Inside SEAL Team Six (19 page)

That summer I was training with a group of athletes who were interested in participating too. Five of us paddled for twelve hours, then drove to the mountains in western Virginia and ran with packs and boots for fifty miles. Following that we mountain biked for another fifty miles with backpacks.

After we returned to Virginia Beach, we rode our bicycles another sixty miles at high speed (about twenty-three miles an hour, average).

As soon as the bike ride was over, I flew to Atlanta with a group of ST-6 operators to provide liaison and security to the Atlanta Summer Olympics, where 10,320 athletes from 197 countries were going to compete in 271 events. We landed, were briefed about the area we would be operating in and the mission, and were told we had ten hours before we had to report to FBI headquarters.

We were staying in a military barracks near a small park outside of Atlanta, which we were told was a known site of drug deals and homosexual hookups. Beyond the park stood several wooded mountains. Even though I was exhausted, I did a twelve-mile mountain-trail run.

On the way to the barracks, I stopped at the base gym to finish my three-day nonstop workout. I crushed myself on the leg-extension machine. Usually I could lift 340 pounds, but this time I could only lift around 30—I was beat!

Wanting to push myself until I didn’t have anything at all left, I started to run back to the barracks, passing through the park that we had been told to avoid. When I stopped behind a tree to urinate, I pissed pure blood.

I’d done this other times during ultra-distance runs and wasn’t particularly concerned. But now I felt light-headed and collapsed to the ground.

I woke up minutes later by the tree, with my shorts down, wondering where the heck I was. I couldn’t even remember the name of the city, or the state.

I pulled up my shorts and started to walk. And as I did, my head started to clear.

Later, when I explained to the guys on the ST-6 security detail what had happened to me, they joked to the FBI guys that I’d been assaulted in the park.

On the night of July 27, 1996, thousands of spectators gathered in the town square area of Centennial Olympic Park for a late-night concert by Jack Mack and the Heart Attack, whose big hit was “Cardiac Party.” Sometime around midnight, someone planted a green U.S. military field pack containing three pipe bombs surrounded by nails underneath a bench near the base of a concert sound tower. The bombs weighed more than forty pounds and used a steel plate as a directional device.

Security guard Richard Jewell discovered the suspicious field pack and alerted Georgia Federal Bureau of Investigation officers. Nine minutes later, the bomber called 911 and alerted authorities.

I was on duty at the operations center with an FBI agent when we got the call. It went something like “My brother-in-law is a nut. He told us that he built a pipe bomb and that he would be famous at these Olympics.”

We’d received dozens of similar calls.

But we decided to take this call seriously and alert authorities, who started to clear concertgoers from the park. At 1:20 a.m., while Richard Jewell and other security officials were in the process of ushering people out, the bomb exploded, killing one woman and injuring over a hundred others. Another man, a Turkish photographer, died from a heart attack while running away from the blast.

President Bill Clinton condemned the bombing as “an evil act of terror” and vowed, “We will spare no effort to find out who was responsible for this murderous act. We will track them down. We will bring them to justice.”

Thirty-four-year-old Richard Jewell was initially lauded as a hero. But three days it came out in the news that the FBI was treating him as a suspect. They conducted several searches of the house where he lived with his mother. Several months later, the investigating U.S. attorney cleared Jewell of all charges.

The investigation stalled until early 1997, when the Atlanta bombing was linked to two other bombings in the Atlanta area. After a massive manhunt, fugitive Eric Robert Rudolph was arrested in Murphy, North Carolina, and sentenced to life in prison.

As the advanced-training officer at ST-6, I organized and conducted elaborate training exercises—capability exercises (CAPEX), we called them. Sometimes we’d rent commercial cruise liners for a week at a cost in excess of a million dollars and practice taking them down.

Often we deployed all three SEAL assault teams, along with the snipers, breachers, and coxswains, and worked with helicopters and ships. We would spend an entire week climbing up the sides of the ship from the cigarette boats, rappelling down from the helos, taking down the ship’s ballroom, disabling the engines, and defusing elaborate IEDs. It was an exercise in coordination with the air assets, boat assets, assault teams, and ship crews.

We also practiced jumping from passenger jets. We’d be sitting in a Boeing 727 with the passengers in the front of the plane and our parachutes stashed in the luggage compartment. Once we got close to our target, we’d move to the back of the aircraft, which would be partitioned off by a curtain.

