SEAL Team Six: Memoirs of an Elite Navy SEAL Sniper (13 page)

Dick didn’t go around the runway where the girls were dancing. He went straight over it. By the time I ran around it and got to the four men, Dick had the loudmouth in a choke hold. During our brief altercation, the three buddies of the loudmouth shouted expletives at their comrade. The four of us left the four Tunisians in a pile.

As we attempted to leave, the new bouncer tried to stop us. “You just had a fight in here. You’re not going anywhere.”

We catapulted him over the bar.

At the front door, a police officer showed up. He must’ve been right around the corner, because it had only been five minutes since the fight had started.

“Come on, gentlemen, let’s just sit down for a minute.”

So we did.
This guy seems cool.

The bouncer had picked himself up and cut in. “These guys are Navy SEALs. They just came in here and were tearing up the place.”

Oh, no. He said the
S
-word.

The officer panicked, calling on his radio. “Navy SEALs are tearing up the place, and I need backup!”

We were sitting down calmly talking to him. That was enough. We stood up to leave.

“Wait, you can’t go anywhere.”

Ignoring him, we walked to the front door. Outside, a sea of blue lights flashed at us from the parking lot. The backup included a large police van with
K-9 UNIT
written on the side. The first officers stepped out of their vehicles.

We started to explain.

The policeman from inside cut off our explanation, suddenly becoming brave. “I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to come with me.” He grabbed Mike by the shirtsleeve.

Dick caught the policeman in the chin with a square blow, dropping him straight down.

Now police officers with batons faced the four of us with our bare hands. We fought for what seemed like ten or fifteen minutes. On TV, batons might drop people to the pavement, but these batons were bouncing off of us. The police dog jumped up and bit Dick. He grabbed the dog by the head, bent it over, fell down on top of it, and bit a plug out of the dog. The dog yelped and ran away.

I was fighting the two cops in front of me when I felt a little thud on my back. Turning around with my fist cocked back, I saw that a small female police officer had just hit me with her baton. It felt like a mosquito bite compared to the whacks the other cops were delivering. Realizing she was a woman, instead of punching her, I picked her up and pushed her onto the hood of her car.

Now there were nearly thirty cops against the four of us. We finally lost. They handcuffed us. We told them our story. The Tunisian guys had walked out of the Body Shop and resumed talking their anti-American rhetoric. Now the police were mad at the first officer. “What were you thinking? Are you crazy?”

What was done was done. We had assaulted cops. They separated us and loaded us into the back of the patrol cars. The female police officer stuck her phone number in the pocket of my shirt and said, “Hey, give me a call sometime.”

At the station, they processed us and gave us a court date. They contacted our command at SEAL Team Two. The police wouldn’t let us leave until SEAL Team Two sent a driver to pick us up.

When our court date came, I feared for my job. We were all new to the SEAL Teams and expected our careers to be ruined. On the front row of the courtroom sat police officers wearing neck braces. One had his arm in a cast. Another had a cane. They looked like fertilizer. In our dress blue uniforms, we looked like a million bucks.

Voted by my Teammates to be spokesman, I told the judge our side of the story. The people in the courtroom seemed sympathetic toward us because of what happened and how it happened.

The judge asked, “Why were three of these men taken to jail and immediately released, and Petty Officer [Dick] wasn’t released until later?”

The K-9 officer explained, “The dog bit him, and we had to take him to the doctor for a shot.”

“How long could that have taken?” the judge asked.

“Well, Your Honor, he took a bite out of my dog, so I had to take my dog to the vet for a shot.”

The courtroom behind us erupted in laughter.

The K-9 officer explained, “Your Honor, it really isn’t funny. It took me months to train him, and I still spend sixteen hours a month training him. But since Petty Officer [Dick] bit the dog, it won’t do the job anymore.”

The laughter rose to sheer pandemonium.

Down came the judge’s gavel. “Order. Order in the court!”

Except for a couple of snickers in the back of the courtroom, the noise calmed down.

“Now, the four of you need to step forward to the bench,” the judge said.

Oh, man. Lose our careers. Go directly to jail. Do not collect two hundred dollars.
We were scared.

