Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL (3 page)

We would be leaving the airplane at seven hundred feet, pretty low for a free-fall drop. After we exited the aircraft, the tail ramp would be winched shut. Assailant 26 would then execute a touch-and-go, divert, and land at the nearby naval air station at Oceana, Virginia. That was the plan, anyway. Moments from now, for me, that plan would completely go to hell.

The combat controller held up his right hand, index finger and thumb half an inch apart. I passed the signal to Hoser: thirty seconds to drop. I checked my altimeter: We were passing through a thousand feet. The combat controller slapped me on the leg. I yelled, “GO! GO! GO!” into my radio headset. At the bottom of the ramp, Hoser let go of the railing and was instantly sucked off the stairs. I watched as he disappeared into the wall of blinking raindrops. The rest of the jumpers clattered down the stairs and dived into black. I was the last man to leave the airplane. Plunging off, I could feel the hot blast of the engines and smell the acrid scent of burning jet fuel.

As my body slammed into the slipstream, I arched my back. The exit from an airliner is not unlike bodysurfing a gigantic wave. The drop feels the same, and you have to arch your back hard so you don’t somersault. I waited three seconds, my fingers hooked the rip cord, and I pulled. I felt the cable whip through its channels and open the parachute container on my back. The spring-loaded pilot chute fired, and my main parachute and deployment bag shot skyward. I braced for opening shock, preparing my body for deceleration from 120 miles an hour to almost zero. I took a deep breath and held it.

But my parachute did not open. Virginia was still coming at me fast. I had maybe ten seconds to live.

I’ve heard it said that in times of peril, victims flash back on their entire lives. I have been in bad places many times, in mortal, violent moments when I did not really know if I would live or die, but a flashback has never happened to me. Maybe I’m not sufficiently contemplative. Maybe I’ve never considered myself a victim. All I knew was that I was hurtling toward earth, and I was going to die if I didn’t solve a mystery. The mystery involving my main canopy. Why hadn’t it opened?

Actually, “why” didn’t matter. What mattered now was getting a reserve chute deployed. I did not flash back over my life, but I did go to adrenaline world. This has happened to me almost every time I have faced imminent destruction. The planet seems to stop. Everything slows and is silent. I no longer heard the roar of the jet. I did not hear the rush of the wind past my helmet. I no longer felt the raindrops slamming like BBs into my face. The world was in slow mo. The only problem was, in about five seconds I would auger into the planet at 176 feet per second.

On the stairs of the airplane, my altimeter had read 750 feet. That was almost four seconds ago. I estimated I was falling through 500 feet now, without a working parachute.

You will read these words in about the same relative time that my accident seemed to unfold. My mind was racing with clear, fluid thought: relative velocities; probabilities; actions and outcomes. I seemed to be falling in perfect silence, but my mind was rapidly processing. Everything I am about to describe unfolded in fewer than fifteen seconds. That amount of time would decide if I lived or died.

I knew whatever I tried might well be futile, but I was going to stay with this problem and fight it until I opened a parachute or I bounced. I had been trained to deal with a variety of nonoptimal parachute functions, and my mind did a pull-down menu of malfunctions and their remedies. Live or die, I would carry out my malfunction drill. The problem was, I didn’t know what sort of malfunction I had.

I lifted my knees to my chest, which pulled me into a sitting position. I was now falling as though strapped to a chair. I looked up; my pilot chute had fired, but the parachute, which is held in the nylon deployment container, was stuck. Instead of having hundreds of square feet of canopy, I had a lump of nylon the size of a large loaf of bread. And it wasn’t slowing me down. My eyes racked focus; hundreds of feet above me, in an even line, I could see the square canopies of the other jumpers. Disappearing into the low cloud deck, the Rastas’ parachutes were getting smaller. I was dropping like an anvil.

Stay with the procedure, I told myself, stay with the drill. I threw away my rip cord and moved my hand to the “twinkie” on my harness. This was a padded nylon strap on my right shoulder, connected to the cutaway cables of my main parachute. Before I tried to put up my reserve, I would have to detach my main parachute, or my second chute would tangle uselessly in the mess that was already up there.

