Warrior Soul: The Memoir of a Navy SEAL (7 page)

The phase culminates with four weeks on San Clemente Island, where students learn basic and advanced demolitions and conduct a weeklong “war,” reconnoitering and interdicting a variety of targets on the island. Naturally, students train with real explosives and live ammunition.

The final phase of training is diving. Open- and closed-circuit scuba, underwater navigation, the use of underwater mines, maritime reconnaissance, and sneak attacks are taught, as well as the operation of submarine escape trunks.

It’s been said that becoming a SEAL is a calling rather than a vocation. That may be true. BUD/S is not so much a battle of wills but a struggle against oneself. No amount of physical training could be enough to prepare you. Whether you start training as an accomplished triathlete or a professional bowler, you will come to grips with misery. The instructors are always there to push each individual beyond maximum. The battle is always to make a cold, wet, tired, and hungry body take another step, run another mile, or climb another rung of the ladder. Quitting is easy. All you have to do is ring the bell, and the pain will stop. The test is against oneself.

But as difficult as BUD/S is, as many students quit, as almost impossibly difficult as training is made by instructors, it is more difficult in the Teams. BUD/S is practice. SEAL operations in the real world are combat. If a student screws up in BUD/S, he has to hit the surf. If a SEAL screws up on a real-world operation, he gets turned into a pink vapor.

BUD/S has to be difficult. It is imperative that the only men who come into the Teams are those who can be counted on: men who are superbly conditioned, adapted to adversity, and have rigorously demonstrated determination and teamwork. This does not mean BUD/S puts out a bunch of robots. Far from it. This persistence and determination BUD/S inculcates is not blind. SEALs don’t charge machine-gun nests. That’s what the Marine Corps is for. Throughout training, students are taught to fight smart; to attack the enemy where he is weakest, not where he is strongest.

Insertion into an enemy’s backyard may involve a three-mile underwater swim, a parachute jump from an airliner, or a five-day walk across glacier and mountain. Just getting to the target can often be an adventure. Getting out of an operational area with an enraged enemy in pursuit can be a nightmare. It is vital that every operator knows he can count on the man next to him. There is no “I” in “SEAL Team.”

BUD/S is one of the few schools in the United States military where officers and enlisted men train together; the course and curriculum are the same. In the Green Berets, there are separate officer and enlisted courses. At BUD/S, an officer is assigned to oversee each phase of training, but the principal instruction is given by enlisted men. It can reasonably be said that the enlisted men pick the officers who will eventually lead them. It’s not just the weak officers who are culled from training. The imperious, the impulsive, and the reckless will also find it impossible to graduate.

The naval special warfare community is the smallest of all the special operations forces, and the bond between officers and enlisted is tight. Platoons and assault elements usually function on a first-name basis. At the apex of the military’s special operations outfits, the “military” is kept to a minimum.

At the end of training, our graduation was low-key. On a warm September morning, a small group gathered on the grinder of the BUD/S compound. A band played “Anchors Away,” and we sat in folding chairs before the same podium Dick Roy had addressed us from six months earlier. There were no friends or relatives in attendance. Our names were called one by one, and we were each handed a certificate from the naval amphibious school. The certificates were definitely not suitable for framing. They stated simply that “the following individual [typed name] has completed the following course [BUD/S].” My diploma looked like it cost $1.25, but to me, it was the most precious piece of paper in the world.

We were officially BUD/S graduates, but we were not SEALs. Not yet. Ahead of us were army airborne school at Fort Benning and months of advanced operator training in our respective SEAL Teams. We would receive hundreds of hours of additional training and serve a yearlong probationary period before earning the gold trident of a Navy SEAL.

Until then we were FNGs: fuckin’ new guys. Good-for-nothing goldbrick class-2001 bananas. But that was fine with me. That afternoon I received orders to report to the commanding officer, SEAL Team Four, aboard the Naval Amphibious Base, Little Creek, Virginia.

I was in the Teams, and I was loving life.

