Unbreakable: A Navy SEAL’s Way of Life (2 page)

CHIEF SEATTLE (a fictionalized speech written in 1971)

“And when the last Red Man shall have perished, and the memory of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Man, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children’s children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the roads, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone. In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude. At night, when the streets of your cities and villages are silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled them and still love this beautiful land. The White Man will never be alone.”

Adamantine: (ad·a·man·tahyn)

The reason I have settled on the word Adamantine is for the context it creates. Adamantine literally means a thing that is not tangible but when it is consumed makes anything Unbreakable. No more fitting meaning to one single word could capture the power of mastering Internal Dialogue.

A
s I sit in my study looking at the calligraphy of this quote which my father, a professional calligrapher, made for me, written in the blood of a deer I shot long ago, it occurs to me how fitting the quote is as I leave for war. I realize this may be the last time I will see my wife and kids—not to mention the land I love.

Stacy asked me to write down what I am doing and experiencing, for her and for my kids, to teach essential life lessons. Like Chief Seattle, I must let go of my life here, yet I want my children to be filled forever with the warrior song I am singing, and also that, as Chief Seattle put it, “The
White Man will never be alone.” He meant it in a different context, but for me, my writing will ensure my wife and children will never be alone. This is my bequest to them.

I want to explain how distant and stressed I am. My stress is different from the kind you experience. I have been in so many battles and risked my life so many times that stress, while there, it doesn’t control my performance. I do regret the toll it’s taken on my family these last two days as they prepare to watch me board a plane that may take me away forever. Especially for kids: it is like tearing out part of your soul when your daddy sits next to you that final night around the dinner table, and you try not to cry or even mention your thoughts. I understand.

Looking into their eyes and realizing I might never see them again, or be around when they need me later in life, was the hardest. I tried to let them cry, and I tried to cry myself, but years of leaving for combat makes me distant and often angry. When I am angry, I tend to yell. I think yelling makes leaving easier. I regret my frequent distance and anger.

Here I am, going to what may be my final battle, to the most dangerous place on earth, knowing I may not see my children again. As my three kids, the last of the Shea clan, read this, I want them to know what happened with their mother, Stacy, and me the night before I left. We lay beside each other, silent. I could not bear the thought of never seeing her again, and she must have known what I was thinking.

As I tried to speak, she reached up and put her hands on my face. The light from the window behind her outlined her long flowing hair that covered her body. Our eyes met, and we just looked at each other, not speaking, for ten minutes. Then she said something that will always resonate in my mind:

Sharing my life with you is only part of my project. Adamantine—tough and hard, the opposite of fear and weakness—is my true gift to you: the gift of quality thinking—the control of your Internal Dialogue. You will have to search and work for it all your life. I will explain how I discovered and realized the power of being unbreakable. I call it “Adamantine.” I will teach you how to attain it for yourself.

Reading and understanding this will be tough for you, my children; even harder will be attempting to accomplish many of the things I will ask you to do without me. As Stacy said to me that last night—it also holds true for each you kids individually:

I need you, my children, to never give up. Do not fear dying. Fear makes you weak. I need you to fight through the obstacles that would stop you from becoming the men and woman you ARE … fearless and strong.

You can control fear if you can control the words in your thoughts. Your Internal Dialogue, what you tell yourselves every conscious moment, is the source of power when properly controlled, but it’s also the source of weakness if you lose control. You will learn this by reading this book.

As you children grow into adulthood, my dream for you, individually, is to be among the few extraordinary people who master their own Internal Dialogue, so you can perform beyond what is thought possible, and become reliable partners and family. Internal Dialogue controls everyone’s actions, but only a few people spend the time essential for mastery—maybe one in five, or one in ten, or even fewer. For those who can master Internal Dialogue, the possibilities are limitless.

D
ESTINATION
: H
ELL

I am seated in a C-5 transport aircraft with the men of SEAL Team Seven, Task Unit Trident, Bravo Platoon, on our way to another Godforsaken country. Our journey is taking us to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, on to Germany, and finally, to hell. Like all things SEAL, everything about the beginning of this trip is managed chaos. C-5s are notorious for delays. We started with a two-day delay in San Diego. To hell with posttraumatic stress; pre-traumatic stress is far worse.

As I look around at my men, my thoughts are exclusively for them. Only three rules matter to me now, ingrained after twenty years of being a SEAL embarking on countless combat missions:

Each of my men deals with pre-deployment stress in his own way. Two hours into the first leg of the flight, some are sleeping. Others are talking about what we will see once we hit the ground. I can never sleep on these flights. (A doctor might diagnose an affliction preventing me from further combat.) Yet on any given day, even at home, I only get four hours of sleep. No one in his or her right mind would do what I do, anyway, so I guess all SEALs fit right in.

The stream of thought before a combat deployment can be overwhelming. Each SEAL’s control over his thinking is what separates us from everyone else I have met. From the first day of training, we learn to be aware of our own thoughts—to see the effect they have on our physical performance and how they affect the performance of others. For us, in the deadly moment of battle, it is the control of Internal Dialogue that shifts the chaos of battle to the calm of victory.

