Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL (54 page)

Anyway, they weren’t my problem—they were gone, probably to a bad place at the end of a piece of piano wire. Although they were turned over to the local leg breakers, I did not feel any responsibility for their fate. They were breathing when I last saw them. Texas Pete and the landing craft were safe, and I wasn’t going to lose any sleep over what happened to four hostiles. If you want to step up and play frogman, you take the chances.

When we returned to Texas Pete, I got on the secure voice back to the flagship. I recounted the story of the capture and the turnover of the prisoners. I added that we had sunk the boat because we didn’t know what the hell else to do with it. The amphibious group liaison officer wrote up the incident for the admiral. I never saw the report or the message traffic about the incident. I wrote citations for Cheese, Rudi, and Dave, but nothing ever came of them. They received no official recognition. Like everything else about this event, their commendations were swept under a rug.

Five months later, I received a navy achievement medal. The accompanying citation said essentially that I was an earnest and diligent young officer and was conscientious in providing security for the task force. It mentioned nothing about the men we had captured, the boat, or the explosives.

The medal came in a blue leatherette box, complete with a lapel pin to wear on my civilian attire. I wondered if it had been sent to the right guy.

I
WAS IN THE DITCH
for a couple of minutes, and the rain pattered into my face. The last thing I remembered distinctly was standing on the tail ramp of the 727, the other jumpers around me, the screaming engines, and the voice in my headphones shouting, “GO! GO! GO!”

Then it came back to me—a plunge from the airliner and the rough tumble through the sky. I remembered falling headfirst and watching Virginia Beach spin below me. The streetlights were white and ocher and the roads slick with rain. My parachute malfunction was a blur. Strangely, when I thought back on it, I
saw
myself falling, flailing at the risers, and spinning wildly as half the parachute deployed. It was as though I’d viewed it from a fixed point outside my body. It was like a movie, scenes from someone else’s life. I’d watched myself falling down and away, through a turmoil of gray cloud, down and down toward the drop zone. The memory of my fall shimmered like a mirage in my brain.

Sprawled in the gully, I tried to sit up, and my ribs shot pain. My right leg was angled back, calf and foot twisted under my left thigh, and the weight of my backpack pressed down, pinning me to the ground. Pulling the quick-release, I dropped the rucksack from its hook points on my parachute harness and pushed it off my legs. I rolled over and slowly came to my hands and knees. I took a few deep breaths. My ribs were killing me, but everything else seemed to work.

Now I felt the wet grass and the mud under my hands. My fingers pounded, and I flinched when a raindrop struck me directly on one of my ripped-up fingernails. I flicked the black blood from my fingertips. None of the pain mattered. I was on the ground, and I was alive.

I gathered up my parachute and limped out onto the road. Thunder rumbled somewhere behind me. I could not help but look into the sky. The clouds were low and heavy and rushing past. I looked to the place where I had been just above the gray, swirling mist, and I felt as though I had fallen off a ladder.

Headlights loomed out of the rain and swept over me. It was one of the white Suburbans from the drop zone. The truck’s tires hissed on the wet road as it jerked to a stop. The window was down. Behind the wheel was Hoser, still in his jumpsuit. His dreadlocks were wet, and he looked frantic.

“Jesus Christ, Chuck.” I was standing in the road, almost half a mile from the place I was supposed to land. “Get in,” he huffed. “Somebody had a total and burned into the cove.”

I grinned as I walked to the back of the truck. “Relax,” I said. “That was me.”

The rest of the jumpers had watched me fall past the formation. They’d seen that I had a bag lock and that my parachute had not come free from the deployment container. They’d shouted to one another as I fell down and into the cloud deck. No one saw my canopy open, and no one saw my downwind slam into the beach or my wild drag across the road. They had taken a muster on the drop zone, and Coyote and I were the only ones missing. Coyote would be located, perfectly happy and intact, on the way back to the DZ. He had overshot the landing spot and come down behind the picnic area adjoining one of the soccer fields. That left me, and here I was, banged up but happy to be alive.