We’d open the door to the luggage compartment and retrieve our parachutes, then crank open the back door of the jet. The first four guys would position themselves on the stairs. When the green light went on, they jumped. Then the rest of the team would run down the steps and jump. We needed to exit quickly so that the separation between all the jumpers in the air wasn’t too great. We usually achieved a tight stack and flew, bumping canopies.

We even had passenger jets specially designed so the seats would turn around to make room for us to don our chutes. We practiced this often.

In addition to being the ST-6 advanced-training officer, I served as the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) officer, which became the most important program that ST-6 was involved with at the time. We went from a counterterrorism team to a counter-WMD team. Part of my responsibility was to help track and recover approximately two hundred nuclear weapons that had gone missing when the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1990.

A large number of these had vanished from Soviet stockpiles in the Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, which had been part of the Soviet Union. Pyotr Simonenko, head of the Ukrainian Communist Party, admitted to reporters, “Out of 2,400 nuclear warheads which were on Ukrainian territory, only 2,200 can be accounted for. Nobody,” he said, “has any idea where the other 200 deadly warheads have gone.”

Maybe he didn’t, but we did. Most of them were recovered. But a number of former Soviet nukes found their way to North Korea, where they were being hidden in large underground tunnels.

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door was not a problem. But breaching tunnels fortified with layers of concrete and steel was a completely different challenge.

Upon learning that there were tunnels of similar size and reinforcement throughout Europe, we coordinated training with some of our NATO counterparts. We surveyed their tunnels to test their vulnerability to an attack. This was very valuable information to the host nation and also taught us a great deal about what it would take.

Many of the tunnels had been built during World War II to serve as bomb shelters. In Norway, there was one twenty-six miles long that served as a hydroelectric plant. Another tunnel had been converted into a huge underground ice-skating rink.

I can’t say much more about the WMD program except that it was a success. The team I worked with also helped locate and recover a number of former Soviet nuclear scientists who were selling their bomb-making expertise to other countries.

But not everything at ST-6 was so life and death—or limited to official business. Once I was traveling with a new ST-6 corpsman named Reed to do some Pararescue training with the PJs in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

As we checked into the hotel, I noticed some pamphlets on the front desk advertising local activities. One devoted to a balloon festival caught my attention.

I turned to Reed and said, “Hey, Reed, why don’t we go jump out of a balloon this weekend?”

He looked at me like I was crazy and answered, “I don’t know, Don. We don’t even have parachutes.”

“We’ll have to find some.”

First, I had to see if I could find a balloonist who would let us jump from his hot-air balloon. Everybody I contacted said no.

Eventually I located this old hippie with a gray beard and long hair. He said, “Sure, dude. But last time I let a jumper out, I smashed into the mountains and ripped off my kneecap.”

He explained that when someone jumps out of the basket, the balloon loses so much weight that it goes spastic.

But he was a cool guy and willing to try again. He told us that he’d be going aloft early the next morning when the air was thick, which enabled the balloons to get off the ground. We agreed to meet at 0300.

Now Reed and I had to find chutes. At the time all of us at ST-6 were jumping with MT1X parachutes, which were also used by the Air Force. So we went over to the air loft at the USAF base and found the chief rigger. Reed and I were these longhaired guys who didn’t look like normal military. And we didn’t have our jump logs with us, because we hadn’t planned on jumping during the trip.

I went up to the chief rigger and said, “I’m Chief Mann and this is my teammate Reed. We are both SEAL medics going through the PJ course. And we’d like to ask you if we could borrow a couple of MT1X chutes for a balloon jump tomorrow.”

The rigger looked at me like I was crazy and said, “Sorry, Chief, but no way.”

Another rigger who was packing reserve chutes on the other side of the room called us over after the chief rigger left.

He said, “Guys, I’ll be on duty tonight, and see that table over there? The door will probably be unlocked, and there will be two MT1X parachutes lying on that table. If they happen to be gone when I come back, I’ll need them back by tomorrow night.”

We went out and bought him a case of beer, then returned later and took the parachutes off the table.

Reed and I didn’t have jump boots, suits, helmets, or altimeters. Nor did we have time to repack the chutes.

We found our way to the large, open desert field where the Albuquerque balloon festival was taking place. Some balloons were already going up, and others were filling with heated air.

The basket could only accommodate two people at a time, so I climbed in first with the old hippie. He turned a valve, releasing propane from the tank, which caused the flame under the balloon to grow larger and fill the balloon with hot (lighter) air. The balloon started to rise gently from the ground.

