No Hero: The Evolution of a Navy SEAL (13 page)

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Walt was going to be my swim buddy.

I raced back to my room and got my stuff packed. The base was built to house about two hundred people, but in a
week the population had grown to almost seven hundred. The chow hall was jammed every meal. There was no room. Hot showers became a commodity. At first, there was never any hot water; then there was no water at all. Then the toilets got stopped up.

At night, we’d sit around the campfire at the center of our compound and laugh about how massive the mission had become. The operation alone was going to begin as a massive bombing campaign. More bombs were going to be dropped in Tora Bora than had been dropped in all of Afghanistan from the beginning of the war.

“We could have been in and out of there already,” Walt told me one night. “All this commotion is only going to give away what we’re planning. Shit, I’ll be surprised if anybody is still in that mountain range. Lord knows if I heard drones flying above my house for the past week, I’d leave town.”

All the commotion at our compound also attracted the attention of the Afghans who worked at the camp. It’s kind of hard to keep anything a secret when you have no less than fifty local Afghans working on your compound, pumping the shitters, filling the water barrels, and doing construction. There was no doubt in any of our minds that everybody knew who we were and that we were spinning up on something big.

Plus, every day the mission was delayed, there was a better chance of it leaking. As we sat at the flight line waiting for our plane, Walt and I both had the same feeling about the mission. Our money was on a dry hole.

“Here is what is going to happen,” I said finally. “They’ll
land and spend a week hiking around the mountains. It’s a multimillion-dollar camping trip.”

Walt agreed.

“Sucks to be them,” he said. “At least our trip will be an adventure.”

We were headed to another Central Asian country. On the way, we spent a night in the capital and then moved back toward the border. But at our first stop, the host country said Walt had to stay behind. They were going to allow only one of us to link up with their forces stationed along the border. Since I was senior in rank, it fell to me. I didn’t much like the idea of heading over the border without my swim buddy, but I didn’t have a choice.

After spending another night in Peshawar, I headed out to the airport to catch a helicopter to a base across the border with Tora Bora. Instead of Walt, a CIA officer called Harvey and a communications tech from the unit now joined me. I met Harvey at the embassy. He was tall and thin and still kept his hair short in a Marine Corps flattop.

A former artillery officer, he was sporting the CIA’s “go to war” uniform of 5.11 Tactical pants, a North Face polo shirt, and hiking boots. I’d worked with the agency before and I wanted to feel this guy out a little bit. We’d be “swim buddies” for the next week or so, but I wasn’t sure he understood the concept like I did.

“So, man, what is your tasking?” I asked.

Harvey shrugged.

“Been up to this area before?” I asked.

“Nope,” he said. “I’ve been at the embassy for a while, but this is the first time in this part of the country.”

“Great,” I thought, “another one fresh off the cocktail circuit.” This was the first time he would be this close to the actual war. Since I worked at the outstation, I’d spent a lot of time with the agency. They all seemed to have advanced degrees, but no common sense when it came to Afghanistan. They spent more time fighting each other. The agency, in my experience, was one big pissing contest.

At the airport we sat on the tarmac and waited for our helicopter to show up. Keeping tight schedules and being on time was something the host country was definitely not used to.

After several hours of sitting around, we were met by a gaggle of officers who ushered us into the most rundown Mi-17 cargo helicopter I’d ever seen. Built by the Russians, the Mi-17 didn’t have the sleek look of American helicopters. Instead, it looked like a fat insect with a bulbous body and a tail boom jutting out. Paint was peeling off the side, and the cabin deck was slick in places from oil or some other fluid. I found a spot on the floor near the back and hoped for the best.

Harvey climbed in next to me, followed by the communications tech.

The helicopter slowly came to life as we lifted off and climbed into the sky. I tried to relax and not focus on the hydraulic fluid leaking from the ceiling as we flew. Something else was wrong as well. The whole helicopter seemed to be tilted to the left. We weren’t even balanced correctly.