Hoser looked at my parachute rig as I lumped it into the back of the truck. The twinkie dangled free of its Velcro sheath, mute testimony to my close call.

“You throw away your rip cord?” Hoser asked.

I had. It was the first step in the emergency process. If my jump had gone right, I would have wrapped the cord around the handle after deploying my main canopy and tucked it into my flight suit as I descended. My rip cord was somewhere at the bottom of Little Creek Cove, the only one I ever lost in more than three hundred jumps. Every time a team member tossed a rip cord, the penalty was a case of beer. That night at the Raven, I would gladly pay the price.

After a rowdy good-bye party—the navy calls it a “hail and farewell”—I was out-processed the next day. I cleaned out my cage and my desk. As I walked around the buildings, I said good-bye to many friends. The wishes were cordial, but people looked at me sideways. I was no longer a shooter; I was no longer a member of the tribe. I was out. I had done the one thing that no SEAL is ever permitted to do: I had quit. And now, even with the handshakes, the jokes, and the backslapping, I was already a memory. I had set myself apart.

Lenny and Dougie came to debrief me, a bit more seriously this time, because I was going into the real world. Going out and staying out. I surrendered my military ID cards and my several passports. I was allowed to keep one, a plain civilian model, “clean” papers that I had not used to travel. I watched as a
CANCELED
stamp was thumped across my other documents. Finally, I walked into the captain’s office. I read and signed my fitness report, my report card as an officer. It would be the final entry into my service record. Even though I had resigned my commission, Bob Gormly had recommended me for early promotion. It was the best and most complimentary evaluation I’d ever received. I thanked him, and he thanked me. He wished me luck on the outside, and I was gone.

As I drove toward the front gate of the base, a marine sentry leaned out from the guard shack. He raised a white-gloved palm at my car as he stepped into the road. I stopped. As I rolled down my window to ask why, he took a paint scraper to my windshield and quickly removed the base sticker from the glass. Lenny and Dougie had called ahead and told the sentry to stop my car. There would be no more driving onto the base. Balling up my sticker in his hand, the marine walked away without a word. The last thing that connected me to the Team had been peeled off and tossed into a trash can.

I sat behind the wheel of my car and felt numb. The weight of everything seemed to cave in on me. I felt like a man who had lived a hundred lives and died a hundred times. The realization that I was now a civilian was crushing.

I drove home as tears ran down my face.

Incredibly, the radio in my car played Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.”

MARGOT AND I SEPARATED
that fall. The time apart was my idea, and it hurt Margot very much. I had intended to enroll in the University of Virginia for a summer term. I’d planned to take organic chemistry, calculus, and a few other science courses I would need to round out my psych degree. When I got out of the Teams, I’d planned to sit the MCAT exams and try to get into medical school. I never enrolled. A dull sort of ennui clung to me. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I did nothing.

I started to have nightmares that I was sinking through deep ocean water. The dreams were always without sound. Blue, infinite blue above and beneath, and nothing beyond the suffocating sensation of plummeting into emptiness. I would wake shouting.

Margot had wanted me to stay in the navy. She used to say that there were two kinds of Navy SEAL: the kind who could do anything, and the kind who couldn’t do anything else. Maybe she thought I was the latter. Maybe she knew I would not be happy doing anything else.

I did my best to move on. I had missed the start of the summer semesters. Med school was a delusion, and I would have to start making money somehow. I thought blithely that I would become a writer. Margot told me that I had lost my mind. She was probably right. My making a living as a writer would be a struggle for more than the usual reasons. Like my father and my brother, I am dyslexic.

Back in college, I had written a screenplay with a friend, Richard Murphy, whom I’d met during my internship. It was the story of a man who escapes from prison and hides out as a counselor in a summer camp for retarded adults. We’d written it with high hopes. No one wanted to buy it, and I went off and joined the navy. Murph is a good and constant friend and managed to track me down at SEAL Team Four.

“Hey,” he had said on the telephone, “I’ve got some news for you. You remember that crummy screenplay we wrote back in L.A.?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, it got nominated for a Focus Award. I got in the master-of-fine-arts program for screenwriting at NYU, and we’re going to be signed by the William Morris Agency.”

