, and another element of SEALs would begin fast-roping in. Timing was critical. If the helicopters arrived before the guys on the boats were on deck, the assault boats and their crews would be sitting ducks.

The SEALs from the helicopters would clear from the deck on up, leapfrogging from one position to another. And then they’d proceed to wherever they’d been tasked to go—a ballroom or a stateroom, maybe, in the case of a hostage rescue.

The guys on the boats would clear from the decks on down, and maybe secure the engine room; it depended on the op. Afterward, the assault boats were picked up by the helicopters, or they were driven somewhere and recovered.

Under-ways were by far the hardest thing we did, and we got very, very good at them.

We worked with
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the best helo pilots in the world. They liked to mess with us. Like the time we were sitting outside on the skegs during a training op in Puerto Rico and the pilot flew fewer than two feet over the treetops at 120 knots. At times, we thought they were crazy, and the feelings were mutual, I’m sure.

Our HAHO capabilities would have given them good reason to think so. We’d fly in thirty-man stacks, and after we jumped, we’d time it so that all thirty chutes opened at the same time and at the same altitude. We would exit the bird up to twenty-five miles away from the target and land just before sunrise.

Every man in the stack would be in communication with the others. You knew who was supposed to be in front of you and who was supposed to be behind you. You would count off from the rear, “Thirty okay,” “Twenty-nine okay,” and so on. In the case of a low jumper or a malfunction, a member of the stack would split away and accompany the distressed jumper to the alternate DZ (drop zone).

I loved the sensation of free-falling. But these weren’t recreational jumps. We were going down in full combat gear with oxygen and weapons.

Guys suffered serious injuries—I broke my back in two places on a HAHO, and I have seen broken legs, ankles, and backs; some men even died.

One night we did a 17,999-foot HAHO jump outside of Tucson where we exited the aircraft about twenty miles from the target. I was carrying a seventy-five-pound rucksack, my weapon, oxygen tank and mask, my compass board, and my altimeter, and I was wearing my jump helmet with comms.

Before opening the main chute, the procedure is to wave off and then look left and right before pulling; this way, when you open, you don’t have another jumper falling or flying into you, which can be fatal.

That night, when I exited, I waved off. But when I pulled, I flipped right through my parachute risers and started falling backward.

This caused my risers to quickly spiral all the way down to my helmet and jerk my neck, helmet, and jaw sharply to my left, knocking off my O
₂
mask. I thought I’d broken my neck and jaw. And when I looked up and saw the other jumpers way above me, I knew that I was dropping like a stone. My parachute wasn’t even partially opened.

When experiencing a malfunction, the jumper pulled his cutaway pillow with his right hand, which freed the main parachute. Then he’d pull the reserve handle with his left hand, which hopefully would deploy the reserve chute.

I performed my cutaway, enjoyed a short free fall, and seconds later saw a nice full reserve expand above my head.

All of us were wearing push-to-talk radios. The comms wire extended down my right arm from my radio and helmet to my right hand. Generally, when you push the button and talk, everyone on your stick is supposed to hear you.

I wanted to alert my team and tell them that I would meet them on the drop zone. But when I pushed the button and talked into the radio, I could manage only a mumble. The pain in my neck and jaw was so intense that I couldn’t open my mouth enough to make anyone understand what I was saying.

I palpated my jaw and realized that it was dislocated and way to the left of where it should be. So I did to myself what I had done to dozens of other people in ER. At around eight thousand feet, I placed my thumb on my bottom teeth, pushed down hard, and jerked my jaw right. It popped into place and hurt like hell!