Looking out from the basket, I was treated to an amazing sight—hundreds of different-colored balloons decorated the sky that changed hue by the second as the sun crept over the horizon.

I was taking it all in when the old hippie said, “Okay, dude. You can jump anytime.”

I had made more than five hundred jumps, and every time I’d jumped, I’d had a jumpmaster with me who gave me a pre-jump inspection and spotted the jump.

This time I was on my own. I had no idea how high we were and how much time I had before I could deploy my chute.

I stood on the edge of the basket and watched different balloons sail by. When I saw a clear space around and under us, I pushed off.

It felt like a base jump, which meant that I was falling right away. When you jump from a plane that’s moving at 120 knots, you’re initially moving at 120 knots too.

But this was more like a bungee jump. I felt an initial rush, waited for the air that I was pushing through to get louder, then pulled. The chute opened, and I had only a few seconds of floating under the canopy before I landed.

Now it was Reed’s turn. The balloonist landed and Reed went up and jumped.

After that it was propane and champagne, which is the motto of ballooners.

Teams and shit. What a thrill!

O
ne of the toughest people I’ve met in my life wasn’t a SEAL; she was an Austrian named Angelika Castaneda. She and her identical twin sister, Barbara Warren (who died in 2008 after a bicycle crash in a triathlon), were world-class adventure racers, triathletes, and ultra-distance runners. Both were tall, blond, and beautiful, and had previously been high-fashion models. Angelika used to work as Farrah Fawcett’s stunt double.

I recruited her to be part of my five-person team for the 1997 Raid Gauloises in Lesotho, South Africa. Even though I was still the advanced-training officer and WMD officer for ST-6, I had a ravenous appetite for new challenges and excitement.

In addition to Angelika, I recruited my buddy Lieutenant John Kainer, who had been stationed with me in Panama and was a member of SEAL Teams Two and Six. In late ’96, the two of us traveled to the Gauley River near Summersville, West Virginia, to test the two remaining candidates for Team Odyssey—Special Forces Major Alan Holmes, an accomplished triathlete, and Nick Spaeder, a great athlete and platoon chief at ST-2.

In three days, the four of us paddled seventy-five miles and ran ninety miles with backpacks and boots.

We flew to Johannesburg in January, and I remember sitting with Angelika and a reporter at a restaurant a few days before the start of the Raid. I’d watched Angelika bonk badly during another competition—crawling on her hands and knees, defecating, and passing out—and I wanted to make sure that she ate enough before the race.

When I expressed my concern, she answered in her charming Austrian accent, “Don, I will not die on you. I might feel like I’m going to die, but I will not die. My body will eat from itself.”

She was hard core.

We always used superglue to repair cuts, bruises, and blisters. It sealed the skin and helped prevent infection. But toenails were always a problem in long races. Sometimes they’d turn brown and black, and you had to peel them off. Other times, they’d fall off altogether.

As I was pulling out my seventh toenail of the race, Angelika reprimanded me. “Don,” she said, “if you’re serious about these races, you’ll have your toenails removed before the race. Have them pulled out and have them sew the skin together so they don’t grow back.”

Of course, she’d already had hers removed.

We started the Raid in South Africa at the foothills of the magnificent Champagne Castle Peak, and then we trekked, rappelled, paddled, biked, and portaged our boats more than five hundred miles over some of the most unforgiving terrain on earth.

Unlike marathons and triathlons, adventure racing isn’t about athletic performance alone. You have to plot and navigate the entire course, deal with team dynamics—which include the pain and emotional lows and highs—sickness, bonking, anger, sleep deprivation, and hallucinations. In addition, you face the challenges of Mother Nature—fog, rain, snow, lightning, strong winds, and brutally high heat and freezing temperatures.

The sport tests you in every way possible. I’m proud to say that Team Odyssey finished in the top ten out of the seventy top adventure teams in the world that year.

The next year, in October of 1998, Team Odyssey competed in the Raid Gauloises in Ecuador. Among the physical challenges we faced this time was scaling a 19,600-foot live volcano named El Cotopaxi (Neck of the Moon). I suffered altitude sickness on the climb but recovered to complete the event.

When I wasn’t competing with Team Odyssey, I raced in ultra-distance marathons and bike races. And I was conducting SEAL training events for civilians. One of these events took place in Utah, right down the road from the home of NBA superstar Karl Malone. After the event, he invited our five-man SEAL training cadre to meet his wife and children.