These men have come a long way since we formed up eighteen months ago. We started out as the “bastard” platoon. Many of the men had suffered through poor leadership on a previous deployment to Iraq. Leaders have such an effect on men, good and bad. I inherited an angry, bitter, dysfunctional bunch of guys. And still we had been selected out of six other platoons to change deployment within a month of leaving to take the battle to the Taliban.

I trained all but four of the men as an instructor in third phase of Basic Underwater Demolitions/SEAL (BUD/S) training. One great thing about SEALs is we all come from the same mold of man and training. Something is familiar about each other, something unique, creating a unity among us all. I hope as you grow up you will feel this way about your family, your team, or your business associates. The greatest gift you can receive is oneness, through countless hours of pain and mutual suffering and success, through a common sharing of goals and life, and, most importantly, a common Internal Dialogue pushing out everything except the moment at hand … the NOW.

My point man and lead sniper, Nike, is the most detail-oriented man I have ever known. He is inexhaustible. He was an Olympic-level rower before becoming a SEAL. Typical of our platoon, he doesn’t deal well with being told what to do. Nor do I, for that matter. The key to Nike is to give him free rein and make sure he feels like he can win—not always easy in the military—and not always doable in combat.

Next to Nike is Mister All Around—breacher, sniper, my lead assaulter. He smiles often and never has a negative thing to say in any situation. No words are necessary here, and I hope someday you kids have a powerful, positive friend like him, who is always there to help.

Stretched out across from me is KM, our primary assault breacher and primary heavy gunner. He epitomizes everyone’s image of a SEAL: built like a fireplug, fitness personified, works out daily. He smiles no matter the climate or condition, and as long as we don’t drink and shoot guns, he is the man.

My lieutenant is the only officer I have known whom I admire and see eye to eye with. Paradoxically, after twenty years in the military, I fight my leaders daily. When he and I joined up, we both agreed the primary platoon relationship was the one between the boss (him) and the chief (me). Since then, we have worked toward giving each other room to do our different jobs while always looking out for each other. As the men saw us work toward doing things for each other and the platoon, they, too, worked toward the same simple vision: we win or lose together and live to fight another day together. Everyone makes mistakes, but we grow stronger together.

Each platoon has a man who is comic relief. Ours wears two hats. He
is my secondary communications expert and air controller … I call him Lawyer. After four years of working with him, I cannot recall a single instance where he has failed to make me laugh so hard I had to wipe the tears from my eyes. I have no idea how he keeps the intricate details of communications and controlling birds (attack aircraft) under control, but he has a knack for making good communications (comms) when no one else can. I just wish he would stop giving me broken radios and laughing when I lose my mind trying to make them work. If I hear him ask me again, “Have you turned the radio on yet?” I will take my radio off and make him carry it.

Next to Lawyer sits Jake, the angriest sniper and corpsman in the Teams—probably why he works so well for this platoon. I think we are all gifted in the “I-hate-everyone” arena, and Jake is Olympic level in the category. But his stability transcends his anger. I laugh as I write this—I think he actually loves the platoon and hates everyone else, but this attitude works for me.

My heavy weapons expert, Carnie—amazing. Early on, when I was with SEAL Team Two, I was invited to a civilian sniper course. Two of us showed up, and lo and behold, here was a fifteen-year-old boy. I thought I was a good shot, but this quiet youngster out-shot me every time. Years passed before I heard from him again. He called me with a simple request: “I want to be a SEAL. What must I do?” At the time, I was racing professionally on the adventure racing circuit, and my answer to him was simple, “Run with me. If you can do it and like the pain, you will be a good SEAL.”

As fate would have it, he made it through BUD/S and was assigned, with no help from me, to my platoon at SEAL Team Seven. He is the most reliable man in the platoon. I just hope I don’t make a decision that gets him killed. I love this man so much I made him and his wife your godparents.

Then, my leading corpsman and lead breacher, Ground Launch, headphones on, is watching some extreme parachuting video … dreaming of ground launching off some mountain in hell with a knife between his teeth, I am sure. To Ground Launch the world is not enough. I think he would shoot a Taliban just to see if he could then keep him alive.

Looking around, I see the youngest man in the platoon, Texas. He is a
true short Texan in every sense of the word—happy being angry. I didn’t have time to do enough for this man in training with just one specialty skill: breacher. Texas will have to learn fast if he is to survive.

Lying next to Texas is the most gifted communications and tactical air controller in SEAL Team Seven, Snowman. He has a way of acquiring the best and latest communications gear without spending a dime. I have no idea how he does it. Actually, I need to inspect Snowman’s gear when we get off this plane to see if he has a nuclear detonator tucked away somewhere.

Finally, since we are going to the fight of the century, we seem to have acquired the best dog handler and dog in the Teams, as well as the highest-ranking explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) warrant officer expert in the Navy. You couldn’t pay me to cut wire or manage a dog in the middle of a gunfight. But I am thankful such hombres wanna get some with us.

For some political reason, only half my platoon is authorized to come into hell with us on the first half of the deployment. But as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said early in the war on terror, you go to war with the troops and gear you have, and make it work. Nevertheless, our sister platoon is at full strength, and thirty SEALs can do serious damage to the enemy.

The first leg of the journey is ending. If the history of C-5 travel holds true, once this big beast lands, it will be three days before it takes off. I love flying in these things, but the landing must surely beat the systems up every time.