T
HE NIGHT WAS
stupefyingly black. No stars, no moon, and a thin cold rain was pissing out of the sky, water dripping from darkness as I lay at the side of the road, my weapon on safe, listening to the night sounds, pupils cranked open to max, waiting. Above, a single canopy of trees rustled as wind stirred through it. Gusts passed now and again, fluttering leaves down on us and onto the road. I was lying maybe twenty meters back from where the two-track narrowed and turned sharply east. My squad, eight shooters, was arrayed close by, each man lying with legs spread, toes of boots touching the heels of the men to right and left, comfort and communication in the opaque night. From the west, low groans of thunder threatened a downpour. We had been in position for almost three hours. Not one man moving and none speaking, a lethal coil waiting to be sprung.

Our ambush had been diagrammed on a chalkboard like a football play. Circles and arrows marked fields of fire, lines of advance, plans of retreat, order for movement, procedures of fire and maneuver, and designated teams to count, search, and later booby-trap the bodies of the dead. Set about a 90-degree turn in the road, two SEAL squads lay pressed into cover, forming the arms of an L. One squad was set up on the portion of road before the curve, and the second squad covered the turn and its egress. Two shooting pairs concentrated on the apex, aimed down and waiting to pour a cross fire into the enemy as they entered what we called “the box,” the kill zone. Lone men were tucked up against trees behind each squad, rear security covering the backs of the ambush parties. Two other men, trip wires, were stationed ten yards up and down the road. It would be their job to warn the others of the quarry’s approach, and then to seal the trap, cutting down anyone who tried to flee from or through the kill zone.

All ambushes are custom jobs, and this one was planned for a jeep and a truck and the men in them. Our trap was set miles inside the enemy’s zone of control, and the countryside surrounding us was theirs—a home game for the bad guys and an away game for the good guys. Tonight’s mission was described as direct action, and its venue was what staff gumbies euphemistically call a “nonpermissive environment.” Nothing had been left to chance; our actions were scripted and the enemy’s moves anticipated. A low ditch circumscribed the outside of the turn, and this depression was likely to be the first cover the ambushed would seek once the trap was sprung. We had placed four claymore mines in the ditch. The detonator wires snaked back to electronic initiators, called “clackers,” laid by my right elbow. Tonight, for our unfortunate guests, there would be a sudden torrent of bullets, there would be a place of cover, and then a cross fire. The end would come in a fiery swarm of shrapnel. The violence would be multiphased, three-dimensional, and as perfect as we could make it.

I lifted the night-vision goggles hung around my neck and switched them on. The NVGs rendered a pale, strangely visible darkness, an incandescent night based on green and light green instead of black. They worked by amplifying ambient light, but our place of ambush was so dark that the image was snowy and the turn in the road seemed flat. In moonlight or even starlight, the NVGs would have revealed the forest as clear as day. Tonight was darker than technology. Looking through the NVGs was like putting your nose to the tube of a 1950s vintage TV set. The images were half focused, without depth or real contrast. I looked up the road, scanning in the direction from which we expected company. I could see very little. The road to the north was uniformly green and silent.

Then from the darkness came a flutter of diesel exhaust and the sounds of gears shifting. The faintest glimmer of headlights swept the road, and the noise of a big truck came closer. Fifty meters from our ambush, the truck and jeep stopped. My heart pounded as I listened to a vehicle door open and slam. The headlights angled over the turn and reflected into the softly falling rain. Hidden in the glare of the truck lights, men were talking, their silhouettes casting huge shadows into the trees above the place we waited.

Shit. Shit. Get back into the fucking trucks.

I watched as one man walked down the road toward us. Next to me, our M-60 gunner gently snapped the safety off his weapon. I clearly heard the sound of the lever shifting from safe to fire, a small click no louder than the patter of a raindrop. The man in the road was carrying an AK-47 slung over his shoulder; in his hand a small flashlight switched on. I lowered my head and pressed my body as deeply into the leaf cover as I could. The flashlight scanned the road surface—sharp turns and steep hills are obvious places for ambushes, and the man with the flashlight was checking the muddy roadbed for boot prints. I could feel the squad around me draw a collective breath. The flashlight beam feebly searched the turn in the road, and as it swung toward me, I placed my face down against the stock of my M-16. Human eyes, like those of animals, will give back reflected light—the classic rat eyes glowing in the darkness—and I averted my face as the beam swept over us. The light switched off, and the man trudged back toward the headlights. We had not been discovered.