I ran to his home from our hotel (twelve or so miles), which he got a huge kick out of. Towering over me, he asked, “In the SEALs, do they ever drop you in the middle of nowhere and you have to find your way back?”

I laughed and said, “Yeah. And sometimes you have to shoot your way out.”

“Do they make you swim a lot?”

“Yes,” I answered. “They do.”

He had his two pretty little girls with him. At one point, he turned to them and said, “Tell this man, what does Daddy do besides play basketball?”

Without missing a beat, they answered, “All Daddy ever does is watch SEAL movies.”

One of those movies was, unfortunately,
Navy SEALs,
a film starring Charlie Sheen. I say
unfortunately
because I was part of a group of SEALs who had been asked to serve as consultants on the movie. Chuck Pfarrer, who had been a SEAL at ST-6, based the script on real events. But, in typical Hollywood style, his original script was rewritten many times until it bore little resemblance to reality.

Over the course of the production, most of the SEALs who had been hired as consultants quit. Charlie Sheen constantly worried about getting hurt. He’d stop filming in the midst of an action scene to make sure the cameras picked up the pretty side of his face. He wouldn’t have lasted a week in BUD/S.

In between training, racing, and working at SEAL Team Six, I was trying to sort out my personal life. One of the girls I dated was a beautiful Australian athlete and diver named Paula.

Once when we were diving together in the Caribbean, we snuck into a shark feeding, where three guys with bang sticks and a bucket of fish were feeding the sharks.

I said to Paula, “Let’s swim down near the wall, so that nothing can get behind us.”

The wall was about three feet above our heads. We saw big fish starting to surround the guys who were doing the feeding. Then, before we knew it, the water around us was filled with hundreds of fish, including seven or eight very scary-looking eight-foot sharks—bull sharks, reef sharks, lemon sharks, sharp-nosed sharks, and hammerheads. As Paula and I watched helplessly, one of them approached, jaws wide open, and at the last moment swam over our heads. I’ve never felt so completely out of control.

Though Paula and I shared many interests, we didn’t have enough in common to forge a deeper relationship. For one thing, she didn’t believe in God, while I do. Things that upset me, like people not respecting their country and burning the flag, she thought were no big deal.

One of the best divers, shooters, and jumpers, and also a plank owner
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at ST-6 was a guy named Ray—he was a good friend and fellow corpsman. For a while, I dated his sister, Janna, and was very friendly with his whole family, including his wife and the mother of their two sons, Dawn.

One day while we were working together at ST-6, Ray told me that he and Dawn were getting divorced. I was sad to hear that because they were both terrific people and Christian and Dylan were great kids.

A couple of months later, Ray approached me again and said, “Don, I’ve found someone else and I’m moving on. But Dawn is lonely. Why don’t you take her out?”

“Me? Take out your ex-wife? I can’t do that.”

He said, “No, really, take her to a movie or something. Call her up.”

I’d always admired Dawn and found her very attractive but had never thought of her in a romantic way, and I didn’t want to insert myself in the middle of a difficult situation.

But Ray kept urging me to call her, so I did, and one night we ran into each other at a local Virginia Beach hangout called Phil’s Grill, where we talked and drank a couple of beers.

Then Ray called me and invited me to come over to his house for Christmas dinner. Dawn picked me up, Ray cooked dinner, and we all sat together at the same table—Ray, his new girlfriend, me, Dawn, and Christian and Dylan.

It was an unusual first date. But it soon became apparent to both of us that we were meant for each other. We shared the same values, liked many of the same things, and, more important, fell deeply in love. Dawn told me that ten years ago, back when she first met me, she would have wanted nothing to do with me because I was too wild. Now I was more mature and a bit more settled down.

Dawn moved into my empty bachelor’s pad in Virginia Beach and turned it into a beautiful home. Christian, her older son, lived with us, while Dylan stayed with his dad. While Dawn and I were happy, it soon became apparent that twenty-year-old Christian was having a hard time.

From the outside, Christian had everything going for him. He was strong, good-looking, athletic, had graduated from high school with honors, and was great with kids. He went to church regularly and worked out.

But while he was attending college at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, he started drifting and hanging out with people who were dealing drugs.