I became the only naval officer in America to have a William Morris agent. Murph and I wrote another screenplay, this one about Ernest Hemingway in Cuba at the start of World War II. It was cobbled together from pages we sent to each other, Murph in New York and me in Honduras, Lebanon, and the Dominican Republic. I wasn’t sure this stuff would go anywhere, but I enjoyed the research, I enjoyed writing, and I liked working with Murph. We sent in the script, and it sold in a week, optioned by Bob Nixon, a former ABC producer who’d just taken Jimmy Buffett into Cuba to visit Hemingway’s farm outside of Havana. Bob said that as he read the screenplay, he’d been sure we had visited Hemingway’s finca. We’d read about it in a book.

That summer, working in the spare bedroom in our house, I wrote a screenplay on my own. It was the story of three officers and their trials through BUD/S. I pecked it out on a manual typewriter and finished it on a 512K Macintosh computer. I sent it to my agent. It was optioned by Orion Pictures.

If anything, this small success seemed to drive Margot and me further apart. We started to have arguments. They were not loud, but they settled nothing and made everything worse. I was in another wild spiral, but this time it wasn’t the result of a parachute malfunction. Margot’s patience never ran out; she never gave up on us, but I gave up on her and on myself. I moved to Manhattan. A very strange thing to do, because I am not a person who likes cities.

I fell in love, suddenly and completely, with a Cuban actress. I was separated from Margot, though we were still married; I was messing around, as usual. My new love put into me a melancholy, contradictory feeling: a dull shame like fog and a thrill like bright sunshine. Magda Esteffan and I moved into an apartment on Seventy-eighth Street and Second Avenue, not far from the Carlisle Hotel. Magda worked as a cabaret singer and got bit parts, mostly commercials. I would meet her late at night, after she’d sung her sets, and we would go out to dinner at three
A.M.
We slept during the day, and when she’d go off to work, I would stay in the apartment and rewrite the script for Orion. It was as much of a bohemian lifestyle as I have ever led. The city was overwhelming for me, and I never did quite get used to it. Magda and I were in love, and time went by very quickly.

We lived in Manhattan about a year, then moved to Los Angeles. I had three thousand dollars to my name, but I was determined to write for a living. We moved into a small apartment in Marina del Rey. I was lucky enough to find another writing assignment, and then another. Orion Pictures made my first movie,
Navy SEALs,
and Universal Studios hired me to write
Darkman.
Several more screenwriting deals followed. Margot and I were divorced, an extremely civil affair conducted by mail, and Magda and I broke up. I made a lot of money and spent all of it. I wrote more screenplays.

I married again, because I am persistent and because I do not like to be alone. Julia Craig was beautiful, athletic, and intelligent. She had rowed crew at Princeton, and her father, like mine, was career military. We seemed well matched, but love had somehow bloomed between two very incompatible people. Our marriage was a disaster, and our divorce was long and unpleasant. I went broke again, made more money, and lost that, too. I was getting very good at barely getting by.

IN LOS ANGELES
I would often be asked if I missed it, “it” being, I guess, the SEAL Teams. The question would often be posed with a glance to my expanding midsection, and I will admit that since I got out, my age in years and the waist of my trousers in inches seemed to be on a merge plot. I would usually answer that I missed the guys. The teamwork. Sometimes I would answer that I did it as long as I thought I could, and that I got out at the top of my game. Both of these statements were true as far as they went, but they meant nothing. What, honestly, do you say to someone who has not been there? What do you say to someone who’s never jumped out of a commercial airliner, or sunk a ship by affixing a limpet mine, or killed a sniper: what do you say to someone who couldn’t have the wildest fucking idea, not one clue in the world, what it was like?

Sometimes the questioners were more direct. Sometimes I was asked how many people I killed. I became adept at turning away the question with a question of my own: “What do you feel guilty about?”

BY 1996 I WAS
twice divorced, and I felt like damaged goods. A woman I knew told me that I should have come with a warning label.