Doors slammed again. In the back of the truck was a sound like a chain rattling. We heard the big diesel and jeep grind into gear and come slowly toward us, the truck first and the jeep some ten or fifteen feet behind. Their headlights shoved light up the tunnel of trees, illuminating them brightly, and I felt the twinge of my pupils contracting, eyes wide open for hours in perfect darkness suddenly pinched by an overabundance of light.

I let the truck pass down to the tree I knew marked the end of my squad. The jeep came on, and when it was just even with me, I rocked the safety back on my M-16 to auto and squeezed a long burst into the passenger window. Instantly, my squad opened fire, and the truck and jeep were exposed in strobing muzzle blasts, overlit and blinking like the red carpet at a Hollywood premiere. The noise was astounding, a tearing convulsion of exploding rifles and machine guns. Immediately, the bullets tore sparks from the metal bodies of the vehicles, and I could see from the hits that fire was concentrated on the cab of the jeep and the high canvas-covered bed of the truck, the places where the people were. Torn by fire, the truck slowed slightly. The jeep remained on the road and collided into the high rear bumper of the slowing truck. Then bullets from the second squad jagged through the two vehicles, the noise of their fire redoubling the astounding din of the ambush.

I reached forward on my weapon, closing my hand over the tube of the M-203 grenade launcher under the barrel of my rifle. I aimed down over the carrying handle on the M-16, nearly point-blank at the hood of the jeep. I pulled the trigger, and a 40-millimeter grenade popped from the tube. The grenade tore the canvas roof from the vehicle, blasting it to rags, and the jeep bucked and jumped backward, spinning ass first and coming to rest on its side, one headlight blown out and the other pointing crazily into the sky. The fusillade continued, its volume a perfect roar, each man of the two squads conscious to slow or speed up shooting as others reloaded or resumed firing. From the bottom of the L, a second set of explosions ripped the killing ground. Two armor-piercing grenades slammed into the front of the truck. The first round smashed the radiator and sent the hood sailing up into the trees above our heads. The second grenade punched through the shattered windshield and detonated in the truck’s cab, blowing open both doors and starting an orange fire inside. Now ablaze, the truck lurched to a stop, half on and half off the two-track.

Perhaps forty seconds had elapsed since we began firing, and the noise and the torrent of bullets had remained almost constant, a testament to fire discipline.

I rolled onto my side and lifted the claymore clackers. I dropped the wire safety catches and squeezed them simultaneously. The night exploded into deafening red flashes as the antipersonnel mines blew up by the roadside. Hundreds of steel balls were sprayed from each claymore, riddling the vehicles, tearing through the ditches, and ripping the tires from the jeep. The mines reached every place bullets could not. There was no place in the kill box not torn by steel or touched by fire.

The detonation of the mines was the signal for the second squad to shift fire, and they now aimed off the road, behind the vehicles and toward the inside of the turn. I stood and pushed my foot down on the men to my right and left. To yell in the overwhelming din would be futile. In the light of the burning truck, I signaled my squad to advance on line. Shooting from the hip, the first squad moved toward the road. Anyone fleeing would cross the two-track and stumble into the barrage laid down by the second squad. I watched as tracers ripped through the woods across from us—waist-high, banging through trees, denying cover, refuge, or escape. We reached the burning vehicles and saw no movement from the truck or the jeep.

Standing in the road, I thumbed a flare into my grenade launcher, aimed the weapon straight up, and pulled the trigger. The illumination round sailed into the sky, dragging behind it a shower of sparks. A flare ignited under a silk parachute and drifted down, casting a stark light over the wreckage. I shouted, “Cease fire,” and the command was repeated up and down the line. The shooting stopped as though someone had thrown a switch. My ears rang; the night was perfectly, eerily still. The crickets, night birds, and seemingly even the rain had been silenced by the horrific noise of the ambush. For a long moment there was only the hissing of the flare drifting down from the sky.