The crew chief started to move boxes of meals ready to eat
and Pelican cases and gear bags back and forth, trying to balance the helicopter. No matter how hard he tried, it never leveled out. Between moving boxes, he started brewing tea in a small electric pot. The first two cups went to the pilots, delivered on a small silver tray. The second cups went to Harvey and me, again delivered on the same tray.

I sipped tea and tried not to think about crashing. Next to me, Harvey sat silently and looked out the window. It was hard to talk over the engine noise.

We landed at the base without incident. The officers were nervous once we arrived. When I tried to help unload the bags, the officers shooed me away and escorted me to a nearby truck. A captain greeted us. His skin was dark and weathered from the sun. A well-groomed mustache covered his lip.

He seemed nervous and agitated.

“It is better you stay in the truck,” he said. “My men will bring your things up to your area.”

The convoy snaked its way from the airfield up a rutted road toward a bunch of buildings. The base looked nothing like ours in Afghanistan. It was wide open, with no walls, and sat in the bottom of a bowl surrounded by mountains. We were located so close to Tora Bora that I could literally look at the mountains in the distance and see the bombs going off.

The trucks stopped at a building concealed behind a fence. It was still on the base, but far enough away where we couldn’t be easily seen. While the communications tech set up all of the radios and computers, I found an empty room and started to unpack.

The U-shaped building was made of concrete. Most of the rooms were empty. We each had a room with a bunk bed, but no mattress, just a box spring on a wire frame. Harvey came into my room.

“They give you any sheets?” he asked, eyeballing my kit and rifle out on the bed.

“Nope,” I said. “I’m just going to use my sleeping bag and the ground pad that I packed.”

He looked annoyed and glanced back into the hallway and then back at me.

“You think they have sheets for us?”

A platoon of soldiers arrived to protect us. They lived in another house next door but kept soldiers posted on the roof and on roving patrols around our building twenty-four hours a day.

I didn’t think they had sheets for him.

“Doubt it,” I said. “But you can ask.”

He left and returned about a half hour later. He had a set of sheets in his hands.

“They have sheets if you want some,” he said. “They had to go around the base and find them. They’re kind of rough.”

There was no way I was going to ask for sheets. As Harvey’s swim buddy, I probably should have squared him away, but I think I was taken aback by how inconsiderate he was acting. He seemed to think the soldiers were there to cater to us. We were the visitors and should have been content with whatever they gave us. I knew full well that we weren’t going to be living in the Four Seasons. I packed accordingly and
didn’t plan on making a fuss. My new swim buddy was already coming across as the ugly American.

It quickly became clear that the mission was out of Harvey’s comfort zone. This was not what he’d been trained to do. He seemed more interested in being comfortable and didn’t seem too focused on the objective. My goal was to build a relationship with the soldiers so if and when we saw squirters attempting to escape the upcoming bombing campaign, I could leverage that relationship and hopefully they would allow me to go out on the operation with them.

That night, I joined the soldiers for dinner. We had a chicken stew with flatbread and several platters of fresh vegetables. We sat around a blanket, our shoes off, and ate with our hands. Some of the soldiers spoke English and we spent the dinner talking about the area and how years ago, it had been a beautiful vacation spot. It was now Taliban controlled and no longer safe.

Harvey was also invited to dinner, but declined and sat in his room eating an MRE. He showed up after dinner looking for some sugar for his coffee. The only sugar we had was raw, which he reluctantly stirred into his cup.

“I like granulated better. Can you get me some of that type of sugar?” he asked the officer in charge of our guards.

He wasn’t making many friends, and by the third day, you could see how much the host country’s officers disliked him. If he wasn’t in the makeshift operations center, he was in his room. At night, he used to wear a pair of short running shorts that barely covered his groin and a tank top that
exposed his slender, pasty white arms. It was amazing how bad he was at building rapport.

None of this was rocket science.

The Army Special Forces get extensive training in dealing with local nationals, but this was all new to me too. Then again, I think my growing up in an Alaskan Eskimo village had something to do with my own attitude. I was comfortable dealing with a foreign culture. It was no different than making friends in school or at work. Just be yourself, be open, and be a good houseguest.

