Inside SEAL Team Six (2 page)

 And as I spoke, I felt a strong sense of affirmation. Now fifty-three years old and a veteran of many ops, scrapes with death, broken bones, and ruined marriages, I knew that every minute of my time with the SEALs had been worth it.

Maybe the young SEAL Team Six member I’d met in the team room months before was right: in my own small way, I’d helped to pave the way to this great success.

I wanted to think so. I still do.

Y
ou having fun, Doc?” Lieutenant Haig asked. He called me Doc because I was trained as a Navy corpsman (the Army referred to us as medics), and he and the other two SEALs on our team trusted me to patch them up should the need arise. Lieutenant Haig (we called him LT) was a Lebanese American, about five ten, 185 pounds. Sported a sinister smile and was a student of military history. He was also as gung ho as they come.

“Hoo-ya,” I answered, which is SEAL-talk for, roughly translated, “Hell, yes.”

I was in my midtwenties and this was my first real-world SEAL mission—a top secret, highly dangerous reconnaissance-and-demolition op; ten years before, I hadn’t even heard of the SEALs. Four of us were sitting in a six-by-six-foot foxhole covered with desert-​camouflage netting on a beach in an undisclosed part of Somalia, up to our necks in water fouled with excrement and puke. Ours. But despite the less than ideal conditions, I was loving it. I said to myself,
This is incredible. It’s what SEAL team is all about!

Two nights earlier we’d executed a jump out of a C-130 off the coast. First out, our rubber boat—a Zodiac CRRC (combat rubber raiding craft), which we called a rubber ducky. It was followed by our gear—scuba equipment, motor, gas can, paddles, water, shovels, MREs (meals ready to eat), commo supplies, rucksacks, demolitions. Then the four of us with our weapons, belts, and packs.

It was pitch-black when we hit the water. Then the C-130 tore off into the night sky, leaving us to our mission with no support whatsoever, which was almost unheard-of. Under normal circumstances, we would have been given backup and a medevac plan.

But this was a special mission. One of the most dangerous and important ops SEAL teams had gone on since Vietnam. So critical, in fact, that the SEAL commandant had personally selected us from all the SEALs stationed on the West Coast.

When our Zodiac CRRC motored to within a thousand meters of the shore, me and my SEAL buddy Bobby O.—a little Irish guy whose specialties were comms and picking up chicks—donned our black skin suits, which covered us from head to foot, slipped on our fins, slid in the water, and swam to the beach. It was a little finger of land with a harbor area and airport to the west and a big landmass beyond a tributary to the east.

SEALs aren’t choirboys. A couple of months earlier, I was trying to get Bobby out of a hotel room in the Philippines. He spoke to me through the closed door, saying, “Don, I’ve reached the lowest point of my life.” When he finally let me in, I saw a naked Filipino woman sitting on the foot of the bed smiling; she was cross-eyed and wore thick glasses and was hugely overweight and covered with freckles.

But despite Bobby O.’s tastes in women, I trusted him with my life.

As I sidestroked through the ocean, I kept checking the water behind and to the sides of him, and he watched the water around me. We’d been warned during the pre-mission intel briefing that these waters were infested with sharks. Seems like the Somali operated a camel-meat processing plant nearby that dumped the camel innards in the ocean, thus attracting hundreds of sharks.

Thankfully, Bobby and I made it to the shore in one piece and the four of us quickly dug two holes, one to bury our equipment in and one to live in, both of which we covered with camo netting.

And that’s where we were two days later, me, Bobby O., the LT, and Drake—a tall, lanky guy and weapons expert—
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It would’ve been easy work if it weren’t for the extreme heat and violent windstorms that filled our mouths and ears with sand. Especially when we were trying to sleep, which we had to do sitting up.

“You still having fun, Doc?” the lieutenant asked.

“Hoo-ya.”

Added to the sandstorms were two other challenges. One, our hole had filled up with salt water during high tide. And two, all of us were suffering from serious cases of food poisoning.

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They reciprocated by showing us how to eat poisonous snakes: by snapping their heads against our boots, peeling the skin back with our teeth, pulling out the venom sacs, and eating the meat. Now we were all horribly sick. Running fevers, puking our guts out, and suffering from real ugly diarrhea.

In between frequent bouts of relieving ourselves in our foxhole, we cursed the Egyptians. Soon after we left Cairo, they were sent on a mission to take down a hijacked Boeing 737 Egypt Air jet.
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on the plane and set it on fire. Fifty-eight passengers died, along with two of the six crew members and two of the three Abu Nidal terrorists. The third, Omar Rezaq, was captured and sent to prison. Until September 11, 2001, it was the deadliest airplane hijacking in history.

The Egyptians considered the mission a success. We, however, were deeply embarrassed and knew we’d get ribbed endlessly about it when we returned to the States. Something like
Nice job, guys. Next time we need to
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foreigners to fry airline passengers, we know who to send.

Back in the hole on the beach, my teammates were losing patience. Even our lieutenant started to bitch, saying, “I should have trained to become a helicopter pilot. This sucks.”

Drake, a total action junkie, said, “I should have stayed living in the desert, racing cars and motorcycles.”

Aside from the occasional gripes, we didn’t talk much. Instead, we listened to our surroundings and were occupied with our own inner musings about life and the possible dangers that waited around the corner, musings that were intermittently interrupted by the sound of one of us snoring or throwing up. Thick green bile mostly, since we didn’t have anything in our stomachs.

LT turned to me and flashed his isn’t-life-a-pile-of-shit smile. “You still having fun, Doc?”

“I’m fine, LT. What about you?”

