Inside SEAL Team Six (21 page)

I said, “Don’t worry, Mom. The nurse is here to take care of you. And I’ll be back.”

Again, she said, “Don’t go.” I saw fear in her eyes.

While my dad was down the road at the VFW, where he served as state commander, a thunderstorm moved into the area, and my parents’ house was struck by lightning. The window between the porch and the bedroom exploded, and the porch caught fire.

As my mother lay in bed too weak to move or call for help, flames from the porch started to spread down the hallway. A neighbor saw the flames and ran into the house to try to rescue her.

The nurse who was with her disconnected my mother’s frail eighty-five-pound body from the respirator and was running out of the room with my mother in her arms when the flames reached the oxygen tanks and the house exploded. The nurse survived, but my mother and the Good Samaritan neighbor died in the fire.

My father called me in tears with the awful news. I got into my car and drove as fast as I could back to my parents’ home. All that remained was charred wood and ashes.

The first thing I did was visit the neighbor’s wife to express my thanks and condolences.

She said, “I always knew that my husband was going to die helping someone. I’m just sorry he couldn’t do more.”

I couldn’t believe the depths of her compassion and kindness. Her husband had died eight hours earlier trying to save my mother, and she was apologizing to me!

I drove to the morgue to view my mother’s body. Her face was charred black. Even with all my combat medical experience and training, I couldn’t take it. I broke down and ran into the woods in tears.

My mother had been afraid of fire her whole life. She’d always been so good to me, and she had asked me not to leave her.

I felt as if I’d let her down one last time.

I had to keep busy, and by the summer of 2001, I was spending about half my time doing weapons and tactics training and the other half training, racing, climbing, and producing extreme sporting events.

That changed when al-Qaeda terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. My focus immediately switched to the war on global terrorism. Sports took a backseat.

On the day of the attack, I was at a U.S. base overseas training a group of Egyptian commandos in M4 marksmanship and weapons drills. Right after we heard the news, the chief of the base directed us to disarm the Egyptians, stay armed ourselves, and not allow the Egyptians to leave their barracks.

The air was suddenly thick with distrust. I understood that the world had changed immediately and that the United States would be engaged in a war against Islamic terrorists that would last for decades.

Since 9/11, I’ve been working to help defend our country in a number of different capacities—training people for BUD/S and teaching military, special-police units, and government agencies how to do VBSS; CQB; fast-roping; diving; shooting; urban, jungle, desert, and arctic warfare; and more.

I’ve deployed to the Middle East many times. In fact, I traveled to Afghanistan soon after the fall of the Taliban in late 2001 to train the security detail of President Hamid Karzai. I was with him in February of 2002 when he teared up after learning that one of his ministers had been assassinated.

When one of the Americans on my team in Afghanistan got sick late one Christmas night, I drove to a clinic to get some medicine for him. On my way I was stopped at an intersection that was blocked by a large tractor-trailer.

A British MP came up to my window and said, “Yo, mate, you might want to go the other way. This truck is filled with explosives and could blow up half the city.”

The day after the incident with the tractor-trailer, I learned that one of our vehicles had gotten stuck in a mud-filled ditch just outside the city. I threw some chains in the back of my armored vehicle and drove to the site as fast as I could.

When you’re trapped like that in a hostile environment, you have two choices: call for help and sit in your vehicle until help arrives, or have someone hold security while someone else tries to get the vehicle out of the ditch.

You try not to escalate the situation. Which means that you don’t point your weapon at a crowd, instigating trouble. Instead, you constantly scan the area using all of your senses, looking in people’s eyes and at their hands.

Hands hold things that can kill you. If you see someone raise a weapon, you have no choice but to eliminate the threat.

As I drove up to the scene, I saw about twenty Afghan men, women, and children closing in around the vehicle. Some of the men were armed. Practically everyone in Afghanistan seems to own an AK-47. They cost about fourteen dollars on the street, less than a pair of Nike sneakers.

I made my way through the crowd and saw that the American holding security was standing with his M4 pointed toward the ground and his mouth frozen open with fear. His partner, meanwhile, was trying to hook a line to the back of their stuck vehicle, without security.

Stepping into the middle of the circle, I motioned to the Afghans who had gathered to back away. I spoke in a firm voice because I didn’t want to make them angry. They started to retreat, which gave us room to hook a cable to the vehicle, and we towed it out of there without incident.

Another time, a successful Afghan construction contractor I was working with was kidnapped and held for ransom. One night he’d entered his driveway, and a black SUV had pulled in right behind him; four armed men wearing balaclavas and CT gear got out. They hog-tied the contractor and drove him through several Afghan military checkpoints without being stopped, which is usually unheard-of.

He was taken to a house and up flights of stairs, where the kidnappers instructed him to call his family on his cell phone. They were demanding three hundred thousand dollars. His family managed to raise two hundred thousand dollars in a week. The kidnappers accepted the lesser amount and released him. I treated his injuries, which included a dislocated shoulder and some minor lacerations.