The judge leaned forward and then spoke quietly and calmly. “Gentlemen, I’m going to write this off to youthful vigor and patriotism, but don’t ever let me see you in this courtroom again.”

I heard applause from the courtroom behind us.

Turning around, I saw the cops in the front row. They looked like thieves had just robbed their houses. On our way out, I passed the cop in a neck brace and the one with a cane. As I passed the police officer with his arm in a cast, I winked at him. We left the courtroom.

Back at SEAL Team Two, we reported what happened to the Team Two skipper, Norm Carley, a short Irish Catholic guy from Philadelphia, graduate of the Naval Academy, and the first executive officer (second only to the commanding officer) of SEAL Team Six. Recently, the SEAL Team Two skipper had returned from Operation Praying Mantis in the Persian Gulf. He looked at us for a moment. “There was a time when we used to go out and fight the cops a lot. Those days are coming to a rapid end. The military is changing.”

He let us go, and his prophecy came true—the modern military has changed. On March 31, 2004, Ahmed Hashim Abed, an Iraqi al Qaeda terrorist, orchestrated the ambush of empty trucks picking up kitchen equipment from the army’s 82nd Airborne. Abed’s terrorists killed four Blackwater guards, then burned the corpses, mutilated them, dragged them through the streets, and hung two of the bodies from the Euphrates Bridge. One of the four guards was former SEAL Scott Helvenston. On September 1, 2009, the SEALs captured Abed. Then three other SEALs received courts-martial for allegedly giving him a bloody lip. Although the three SEALs were eventually found not guilty, such charges never should have risen to the level of courts-martial. If the SEALs had simply killed Abed, nothing could’ve been said. It’s hard to lawyer up when you’re dead.

In the same building as the Body Shop was a 7-Eleven. My house was 2 miles away. One evening after dinner, when Blake was still four years old, I drove with him to the 7-Eleven around seven o’clock to get some milk and bread. At the same time, Smudge pulled up in his Ford Bronco pickup truck jacked up on big wheels and big suspension. We had become friends after I joined him in Foxtrot Platoon at SEAL Team Two. Smudge walked over and, as usual, picked up Blake and gave him a hug.

As he held Blake, I said, “I’m just going to run in and get some milk and bread. I’ll be right out.” When I came back out with the groceries, they were gone. I looked at the Body Shop. Smudge’s girlfriend was a stripper there.
Oh, no, he didn’t.
When I hurried in, the bouncer greeted me, “Evening, Howard.”

“Hey, Bob,” I said. “Need to see if my son is in here.”

He smiled, letting me pass without paying the cover charge.

Walking into the club, it was mostly dark except for light coming from the center stage where a dancer shook her assets. Smudge sat at a table with his foot up on the stage while Blake sat on his lap. Smudge’s topless girlfriend stood next to them, bent over, running her fingers through Blake’s hair and stroking his cheek. “You’re such a cutie.” Her breasts were so huge, it’s a wonder she didn’t put my son’s eyeballs out.

I grabbed Blake, yelling at Smudge as I left, “Man, are you crazy? You’re going to get me killed.”

He couldn’t see what the problem was. “I just wanted to introduce him to Cassandra.”

I helped Blake into the car and tried to debrief him on our way home.
This is going to be it. Smudge is one of my good friends, and he loves Blake—but if Laura finds out, I’ll never be able to have Smudge around my child again.

At home, luckily Laura was busy working in the kitchen. I took Blake to his room and occupied him with his Nintendo Duck Hunt game. Then I put away the milk and bread I picked up from the 7-Eleven. I went into the living room and studied some op orders and SEAL training manuals as I often did, but I had my eye on the clock, waiting for Blake’s bedtime. If I could get him to bed, I’d be in the clear at least until morning. Usually, I was the one to tuck him in for the night, and when his bedtime came that evening, I made a point of walking to his room and tucking him in. Days later, Laura, Blake, and I drove by the Body Shop on the way to SEAL Team Two.
Holy crap, is seeing the place going to trigger Blake to say something to Laura? “Hey, I saw some big boobies in there.”
Even for a couple of weeks after, I still worried. Fortunately, Blake never said another word about it until he was twelve or thirteen years old. And I never went back to the Body Shop again.