For a guy who worked for an agency tasked with winning over sources and building rapport with the locals, Harvey didn’t have a clue. At every turn, he offended our hosts. From the sheets to the sugar to the tank top, he damaged every bridge I tried to build.

Harvey was making it impossible for me to build rapport. Even though I had a good relationship with the soldiers, when Harvey walked into the room the mood changed. The soldiers became stiff and formal. Their body language gave away their disdain for him. He wasn’t accountable at all for his actions. Harvey was thinking about only himself, and not the mission. And by doing that—having that mind-set, which is the antithesis of the SEAL philosophy—he jeopardized the success of the mission. In his community there was very little teamwork, which to me was alien because the team was the bedrock of the SEAL community. At this point in my career, I’d worked only on kick-ass teams. Shit, even when I worked with the Polish GROM during Operation Iraqi Freedom my
first deployment, they fit in perfectly with our SEAL platoons. I assumed that everyone was like we were.

I also knew if my teammates forced any fighters across the border, there was no way they were going to allow me to tag along. At this point I wasn’t even sure I’d want to go into the field with Harvey as my swim buddy. I missed Walt.

With the mission under way on the Afghan side of the border, I sat in our small command center and scanned all the ISR feeds. Based off the radio traffic and what I was seeing on my screens, nobody seemed to be moving in my direction. For that matter, nobody seemed to be moving in the Tora Bora region altogether.

My squadron assaulted onto the top of the deserted Tora Bora mountain range the day after I left. They set up at a patrol base. From there, they started to search the area. The FBI’s DNA expert arrived on the third wave of helicopters and promptly got altitude sickness. She had to be medevaced out twelve hours later. So much for that good-idea fairy.

A couple of times during the mission, I’d have to call in the officers after one of the Predators saw a large group of men with guns moving along the border, only to be told the group was part of the host nation’s forces. One time, the Predators spotted what looked like a camp near the border. I could make out tents and several men with guns walking around the area. They didn’t appear to be in uniform, but after an investigation with our host, he reported that it was just a border checkpoint.

After several days with little to no activity and the
operation starting to wind down, the PakMil sent word back to the embassy that they didn’t want us there anymore. The next day, Harvey and I packed our gear and climbed aboard the same ratty MI-17 helicopter. Over a cup of tea, I watched the mountains slip by as the helicopter—still cockeyed—flew us back to the capital, where I met back up with Walt. We were both frustrated and ready to go back to some real work.

I told Walt what happened with Harvey. It dawned on both of us just how lucky we were to be in the unit where your swim buddy would take his shirt off his back for you. There was no AAR between Harvey and me, and no chance for us to discuss lessons learned. He wasn’t interested in being a good teammate and I never felt like he had my back. I was happy that I’d never see him again

We boarded a plane to fly back to Afghanistan. Walt and I were flying back with a half dozen other diplomats and soldiers. Just as I settled into my seat, the door opened and the young State Department staffer who took us to the plane climbed back onboard.

He’d set up the flight, but now he looked pale and nervous. Right behind him were several customs officials with AK-47s. From what I could gather, they wanted to know who was on the plane and the State Department staffer didn’t have any answers. The staffer was no older than twenty-five and probably hadn’t been in the country more than a few months.

Walt and I had our guns, explosives, and all our operations gear in our bags. As ordered, we’d brought everything we’d need to go into the field.

“Leave all your stuff,” the staffer said to everybody. “They told me the plane can leave, but only if you all get off. You all have to get off the plane right away.”

I could see the stress on his face. The staffer kept looking back at the officials. Something was really wrong. I glanced over at the guards. They looked angry.

As the others got up to leave, Walt and I ditched our pistols by hiding them in our bags and followed the staffer. Outside on the tarmac, a guard shoved his rifle in my face and started to scream at the group. I held up my hands and smiled. It felt strange to be without my pistol. It wasn’t like I was going to start fighting customs inspectors, but the weapon was a security blanket for me. I felt naked without it. I could see Walt sizing up the guards and assessing the situation. He was always the little guy with the big personality.