Releasing the twinkie was a two-step process. First, it had to be ripped away from the double-sewn Velcro that held it in place. Then, the twinkie and approximately two feet of cable had to be pulled clear so my main parachute would cut away from the riser straps connecting it to my harness. My eyes fell on the glowing dial of my altimeter. I was now at four hundred feet, the lowest recommended altitude at which a reserve parachute can be deployed. Stay with the emergency procedure, I told myself. Improvisation is for desperate people.

I had the twinkie in my hand. I’d pulled it free of the Velcro, and I was about to cut away. In that instant, my main parachute opened. Sort of. Three of the eight cells of my main canopy worked free of the deployment bag. My head jerked skyward as my body decelerated. This was definitely luck of the Irish: I had half a parachute.

I looked again at the altimeter: three hundred feet. One hundred feet below the minimum altitude to deploy my reserve. I was desperate. It was time to improvise.

I made a command decision. I was too low to cut away my main, fall clear, and deploy my reserve. My one chance was to stay with what little parachute I had and try to ride it in. My altimeter was basically useless below 500 feet. The device worked by measuring atmospheric pressure, and I was falling through a thunderstorm. I might be at 300 feet, I might be lower. My altimeter might still be reading 300 feet when I smashed through somebody’s skylight.

My eyes flicked down for the first time since I left the airplane. I was over water, an L-shaped inlet I knew to be Desert Cove in the Little Creek neighborhood of Virginia Beach. The cove was maybe half a mile from the soccer field where I was supposed to land.

My mind raced. I was doing the math faster than a science nerd’s solar-powered calculator. I was still falling ninety miles an hour, at least; I had a marginal opportunity to get my rig fully deployed. If I hit the water, it was possible the impact would not kill me. Theoretically possible but unlikely. If I was not killed outright by the sudden stop, I would almost certainly be knocked unconscious. With sixty-five pounds of gear strapped to my body, I would sink and drown. I had to get my rig open.

The MT-1-X parachute is not a round chute, it is shaped like a wing. And like a wing, it can be steered precisely and flown in any direction the jumper wishes to go. It’s an excellent rig; with this equipment I’d made pinpoint landings from six miles up. But I had only half a wing. Worse, I was no longer falling vertically: The three inflated cells of my canopy were spinning me in a wild spiral. I was in a flat spin, making two full 360-degree revolutions a second. Below me, Desert Cove was spinning like a Frisbee. Like a fighter pilot pulling too many G’s, the centrifugal force was pushing the blood away from my brain and into my legs. I was getting tunnel vision and was close to blacking out. I had to get the rest of the canopy open before I lost consciousness.

I reached up and grabbed the parachute’s risers with both hands and pulled at them with all my might. It was a last, desperate move—and it worked. With a loud
pop,
the remaining five cells on my canopy opened. One cell was tattered and deflated, but I had an almost full parachute. I was now at approximately 250 feet.

I was still over water, and although I was prepared to ditch, I thought it better to try flying toward land instead of attempting a swim with sixty-five pounds of assorted metal objects. Lightning flashed; through the rain, I could see a boat ramp and an empty parking lot a hundred yards to my right. I turned in to the wind and headed for a perfect landing.

I was congratulating myself on my brilliant airmanship when something salty splashed my face. Blood dripped down my wrists and spattered my goggles. I had ripped two fingernails off my right hand, clawing at the twinkie. I didn’t feel any pain, but I knew the nails had been ripped clear of their beds. I pulled the blood-spattered goggles from my face.

Looming out of the rain, a trio of high-tension wires draped over the parking lot. I hadn’t just cheated death in order to be hung up and electrocuted. I made a hard right 180. As I pulled the turn, my parachute fluttered violently. The damaged center of my rig sucked in the remaining cells, the canopy collapsed and dropped me a heart-stopping fifty feet before it again caught the wind. No more turns were possible. I was now headed straight downwind. And that was not a good thing. My parachute was in full flight, and I was riding a twenty-knot gust. I was doing maybe forty miles an hour over ground. Landing was inevitable. Landing at this speed, with no steering, would not be pleasant.