The first time Blake had a sip of beer, a Team guy gave it to him. When he got older, we all played golf together. Blake’s first driving lesson came on a golf cart with one of my drunken buddies—bouncing off of trees. Blake would later tell me, “Some of my best memories of Virginia are hanging out with the different guys.” They were his SEAL Team uncles who listened to Thin Lizzy’s “The Boys Are Back in Town” and sometimes let him do things he shouldn’t do.

After a few months of limbo, doing odd jobs around the SEAL Team Two compound, I finally made it to advanced training in sea, air, and land warfare, known as SEAL Tactical Training (STT). While BUD/S focused on screening out people
and
training the survivors, STT mostly focused on training. During the six months of STT, only two people were dropped because of poor performance. We learned advanced levels of diving and land warfare, including close-quarters combat (CQC). (For more on advanced training after BUD/S, see Dick Couch’s
The Finishing School
.)

When I completed STT, the SEAL Team Two skipper, Norm Carley, came out with tridents and pinned one on me. The trident consisted of an eagle clutching a U.S. Navy anchor, trident, and pistol. Because it looked like the old Budweiser eagle, we often called the trident “the Budweiser.” Both officers and enlisted wore the same gold badge, rather than following the common navy practice of making enlisted men wear silver. It is still one of the biggest, gaudiest badges in the navy. With his fist, Skipper gave it a smack on my chest. Then each member of my platoon came by and punched it in. The trident literally stuck so deep into my chest that the leading petty officer had to pull it out of my skin. The marks remained on me for weeks. Now I could officially play with the big boys.

My first platoon commander was Burt. In the navy, a “sea daddy” is someone who takes it upon himself to mentor a sailor. I never really had a sea daddy because I took advice, both tactical and personal, from a number of people, but I owed gratitude to Burt for drafting me into his winter warfare platoon right out of STT. SEALs were supposed to have served in a regular platoon before working in a winter warfare platoon, but Burt showed an early confidence in me.

Like nearly 50 percent of SEAL officers, an extremely high percentage in the military, Burt had been an enlisted man before becoming an officer—what we call a mustang—which is probably why I liked him so much. Never asked us to do anything he wouldn’t do himself. He was big on doing proper mission briefs, thoroughly evaluating the brief and the resulting op. The man was a great facilitator and diplomat. Burt loved the winter environment—skiing, snowshoeing, and the rest—and leading the Teams in high-tech winter warfare gear. For example, we tested and evaluated expeditionary weight Gore-Tex.

Burt’s second in command was Mark, who stood over six feet tall. Mark’s parents emigrated from a Russian satellite country. Low-key, he didn’t tell people he was an MIT graduate who spoke Russian, Czechoslovakian, Polish, and German. His security clearance took forever. Although highly intelligent and multilingual, he never talked down to us. Mark devised great plans, and he could explain them simply and clearly enough so everyone could understand. He spoke with a slight lisp, though, which we mimicked during his mission briefs, screwing with him. After work knocked off, give him a couple of drinks and a pretty girl on each side, and Mark’s speech would become incomprehensible.

At SEAL Team Two, one day a week, we did Team physical training. Wednesday was O-course day. The other days, we ran our own PT. Some guys used those days as time to play basketball or goof off, but Mark insisted we bust our chops doing a long run-swim-run or some other torture. He ran like a gazelle and swam like a fish—making those of us who couldn’t keep up with him hate life, although we enjoyed working with Mark.

*   *   *

At SEAL Team Two, I started to hear whisperings about a Top Secret SEAL Team Six. After the 1980 failed attempt to rescue American hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Iran, the Navy asked Richard Marcinko to create a full-time counterterrorist team. As its first commanding officer, Marcinko named the new unit SEAL Team Six. He recruited heavily from the SEALs’ two counterterrorist units: Mobility Six (MOB Six) at SEAL Team Two on the East Coast and Echo Platoon at SEAL Team One on the West Coast. They wore civilian clothes and longer haircuts and were allowed to grow nonregulation beards and mustaches. Officers and enlisted men addressed each other by first names and nicknames, not using military salutes. They specialized in rescuing hostages from ships, oil rigs, and other maritime locations. In addition, they assisted with military base and embassy security. On top of all that, Team Six also supported CIA operations.