Kill Bin Laden: a Delta Force Commander's account of the hunt for the world's most wanted man (11 page)

For roughly an hour now it was open season on Dalton Fury. Nothing was off limits as the personal and professional questions came at me like darts. Tell us about your run-ins with the law. What were you thinking when you ordered your company out on a twelve-mile road march on Christmas Day in Korea? How do you explain this? Can you be trusted? Why should we select you, an average officer?

Any fear of personal embarrassment was subordinate to their desires in the brutal interrogation, and at the end of the hour, I was totally confused and mentally exhausted. Colonel Bargewell stood, stepped forward, and extended his hand. “Captain Fury, welcome to Delta,” he said.

Next only to my wedding day and the births of my two children, it was the proudest moment of my life.

Yet it would still be some time before I would be considered a full-fledged Delta operator. Soon after the commander’s board, the would-be Deltas attend the six-month Operator Training Course, a finishing school where finer points of killing are taught, along with other unique skills required of a covert commando.

Finally, I was declared ready, and was put to work.

With the required operator training behind me, I was fortunate to land in Lt. Col. Gus Murdock’s squadron. I had met him only once before, when he had appeared in the rain at the end of the endurance course, sizing
up the candidates, but knew him by reputation, which could be the base for a multivolume nonfiction action series.

Murdock had been associated with Delta since the early 1990s, had been on the ground in Mogadishu, was a key player in running down Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, and had hunted war criminals in the Balkans. Twice wounded in action, he would give up his command just before 9/11, then to no one’s surprise, was one of the first special operations officers inside Afghanistan. He spent several years in Iraq commanding a Joint Special Operations Task Force, and was there when Saddam Hussein was captured. Murdock eventually became the overall commander of Delta Force, and was the most phenomenal officer I ever served under.

Gus took a personal interest in the mental and physical conditioning of his subordinate officers, and on Officer Day he took pleasure in pitting fellow officers Serpico, Bad Chadio, Super D, and me against each other in man-to-man, winner-take-all commando competitions. Of course, Gus never was a good spectator and would usually be found in front of the pack during these adventures.

I’m convinced that Murdock was hiding gold or moonshine down the hill at the Delta obstacle course because he was always there. At least once a week Gus would show up unannounced in our office wearing a dull green flight suit and grab all the officers to “run the O course.” We learned to make ourselves scarce around the squadron area just before lunch.

Not to be outdone, Sergeant Major Ironhead and my second troop sergeant major, Jim, dreamed up masochistic events of their own. The events had to be painful, unique, and involve some analyzing of a problem. Simply thinking wasn’t enough to be successful. Climb four flights of stairs at the sniper condo and come down carrying a 150-pound dummy over your shoulder; drag a wounded teammate one hundred yards as fast as possible; put on full fighting kit, close to forty pounds of gear, and use a long rope and simple snap link to get your team up an elevator shaft.

All these exercises were tailored after real-world expectations and designed to break up the monotony of the standard days of close quarters battle, running, shooting, lifting, and swimming. Guys in Delta typically possess type A personalities so each event was very competitive. Nobody
liked to lose, including me, but I was just too average among these elite men to ever win. And I knew it.

In Delta, as in the most successful Fortune 500 companies like GE, Microsoft, and Cisco, the organization makes the individual its number-one priority. It teaches, nurtures, and implements bottom-up planning. That is the direct opposite of the U.S. Army’s structured and doctrinally rigid military decision-making process, which is too slow and inflexible for fastpaced, high-risk commando missions or minds, and one undeniably driven from the top down.

The Delta technique is a modification of the Delphi method of estimation or prediction that was developed by the RAND Corporation. In Delphi, groups of experts are elicited for combined judgments. We apply this method to planning complicated direct-action assaults.

The sergeants in Delta typically stay in the Unit for eight to twelve years, which provides a continuing institutional memory. Their collective longevity ensures that most good ideas have been proven as “best practice” methods and can be expected to serve the Unit well again. They also remember mistakes that must not be repeated. The senior officers in Delta have spent multiple tours in the Unit, some ten years and counting. The obvious experience base is priceless and it would be foolish to exclude any of those men from the process.

Still, there is no confusion that bottom-up planning also means bottom-up leadership. Leadership can’t be abdicated. But the practice of bringing in these quick minds on decisions is one of the greatest virtues of Delta. Shared knowledge and the cultivation of organizational strength must be fully understood and embraced by everyone selected for the service. Individuals are subordinate to the group.

I refer to this as the Delta problem-solving process, in which a group of experts, say fifteen operators and five experts in critical support skills (communications; nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare; medical; explosives; etc.), are presented with a problem (hostage rescue, kill-or-capture
mission) and interact face-to-face in a combined session. After hearing the problem, the group breaks up into their respective assault or sniper teams to develop solutions. Unlike the normal Delphi method, Delta encourages an adversarial process and exploratory thinking.

