Inside SEAL Team Six (22 page)

Al had a reputation of being one of those sky gods at ST-6, a man who would jump on the back of a new jumper as he was falling at 120 miles an hour to scare him shitless. Or he’d grab the jumper’s feet and spin him in circles.

Al and I exited the bird at twelve thousand, five hundred feet, the two of us secured, my back to his front.

When we got to eight thousand feet, I yelled, “Okay, Al, I’m going to cut away now.”

He said, “Wait, let’s go over there.”

He steered in an easterly direction for about a thousand meters as we fell to seven thousand feet.

I shouted, “Okay, Al, now!”

He said, “No, you were right. Let’s go back over to where we were before.”

Now we were less than six thousand feet and I was getting worried because I still had four release points to pull—two at my chest, two at my hips—before I could free-fall away from him and pull my chute.

“Al, now!”

We were down to five thousand feet and falling. Had it not been an experimental chute, I wouldn’t have been so anxious.

“Al! Damn it!”

He smirked, then gave me the signal to release. I cut away from Al and had a good opening and a safe landing.

As I continue to work the dirt circuit—which is what we former operators call the Middle East—I keep running into retired SEALs like Al. Guys I’ve known for thirty years now. It’s always great to see them. We’ve all turned gray and look a little weary but are still riding the operational train.

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Today’s ST-6 operators are very intelligent and have more combat experience than any unit in the history of the United States. They score far higher than average on standard military intelligence tests and are usually college graduates. Some even hold advanced degrees. In this era of unconventional warfare, they’re called upon not only to possess battlefield skills but also to think on their feet, overcome fear, operate sophisticated high-tech equipment, and plan for every possible contingency.

Like one team member told me, “Given the pace of operations and all the things we’re asked to deal with, mental toughness is more important than ever.”

Today’s SEAL training focuses on ways to rewrite primal and remembered fear. Researchers have discovered that once an animal learns to be afraid of something, that memory never vanishes from the amygdala, a part of the brain. But according to Dr. Gregory Quirk of the University of Puerto Rico’s school of medicine, a person can supersede those bad memories stored in the amygdala by forming new ones in the brain’s prefrontal cortex.

How? By repeating an action, any action, over and over, with the understanding that you are rewriting the bad memory.

Lieutenant Commander Eric Potterat, a Naval Special Warfare psychologist, compares the process to the making of world-class athletes. “Physically, there’s very little difference between athletes who win Olympic gold and the rest of the field. It’s like the SEAL candidates we see here. Terrific hardware. Sit-ups, push-ups, running, swimming, off the charts, superhuman. But over at the Olympic center, sports psychologists found that the difference between a medal and no medal is determined by an athlete’s mental ability.”

The elite athletes—the Wayne Gretzkys, the Laird Hamiltons, the Michael Jordans—know how to use the information they learn about how their body responds during a contest or a race. According to Lieutenant Commander Potterat, this is what separates them from the competition.

Just like some SEAL snipers I know, who, before lining up their targets, steady their hands by taking four very deep breaths to oxygenate their bodies as much as possible.

Of course, nothing prepares a warrior better than combat. And today’s ST-6 operators are conducting live-fire missions all the time.

Most of the recent ops that they’ve been engaged in are rarely talked about and don’t reach the press. But the pace is incredible, and the missions are highly dangerous.

Some of my ST-6 buddies played an important role in Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan during the U.S.-led coalition effort to rid that country of al-Qaeda terrorists
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The first helo landed on a high slope near the east peak of Takur Ghar at 0245 hours on March 4 and was immediately struck by machine gun fire that ripped into the fuselage and cut the hydraulic line. With the severed line spraying hydraulic fluid everywhere and the chopper jerking this way and that, my friend Petty Officer First Class
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In a letter Roberts left for his wife to be opened in the event of his death, he wrote, “If I died doing something for the Teams, then I died doing what made me happy. Very few people have the luxury of that.”

His was the saddest SEAL funeral I’ve ever attended. As I looked around me, I was struck by how many of the current ST-6 members in attendance were badly scarred and missing limbs.

Since Neil’s death, ST-6 operators have staged literally thousands of raids throughout the Middle East—taking out high-value targets, killing Islamic terrorists, rescuing hostages, and collecting intel.

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Since December of 2001, when the al-Qaeda leader was almost killed by U.S. bombs in the mountains of Tora Bora, Afghanistan, bin Laden had disappeared from sight. By 2011, many Americans believed that he was either dead or so deeply hidden that he would never be found.

But after years of painstaking detective work carried out by the NSA, the CIA, and U.S. military intelligence, the United States eventually pinpointed the location of bin Laden’s longtime trusted courier Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. CIA agents and satellite surveillance cameras tracked al-Kuwaiti’s white SUV to a large concrete compound in the mountain resort of Abbottabad, which is an hour’s drive north from the capital city of Islamabad.
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named the Pacer, who was living in the compound surrounded by wives and children, was Osama bin Laden.

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On March 29, President Obama met with his national security advisers in the White House Situation Room to review a plan to attack the compound with helicopter-borne commandos. Some military advisers favored destroying the compound with smart bombs. But President Obama vetoed that option because of the extensive collateral damage a bombing raid would likely inflict on the surrounding area.

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ST-6
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