After the contractor was released, he told me that he was sure that officials from the Karzai government and local banks had been part of the kidnapping ring. It explained, he said, why his kidnappers were able to pass through government roadblocks without a problem and how they knew that he had a lot of money in the bank.

Things weren’t any less complicated in Iraq, where I’ve also spent a good deal
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ST-6
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Unlike many of the Afghans and Iraqis I’ve encountered, the Kurds, who occupy northern Iraq and make up about 17 percent of Iraq’s total population, seem to appreciate Americans and what our country is trying to achieve.

The first time I arrived in Iraqi Kurdistan, my interpreter explained the absence of trees. “Saddam had them all burned down so that when he attacked, people couldn’t hide behind them.”

When I pointed out that there seemed to be many more women on the streets than men, he said, “That’s because Saddam had the men killed.”

Then when I noticed a large number of little boys and girls with cysts on their necks and faces, he said, “That’s because the gas that Saddam used against us gets into the DNA and is passed from one generation to the other.”

The terrain wasn’t as brutal as the dictator had been, but it was pretty demanding. I was teaching a weapons and small-unit tactics course in the snow-and-ice-covered mountains not far from the Iranian border with a former
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man and another security contractor. There was a two-thousand-meter mountain I wanted to climb, so I asked my colleagues if they wanted to do it with me.

The
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guy said, “The mountain road is too dangerous. We might run across an IED.”

“We can avoid the road and run up the side of the mountain and post-hole through the snow,” I replied. “No one’s going to place an IED on the side of the mountain where there’s not even a trail.”

We started out together, but I arrived at the top first. At the summit stood a little wooden hut.

After my two buddies arrived, I looked over a snowbank through the door opening and saw somebody’s hand on an AK-47. Seconds later, four soldiers emerged and they held us at gunpoint.

With my hands held over my head, I tried to explain why we were there. Unarmed and wearing cold-weather workout gear, we hardly looked threatening. Nor did the Iraqi soldiers, who seemed to be in their late forties and fifties.

The one soldier who understood a little English translated for the others. They lowered their rifles and invited us into their little shack. As we sat on a rug, they shared tea and bread with us and explained that they were on guard against foreign fighters sneaking across the border from Iran.

Sometime in 2005, I traveled two hundred fifty miles northwest of Baghdad to Mosul, Iraq, with three other Americans
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At the time, the ancient city of two million was the scene of constant and severe violence as its diverse ethnic, religious, and political groups vied for supremacy.

On December 21, 2004, fourteen U.S. soldiers, four American employees of Halliburton, and four Iraqi soldiers had been killed by a suicide bomber who entered a dining hall at Forward Operating Base Marez near the main U.S. military airfield at Mosul wearing an explosive vest under an Iraqi security service uniform. Another seventy-two Americans were injured.

After arriving and completing our mission, the four of us stopped at a safe house where American soldiers were defusing a rocket that had been placed near the front door. The chief who ran the building said, “You guys came at the right time. We need more shooters. We’re being attacked all the time.”

The four of us were armed and ready. But nothing much happened during the daylight hours other than our hearing rocket attacks and small-arms fire off in the distance. At night, as we prepared to leave, the chief said, “Great. Now that you guys are leaving, we will be attacked again.”

The four of us climbed into an armored vehicle with our gear and weapons and headed to a deserted field on the outskirts of the city where we were scheduled to meet our aircraft.

As we drove, we heard the chief shouting over the radio, asking for the QRF (quick reaction force) to respond: “We’re being attacked!”

We couldn’t turn around. Instead, we waited in a darkened field for about forty-five minutes until a blackened six-seat prop plane landed. As we scurried aboard, the pilot shouted, “Hurry up! Hurry up!”

Recognizing his voice, I said, “Al?”

“Don?”

He turned out to be a pilot and a good buddy from ST-6 who is still flying high-risk missions all over the Middle East.

As I sat with him in the cockpit, he said, “When I first starting flying here, soon after the war started, I noticed all these little lights coming at me, like fireworks, and quickly realized that they were tracers and I was being shot at from the ground. But I love it! I love the action!”

Al approached the Baghdad airport, then started to corkscrew in so suddenly that I felt like my stomach was coming out of my throat.

As Al did this, he gave me a little smirk. It was the same little smirk he’d given me years earlier when the two of us were testing an
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Al and I were going to jump out on an experimental tandem rig. It was actually two jumps combined into one, because soon after Al deployed his main chute, I had to release four points of contact with him before I could free-fall away from Al and pull my chute. Before I jumped, I said, “Al, I want to be released at eight thousand feet so I have plenty of time to do a cutaway.” And knowing Al the way I did, I added, “I’m serious, don’t mess around up there.”