My job as a subordinate commander was not to have all the answers but rather to guide the process, keep it moving, and as Gus Murdock consistently cautioned, prevent groupthink from taking over. Then, what the experts conclude needs to be cross-checked with the intent of the higher two commanders before the final decision is made.

My three troop sergeant majors had more than three decades in the commando business, which shored up my personal inexperience in the counterterrorist trade. Their knowledge and camaraderie, tested in battle, was an enormous combat multiplier. Who could blame me for wanting to work with men of such caliber? Together, we formatted and packaged the product at the end of the process, synched it with the other moving pieces in the big picture, then briefed it back to the experts as a group to allow for any changes of opinion and to ensure we all were in as we moved toward launch time. In Delta, egos need to be checked at the door.

Strangely, the greatest benefit of this bottom-up process is saving precious time. Conventional units doctrinally prepare three courses of action, then undergo a lockstep process to decide which course presents the most promise of success, based on what the enemy is believed likely to do in a given situation. A conventional staff scrutinizes each option and ultimately recommends the one most likely to succeed.

This can waste an enormous amount of time and it is unsuited to the fluid, ambiguous nature of the war on terror. Minutes count. By the time a conventional planning process has been completed, Delta is already typically “mission complete” and back in the chow tent for hot soup and crackers.

The positive value of our organizational culture and the uncommon sergeant-to-officer relationship cannot be overestimated or matched in any other military organization. By way of example, our squadron’s troop sergeant majors already were living legends inside the Delta community when the attacks of 9/11 took place.

Jim and Bryan were both decorated for valor for leading small teams in the Tora Bora Mountains in 2001, awards that were pinned next to the Bronze Stars for Valor they had won during a little-known firefight on a
rocky outcrop in western Iraq in 1991. Jim eventually became the squadron sergeant major and retired from Delta after being wounded in Iraq and earning his third Bronze Star for Valor. His new job would be no less dangerous.

The third one, Pat, was wounded and decorated during Operation Acid Gambit, the rescue of hostage Kurt Muse at the beginning of the invasion of Panama. Pat survived three helicopter crashes during his time in Delta, and was again wounded during the first combat raid into Afghanistan before retiring several months later.

A fourth troop sergeant major, Larry, was also on the Muse rescue in Panama and is one of the best pistol shots in the world. Soon after retiring, Bryan, Pat, and Jim took their skills back to Iraq and Afghanistan, as part of an organization with the mission of protecting our troops from improvised explosive devices—IEDs. Résumés containing the words “Delta Force” rise to the top of the heap in a hurry in today’s security-conscious world. Dozens of former Delta operators have moved into the security industry, while others have taken their skills to the CIA, and they provide progressive leadership, organizational ingenuity, unique expert training, and unparalleled vision in helping protect the United States.

Having retired from the army, many of Delta’s world-class shooters have chosen to carry their skills to the civilian, law enforcement, and military markets where they teach the finer points of combat marksmanship and urban battlefield tactics. Delta Force legends like Paul Howe of Combat Shooting and Tactics Inc., Larry Vickers of Vickers Tactical Inc., Brian Searcy of Tiger Swan Inc., and Kyle Lamb of Viking Tactics Inc., can’t only teach you how to shoot a gnat off a bull’s ass at fifty yards while on the move but they will actually show you how it’s done first. And they will teach you the combat mind-set so important to develop to do this task while someone is trying to kill you first. If you truly want to see the best of the best in action and are serious about dropping the bad guy before he gets the drop on you, then give one of these guys a call.

What makes Delta so intriguing to the average American? Delta operators are intuitively winners, and although many folks openly cheer
for the underdog, deep inside, we secretly prefer being with the winners. And there is something about Delta specifically, and special operations in general, that is very attractive to the typical male adult.

Many red-blooded American men want to be special operators, just as many young boys want to be professional ball players, because it is arguably the highest achievement in the military profession. Of course, just as in professional sports, only a relative handful of men possess the desire, commitment, or God-given ability to reach that pinnacle. I used to add luck to the equation as well, but I heard numerous times over the years that “Delta makes its own luck.”

It is gospel in the U.S. Army that noncommissioned officers, the sergeants, are the backbone of any outfit. Nowhere is that more true than inside the special operations community. They are remarkable men.

The typical Delta sergeant, from the youngest staff sergeant to the unit command sergeant major, possesses an incredible command of the English language. Most have little, if any, college training but own remarkable vocabularies. After having briefed you on the finer points of a sensitive situation, you usually have to grab a dictionary to look up a few words that they used. I’m not sure that the power brokers look for this quality during the assessment and selection process, but it is a common trait.