 Sitting in a foxhole with sand whipping our faces and shitty water up to our necks didn’t seem to be such a hardship, considering the excitement of the op. I mean, no one other than a handful of people back in Coronado, California, even knew we were there. We were completely on our own in enemy territory with limited ammo, on a
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It didn’t get more thrilling than this.

Day three, I was on watch with my
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—when, through my goggles, I spotted a local man approaching. Through the rising heat and swirling sand, he looked like a figure out of the movie
Lawrence of Arabia
.

It was about three in the afternoon. The man was skinny, midtwenties, with a short beard. He obviously had no idea that he was approaching a hole with four armed U.S. Navy SEALs inside.

I roused my buddies as I kept my weapon trained on the Somali man’s chest. We’d been taught to aim at the center of mass. Despite what you see people do in the movies, heads are too easy to miss.

The four of us SEALs were well versed in the U.S. military rules of engagement, which stated, in part: “Deadly force may be used to defend your life, the life of another US soldier, or the life of persons in areas of US control…when (a) You are fired upon; (b) Armed elements, mobs, and/or rioters threaten human life; and (c) There is a clear demonstration of hostile intent in your presence.”

Common sense told us to simply take the guy out with a silenced weapon and feed him to the fish. But warfare is rarely simple, and we’d been trained to operate within the parameters of the U.S. military code.

There was nothing we could do except watch the guy approach and hope he changed course. Which he didn’t. Because, according to Murphy’s Law, “If something can go wrong, it generally will sooner or later.”

When he got within thirty yards of us, he saw us, and the guy stopped in his tracks. I watched his shocked expression as he took in the camo netting and the four of us wearing desert-camouflage uniforms, floppy hats, and goggles, all of us pointing weapons at his chest. For all we knew, he thought we were aliens from another planet.

Then he raised his arms. No, he wasn’t giving us the Vulcan salute. He was freaking out, shouting in a language none of us understood—probably Somali. After doing a quick about-face in the sand, he ran away as fast as his skinny legs could carry him. Since we weren’t in a position to take him prisoner, we just watched.

“Shit!” muttered my teammate Bobby O.

Now, in addition to being sicker than ever, we’d just been compromised. Which wasn’t good at all. We were having trouble keeping down water and MREs (which we called “not really meals or ready to eat”). And our demolition mission and extraction wasn’t until the following night.

We waited until nightfall, then slammed into action. The plan was to dig up all our gear, cover the holes so it looked like we were never there, inflate the rubber Zodiac, put it in the water, place our dive gear inside, rig the gas tank and engine, motor toward the harbor, then dive and attach a limpet mine to one of their ships.

We definitely weren’t in the best of shape. But the three of us were digging hard, unearthing our equipment, as the LT kept watch. I was psyched to finally be moving; I was heaving shovelfuls of sand over my shoulder when I heard the LT say, “Okay, guys, put your hands up.”

“What?”

“Guys, put your hands up!”

I wasn’t sure I was hearing him right. But when I looked past the LT I saw about two dozen armed Somali approaching with AK-47s pointed at us. They were climbing over a slight knoll about a hundred meters away, and they looked frightened, as though they were wondering:
What are these strange-looking giants doing on our land?

Maybe because I was in the company of highly trained teammates I trusted, I wasn’t scared. We could have run and jumped in the water. Or we could have reached for our weapons. Either way, we probably would have been shot to pieces by the Somali.

Our lieutenant wisely told us to stand right where we were and raise our arms over our heads, which we did, even though it felt wrong to surrender without a fight.

The Somali circled us with their fingers on the triggers of their AKs. Safeties off. I remember thinking:
They can’t shoot us now, because if they do, they’ll fire right into one another.

But these weren’t trained soldiers. Besides, what did I know.

Their leader started screaming incoherently. We had no idea what he was saying. His men looked like they wanted to blow us away and return home.

Bobby O. tried addressing the head man in English. “Hold on, chief,” he said. “Let me show you something.”

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As Bobby reached for his rucksack, four Somali put rifles up to his head. I thought they were going to blow his brains out.

Bobby shouted, “Whoa, guys! Back off!” And looked like he was about to shit his pants. All of us tensed up.

Their leader motioned with his arm. Using the few words of English he knew, he said, “Down! Down! We shoot you!”

Screw that.

His volume increased. “Down! Get down!” It looked like his eyes were going to pop out of their sockets.

We weren’t moving. No fucking way.

As their leader continued pointing at the ground and screaming, a couple of the other armed Somali discovered the gear we’d started digging up. Thankfully, they didn’t look through the bags, because if they had, they would have seen the mines and demolition equipment and quickly figured out that we were up to no good.

Our LT said, “We speak English. Do you know someone who speaks English?”

“Eng-leesh?”

“Yeah, English. We’re Americans.”

This seemed to register with their leader, who decided to hold us prisoner while one of his men returned to the nearest village to find someone who spoke our language.

Several hours later, his man came back with a dirty-looking fellow who described himself as a local merchant. He wore a robe with a dark vest over it and spoke some English.

It was approaching midnight. The merchant explained that the Somali were going to kill us for trespassing on their land. He said, “Okay, sir. Now you must lie on your stomach, so they can shoot you in the back. Because that’s what they do here to trespassers.”

No, we told him. That’s not going to happen.

What started as a standoff turned into a discussion conducted without anger or raised voices but with loaded AK-47s still pointed at our heads.

After several hours of back-and-forth, the Somali leader gave us permission to show the interpreter one of the
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we had in our rucksacks. “It says that we’re only on a training mission,” the LT explained. “We’re Americans. We’re sorry we trespassed on your land. We won’t do it again.”