He’d come home late at night with his pants hanging down below his underwear, a hat worn sideways, and a glazed look in his eyes. He was a smart young man, but somewhat naive about the world. I tried many times to warn him about the drug scene he was starting to enter.

I said, “Christian, you might not know it, but you’ve got everything in the world going for you right now. You’ve got a beautiful girlfriend, you’re doing well in college, you’re young and athletic. Don’t screw it up. If you’re having problems or are confused about something, let us know.”

He maintained that he was fine. But soon we started seeing less and less of him. He’d sleep until noon, go to school, hang out with his friends, and come home sometime in the early morning.

Both Dawn and I were concerned about him, but we didn’t know what to do. And Christian wasn’t sharing anything.

One night after he and his girlfriend came back from a trip to Florida, the four of us were sitting around the dining room table eating dinner. Both Dawn and I were curious about the purpose of the trip.

So I said, “Hey, Christian, how was your trip to Florida?”

“Fine. I went there to chill for a few days.”

“That’s funny,” I said. “Because you know my friend John, the FBI agent who lives down the street? He said something about your cell phone and having your cell phone number. Is there any reason he’d be following your cell phone?”

Upon hearing this, Christian’s girlfriend dropped her fork and said, “Oh God. I’m feeling sick.”

This confirmed our suspicion that Christian had gone to Florida to sell or transport drugs.

I called my brother, Rick, who was involved with AA and NA, and explained what Christian was going through. And I spoke to friends who worked in law enforcement and drug rehabilitation. They all said the same thing: You can’t help someone with a drug or alcohol problem unless he wants help.

Both Dawn and I tried talking to him. Some nights I’d be up in his room until five in the morning trying to get through to him. But nothing we said seemed to work.

One night Dawn went up to his room and found sixteen thousand dollars in cash. She came down the stairs holding it in her hands and said, “Look, Don. Whatever Christian’s doing, he appears to be good at it.”

She said it in a sarcastic way. Both of us were very alarmed.

I said, “Hide it. It’s dirty money. We’re going to find something positive to do with it. But in the meantime, put it away.”

A couple days later, Christian confronted her and said, “Mom, I need that money.”

“Why?” she asked.

“I want to buy a Lexus.”

“No, you don’t,” I said.

“I need a good car to drive back and forth to school.”

“A Lexus? Come on, Christian,” I shot back. “A Lexus would only advertise that you are in the drug culture.”

He found the cash Dawn had hidden and added it to other money he had to buy the Lexus. I told him that he couldn’t park it in the driveway. I was pissed.

He parked it on the curb in front of our house, and was coming home later at night and more infrequently.

One night, as Christian was driving back from a Snoop Dog concert, he was stopped by the police. They searched his car and found a couple of ounces of marijuana in the backseat. Christian was arrested, and the Lexus was confiscated.

Two uniformed policemen showed up at our front door to explain what had happened.

I said to the two young officers, “I don’t blame you for arresting our son. If I saw someone driving a new Lexus away from a Snoop Dog concert, I’d follow them too.”

One of the police officers said, “No, Mr. Mann. He was going eighty miles an hour through a red light and was sloped so far down in the front seat we couldn’t even see his head.”

Christian’s father, Ray, took out a second mortgage on his house to raise the bail money to get Christian out of jail.

When Christian returned home, I sat him down and said, “Christian, now you’ve got a big strike against you. Your life is going to be a lot harder. I know. I’ve been there. I know the excitement, the adrenaline rush you get from the outlaw lifestyle, but you’ve got to stop. You can turn your life around. Look at me. I turned my life around and managed to change, and you can do the same.”

A couple of months later, Christian was arrested again for possession of marijuana.

Now, for the first time, Christian seemed concerned. When I spoke to him after his second arrest, I felt like he was hearing what I said.

“Christian, now you’re really in trouble. I know that I’ve been saying this for a long time. But now you have no options. Turn in the names of the drug punks you’re hanging out with. In order to save yourself, you’ve got to turn them in. You’ve got no other choice. They’re not your friends, and they don’t deserve to live in our society.”

He did. Christian went to the police and gave them the names of a couple of the big drug dealers he was working for, including a thug called Marc. Christian also stopped dressing like a gangbanger and got a good job working at a hotel.

Marc and another drug dealer were arrested; they posted bond and were released within a week.

That weekend, Dawn and I were in Kentucky staging a five-day adventure race we had organized, the Beast of the East, when we got a call from Christian’s girlfriend.