A hundred and fifty yards away was a strip of sand, Demonstration Beach, a place where we sometimes launched practice diving missions. I had just enough altitude to make it, but I was still going too fast. Even if I completely braked my canopy, I’d still be traveling at the speed of the wind, maybe thirty miles an hour. I dared not try to put the canopy into a stall; the rig would fold up and drop me. Full speed was my only speed. I reached up and nursed my steering paddles, gingerly making a series of corrections right and left. I glided for the beach, puckered my ass, and braced for impact.

A galaxy of stars exploded in my head. My knees slammed into my backpack, my MP-5 machine pistol jammed into my ribs, and I heard a sickening snap. Half conscious, I bounced and was dragged by my still-inflated canopy across the beach. Digging a trench with my heels, I was pulled across the sand through a strip of grass and out onto the road that circled the cove. Caught by a gust, the parachute that had saved my life was going to drag me until I was hamburger. I clutched the twinkie with my bloody fingers and jerked it clear. The main canopy cut away and drifted off. I came to a stop in a ditch on the other side of the road.

Finally, the ride was over.

Sand and blood covered my face and hands. My ribs crackled as I sucked in air. I lay in the weeds, and the rain beat into my face. I started to laugh; it was 2356 hours in the eastern time zone, 11:56
P.M.
In three minutes and twenty seconds, I would be a civilian.

I
T WAS PROBABLY INEVITABLE
that I joined the navy, though I resisted it. I am the son of a career navy officer and a navy nurse. My father, Pat, was an Annapolis graduate, a destroyer captain, and ended his navy career as a professor of tactics at the Naval War College. He’d met my mom, Joni, when she was a navy nurse stationed at the Oak Knoll Naval Hospital outside San Francisco. I am the oldest of four kids, two boys and two girls. In my family, the apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree. My brother, Sean, is a chief engineer in the merchant marine, and my sisters, Colleen and Katie, are registered nurses.

We moved around quite a bit as a navy family, and we were close. We weren’t rich, but we lacked nothing, and I count my childhood, essentially, as a happy one.

I was raised a Catholic. I went to catechism, collected holy cards, and had my first communion in full regalia. Though my family was not overly religious, we ate fish sticks with ketchup on Fridays. I was a typical Catholic kid, felt vaguely guilty about something (though at age twelve, I didn’t know what yet), but I accepted my faith, the sacraments, the saints, and the whole enchilada without question. That wasn’t to last.

About a month after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, in August 1969, a single towering thunderstorm drifted off the coast of West Africa. Borne offshore on the trade winds, the clutch of thunderstorms meandered west across the Atlantic. Soon this evolving low-pressure system had a name: Camille.

Hurricane Camille would turn into the most devastating weather system ever to strike North America. Swirling, gathering power from the warm waters of the tropical Atlantic, Camille stalked the Florida straits, made a brief feint at Tampa, and roared into the Gulf of Mexico. The 85-degree waters of the Gulf turned Camille into a monster.

And my hometown was directly in her sights.

On the seventeenth of August, 1969, Biloxi, Mississippi, was laid waste by Hurricane Camille. At the time, my father was assigned to MACV, the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam. Unlike Dad’s previous tours as a destroyer captain, this tour was on the ground. The war in Vietnam was at its bloody height, and he’d deposited us in Biloxi to await his return.

At twelve years old I was the man of the house. As the eldest son and a navy brat, I’d grown used to the job. We’d lived in every navy town from Newport to Pearl Harbor, and by the sixth grade, I’d attended five different elementary schools. Beyond having a very real stake in the war, my siblings and I were children without a care in the world. It was high summer, a time of bicycles and snow cones with a new set of friends.

Storm-track prediction in 1969 was not what it is now, and no one, forecasters included, could conceive of Camille’s power. My family had no clue. As the hurricane turned north, we didn’t have the sense to evacuate. Only hours before the storm hit, we moved from our waterfront home to a multistory hotel on the beach. In hindsight our move was idiotic, but it saved our lives. My brother and sisters, our mother, and I rode out the storm in one of the few buildings in the city to survive intact, a 1920s-era hotel on Biloxi’s main beach.

In the morning we rose to find the city wiped from the face of the map.

Around the hotel, oceangoing freighters had been tossed up hundreds of yards from the sea. Bodies hung in trees. Debris, dead animals, shrimp boats, wrecked cars, and the mud-soaked possessions of the dead were scattered for miles. Biloxi was no more.